What is Indie Hacking?

Indie Hackers are all around us and you my friend - if you are subscribed to this newsletter - may be one as well.

Aug 03, 2023

I don't remember when I first heard the term “Indie Hacking”, but what I do know is this: I've been an Indie Hacker for as long as I can remember, and for a better part of my professional software development career.

As I think more about it, Indie Hackers are sort of the outliers and radicals of the business world.

I do know a few folks doing indie hacking, and you may know them too, they may be the ones that built your favourite mobile app on the App Store, or your favourite web application that save you a lot of time or provide a service that makes your life easier.

Indie Hackers are all around us and you my friend - if you are subscribed to this newsletter - may be one as well.

Independent Hacking

The word Indie in Indie Hacking is short for Independent. So Indie Hacking is Independent Hacking but what exactly does that even mean?

Indie(Independent) Hacking is an independent entrepreneurial pursuit.

It’s you for the most part seeing a problem and assembling everything you need in order to solve that problem and build a business out of the solution by yourself(you can also assemble a team but you often start solo or with a co-founder).

I like the way Rameerez puts it 👇🏾

it’s you, and only you against the world. In other words: a one-man band company.

You see, most businesses follow the conventional route of raising funds from venture capital(VCs) right from the start, resulting in ownership not being entirely in the hands of the entrepreneur.

In Indie Hacking however, you - the entrepreneur - take the road less travelled by starting off hacking on a cool idea you have(often to scratch your own itch) an own 100% of the business.

Indie Hackers mostly start out with the mindset that they don’t need any permission to build stuff that people will pay for and use.

The way I think about Indie Hacking is that you mostly see a need(whether its yours or others) and then you provide a solution and distribute that solution to folks that need it.

Indie Hacking is for profit 💰

This is one thing I love about Indie Hacking. Unlike VC-backed business that focus more on growth and scale, Indie Hacking focuses on profits and revenue.

Having users pay for the solution you’ve created is the only validation for a paid product built by an indie hacker.

Since the product is mostly financed by the indie hacker, become profitable is really very important so the product is ideally optimised for profits for Day 1.

Indie Hackers amongst us

So let’s learn more about Indie Hacking by highlighting some indie hackers I know personally and what they are building.

This is not an exhaustive list as there are a ton of Indie Hackers out there.

Taylor Otwell

I’ve been a fan of Taylor Otwell for as long as I can remember. How he does Indie Hacking is really quite inspirational. In my opinion, he is one of the most successful Indie Hacker out there.

After building Laravel - a popular PHP framework for building full-stack web applications, he proceeded to start Laravel LLC, a company, which provides SaaS(Software as a Service) products for Laravel developers.

Such products include 👇🏾

Note that these are all paid 🤑 products that have been reported to make a lot of dollar bills yearly.

Nadia Odunayo

Nadia is the founder and CEO of TheStoryGraph - An app for you to track your reading and choose your next book. She is also the only developer working on the project with millions of users.

I had the pleasure of interviewing her in a Space, you should check it out as she shared amazing tips about Indie Hacking.

Adam Wathan

I’m a big fan of Adam Wathan(if you haven’t noticed 😅). I really like his indie hacking journey and it’s a bit similar to that of Taylor, he built a business on an Open Source project - Tailwind CSS - a utility-first CSS framework(suck it Tailwind haters 😁).

Adam then proceed to create Tailwind Labs, a company that now offers Tailwind UI which is a paid component library based on Tailwind CSS.

Hassan El Mghari

You probably already know Hassan from the first BBoJS Podcast. Hassan currently works at Vercel as a senior developer advocate but that didn’t stop him from building a ton of projects(mostly powered by AI). Hassan has built 👇🏾

Wilson Wilson

I think I recently found out about Wilson and the product he is building with his co-founder -. The product is Senja - a product which is making collecting testimonials easy.

I always love seeing the tweets like this one about their project and how much they are making in MRR 💰

Paul Jarvis & Jack Ellis

When I heard about the project that Paul Jarvis and Jack Ellis were building to compete with Google Analytics, I was really quite amazed and it also reinforces the idea that the internet is permissionless and you can build literally anything on it.

The product by this co-founders is called Fathom Analytics - The Google Analytics alternative without compromise. I use Fathom Analytics and I love it!

Marcel Pociot

Marcel and the team at BeyondCode are a group of Indie Hackers that make amazing developer tools. What Marcel cooks has always inspired me, in fact, Tinkerwell inspired Guppy. Here are a couple of their amazing products 👇🏾

Kelvin Omereshone

Of course this author(channelling my inner Lady Whistledown 😁) is also an indie hacker, I founded The Sailscasts Company which is a vehicle for all the indie hacking ideas and projects I have built and have plans of building. These projects are

Take Action 💪🏾

I advice you, dear reader if you are an indie hacker at heart that you study the indie hackers mentioned here. Learn their stories and their processes and glean as much as possible.

Happy indie hacking.