What's New: Your indie hacking toolkit

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

What's in your tech stack?

• From communities to hosting, dev tools to productivity apps, which tools keep you going?
• Less than 4% of the creator economy actually earns a living from their creative work. Should the top earners be earning so much? Maybe. Here's the case against having a creator economy middle class.
• Founder Mike Cardona sold an Airtable database for $7,000. Below, he shares how long it took to build, how the sale came about, and why he sold instead of maintaining the product as a SaaS business.

Want to share something with nearly 90,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

💻 What's in Your Tech Stack?

by Sébastien Dubois

What's in your indie hacking toolkit? I thought that I would share a list of my tools, and hopefully, you will share your own! That way, we can all learn from each other. Let's dive in!

Personal knowledge management (PKM), note-taking, and journaling

• PKM: Obsidian.
• Journaling: LogSeq.
• Shared knowledge, inventory, processes, etc: Notion.
• Capturing highlights: Readwise.
• Mind maps: Freemind and Whimsical.

Productivity

• Time blocking and focus: focusd, my upcoming project.
• Time tracking: Clockify.
• Tasks: Trello.
• Calendar: Google Calendar.
• Text expander: Espanso.
• Timer.
• And my whiteboard, of course!

Dev tools

• Integrated development environment (IDE): IntelliJ (feels so much better to use than VS Code, in my opinion), VS Code (because it's useful too, from time to time), and VS Code extension packs.
• Source code manager (SCM): GitHub.
• Git graphical user interface GUI: GitKraken is a very pleasing UI for Git, allowing you to quickly add or remove hunks.
• Code formatting: Prettier, because we have better things to do than format code by hand, or waste time comparing code style differences.
• Scripting and shell: Bash, ZSH, and tmux.
• Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL): Helps you feel right at home, even on Windows.
• Linux Terminal: Tilda.
• User story maps and brainstorming: Miro.
• UX and UI: Figma.
• Schemas: Excalidraw.
• Logos: Logology.
• Testing API calls: HTTPIE and Insomnia.
• FTP and al: FileZilla.
• Network analysis: WireShark.

Tech stack

• Language: TypeScript.
• Frontend: Next.js.
• UI: Tailwind.
• Backend: NestJS.
• Monorepo: Nrwl NX. I really can't live without this one!
• State machines: XState.
• Immutability: Immer.
• DB: CouchDB.
• Authentication: Auth0.
• Infrastructure: Skaffold and Dive.
• Hosting: DigitalOcean, Vercel, and Netlify.
• DNS: CloudFlare.
• Certificates: LetsEncrypt and mkcert.
• Reverse proxy: NGINX.
• Analytics: Plausible.
• Mail: Mailgun.
• Integration: Zapier.
• No-code: Bubble.

Writing

• Grammarly.
• Hemingway.
• Rephrasely.
• Fiction writing: Scrivener.

Images

• Unsplash.
• Pexels.
• Kaboompics.
• unDraw.
• Favicon.
• The Noun Project.

Fonts

• FontSpace.
• Google Fonts.

Files

• Google Drive.
• Synology NAS.
• Amazon S3.
• Digital Ocean.

Product and domain names

• Namecheap.
• Google Domains.
• DreamHost.
• Domainr.
• Namelix.
• Namae.

Social handle availability

• NameCheckr.

UI inspiration

• Dribbble.

Trademark checks

• USPTO.
• BOIP.
• WIPO.

SEO

• Ahrefs.
• Wordtracker.
• Sitebulb.
• Keywords Everywhere.
• Google Webmaster Tools.
• Detailed SEO Extension.
• Linked Data vocabularies.

Trends

• Google Trends.
• Trends.vc.
• Exploding Topics.
• Pinterest Trends.
• Subreddit Stats.

CRM

• Odoo.

Landing page

• Carrd.

Image hosting

• Cloudinary.

Remote backups

• Backblaze.
• Amazon Glacier.

Passwords

• KeePass. (Yes, I'm old school!)

Online banking

• Wise.
• PayPal.

Payments

• Stripe.
• Gumroad.

Newsletters (free and paid)

• Revue: Has a great Twitter integration.
• ConvertKit.

Polls

• Typeform.

Slide decks

• Excalideck.

Video recording

• Loom.
• Sparkocam.
• Record on phone: Filmic Pro.

Video editing

• Adobe Premiere Pro.

Image editing

• Minimize images: TinyPNG and ImageMagick.
• Resize and convert images: Paint.
• Create animated GIFs: ScreenToGIF.
• Photos: Adobe Suite and Gimp.
• Create and edit SVGs: InkScape.

3D modeling

• Blender.

Audio recording

• Audacity.

Streaming

• StreamLabs OBS.

Audience building

• FeedHive.
• TweetDeck.
• BlackMagic.
• SparkToro.

Staying up-to-date

• My Twitter lists.
• Feedly.
• The Indie Hackers Podcast.

Communities

• Indie Hackers, of course!
• Rosie Sherry's Indiependent Community.
• Indie Worldwide.
• Circle.

If you enjoyed this post, check out my weekly newsletter here!

What's in your tech stack? Share in the comments below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

🏖 The Great Resignation is slowly becoming the Great Sabbatical.

📉 Robinhood has fallen 71% below its IPO price, hitting a record low.

🏠 Real-world properties will soon be available for purchase as NFTs.

🤩 Millennials and Gen Z are embracing luxury more readily.

📱 Apple may soon let you unlock iPhones with your mask on.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🛠 Does the Creator Economy Need a Middle Class?

by John Bardos

According to Signalfire, less than 4% of the creator economy (which is comprised of an estimated 50M creators) actually earns a living from their creative work.

Creators like 10-year-old Ryan Kaji and MrBeast earn millions of dollars, while most creators struggle.

Why is one person worth so much? Wouldn’t it be great if every new creator found success, and started earning a livable income? Isn’t that the implied argument for the creator economy middle class?

According to the Pew Research Center, the American middle class consists of:

The 52% of adults living in middle-income households, with incomes ranging from $48,500 to $145,500.

Let’s extend that out to the creator economy. Is it possible for more than half of everyone who publishes content online to make over $48,500? Would it be a desirable objective?

Creator economics

In 2020, the top 1% of creators on Gumroad earned about 60% of the payouts. The top 10% earned 92% of the total disbursed. Out of about 45,917 creators on the platform, 43,877 made less than $10K.

Last year’s Twitch data hack reveals similar numbers. The top 1% earned almost 60% of the total $889M paid out to streamers, according to The Wall Street Journal. 75% of creators made less than $120.

This trend is consistent across platforms, affecting YouTube creators, Spotify creators, and SnapChat creators. And TikTok is notoriously difficult to monetize for everyone. TikTok influencer Zach King recently shared that he earns about $23 per day, and he has 66M followers.

The total size of the creator economy continues to expand, but it’s clear that only a small percentage at the top are getting the vast majority of the rewards.

The long tail is very long

There will always be a small percentage at the top that reaps the majority of the rewards.

Clay Shirky outlined this dynamic years ago:

In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.

It’s the familiar long tail made popular by Chris Anderson’s book, and the same dynamics of the Pareto Principle.

Clay points out that this power-law distribution would occur naturally, even if all the options were of equal quality. The likes, shares, links, and mentions of older content heavily influence what people will consume in the future. Popular content continues to be favored precisely because it is popular:

The system assumes that later users come into an environment shaped by earlier users. The one-thousand-and-first user will not be selecting blogs at random, but will be affected, even if unconsciously, by the preference premiums built up in the system previously.

Add in the superior quality of the best creators, compared to the mediocre middle, and the power-law distribution becomes even more pronounced. In his Harvard Business Review article, "The Creator Economy Needs a Middle Class," Li Jin acknowledged this superstar phenomenon by quoting Sherwin Rosen’s paper:

The phenomenon of Superstars, wherein relatively small numbers of people earn enormous amounts of money and dominate the activities in which they engage, seems to be increasingly important in the modern world.

Sherwin's basic argument is that average talent is not a substitute for top performers. This superstar phenomenon is further compounded by The Matthew Effect, where the rich get richer, and the popular become more popular.

Richard Bachman’s bestselling book initially sold a respectable 28K copies. When it became known that Stephen King was the real author, the book went on to sell over 3M copies.

Winners keep winning in the creator economy.

There has never been a better time to be a creator

While it’s difficult to build an audience and make money from your creations, there has also never been this much opportunity.

It’s essentially free to publish your ideas to the world. You can write a book, publish a newsletter, film a movie, upload songs to Spotify, become an influencer, start a podcast, mint an NFT, form a DAO, or anything else you can imagine.

You don’t need permission, and you don’t have to wait to be discovered.

The most talented, most interesting, and best-promoted creators will rise to the top over time. Time is a critical factor. There is a clear path to creator success built on a very simple idea: Don’t give up.

As Jake McNeill from Creative Hackers said:

You’re not competing with 100% of the creators in your niche. You’re competing with the 8-10% who don’t quit.

We don’t need a middle class of average creators. There is no shortage of weak content online. We all benefit when great creators succeed. David Perrell calls this The Paradox of Abundance:

The average quality of information is getting worse and worse. But the best stuff is getting better and better.

The path to success in every creator field is to "become so good they can’t ignore you."

For more, check out the IdeaEconomy.net Newsletter.

Does the creator economy need a middle class? Let's chat below!

Discuss this story.

🌐 Best Around the Web: Posts Submitted to Indie Hackers This Week

📝 A list of smaller indie hackers to follow on Twitter. Posted by Laurin Wirth.

🙅 I never want to manage developers. Posted by JJ Thomas.

💲 Getting your first paid user. Posted by Ohad Azgad.

🤷‍♀️ Where should business ideas come from? Posted by Marc H.

🌎 UX is taking over the world. Posted by Pete Ramsey.

⚖️ Mission vs. money. What do you prioritize? Posted by Toni.

Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy.

💰 Mike Cardona Sold an Airtable Database for $7K

by Mike Cardona

Hey indie hackers! I’m Mike Cardona. Last month, I sold an Airtable database that allows users to run a newsletter entirely through Airtable, using Integromat and Mailchimp, for $7K. This is the initial workflow that illustrates how it all works:

This was a case of scratching my own itch.

I help run another newsletter, and we have close to 20 guest writers. I was building an editorial campaign in Airtable, but managing the newsletter with so many writers was becoming a huge bottleneck.

I wanted to managed everything from a single place. That's when I stumbled upon Aron Korenbilt's video tutorial on building a workflow, and started building.

AMA!

How did the sale occur?

I’m pretty active on LinkedIn, and I also help job seekers transition into tech. Someone that I was helping referred me to a friend who needed help with automation, since their agency and newsletter had a lot of inefficiencies.

After speaking with them, I rushed to build additional features:

• After three sales calls, and some negotiating, we agreed on $7K (I’d asked for $10K).

• This included all the documentation (SOPs) and 12 months of support (a monthly 60 minute call).

The added features included the ability to add tags and segmentation, creating an activity log in Airtable to ensure that the automations were working at all times, and integrating it with another editorial calendar (which I’d already built).

Here are a few things that I believe made this possible:

• I’m active on LinkedIn, and had already established credibility and trust there.

• My sales background was a tremendous help.

• Luck. I don’t think this is something I can replicate, but it validated the idea that there’s a great need to help businesses with automation.

How long did it take you to build?

The database took about two-and-a-half weeks, and the SOPs took two weeks. I spent a few days setting up the initial database.

It took one week to add the extra features (tagging, segmentation, etc.), and another week to create the activity log, which ensures that the automations are running correctly.

Why did you sell instead of maintaining it as a SaaS?

It’s a product that could be replicated (just like I did) relatively quickly. If I'd priced it at $500 per month, it would take me 14 months to earn the $7K that I made from selling. I’d risk the client canceling, or may have had to spend time doing support to prevent them from churning.

The documentation and SOPs require customization for every client, since not every business will have the same workflow. This alone requires a lot of time and work.

I feel that this business model only works if you’re looking to turn it into an agency, which I wasn't.

What is your approach to LinkedIn content?

LinkedIn has a lot of poor content, which is a good thing for us, because it means that the platform is starving for great content. Therefore, it's easier to stand out if you deliver!

The key is to purge anything that you don’t enjoy. Who you connect and engage with has an enormous effect on what the algorithm feeds you.

You also want to keep in mind who you want to serve. Does your audience hang out on LinkedIn? If so, always add value first. Also, personalize connection requests.

Engage. Engage. Engage.

This means, don’t just "like" posts. Comment and add value if you see a post that your target audience is likely to view. Publish content that establishes you as an authority in whatever service or product that you’re offering.

If you don’t have expertise yet, that’s fine. Write about what you’re learning, and if you’re consistent, you’ll attract a following (if it adds value).

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Also, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter.

Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Sébastien Dubois, Priyanka Vazirani, John Bardos, and Mike Cardona for contributing posts. —Channing