What motivated you to become an indie hacker?
Do you remember the stories, the people, the companies, the websites, etc., that first motivated you to start your own business? What were they? Give them a shout out below.
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I just want to make enough money for food and shelter without hating my life for 40h/week.
+1
me too
As a web developer I am selling my time for money and I don't like that. My goal is to sell products for money not time :D
This is what keeps me awake at night. I don’t necessarily condone trading time for money, but to me, at this stage, I think selling product for money is a better alternative.
Every compensation milestone I have hit at my day job hasn't made the idea of trading my time for money better.
Selling a product is more better, it gives freedom.
As a web developer you can probably find a way to offer a productized service. I guess that would be a step closer to a product. I've mostly do freelance video editing/animation stuff and I've exploring ways to turn it into productized service where I can create some system to produce the final result.
For me it was this website!
I started my indie hacking journey at around the same time as Indie Hackers was gaining traction (early 2017). The LogoJoy interview was the first one I remember seeing where I was like "holy crap it's possible to build a real, self-sustaining business by yourself". The rest - as they say - has been history.
From IH I got clued into bootstrapping from some of few people who were really talking about it at the time, including @csallen @NathanBarry @patio11 @levelsio and @robwalling. Those were smaller/simpler times!
Agreed, there is plenty of inspiration here.
When I was a kid growing up in the 90s, it was Bill Gates. He was the richest person ever, and the adults around me talked about him a lot and encouraged me get good with computers.
When I was in college, it was @patio11 sharing stories of making money with Bingo Card Creator. The 37Signals (now Basecamp) crew @dhh and @Jasonfried who blogged a ton, and who I saw give a couple talks in person. And Kevin Hale who took Wufoo through YC, but then decided to charge money instead of raising money.
Before I started IH, it was @vwoo and @levelsio, who shared their stories on YouTube and Hacker News, and showed me that bootstrapping a company was becoming easier and more profitable with a small team.
I also found 37 signals very influential. Ruby on Rails was a huge phenomenon at the time. I got to interview DHH for a podcast, and it was like meeting a rock star. It felt like they were early to the content marketing game - releasing lots of interesting ebooks and blog articles. They were outspoken about charging for your product, at a time where that felt quite unusual.
Aren't like 99.999% of all businesses 'bootstrapped'? I don't think it's some kind of modern phenomenon, it's just a word that people in tech like to use to differentiate themselves from VC-backed businesses. If you look around you when you walk through any town or city in any country in the world, you're surrounded by businesses, and those are just the ones that need a high street presence. How many of them took institutional investment? Practically none, if you exclude bank loans.
I never took “bootstrapped” to mean anything that wasn’t started with VC money. Like, if you had a rich relative who gave you, say, $75K to start a business, I wouldn’t call that bootstrapped either. AFAIK, it’s a business that a founder started largely with his or her own sweat equity, taking little or no funding of any kind to get off the ground. Before the web and a critical mass of people understanding that it is actually a doable thing to create your own web-based business, most folk would get a loan to open up some sort of brick-and-mortar business or perhaps kick of manufacturing of a prototype or the like. Of course you could always find examples of folk starting a business from scratch and little or no resources, but the odds of success given investment of time and energy were I think appreciably lower.
The majority of businesses have historically been self-financed or 'bootstrapped', at least in as much as any modern-day tech bootstrapper is doing it. The odds of succeeding in business have not changed in the last 10 years either, but there is more fetishization of entrepreneurship so were confronted by success stories more readily - the fact we now have instant access to any outlier success stories via the internet doesn't mean there wasn't an incredible array of successful enterprises across the planet for centuries prior.
I don’t know that your first sentence is actually true. It might be an interesting thing to research, but that assertion is definitely counter to my personal experience and observations. YMMV as we used to say. I suppose it might depend on what sort of business we’re talking about. Lemonade stand? Mary Kay cosmetics? Convince store? Restaurant? Cattle farming? Oil drilling? There’s a range, obviously, but I gather this is not critical to your observation. If your whole point is to suggest that the activity of “bootstrapping” a company from scratch isn’t entirely new, that’s fine, I don’t think that was Courtland’s point anyway.
His last paragraph he mentions it becoming easier and more profitable and that's what I'm addressing. That's just not especially true - it's just as hard to be profitable as it ever was, and the odds of succeeding haven't increased. It's arguably an important myth that sustains the indiehackers community/ethos, but that doesn't make it true, even just needs to believe it's easier, a bit like a get rich quick scam but where you're told you have more agency and better odds because the internet exists.
Rap songs- rappers sing about how they got from nothing to millions ('started from the bottom now we here'😂) by following their dreams, passion and with a bit of luck they reached their goal.
I can't rap but I can code so coding my own product gives me a chance to find a way to be independent and successful and not only in terms of money.
At least that's what I feel and it motivates me.
We have power to create something that people might like just as rappers, singers and writers. Of course it's harder to sell unless it's for the everyone like a song or facebook but that's a different subject.
ps. I know rap songs contain also many other, more or less valuable thoughts but that's what I get from them😉
I was interested in starting my own business for a long time, but it didn't quite crystallize until I started listening to the Indie Hackers podcast in 2017.
The early episodes with @patio11, @tylertringas, @Shpigford, @garrettdimon, @tracymakes made me realize that there were people not too different from me, and they'd figured out how to run their business without doing all the fundraising stuff that always scared me off from being a founder. I remember being especially blown away by how @mperham was earning almost $1MM/yr (at the time) just writing software by himself and not having to worry too much about marketing or social media promotion.
Before that, the things that pushed me toward the idea of creating my own business were popular books where I thought 90% of the content was stupid, but each one gave me some critical piece of inspiration:
My boss Ryan.
I grew up in a not so nice neighborhood with rampant crime and poverty. The idea of gainful employment, let alone starting a business, felt about as realistic an idea as aliens landing and giving me the winning lottery ticket.
To cut a lot out, I ended up learning to code and got my first job working at an e-commerce agency.
Ryan took me on, trained me, nurtured me, mentored me, and mostly trusted me. I wasn't just employee-number-whatever, I was a person who had ideas and could contribute in meaningful ways. As I gained more and more responsibilities, I got more insight into what a business was, how it should operate, what is required, and so on. Without his guidance, starting a company would've remained an alien concept to me. Because of him, it felt like something that I was able to do.
I started Feetr because I had a great product that worked really well for me and I thought that the moral thing would be to allow others to use it. Ryans constant guidance, breadth of knowledge, and insight has been invaluable. Without him, I don't know where it'd be.
If you're looking for an e-commerce website or marketing (or pretty much anything), I can't recommend Hudson Commerce enough.
Thanks Ryan. Love you big man.
My dad was an entrepreneur, and so were a lot of his friends/network, so I think I was exposed to it that from a young age.
I do also wonder if you ever really 'become an indie hacker'. Most people start businesses because it's either an intrinsic part of their nature to build and have ownership, or it's out of necessity. Well, that, or they're tired of working for terrible bosses and companies!
An “indie hacker” isn’t a term for someone who starts a business. It’s a term for someone who starts a particular kind of business, or more broadly someone who codes for themselves, whether for profit or hobby. Agreed that people who launch businesses of their own are typically folks who for one reason or another have an enduring drive a create a thriving business for themselves rather than support another as an employee.
If you go to the about us page on indie hackers you'll see that Courtney has a different definition that doesn't make being an engineer a prerequisite to indie hacked status, though I appreciate others will have their own definition I was responding to his post and making a general point. Whether you call it indie hacking or entrepreneurship I think there's not really a starting moment, as much as there's just some people who are predisposed by circumstances or temperament to build things if their own.
I became an indie hacker for three reasons.
I just want to see my idea through and see whether it's useful or not
Blackjack and h**kers.
joke aside, the ability to change people's lives. - everyone can break things, but not that many can build.
agreed
I find having to ask for someone else's permission to go on vacation, take time off, or even just spend time with family/friends very humiliating and debasing.
Surely there must be a better way of doing things... if I'm as smart as I think I am.
I always wanted to be self-employed in some capacity. In University, I thought I had to be a consultant because building a company was just too much. Even though I read Rework around that time, I still didn't think it was possible.
It wasn't until like 6 years later when I discovered Inkdrop by @craftzdog (on HN I think). I was shocked that it was possible to build software and make a living from it. Not some dollar iPhone app or shitty game, real software with real paying users.
Not too long after that I was reading blog posts on Hacker News about solo businesses like how some sales guy just started a SaaS and sold for millions and was writing a post about how great he was, but not about how he built a company (market/product/etc). I'm glad I found Indie Hackers shortly afterward.
Then I was hooked. I started reading books on entrepreneurship, thinking of ideas, going to meetups, and listening to podcasts.
I'm not entirely sure why I became an indie hacker, but I suspect that it had something to do with A LOT of the jobs that I had while I was growing up.
I'd always heard that you could work your way up in the company, but I frequently found that this wasn't the case.
In many cases, you were expected to do a given job, and then you were gone.
That said, there are times when working for yourself is easier than working for someone else because there's someone holding you accountable—and that's great if you like managing people.
i'd agree with this one too. i've also heard the 'work your way up the ladder' myth, and always found that any reward was a pittance compared to the work invested, or the timeframe to advance is best measured in decades. enough of that. if I'm going to bust ass, I'd appreciate seeing a fair return for that work.
I believe in the compounding effect of continuing to invest in building something that you have ownership of, instead of working for to build something for someone else
Freedom
I couldn't stand not knowing whether I had the tenacity to invent, build, and maintain something that enough other people would pay for that I could support myself. The jury is still out, but I'm hopeful. 😄🤞
I got motivated by the startup VC world. Listening to podcasts and watching movies. However, when I took the leap I found the world of bootstrapping and indie hacking and immediately knew that this was my crew. Now I hang out with them everyday on the WBE Space, here and on Twitter
I remember distinctly when I was struck by the innovation as my ah ha moment… I had watched Dr. Dre The Defiant Ones on starting Beats with Jimmy Iovine. I then start searching YouTube for how to start a business and I found YC’s startup school and I watched and watched all of their videos on repeat, making notes and studying them in depth. That’s when I realised hey it’s not only corporations that can start successful businesses, regular people can be innovative too. The word Product I couldn’t quite understand what was meant by this initially and that lead me on a path now 4 years later, I’m startup obsessed and hacking away on a few ideas.
For me it started after I read Rich Dad Poor Dad. I desire financial independence and a business is the best way to accomplish that when you don’t have large funds for investing.
Always like the idea of software for a product since high school - then it was the inspiration of Gates/Ellison/Jobs.
Once building my own business doing custom application development it was always seeing that you could re-sell existing work to new customers but you needed to find a niche with scale.
At that stage Basecamp and Freshbooks had just gotten traction. It was still a team to build a product.
Nowadays there are way more Indie, but the Internet has become so ubiquitous that you can find a hundred niches that let you focus as an Indie, versus needing a whole team. It used to be that my focus would be on desktop applications, but nowadays you really can build a highly functional cloud/web-based application for almost any purpose.
I remember clearly I read this article https://medium.com/free-code-camp/how-to-price-your-side-project-f4e0f86dbfde
And I had zero idea what it is to be an indie hacker and thought omg this is incredibly cool, this dude is running a service and gets side project money for it. He even got his employer to use his service (Buffer I think it was) which is also incredibly cool.
It motivated me to start side projects
I have always loved making stuff. That was my favorite thing about early computers, they were so malleable. With enough effort you could make them do almost anything. Sure, there were some limits, but often times the limits were your own knowledge, which is itself a malleable thing.
Over time I realized that what I was actually making was a "software product" and that you could sell those. 😂
And so that's what I did. Started a company and turned everything into a product. Some were free, some were shareware, others were just normal "shrink-wrapped" products. I was still making stuff for myself, but now I had customers, and customers were awesome! They were fun to talk to, and they told you stuff they wished you would build!
I have worked at a number of companies since then --- and founded a few small businesses in there as well --- but every time what gets me going down the entrepreneurial path is the desire to make something new. Something that I want for myself, but, more importantly these days, something that I hope will make a positive impact in other people's lives.
Some people see art in their head and bring it to reality. I wish I had understood my calling earlier. I see potential, I see business, I love tech even if I cannot code. When I first learned about financial freedom as a Gen X worker still not close enough to retirement, it made just as much sense to me to have personal freedom, creative freedom, and joyful freedom. Those things led me to tech Twitter, and down the Indie Maker rabbit hole it was. Best choice ever.
As a developer, I have a lot of products ranging from Transportation, Lims, Oil, and Gas just to mention a few, I just realize that if you do not have sufficient funds to advertise your product, it might just remain on your laptop with you to eternity.. So for now, I want to Sell some few generate money and create a product that will match Apple's initiative..
I've mentioned before on IH that I'm not a coder. But I def. have the entrepreneurial spirit. I started making skateboard decks when I was about 16 and sold them to mates. They were crap and broke easily. I then started screen printing band t-shirts and selling them to friends, family and a local record store. This was far more fruitful and easier to scale up. All my stencils were hand cut and made from paper so I only got a short run.
Fast forward a bit. I got a job in a small design/ad agency. My boss taught me a lot about the business... I rose to become MD in about 3 years. I liked working there but the boss's values and empty promises (I'll give you part of the business)... made me think I can do this for myself and do it much better. So I packed up and left and started my first agency the day after with someone else from the agency. Jerry Maguire moment!!!!
It was super hard work, lots of hustle, but I was the boss. I had the freedom to do whatever I wanted.
Fast forward to 2010 and I started Hunter. A new model with distributed teams and a hybrid workplace. Working with the best people and clients as one company across the globe.
Yet... it was really only in 2017-18 that I started to really learn about what an entrepreneur does. I deep-dived into absolutely everything. From Lean Startup, Lean Business Model Canvas, different ways of working (ReWork), Pricing, etc. etc.
But ultimately what I love is the flexibility to do whatever I want. There is nobody there telling me what I can or can't do. To work with whoever we want on whatever we want.
Success or failure is down to me... and that keeps it real and keeps me alive.
Rob Fitzpatrick. His idea of writing useful books, and his 3 super-useful books.
https://writeusefulbooks.com/
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