In this episode, Li & Nathan chat with Courtland Allen, founder of Indie Hackers. Indie Hackers is an online community that focuses on entrepreneurs who build profitable internet businesses. They describe themselves as individuals seeking financial independence, creative freedom, and the ability to work on their own schedule.
Show Notes
Indie Hackers is an online community that focuses on entrepreneurs who build profitable internet businesses. They describe themselves as individuals seeking financial independence, creative freedom, and the ability to work on their own schedule. Entrepreneurs in the community have built B2B SaaS applications, paid newsletters, and everything in between.
Courtland started Indie Hackers in 2016 and it was acquired by Stripe 10 months later. He now works for Stripe operating Indie Hackers and hosting their podcast. As of February 2020, the site was seeing about 1.5 million page views per month and the community had grown to 80,000 members.
Before creating Indie Hackers, Courtland spent several years working on software startups and graduated with a degree in computer science from MIT.
In this interview, we talked to Courtland about:
-The origin story of Indie Hackers
-The best products and services that niche online communities can use to monetize
-The types of businesses that have become more (or less!) popular to start during Covid-19
-The traits of successful Indie Hackers
-What the mainstream technology community misunderstands about Indie Hackers
-The biggest issues Indie Hackers face
-The most popular tools for Indie Hackers
Brought to you by the Means of Creation newsletter: meansofcreation.substack.com
What is Means of Creation?
Work is changing. The old structures that dominated the 20th century are gradually being replaced by platforms and cultures that have grown up on the internet that aim to help people do what they love for a living. Li and Nathan unpack this new passion economy in a weekly conversation with guests at the forefront of this change.