Is Indie Hacking really dead or has it just gotten harder?
I talked to Pieter Levels on this show earlier this week and he had several controversial ideas
that he shared with me during our conversation. But Indie Hacking being dead? That was probably
the most controversial of them all. Welcome to the Bootstrapped Founder. Today we will dive into what is
a pretty meaningful and identity creating term for us digital entrepreneurs. The life and death
of Indie Hacking. Thank you to Acquire.com for sponsoring this episode. More on that later.
Now let's take a look at Indie Hacking and see if it's still kicking. The conversation around this
whole topic started a couple weeks ago with a tweet by Pieter Levels. He said Indie Hacking is
dead and he mentioned more competition, less community and saturated niches, all leading
to the demise of Indie Hacking. I've come to a conclusion here too along with others who've been
in this field for a while. Indie Hacking, as we know it, is actually dead but just as we know it.
Not as it's going to be moving forward because it is still going strong but it has changed quite a
bit from what it was in 2016 or so when it became a term. That's really just seven years old at this
point. In the past building this Indie software tool, what Indie Hacking is all about, in a niche
without much competition and just expecting easy growth, well that was possible. There was a lot
of fertile and underserved market ground to be had. That easy way, that is dead now. There may
still be unexplored corners and niches in the market but the way to go about it has changed
significantly. That said, Indie Hacking as a way of life is more life than ever and it's still Indie,
still self-funded, unencumbered by organizational restrictions and it's still revenue driven but
the hacking part in Indie Hacking, skipping steps in the playbook, that is over. So what is that
about Indie Hacking? Well, a strong sense of community that kept people from competing with
each other. That's dead. If it ever truly existed, it's gone now. Nowadays people are more likely to
clone each other's work after sharing it on Twitter or something or discussing it there than ever
before. Most successful Indie hackers see copycat attempts on a weekly basis. What protects them
against this army of clones, the clone army, is having figured out distribution. People like Peter
Levels, who I talked to on the podcast about the death of Indie Hacking, succeed by building in
public, experimenting with ideas, sharing their progress and building an audience around themselves
as entrepreneurs, not just their businesses. It's less likely that your first product will be
successful without this kind of distribution because you're pretty much competing with equally
skilled founders who aren't not just good technicians but also understand how important social media and
being a personal brand has become to the buying decisions of their prospective customers. And
that's true for customers like small individual customers or corporate enterprisey customers.
It matters who we buy from much more than it did in the past. If you build an Indie business in a
kind of hype based field like AI or audience building, your competition is extremely strong
and you have no technical advantage here because you're effectively building on somebody else's
platform. OpenAI or Twitter or Shopify, you depend on a much bigger business to run your own on
and they don't really care much about you, those platforms. They will allow you to work with them
but they're not going to go out of their way to promote your thing. You need your own distribution
to be successful. And this reminds me of Rob Walling's stair-stepping approach. He suggests
to start small with tiny projects and plugins before building a larger product, a SaaS,
or building a portfolio along the way and more importantly building this feeling and a platform
for distribution that you need for this. And funnily enough, Rob introduced this concept of
stair-stepping in 2015 before Indie hacking was a big thing or thing at all. Back to the basics,
I guess. Indie hacking has matured along the way. It is now Indie entrepreneurship rather than hacking
your way into growth. The hacking part has diminished. Growth hacks in general are so
common now that they're nothing special anymore. They're really not even hacks. They're just
somebody else's playbook. And we have books too, right? Guides to Indie hacking exist and I have
written several of them myself and many people follow them as strategies for building businesses
and legacies. So what else does Indie hacking require now other than distribution? Well,
more than ever before, it requires a specialized niche. You must be specific in your choice of
market because you're going to be competing with other Indie hackers who may be more nimble in
serving their customers or quicker to build their products. The only advantage that will be hard
for them to emulate is your expertise. So Indie hacking isn't for those without prior experience
anymore. Even if you're an experienced developer, that doesn't guarantee success in building a
software business. It doesn't even mean that you will succeed in building developer tools as your
product. You have to be extremely specific and knowledgeable in what you want to solve and who
this will help. This is now a requirement, not a nice to have anymore. Before you start coding
your Indie software product, you need to gain experience in the industry that you care about
and where you solve problems. You need to understand its dynamics, the politics, the needs,
the regulations, everything that shapes the ecosystem. Your advantage comes from your
expertise in the field because successful Indie hackers usually have a large following or are
experts in one particular field. The following tends to be a result of being an expert there.
The best way to start both of these things when it's just starting out, well, and this is going to
be disappointing, get a job. Learn from the expertise of people around you and then share
that learning journey with other people that are on the same trajectory as you are slowly built up
the knowledge and reputation that will eventually end up being your distribution platform. Your
first project is probably best a side project while you work a full-time, part-time, freelance, whatever
kind of job in that industry. If you're already experienced in a certain industry, you have to
focus on business ideas related to that field. Source these problems from within the communities
that you live in. I call this embedded entrepreneurship, which is my second book. The idea
is that if you know a field and if you understand the dynamics in it, you will see where people's
complaints or people's ask for help, people's suggestions to each other, where they indicate
the lack of a product that you can build. But you need to be an expert or at least as somebody who
wants to be an expert in that field to get there. Let's say you work in publishing or you worked in
publishing before you wanted to be an indie hacker. As an example here, if you want to start,
we'll look for platforms with plug-in compatible marketplaces like Shopify. For example, you could
create a tool that helps publishers, your field of expertise, sell their books better on e-commerce
platforms. Or you could build a plugin for WordPress that allows you to create attractive
book sales pages. If you can then sell this to those publishing platforms and allow them to build
their own marketing landing pages, that's a business opportunities. These plugins might be
quickly built. Everybody can build these. These platforms are open and everybody is allowed to
build stuff there. But your advantage is really getting your customers. You really understand
them. When you provide support, they will see this. They will feel this because you understand
the underlying problems and that's what they came to you for. A solution. They try to get a solution
from you and they will see that your expertise makes it easier for them to use Sticky Customer.
That's the idea here. So, yeah, indie hacking. It has changed quite a bit. You need both distribution
and expertise now. But indie hacking in its core is still about solo partnership and building a
lifestyle business without outside dependencies. That has not changed. It's just not bootstrapping
a SaaS business anymore. You can see this in different ways too. Indie hacking now is a more
flexible thing in terms of making money and building a business. Some people sell lifetime
subscriptions or pay once used forever packages. Others offer one time licenses and lifetime support.
The way you monetize your business doesn't define indie hacking anymore. There are many ways to make
money from customers and achieve that kind of independence. So, is indie hacking truly dead?
Well, of course not. But it has evolved and it keeps evolving. Modern indie hacking is less about
shaky MVP prototypes and more about expertise and distribution. Focus on your personal strengths,
your expertise, your knowledge, your experiences in the field to build a successful business
in today's software business landscape. And that's it for today. I will now briefly thank my sponsor,
Acquire.com. Imagine this. You're a founder who's built a solid SaaS product. That's a cool dream,
right? You acquire customers and everything is generating really consistent monthly recurring
revenue. The SaaS dream. The indie hacker dream, right? The problem is you're not growing for
whatever reason. Maybe it's a lack of focus or a lack of skill. Maybe you just don't know what to do.
Or there's a lack of interest. You feel stuck in your business with your business. Well, what should
you do? The story that everybody in our community would like to hear at this point is the long Twitter
thread about how you buckled down, reignited your fire, started working on the business, not just in
the business. You built an audience. You did marketing, sales, outreach, all that stuff. And
six months down the road, you made a boatload of money. You've tripled your revenue and you have
this hyper successful business and everybody's happy. Well, reality is unfortunately not as
simple as this. And this situation that you might be in right now, it looks different for every
founder facing this particular kind of crossroad, but too many times the story from there ends up
being one of inaction or stagnation until the business either becomes less and less valuable
over time or worse, completely worthless at some point. So if you find yourself here already,
or you think that your story is likely headed down a similar road, I would consider a third option
and that's selling your business on acquire.com because capitalizing on the value of your time
today as an entrepreneur, as a founder, that's a pretty smart move. Acquire.com is free to list.
They've helped hundreds of founders already. Go to try.acquire.com/arvid and see for yourself if
this is the right option for you and your business at this point in time. Doesn't hurt to check.
Thank you for listening to the Bootstrapped Founder today. You can find me on Twitter @arvidkahl,
A-R-V-I-D-K-A-H-L and you can find my books and my Twitter course there too. If you want to support
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Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye bye.