I'm about to launch a bootstrapped project on my own (my third idea). Your post really resonated with me because I have been thinking about the same feelings and outcomes as you shared in your blog. My conclusion is that the only guaranteed outcome from ventures like this for people like us (who are trying to build wealth from nothing) is and should be the learning. I have accepted that today I don't know how to create wealth by building a SaaS product and I want to immerse myself in that problem enough to learn more. Building my product is my teaching instrument. When you have a full time job, a family and other responsibilities this a hard thing to justify because you sink so much time into it; time which you are taking away from yourself and your family but this is what it takes to succeed IMO.
I am sure that I will fail but there is no other choice except to assess what doesn't work, adjust, rinse and repeat until I figure it out. Some of us get lucky and struck success early but others will have to try again and many will never succeed and that's just life and nothing is free in life (unless you come from money but then again I've never been in that position either).
I wish you success on your next venture, but if the problem you're focused on solving is "creating wealth by building a SaaS product," your focus itself might be holding you back.
Imagine going into a meeting with a potential customer and saying "Hi, my name's armanm, and I'm looking forward to our chat today about how I'm creating wealth for myself." They would probably walk out of the room!
If there's any one commonality I've observed across almost all the successful business owners I've met, it's that they're intensely focused on one or more customer problems. They've picked a market that they know well (meaning they know a lot about it, and they also know a lot of people who are in it). And they ultimately spoke with hundreds or thousands of people in that market, figured out where there was a common need and how much everyone was willing to pay to fulfill that need, and they they came up with a solution. They're usually so obsessed with solving this problem their customers have, that it's hard to get them to talk about anything else!
If you approach it as a personal or passion project to fulfill your own goals, the response of the market will probably be lukewarm because your pitch, your product, or any other number of things probably won't be calibrated correctly. Whereas if you dedicate yourself to understanding, mastering, and solving a pressing problem for a bunch of people who want to spend money, you have a much higher chance of success.
One way that your own interests definitely factor in is when you have personally been a member of that market, experienced the need yourself and would be willing to pay for the solution and have spoken to a bunch of other people who feel the same way. That's a long list of criteria but if you meet them all you have a very high chance of success. That's why the average age of a successful entrepreneur when they found their company is 42. It takes years and years to acquire all the knowledge and meet all the people but once you do, it becomes vastly easier for the rest to fall into place.
Author here - Thanks for reading. I'm glad to hear this post resonated with you. As long as you're learning new things with each experience, you're getting value from it. I know the goal is always to build value through wealth, and as we both know, that doesn't always work out. But for me personally, the things I've learned on this journey have tons of application to my career. It's just made me so much more well rounded. And I think if this doesn't work out and I went back to a full time job, I'd end up building more wealth in my career because I have these new skills. So, don't be too hard on yourself, there's still lots of value in the journey. Best of luck with your new project!
Also just starting out on this journey. Thank you for the post! Subscribed and eager to follow along. If you ever do a writeup of who’s who and what’s what in the bootstrap community, I’d love to read.
Here's a link to the author's project: https://pagefactory.app/ For an indie hacker project that you're doing for passion, you really have to pick something that connects with the dreams of people. Especially if the thing is a tool that empowers ordinary people. No one dreams about how much better the web will be with lots of auto-generated content. In order to sell something like that, you'd have to do a YouTube hustle talking about how rich you got doing it, and how rich you can get too if you buy the product. A bunch of people have been doing that lately encouraging people to submit ChatGPT generated articles to publications that pay for content, and a lot of those organizations are now shutting down their open submissions due to the avalanche of low-effort content.
I don’t really see the “indie” connection then, frankly.
It’s an app for churning out wordy, SEO optimized articles, right? I feel like you may have picked the wrong platform to brag about that achievement, most people on HN don’t have great things to say about the way SEO driven tools like that have changed the web.
EDIT: The demo on the site being 2min of time to churn out an entire website’s worth of content. I weep for what tools like this have allowed the web to become. You have the furthest thing from my support, I’m sorry.
Ha, I thought this was a great line, I guess I always assumed you'd spend all your time building the products you were selling. But I can imagine there's a ton of customer support, unplanned features requests, talking with tax people and other business owners in the space etc etc
"Starting out, I thought bootstrapping meant freedom from the messy complications of building and maintaining relationships. Turns out, it's just the opposite."
Author here - Yeah, realizing I couldn't spend all of my time just building the product was a hard lesson to learn. This experience has forced me to learn a lot of new skills though, and I'm much more rounded as a person because of it.
An indie hacker is an individual who builds and launches a business or product independently, without the support of a large organization or team.
Most 'indie hackers' i've met are working on some app, or SAAS that they see a need for in the market. They strive and toil, for a grand vision; And there is beauty in that, but....
More 'Indie Hackers' should find fulfillment in starting an agency. The risk is honestly zero, and although harder to scale it may bear the same fucundity of any 'Killer App'. Even if you don't have the connections, Upwork is a fantastic way to get your initial clients.
When people quit their software job to be an indy hacker, what they really want is the freedom to code in the direction they choose. Although dealing with clients may seem like 'having a boss', the ability to pick your clients wisely is the first skill you learn.
I quit my job working in tech and now i run a solo tech consultancy. You get your initial clients to pay for the infrastructure and as long as you stick in your lane, you can utilize all your tooling for the next client and charge a bit more in hourly rate. It soon becomes a self-fulfilling cycle.
I agree with your initial idea, but you lost me at "hourly rate". I think doing fixed prices for fixed scopes allows any agency to scale up to a certain point. (Instead of disincentivizing efficiency through hourly rates)
Depends on whether it's internal development or external recs. I've had alot of success doing T&M's for the State and local governments. It consumes the resource for your agency, but the rate arbitrage is attractive.
But yes, as you scale from just being you to multiple people you should have fixed proposals and ideally, an annual maintance and monthly retainer.
Author here - Totally agree. Service based businesses like an agency is a much better way to start out. If I was starting over, this is the approach I would take.
> With the launch of my second business last July (a programmatic SEO tool called PageFactory
Great read, but it's a bit disappointing to see that the author was only able to make money with yet another SEO spam tool to generate low-quality content. The idea of the original Fantasy Congress was much more interesting, too bad that didn't work out.
To me, that's actually one of the most optimistic parts. The author is willing to build what markets want, not a passion project, which is a turning point.
Author here - Thanks for reading! Glad you enjoyed the article.
Programmatic SEO has a long history of being conflated with spam, though, it is not. There are many instances where this approach to creating content is the best approach for users, and many are surprised to learn how often and how much programmatic content they consume (I often use nutritional information as an example).
I've talked about this at length on my twitter, podcast interviews, and my free course on the subject. I will put links to these below. If you're concerned about the efficacy and morality of programmatic SEO, I'd suggest getting more information from these resources in order to make an informed opinion.
Also, my product does not provide any AI services. I know it's common for people to assume "programmatic" means "AI", but this strategy has been around much longer than AI.
I don’t think anyone’s going to listen to a whole podcast to get the answer they’re looking for. I’m still of the opinion that “programmatic SEO” == spam, but perhaps you can use the space here to explain why that’s not the case. I perused your Twitter but was admittedly left even more confused.
“ Programmatic SEO is not a means for replacing human written content.
This strategy targets keywords that aren't served well by human written content. It lacks the critical analysis and nuance only humans can provide.”
Maybe you can explain. Is it a real human writing every line of the copy you’re generating? If not, how is it not very directly “replacing human written content”.
What you’ve mentioned in this thread seems to run contrary to what’s on your Twitter and the product page itself.
"This strategy targets keywords that aren't served well by human written content."
One example I often use is nutritional information. We don't need in-depth, 1200 word articles for how many calories, carbs, protein, etc. there are in every food and drink item out there. Plus, there are billions of them. So it's not even feasible to create human written, long-form articles for every item. Websites use templates to plugin in nutritional information into webpages, and Google picks it up. That's programmatic SEO. It's applicable to lots of situations, and we consume tons of it every day.
If you can't see even a single legitimate use case for this strategy after all the resources and details I've provided, I just have to assume you're looking for people to argue with. Not worth my energy, sorry dude.
This. If the idea of doing sales or marketing at a small startup turns you off, don't become an indie hacker because that is your main job - to promote what you've made.
as someone who is also thinking about quitting my job to start a business , this suggestion is helpful to me : "I wouldn't encourage anyone to quit their job until they've made at least one dollar selling a product or service online"
Author here - Glad you found that line helpful. Of course, the goal would be building your business on the side until it's making a substantial amount of money, and then quitting your job. But I know that isn't a feasible path for everyone. Personally, I tried starting my initial project as a side project, but made very little progress over two years, which was the catalyst for going "all in". I'd still suggest trying to build the business on the side first, just to see if you can manage it. Best of luck!
It really comes down to side business model, the culture of where you’re at full-time and how much you’re willing to sacrifice personally.
I never quit my day job after growing my business to ~$5m annually mainly because it’s e-commerce which is easy to automate and I’ve hired a great team.
It’s sad to say but unless you’ve cleared $15m; making a few million really isn’t a lot of money truly so I recommend that people either:
1) make their day job their first customer or an investor
2) explore lifestyle type businesses that work well with their day job meaning no travel, easy delegation, etc (ie. FBA, shopify, physical products, micro-SaaS)
The DTC (later DNVB) sector was a big part of the e-commerce boom in the 2010s through the pandemic.
It was fueled by cheap Facebook advertising, iOS tracking and cheap FBA fees then later on by cheap Amazon advertising and to a lesser degree, TikTok.
Lots of successful small and family businesses were created during this time period with revenues of 500k-$20m of which I own one.
But the largest ones were companies like Anker, Away, Casper, Warby Parker.
And the underlying shovel companies like Shopify, Stamps/ShipStation, Mailchimp, Zebra and many others.
Pretty much, the play was the same.
1. Identify a decent size niche market that you can hyper target on Facebook or Instagram. Pet, health/wellness, beauty, exercise were especially popular.
2. Source/design a product from Asia that has a high enough margin for advertising
3. Buy ads on social media, hire influencers, and build a strong email channel via Mailchimp
4. Drive customers initially to Shopify and then later to Amazon FBA
5. If you have a strong enough brand, then take your products to brick and mortar retailers
That all went well for years especially with customers flush with pandemic monies until the iOS upgrade and Amazon started squeezing sellers.
At the tail end of the pandemic, VC money poured multiple billions into the market as they used the PE aggregator model to create entities like Thrasio, Elevate, Accel to buy up a lot of small players in the $5-20m ARR space.
I share the same dream; of one day charting my own path. I've been doing things a bit differently. I've kept my job and am building my product (www.bannerbox.io) on the side. I wake up early and dedicate a few hours to it in the morning. So far I've built the MVP but have no users. I'm fine with this because I'm learning.
Last year I've dedicated 100% of my time to building. This year I'm spending half of my time marketing. I'm struggling with this new arrangement. Marketing makes me uncomfortable. I haven't made meaningful progress on marketing yet but it's the right move as long I am consistent.
Same boat. I've made some small change. Marketing really is the thing to learn. I find it kind of fun actually because I know it is building skills to align with my existing technical skills.
Author here - That's awesome. I admire your grit. Realizing you needed to change and focus more on marketing is a big step in the right direction. We all start out doing the wrong things and making mistakes. The key is learning from them, which it seems, you are willing to do. Best of luck!
It was very disappointing reading how the author found credible podcasts, books and people to follow, only to recommend nothing and leave the reader wondering about this mysterious information.
Author here - Sorry about that. Since I haven't been much of a success, I didn't think people would be interested in my recommendations. But here are a few that I found really helpful:
Books:
The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris,
The E-myth by Michael Gerber,
Running Lean by Ash Maurya
As the other posted said, any resources provided by MicroConf are also great. Basically look up their videos on YouTube and follow all of their speakers on Twitter or subscribe to their newsletters.
Author here - Yes it works. I have two programmatic sites so far, one of which I built in public on my blog. I also consulted on programmatic SEO for a bit. Just like human written content, Google won't index your pages if they are low quality or straight up spam. You have to actually provide value to the user. A common example I use for when programmatic SEO is appropriate is nutritional information.
Author here - Thanks for reading. The $1k/mo is just my "salary" from revenue generated by my indie projects. I had a substantial amount of savings that I lived off of for my first year. Since then, I've supported myself with contract work. I'm also very lucky that my partner is very supportive and has a good job, so at times (such as last year when I was launching my latest SaaS), he picked up our shared expenses.
My first year I lived entirely off of my savings and dedicated myself full time to my first project. So, it is indeed the anniversary of when I attempted to go full time, which was the sentiment of that sentence. Sorry if that wasn't more clear.
All the contract work I've done was part-time at most, so I also haven't had the comfort and safety of a full-time gig during this time period. My projects have been the priority, and I've only done the bare minimum to get by. Which, imo, is still full time "indie hacking", though maybe you disagree.
Hi Allison, thank you for sharing your story. It’s inspiring in during a tough time. Just wondering if you were able to find contracts regularly with ease? If so, how did you do that? Thank you.
Well, it wasn't easy. I tried many things: searching twitter, cold out reach through linkedin, upwork, broadcasting my availability to my personal network. Usually at least one of these would work. If I was more serious about building a consultancy, I would build a pipline for leads. However, my SaaS products have been my main focus, so I continue to rely on the tactics I just mentioned.
I honestly found the article rather confusing. Maybe it’s the terminology used? When I hear the term “indie hacking”, I don’t think of product building (although author’s link has that as a definition). Going into the post I thought I’d read about some person’s five year journey into some wonderfully whacky personal hacking projects. The post seemed to start that way.
But then half way through, the tone changes to talk about product and business and learning all that commercial stuff.
The story ends talking about the projects only generating minimal revenue, and disappointment stemming from that.
I am far from an expert in this, but what seems to be lacking is clear cut goals from the start on the business side. If the goal is to hack, then the code itself is the reward. If the goal is to start a business, then you need targets (users, revenue, profitability, growth, etc) and plans (product vision, marketing strategy, market research, etc).
Author here - Sorry for the confusion. The term originated from the Indie Hacker forum launched around 2016, a forum that was dedicated to helping people start small businesses online. This is the website I linked to at the beginning of the article to give people context. I've seen this term used often in the context of startups on reddit as well as hacker news, so I thought it was common knowledge. It doesn't have anything to do with "hacking" computers, though I can see why people might think that.
Well, the term "indie hacker" means starting a business yeah. The difference with just "starting a business" is that the mindset is most of the time to build a small scale project that can be built and maintained alone.
Funny part is that indiehackers was purchased by stripe, meaning they likely ended up more financially successful than 99% of the startups posting on their site.
I resonate with your idea about passion a lot. Passion is what gets you to do the job, but once you're on the job, you have to put that aside and think with a cold mind. You turn passion into a small flame inside of you. It helps you go through the darkest moments.
Author here - Thanks, glad to hear that part resonated with you. I agree, you can't let your passion burn too bright, or it will consume you. "a small flame inside you" is a great approach.
I think an important thing is to identify what your end goal is - is it to create some cool app and get some people to use it or create a real business. The latter is much harder and even startups/companies with big funding and millions of users struggle to do it.
And just by implementing some cool app you don't magically obtain business knowledge required to get it to the next level - probably the ability to sell stuff and marketing being the most fundamental.
> I finally started generating enough consistent revenue to pay myself a meager salary. After five long years, I now make $1k/month.
> More than anything though, I'm so thankful I had the courage, and privilege, to take a swing at this.
I'm glad the author acknowledged that privilege. As someone not from a terribly privileged background, this sort of article usually just makes my blood boil.
It doesn't take extreme privilege to quit your job and indie hack for 5 years. It takes $60k in savings and extreme frugality (or the equivalent of the cheapest amount you can live on for 5 years in your country). $60k of savings can easily be saved in a year with a junior dev job in the USA, or 2 years in Europe as long as you have the frugality. Of course, you do sacrifice having a family, living in an expensive area, going out to restaurants and all other luxuries, but you can own your time without being born into any sort of wealth or privilege outside of being born in a country with GDP per capita above $10k.
Most people would rather live a more normal middle class life and work for the man instead. To each his own, but don't act like it's not a choice available to practically 100% of HN readers.
Sorry, where in EU or US can live a "normal" live on $12k/year? Sure, you can do it if you live in a one bed-room apartment in the middle of nowhere and only eat home-cooked pasta every day. But I don't think anybody that had an above average lifestyle before that can sustain that for 5 years, especially if you know that "luxury" is just one succesful job application away.
I have seen this logic presented in multiple places. While it might be possible to live that frugally, it only works if you have your work already sorted out. Like the business plan or an app idea. As a college student who spent $2/day on food (India 15 years back), I can assure that it’s not the setup for a healthy mindset. It also restricts exposure a lot and thus limits access to new ideas. Most of my brainpower was spent on penny pinching each expense.
If the article were more prescriptive (i.e. it were giving people life advice or suggesting policy) I'd agree.
But it's primarily descriptive ("this is what I lived" and the prescriptive parts are limited to "if you find yourself in this situation, here's how to do it better than what I did").
Seems a bit silly to require a meaningless disclaimer on someone's memoir.
> And that most people take many years, and many failed ventures, to eventually build a sustainable, profitable business.
I'm not sure how to parse that.
Sometimes people need to hear that it's not going to be easy, and they have to stick with it. (How I've sometimes put it, something like: "You know how, when a startup person is telling the story of how they succeeded, and the hardest part was when we thought we wouldn't succeed? This is one of those times. And if we can pull it off, someday we'll tell the story of how we didn't know whether we'd succeed, and no one will really understand until they experience it themselves.")
But other times, people need to know that many people will never succeed at building a viable business, no matter how many times they try. There are many factors, including dumb luck. Someone trying to start a business can lose a lot. They should go into it knowing that odds are that they will probably fail to build a viable business, that it's harder than it sounds, so they should take it seriously, and cover all the non-luck bases that they can.
The wording of a video title is determined by the rules of copywriting. You try to maximize clicks and gain virality. There is no correlation to the quality of the content.
In terms of website, I am not sure what you are referring to: acquisition.com is the actual website, that is dedicated to buying businesses. There is no paid course, all content is free. Technically the e-book costs 99 cents.
I am sure that I will fail but there is no other choice except to assess what doesn't work, adjust, rinse and repeat until I figure it out. Some of us get lucky and struck success early but others will have to try again and many will never succeed and that's just life and nothing is free in life (unless you come from money but then again I've never been in that position either).