i disagree. Maybe the POSTS in the Forums are low-value, but the Podcast and interviews have always been great sources of inspiration and value imo.
I do agree that the past several months, and the past several podcast episodes have been less than exciting and inspirational, but I wonder if the reason has anything to do with this decision. It may be that there were changes happening behind the scenes and Courtland and Channing were getting bored and that affected their enthusiasm. That could be why they decided to leave and rekindle that Indie spark.
Either way, I never thought the value of IndeiHackers was in the forum post - comments sometimes maybe- but rather in the podcasts and interviews as these told the stories of starters and how they built their companies. To me the forum was just a way to keep traffic around engaged between episodes of the podcast.
Indie Hackers is what led me down the road of building side projects. For me it was the inspiring interviews from people like Mike the founder of Park.io. How one person can build a business solo is amazing.
Five years into the future, I am now working to grow T.LY URL Shortener to be the best way to create and manage short links. I have a long way to go but I have made a lot of progress in a "short" time.
That Park.io interview is one of my favourites too, I love his approach to "growth" and that it's not always a good thing for a company and he's just happy doing what he does.
Very inspiring for solo side-project people like myself :)
As an avid follower of indiehackers.com since its early days, I have to say that I'm disappointed with the current state of the site. What used to be a vibrant community of indie founders sharing their struggles, learnings, and wins has devolved into a spammy showcase of "look how easy it is to make money/followers with this hack" posts.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for celebrating success. But the recent flood of self-promoting posts that offer little substance or value to the community has made it harder to find the signal amid the noise.
I hope now that the site isn't pressed to make money maybe it will go back to the roots and stop compromising the quality and authenticity.
This is not a dig but the (current) reality of community sites.
At Stripe, they were probably being paid as marketers, not engineering managers. (No team, no direct reports.)
One problem is that indie hackers, by self selection, are not typically investable. If you're not looking to raise, the forum you spend your time on can't, say, buy equity in you or funnel you toward a batch-based accelerator program.
Maybe the Allens can do micro-investments, but again you have a selection problem at play.
They could choose advertising and decide to grow the base. Then they start competing with outlets like The Hustle, My First Million and Morning Brew.
The group of people who want to be indie hackers is much smaller than the group who enjoy “business news” (Morning Brew) or business entertainment (My First Million).
The indie hacker community doesn't feel very indie or hacker in the sense that it seems to fall into the same "easy money with this hack" junk content and "let's interview successful person about why they're successful and hence make them more successful" tropes that every other site has.
Doesn't mean indie hacker hubs are a bad idea, just that it feels less about learning and more about cheap content.
"I hope now that the site isn't pressed to make money".. it is the opposite ,right? now they have to make revenue and profit because they are independent
They aren't going to run the site for free. They need to earn revenue from it to stay afloat and earn a living. They will monetize it somehow - ads, subscriptions of some sort, some other manner. Maybe they will sell it outright and move on to some new venture. But they will find a way to monetize it now they are not getting salaries from Stripe.
> Don't get me wrong, I'm all for celebrating success. But the recent flood of self-promoting posts that offer little substance or value to the community has made it harder to find the signal amid the noise.
Yesterday I posted a question about which country is best for an indie hacker to incorporate in. Got zero responses.
I posted about how to do outreach sales. Got some response but the response I got from /r/startups was 100x better and gave tons of info on how to start and what to think about.
I like the idea of indiehackers.com, I think when they got bought by Stripe they were given goals/targets that resulted in it turning into what it is.
It was never pressed to make money. Courtland said it many times on his podcast that Stripe never expected or gave him goals to earn revenue.
My guess as to why Stripe acquired IndieHackers is that COurtland promoted founding small companies to aspiring solopreneurs and those new companies would need to collect money and hopefully would use Stripe to do so. Encourage more and more people to found companies, and more and more new companies would use Stripe - free low-key sourcing of new customers without marketing or real revenue generation from IndieHackers.
Indie hackers inspired me as a junior developer to work independently and have a startup focused mind. I have to confess that I left the community some time ago due to the rapid descent into hustlebro type content. I hope this is a positive change leaving stripe but my more cynical side is thinking not much will change.
It's interesting that IH promotes sharing business details and figures from all of their guests but they don't share their own info.
On one hand they mention they're at $0, but also say Stripe is still being supportive as an investor. Is Stripe still financially supporting them? What were the details of their set up? What did their salary look like over the last 6 years? What was the growth like? What was it like working for Stripe? What caused the break?
Hopefully this means they go back to actually focussing on Independent software development and entrepreneurship. I stopped listening to the podcast after what felt like the tenth unrelated big business content creator or VC interview and the actual community became a boring series of promotion and PH launch posts.
Glad to see if back in the founder hands with a fire to make it great again.
How what went down? If you mean Strip not owning it anymore, I think the post explains pretty much everything. They're on good terms and Strip is simply supporting rather than owning IH now
Presumably Stripe owned it before, now they don’t… or own some smaller portion (since it’s stated they’re an investor)
Likely either founders bought back a portion of the company, or Stripe relinquished ownership out of goodwill. Perhaps it was worth very little, I’m not familiar with it
Maybe Stripe gave it back partly out of goodwill. For Stripe to do something without the brothers would be to spend a lot to reinvent it anew. Not worth the effort probably. Indiehackers always struck me as pretty small for something like Stripe to own. As if Microsoft had the one single coffee shop somewhere in Manitoba.
Teach and inspire people to become entrepreneurs on their own terms, e.g. without raising venture capital. Media company (podcast, newsletter) with a large online and in-person community.
Sorry for asking... what is the site about? From first glance it looks like a Reddit/Hacker News clone? But it was acquired by Stripe so I guess I am wrong?
It's a Reddit/HN clone maybe in the sense that it's a community, but it's not a "post links get karma discuss" it's more focused on individuals trying to make profitable internet companies & helping each other out on that journey (and of course promoting themselves along the way).
They have $0 MRR, so presumably Stripe was paying them to work on something that makes no money. If Stripe didn't want to do that anymore and didn't want to generate community ill will from shutting down Indie Hackers, this would be the scenario.
It was never bought by stripe to have MRR. The initial acquisition by Stripe was to allow Courtland (and Channeing) to continue just inspiring people to become business founders. No revenue generation, no MRR for IndieHackers. Just continue inspiring people to start businesses by sharing advice and success stories.
The goal was to increase the number of independent online businesses directly or indirectly and by doing so hopefully increase the number of online businesses that used Stripe.
FTA:
> This has been about four months in the making. Branching out on our own is something we mutually decided on with Stripe, and we're excited about it!
If I had to hazard a guess this might be a cost-cutting measure on Stripe's part similar to cuts on content marketing that other companies have done. DigitalOcean divested from CSS Tricks [0], and there was an article earlier today about Amazon shutting down DPReviews [1]. Maybe the Stripe founders gave the IndieHackers folks a chance to spin it off again as opposed to shutting down.
The two founders/employees probably cost $600k/year and at this point, Stripe is so well established that IndieHackers sponsorship probably doesn't move the needle much on Stripe adoption anymore. They probably just mutually agreed to cut ties and the founders will have control over their own revenue / income.
$300k each sounds high. I don't believe they had reports. It was its own fiefdom. Probably closer to ~$200k. I don't believe they are Bay Area–based, either, where 300 might make more sense.
A stripe software engineer in the US is easily making $300k, including equity, unless they’re a new grad. Add another 10-15% for their benefits and total cost to Stripe.
It seemed like a standard acquisition / acqui-hire. Buy out the business, Stripe owns it, the employees are paid like Stripe employees. Access to codebase is tangential, big tech co codebases are already very segmented off into tons of repo's with different access permissions. Ultimately, this is just conjecture.
Completely off-topic, but I was an avid IH user before I somehow lost my password.
For some strange reason resetting the password doesn‘t work for me. It tells me it‘s going to sene a mail with instructions in a few minutes and then nothing ever arrives…
If you are looking for inspiration or case studies, try Starter Story. They pretty much picked up where Indiehackers left off.