That's actually substantially higher than I would have imagined. Bootstrapping a business by yourself (and especially doing it like most of those people where it is not something you aren't usually committing full time to) to that mark is incredibly impressive.
Not stopping for 5 years straight on top of your day job, while you’re are the sole on call pager duty engineer (through holidays and work crunches, etc), is kindly very very difficult and kudos to you but probably borderline unachievable for mere mortals.
Makes sense. You do mention it on a few occasions and I am guessing the domain name reflects that as well so this yields some curiosity. Sounds like it hasn't had much impact on your life more recently. Was it an issue during any fund-raising activities during the due diligence process?
I've spent time reading through your site and inspired by your story and thoughts. One thought came to mind was - what's your go-to tech stack? And how do you typically acquire customers (distribution channels) in the early days of a project?
Rails / React / Tailwind / Postgres - I try new things out as they come out, but this is my current stack.
Early days of a project - I have an active audience, so I simply email them when I want to try a new project. Before that though, I spent about 5 years gathering an audience by being really active in various subreddits.
I actually used it to hire voice actors for a few games/apps I made. Very much enjoyed the community. One guy would submit auditions for parts and intentionally read for the characters in a strange way.
Had exactly the same reaction, every one of these projects is probably life changing for the founder(s). It's hard work but those stats are still way better and much more satisfying than a lottery ticket.
There is certainly selection bias going on here. Sure, a lot of indie hackers register with the site to get exposure. However a lot of people won't disclose financials until the exposure is an obvious positive for them -- ie "look at how many people already trust and use what I provide."
Same reaction here - 5% sounds pretty good, especially considering indie hackers usually boot strap on their own free time while working. I'd be happy working on a 8-hour-a-week project if it was making 2-4K/Month.
Just as a gut feeling I would normally say that much less than 1% of indie projects ever make more than 100K/year in revenue. Their pool is of indie hackers with the caveat of:
"At the time of our analysis, there were total of 937 products with Stripe verified revenue. The information we gathered to make this analysis are revenue and product's categories."
I assume there are 10s of thousands of listings that don't have Stripe verified revenue on Indie Hackers (owned by Stripe).
Just look at Product Hunt and track to see how many of the Product Hunt of the day fail in less than 2 years.
And how much of that revenue gets eaten up by the other services is another story ranging from Google ads to AWS to other SaaS offerings like the scraping fish (the authors of the post). (Please buy more shovels from us for the gold rush.)
I still hope people follow their passion and dreams. Just good to keep in mind that the odds are stacked against you and to try to succeed accordingly.
As a counterpoint, I avoid adding a revenue figure to some of my businesses. Why? There’s certain niches that you can make a killing on for short periods - the last thing I want to do is attract attention.
As an example, during the last refinancing boom I stumbled into an opportunity and a couple weeks later I had an MVP. Very quickly we had customers willing to pay 5 figure sums for our product. There’s no incentive for me to go around bragging and attracting copy cats.
How do I know this? Because I have no shame in launching a competitor if I see someone’s making money and I think I can outcompete them.
As a second point, most indie hackers are cycling through ideas until they either give up or stumble into something. If your business fails, you quickly move on.
Across 5 years you could have tried 10 things and only the last one made money. But it doesn’t matter since business revenue follows a power law. So (theoretically) you retire on the last idea while your batting average remains below 10%. Not necessarily a bad outcome?
Regardless I do agree the overwhelming majority of indie hackers are wantreprenuers that will never make a dime. Just don’t discount the professionals.
I was going to say this as well. I have two companies listed on IndieHackers. One of which is stripe verified and does about $2k/mon.
The other which is not stripe verified because our price point is much higher and we do checks not credit cards, makes $90k/mon. Just an important point there is a business model that is excluded here. General SaaS offerings though, I would imagine would be Stripe Verified if they wanted to publicly share though.
I don't really think that's an "only" statistic - 1 in 20 products there is a strong lifestyle business or more? That's amazing. They're comparing it to a full-time programming job but I think almost all of these are side projects until they hit a sustainable number for MRR.
It also filters out projects by older people, who are socially less likely (IMHO) to share how much money they make with strangers.
Also -- with SaaSes I've started, the bigger customers all paid via non-Stripe means (ACH, check, etc.) and would not show up in these stats. Would have made those businesses appear smaller than they were.
From following Pieter Levels for years, this article coincides with exactly what Pieter says about his own products: Only 5% of his 70 projects have ever made any real money. Therefore it's a better idea to build a lot of small things fast (to test traction and profitability) instead of focusing on one huge project and hope it takes off.
Obviously this is general advice and there are outliers that will break the mold, but from a lot of this data and indiehacker anecdotes, the more shots you fire the better chances you have of one of them being big. THe key is to spot the losers quick and move on to something different, and then spot the ones that are gaining traction quick and then double down on your efforts for that/those one(s).
> A person who chases two rabbits catches neither. -Confucius.
A low success rate is not a sign you're doing things right. If you're solving a real problem people will not have an issue paying you. There is a real opportunity cost to starting a business and I would not advise anyone to use this strategy. For starters, I don't see how anyone could possibly have 70 projects. I can only assume they are a con artist.
"If you're solving a real problem people will not have an issue paying you"
The counter to this is you don't know at the outset:
- whether you have identified a real problem
- whether you are solving the problem the right way
- whether the amount the buyers are willing to pay aligns with how much you need to earn for solving the problem
- how many actual (vs potential) buyers there are for a solution to this problem
- how difficult (read: expensive) it is to find people with this problem and make them aware of your solution
- how quickly a better-funded company will come in and offer a better (in some way) alternative
- how much you like (dislike) working with the median purchaser of your solution
- how much enjoyment you personally derive from providing this solution
- etc.
All of these lead to the realization that it might be possible to struggle it out with a given niche, but it might not be the best course of action for you personally.
He built all/most of those in public, btw. Which is part of how he was able to develop a lot of well-deserved trust. This strategy has a very good reasoning, but I do think it's hard because not everyone is able to develop a huge following easily (even in daily life).
It’s software. Most of the time consuming work can be copied after the first time. User accounts, payments, etc.
There is also a fair amount of stories out there in hit based industries (startups, games) where people have documented their 50+ projects. Its hard yes. It can also make a lot of money. Few people are willing to do it or it would be more common.
Company, not individual. There is a list on Wikipedia but it shows 34 games, not over 50. It's a shovelware factory. They farmed the work out to employees and contractors. I think they got lucky, they were on the verge of bankruptcy. Not efficient or repeatable.
This is a good point - and a mistake I often see is to "pivot" from industry to industry, never really getting one's teeth into the details of any particular industry.
This inevitably leads to failures because you get two valuable assets from spending time in one industry: (1) an understanding of what companies' actual problems are, in detail and (2) relationships and reputation within that industry.
Pressing 'reset' frequently makes success much more remote, but continuing to pick at a single (good-sized) industry over years will almost always yield some success to those who are good at listening and willing to adapt what they do to what they hear from customers. Even if the first idea or two don't get traction.
This is also advice that Taleb talks about in his books. There are certain opportunities that are exponentially more important to focus your attention on. Spending your time preparing for said opportunities are how you make the most of them.
"Business owners rediscover the Pareto distribution! Film at 11!" I genuinely don't understand why this comes as a shock to people. 80% of the results (or revenue or productivity or whatever you're measuring where human output is the foundation of what you are measuring) will come from the top 20% of the producers. This is a normal, predictable phenomenon that continually blows the minds of people who think it's somehow a product of "systemic bias", or who think it should all be a relatively flat, uniform distribution.
Here's the "paradox" that takes this phenomenon even further: the more choices people have, the less uniform the distribution is, and the more it favors the top producers.
> Here's the "paradox" that takes this phenomenon even further: the more choices people have, the less uniform the distribution is, and the more it favors the top producers.
How do you explain the pre and post netflix years. More movies produced more people get rich post netflix. Fewer movies produced less people got more rich before netflix.
To me it sounds like "more people get rich" is a line in the sand. There are more movies to choose from, but the top movies gross more now than they ever have and the "middle-performing" movies, relative to the others, make less than they did 40 years ago. If you draw a line and say "more movies make over 100 million in revenue now than before", that is a natural byproduct of there being more movies to pick from now, and more people watching movies now.
Pareto distribution also explains wealth distribution and "income disparity". There are simply more people now, so the separation between the median and top 1% is going to be greater now than it ever has been. There's nothing political about this. It's a natural manifestation of a Pareto distribution, and as another commenter pointed out: this distribution shows up all over the place in nature.
Your parent comment was talking about distributions, while you are talking absolute figures. For example, if we define rich as >1 mil, then lets say before netflix, 100 movie producers made exactly 1 mil. Then after netflix, 5 movie producers made 1 bil while 150 made 1 mil. Still more people total, but the distribution is more uneven.
I see it now. "1.5" billion from 150 people contributes to making the distribution uniform where as 5 billion from 5 people is contributing to skewing the distribution. But is there a proof to that or it more of an observation.
According to this data, I'm doing better than 99% of Indie Hackers (I make $700k a year).
To me, this tells me that Indie Hacker members are busy networking pretending to build companies, and not actually doing it. I say this because I don't think I'm that remarkable. I'm just going along trying to build a small business without much glamour about it.
But I can see the appeal. There is almost cult-like mindsets all hyping each other up.
Or Indie Hackers companies are earlier stage than you. In a different comment you mention working on your startup for nearly a decade, so folks who are earlier-stage would be less likely to have as much revenue as you.
But honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me that $700k ARR is the top 1% of Indie Hackers. I would have been surprised if it was much lower than that. Congrats on your success!
I wanted to quit twitter because of this sort of ads federation network. It's worse than platform ads. Somehow tweeting every single day is a good thing to do to ecosystem. Imagine all of your circle members trying to sell something to you everyday.
> adox" that takes this phenomenon even further: the more choices people have, the less uniform the distribution is, and the more it favors the top producers.
Marrying this analysis with the FE International valuation spectrum for SaaS businesses under a $2m valuation[1] gives some interesting results:
- ~6% of these founders have built businesses that could likely be sold for > $500k today
- ~4% have built businesses they could likely sell for > $1m
- ~3% have built businesses they could likely sell for > $2m
And for those that want to go bigger, having enough revenue that one could exit for 7 figures makes pitches to investors much stronger. (Some of these companies are doing better financially than VC-backed firms that have raised tons of money. Fast.co, which raised over $100m and produced only $600k in revenue, comes to mind here.)
(I give credence to the FEI valuation spectrum because they were the broker when I sold my last SaaS, and their valuation advice led to a successful sale. I highly recommend them, and will likely use them again in the future.)
Lower-value exits are somewhat harder to value, but I do find it striking that of the analyzed firms, perhaps 10% have built businesses they could sell for $250k or more. (And likely more of the analyzed first simply haven't gotten to that point yet, since this analysis doesn't analyze time-based cohorts. 5-year-old firms are in the same bucket as companies that joined this week.)
Why is revenue the prevailing number used for measuring a business? I see revenue cited almost universally these days, with no mention of profit.
A hardware company that makes $100k in revenue (with no profit) is very different than a SaaS product that makes $100K with 90% profit. Why don't we just use profit?
If you make 100k but reinvest half in marketing, your profit is 50k, but it would be misleading to equate your business to another one that makes 50k and doesn't reinvest any of it.
What you're looking for is gross margin, but even that is hard to pin down exactly since there can be a fuzzy line between whether an expense is required or discretionary.
Profit is a tricky concept in any business, particularly a small software business.
A lot of very successful businesses have zero or near zero profit (considering that paying the CEO reduces the profit, reinvesting reduces the profit, etc).
IT's funny you mention this. There has been talk on twitter among a lot of Indie Hackers the past couple weeks (months?) saying the same thing. Especially now with a potential recession looming. I've always thought the same. But I think the reason revenue is used most often stems from VC backed businesses (and those seeking funding) trying to show that they are viable and have customers so they can raise more funds even before they have profit - think Twitter and Facebook as big examples.
I know I'm in the minority here because these articles seem to pop up quite often but what is it with Indie Hackers and so many articles being about ARR/MRR?
It's one of the least interesting things to me compared to the actual product or ideas. I get that it's mainly content marketing to talk about how much you're making but why does it work so well?
Because it's about the business and revenue is what's important. The product is "just" the thing you sell to get revenue. A business with $50k MRR is far more interesting than one with $5k MRR even if the 50k/month business is using 50 year-old technology while the $5k one is bleeding edge.
I have a bootstrapped business started in 2016 doing something like 12k/month in MRR but also doing 35-50k/month in consulting around it. The consulting side is not at all MRR but it's pretty stable.
So even if MRR is not great sometimes it's still interesting because of consulting or even reputation.
If it was only about MRR it would not make sense compared to a full time job in IT. But all in all it's better because I was able to start other businesses, hire, and be my own boss.
Sure, it's a serverless CMS (Visual builder) & Backend (API + SQL DB) based on AWS Lambda & Aurora.
It's used by startups & enterprises to build scalable web apps & mobile apps backend.
The consulting part is all about helping customers to implement what they need.
You can check it here: https://appdrag.com
Right, well it's not really by design that they make so little... but the way most of them they run their businesses, is it any wonder?
A lot of people do these as side projects. A way to sort of build a model train in their basement, free from all the complexities and compromises of "real" software development... They are trying to avoid product managers, sales people, designers, testers... countless others... getting a say in what they build.
And, as a result, there's no business plan past a dream of, "If you build it, they will come." Hard to see any "indie hacker" project that wouldn't be improved with more testing, more marketing, more UX design... more customer research... but most of the time, it's just some guy with a boring day job trying to make $5 selling a widget nobody asked him to build in the first place.
Anyway not to be negative... but like, if you're a small indie hacker who is trying to make a buck, remember that all of the software we use today has a village of people involved in the creation and support of it. If you're trying to do it all on your own... man, that's an up-hill battle. Bring in others as soon as you can.
Then make sure you have a business plan that has the capacity to reward everyone, and be patient. A lot of people in tech... we're early-adopters. This means we do things well before a lot of people even know they exist, and by the time an audience has grown we've already moved on thinking our ideas were a flop. Sometimes they just take a little longer to pan out. (=
I'd argue a lot of these indie hackers ARE probably profitable. If you take Pieter Levels as an example: He builds a shit ton of small projects, tries to monetize them, many fail, but a couple (NomadList and RemoteOk) take off and earn BIG revenue. He's a one man company, brings in almost $3m USD per year and only has 2 part time contractors to assist with community moderation (on his Slack and Discord channels) and server uptime (which he says hasn't been necessary in months (years?) and security). He profits 80-90% on his companies so that $2m + per year now? And he automates the businesses so he doesn't have to do maintenance - just build new features the community requests when he wants to: No sales team, no marketing team, no stable of devs, no customer support team. Just one man and 2 part time contractors.
Point is: you don't need a huge team to scale. You don't need to throw money at the company to grow. He's not the only one who's achieved this, but he is a great example of what's possible by one guy with mediocre dev skills and a passion to help others can do.
it can take a village of wage earners with no meaningful stake (and often stolen wages or exploited salaried overtime, plus all the managers needed to herd) to create the work of a few owner-laborers properly aligned with business interests and vision. but then these owners need to do work and LPs stand to gain less from not pumping it into a moonshot
if you're a small indie hacker who is trying to make a buck, remember that all of the software we use today has a village of people involved in the creation and support of it.
Much of it does. And yet sometimes extremely successful software, even a few products that entire industries have relied on every day, has been created by a single person. In software of all industries one really good dev or a small tech-heavy team can punch way above their weight.
In any case for stereotype indie hackers the goal isn't necessarily to found the next unicorn. Not everyone wants to follow that path, even among people reading HN. For some the dream is just to make a decent living doing something they enjoy without having red tape and office politics bringing down their day. I know several people who have made that particular dream come true and are entirely content with that result even if they're not going to be the next Web3 billionaire.
I wonder how many of those people are actually following Russ Hanneman's advice. To be fair there is some sense to it.
"If you show revenue, people will ask 'how much' and it will never be enough. I don't want to make a little bit of money, every day... I wanna make a f-k ton of money, all at once. ROI!"
Please also note that some products from "Indie Hackers" are actually from a small team (e.g., 5+ people) that raised a"tiny" family & friends round (e.g., $500k) :)
In the purest form of "indie hacker" (i.e., a single person team + use your own saving + maybe part-time outside day job), % of $100k+/yr revenue is way lower than 5%.
Depends on where you live and your cost of living. For someone living in small town in India, even 20k per year is good. I think if you are able to create good enough income for you as an indie hacker, that is success.
So the better metric would be to find out what percentage of indie hackers are full time with their gigs and have enough to live ok.
Without any indication of where these indie hackers live, the income statement is almost useless. If you earn $100k/year while living in Bratislava, Slovakia, that would put you in the upper bracket when it comes to income, while if you live in San Fransisco, US, you're not exactly making a killing.
Apparently it's "Stripe verified revenue" which is based on this[0]. I imagine it's all USD but you're right that it doesn't indicate the living situation of the humans running the operation.
Exactly, a lot of them live in remote areas like Bali with low costs of living, and have better housing etc. compared to a lot of salaried employees here.
it’s likely mostly passive income if R&D slows to a minimum. that affords a lot of flexibility with one’s time vs comparing with wage labor where free time is never earned
I'm in this data set. I've shared the Stripe revenue for my web app with Indie Hackers. It brings in about $3000 USD a month.
It's not a big amount of money, but I keep going because I believe the app has potential to do much larger numbers. Also because I generally dislike working for other people.
The ones who are making real money don't come out publicly unfortunately. I personally know 2 solo devs making over 500k per month with apps. But they are in a b2b niche and have nothing to gain with sharing their story.
Take all of this with a grain of salt. I’ve been making over $100k/year with a handful of my indie projects and would never publicize it for fear of copycats and/or targeting by patent trolls
This also biases towards indie hacker projects that weren't too successful, since when revenue gets too high, there is less incentive to share it (too many inbound marketers, etc).
I think revenue comparisons with non-indie companies miss the point, because a lot of Indiehackers live a different lifestyle altogether, where their "Ramen profitability" of $1-2k MRR can already allow them to live very comfortably in a remote area compared to many salaried employees here.
And they have more freedom etc. in terms of what and when to work on, which is hard to measure in money, but that resource (time) is arguably our most precious thing in life.
For those who might have significant style revenue of the indie hacker style, here's a question.
Do you feel that in 2022+ the SaaS/software/e-comm niche generally has too little of a moat, now too much competition, and small startup costs? I've been in the "life-style" for a while now - but getting that feeling to move out to other areas.
Having started 2 SaaS products in the past 9 years (1 exit and 1 profitable but nothing big), i would say definitely Yes. There are much less greenfield niches available. All the low hanging fruit ideas are gone and the ideas left are much harder to execute on, and may not even yield the same ROI. In short, you need to work harder for lesser gain.
I was curious too, Here are the products under wearable categories[1] on indie hackers.
Very few of them which make revenue has something to do with apps/data on wearable, Most them listed in that category have nothing to do with wearables.
Especially for other countries that are not USA and EU, people can live well off of projects that make much less. Which is opportunity to get really good services while somebody is having a decent lifestyle of independence and creativity.
