I’ve been listening to Courtland Allen’s podcast Indie Hackers for a year now. Every week interviewing people who built micro-saas businesses around their once “side” projects.
The model seems interesting since we usually underestimate the amount of work –and compounding– we put into something we love.
A common pattern for these stories often goes like this:
- I started with an MVP to solve problem X for me & my friends (mvp code, design & infra)
- I started posting on online communities/forums about my idea (discord, slack, circle, reddit)
- I started to ship content around the product’s story (tech blog, tweets, linkedin)
- I started setting up systems for email & content marketing
- I started gaining traction and getting feedback from early users
- I went from X MRR Y months ago to Z current MRR
While I was listening to this kind of stories I used to mistake the above model for a startup.
This is not a startup. This is Indie Hacking.
What finally put it into perspective for me was a random essay I was reading the other week. Essay was called Worldview Drift.
It categorizes successful careers in tech into the following:
- Startups: raise money, take equity in projects you work on, focus on how to scale
- Bootstrapping: don’t raise money, own 100% of your projects, focus on cash flow
- Indie Hacking: build products that generate passive income, focus on content & audience
- Big Tech: find a very high salary job, retire early, focus on saving & investing
Author backs the fact that all of these views are proved to be right, each in its own way. Moreover, as we start to get deep into one view, our values & goals often drift toward the cultural standard in which we immerse ourselves into. In the end, no perspective has all the answers.
“How can you stay grounded, you ask? The goal is not to get rid of our cultural influences, but simply to become more aware of them, and to notice when they’re limiting our actions.”
With that said, almost six years into my career, I’ve seen enough real-life successful examples of each of the above routes. As well as not-so-successful examples, falling victims to a deferred life plan. I have witnessed people of startups suffering from the effect of a deferred life plan in a drastic way. And I would not like to be there at any cost.
“Founders and early employees of tech companies often pay a high personal cost. Most of my tech industry friends have gone through major burnout at least once in their careers, a result of a culture that idolizes workaholism. This is heartbreaking, as most of the people I know in the startup world are in their twenties and early thirties — the prime years of their lives.”
And there it is, the diff between both: Indie Hacking enables slower sustained growth for a smaller product; one that usually starts as a side thing, then turns into a SaaS business. Startups on the other hand are bigger risks, faster growth, and forever-moving vehicles that can not be stopped at any cost.