from Hacker News

Indie Hackers is indie again

by TimLeland on 4/5/23, 9:05 PM with 78 comments

  • by schnebbau on 4/6/23, 7:22 AM

    Indiehackers is not the same resource it used to be. Since the acquisition it has devolved into a spam hub of little value, just like Product Hunt.

    If you are looking for inspiration or case studies, try Starter Story. They pretty much picked up where Indiehackers left off.

  • by TimLeland on 4/6/23, 12:14 AM

    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.

    T.LY URL Shortener https://t.ly/

    Park.io Interview https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/034-mike-carson-of-park...

  • by thyrox on 4/5/23, 11:44 PM

    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.

  • by quantumwoke on 4/6/23, 5:09 AM

    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.

  • by nickjj on 4/6/23, 10:16 AM

    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?

  • by dopeboy on 4/6/23, 4:47 AM

    Got to meet Channing and Courtland at a meetup in SF years ago. Two awesome, humble dudes. Congrats on the acquisition and being free again.

    If you're reading this, I'm curious what your plans are to monetize. What companies are you taking inspiration from?

  • by tchock23 on 4/5/23, 10:19 PM

    Happy for Courtland. Should be a good move in the long term. Hope they keep the (excellent) podcast going.

  • by simonbarker87 on 4/6/23, 9:42 AM

    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.

  • by theery on 4/5/23, 9:08 PM

    Wow! That's crazy. I wonder exactly how that went down.

  • by urbandw311er on 4/5/23, 9:55 PM

    What exactly does indiehackers do?

  • by Bjorkbat on 4/5/23, 10:54 PM

    Very exciting!

    On a side-note, I wonder if this decision relates to Stripe’s ambitions to IPO soonish.

  • by shp0ngle on 4/6/23, 11:25 AM

    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?

  • by wonderfuly on 4/6/23, 9:08 AM

    How does this happen? Did they buy it back from Stripe?

  • by gardenhedge on 4/6/23, 1:56 AM

    Wow this is a pretty big spin. To me it sounds like they basically got fired or let go and/or lost their main investor.

  • by rektide on 4/6/23, 2:22 AM

    OT but had this confused in my head with indie.vc, supported by OReilly AlphaTech Ventures, which shut down March 2021. https://www.axios.com/2021/03/03/indievc-venture-capital-inv...

  • by ingend88 on 4/5/23, 10:43 PM

    Wow this is a big one! Congrats csallen@, what drove this change ?

  • by mactunes on 4/6/23, 4:27 AM

    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…

  • by rvz on 4/6/23, 2:17 AM

    TLDR:

    Stripe lays off the creator(s) of Indie Hackers and they (Indie Hackers) will start to monetize the website with ads, newsletters and merchandise.

    So predictable.