[HN Gopher] Analyzing Indie Hacker Products with Verified Revenue
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Analyzing Indie Hacker Products with Verified Revenue
Author : mateuszbuda
Score : 162 points
Date : 2022-07-19 13:33 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scrapingfish.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (scrapingfish.com)
| c16 wrote:
| ScrapingFish ... ScrapingBee?
| [deleted]
| altdataseller wrote:
| ScrapingBee sounds much more trustworthy. You can't trust fish.
| mateuszbuda wrote:
| This is fishy.
| [deleted]
| jonatron wrote:
| "Buy Request Pakcs" hmmm
| sixQuarks wrote:
| 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
| wenbin wrote:
| 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%.
| ameister14 wrote:
| 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.
| pineconewarrior wrote:
| Agreed, 5% seems like a huge, encouraging number!
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| There is a big difference between revenue and profit. So
| nothing encouraging about this at all
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| i don't come across many low margin indie hacker projects
| elsewhen wrote:
| Are you considering marketing (eg GAds) spend?
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| How many of those are making over $100k? And how many are
| 100% honest about their costs?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| no clue mate. professional experience these days does
| certainly teach people to give vendors a lot of rent to
| get the job done
| acover wrote:
| > there were total of 937 products with Stripe verified revenue
|
| The stripe requirement filters a lot of zero revenue side
| projects.
| rco8786 wrote:
| And lets through a lot of low revenue side projects
| runako wrote:
| 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.
| personjerry wrote:
| 1 in 20, that know about the Indie Hackers website, posted on
| there, and use Stripe, so that's a hugely biased number already
| jrumbut wrote:
| Sure, but that's not the highest bar to clear.
| stuckinhell wrote:
| This is a sobering wakeup call especially in combination with all
| the other AI stuff on hackernews these days.
| sdfhdhjdw3 wrote:
| dinvlad wrote:
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| That's about an order of magnitude higher than I thought it'd be.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| 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.
| daveguy wrote:
| 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."
| game_the0ry wrote:
| 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.
| hackitup7 wrote:
| 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.
| some_random wrote:
| I had the exact same reaction, I expected the "made any money
| at all" category to be closer to 5% than this.
|
| Edit: They filtered out any businesses without stripe verified
| revenue, which makes these numbers a lot more believable.
| buf wrote:
| I wrote about this extensively here:
| https://siliconvict.com/articles/5-lessons-starting-a-500m-a...
|
| It took me nearly a decade to get to where I am today ($700k /
| year), and half of that time I had a full-time job.
|
| The most important thing to keep in mind is not to stop.
| rexreed wrote:
| I'm intrigued by your past and the felony conviction. Do you
| write about it on your blog? Trying to find more details Mr.
| Buford
| buf wrote:
| I've been meaning to but as you can imagine it's a
| sensitive topic.
|
| Many people in society simply cannot accept that a
| convicted felon deserves second chances once their time is
| served.
|
| It's been 20 years and I was finally pardoned a few years
| ago so I'd like this part of my history to be more in the
| foreground.
| rexreed wrote:
| 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?
| buf wrote:
| No. It was asked but it was not an issue. It felt harder
| to rent an apartment than to get VC funding when you have
| a record.
|
| It was an issue when I immigrated to Europe the first
| time though.
| 4pkjai wrote:
| Congratulations, I used castingcall.club in around 2014
| buf wrote:
| Now that's surprising! Usually the HN and CCC crowd don't
| mix.
| 4pkjai wrote:
| 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.
| vitruvian_man wrote:
| 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?
| buf wrote:
| 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.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| 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.
| danvoell wrote:
| Love your quote "<>, I guess I need to read what this <>head
| has to say"
|
| My feeling. every. time.
| codegeek wrote:
| 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.
| 4pkjai wrote:
| 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.
| js4ever wrote:
| 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.
| doppp wrote:
| Can you elaborate a little more on your business?
| js4ever wrote:
| 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
| mouzogu wrote:
| i wonder if those 5% have anything in common
| devmunchies wrote:
| 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).
|
| As an anecdote, my I took down my stripe verified revenue after
| my project passed $200k/month. Someone took a screenshot and
| shared it on twitter
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EXbNBVUX0AAotOo?format=jpg&name=...
| buf wrote:
| 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.
| jordanmorgan10 wrote:
| Some of the most successful indie hackers I've seen have a very
| small social presence nor do they share much. They are just
| building cool stuff.
|
| Not that I am at all against sharing your progress or having a
| social presence, but it's definitely something I've noticed.
| desireco42 wrote:
| I think you are correct, a lot of people like to talk about it.
| Working is not super hard, but it is harder than actually
| talking about it :).
|
| I am not there yet, but I am realizing that I need to avoid
| people for a while to get anything done :).
|
| Also your niche with actors and creatives, I think it is really
| good one and you hit a jackpot there.
| dbancajas wrote:
| > 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.
|
| > reply
|
| Can you at least share how you found your niche?
| jdmoreira wrote:
| If you want to share more about your journey and what you know
| works ping me at joao_at_jdmoreira.me
|
| I'm a huge fan of learning from others experiences so I would
| love to pick your brain.
|
| Of course you are probably way too busy building your business
| and focusing on what matters (just like you wrote) and I
| totally respect your mindset.
|
| But still, worth the try!
| buf wrote:
| I don't write often, but when I do I share it here:
| https://www.siliconvict.com
| gnicholas wrote:
| 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!
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| are you doing the labor or hiring it?
| buf wrote:
| I'm doing the labor but it's saas so mostly it's automated.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| nice work
| notlukesky wrote:
| Your delivery doesn't need a midwife though.
| buf wrote:
| I get so nervous writing something for the crowd.
| capableweb wrote:
| 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.
| judge2020 wrote:
| 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.
|
| 0:
| https://www.indiehackers.com/products?revenueVerification=st...
| nobody0 wrote:
| It's not a killing definitely a living though..
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| 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
| cuu508 wrote:
| IIUC $100K is the revenue number, you also have to take into
| account operating costs, overheads, taxes.
| dinvlad wrote:
| 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.
| warrentr wrote:
| I see MMR in here a couple times. Do you mean MRR? Edit: Awesome
| write up!
| pawelkobojek wrote:
| Yes, we meant MRR, thanks for pointing up the typo
| prometheus76 wrote:
| "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.
| thorw73m wrote:
| > 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.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| 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.
| bambax wrote:
| > _where human output is the foundation of what you are
| measuring_
|
| While Pareto was indeed a sociologist, the Pareto distribution
| can be observed in many, many natural phenomena. It's literally
| everywhere.
| squirtle24 wrote:
| 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!"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
| dbg31415 wrote:
| 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. (=
| altdataseller wrote:
| >> Bring in others as soon as you can.
|
| But then you're no longer profitable. Barely any of these
| projects can sustain 1 person, let alone 2 people.
| dbg31415 wrote:
| Takes money to make money...
|
| Have a valid idea. Build a business around it. Get an angel
| investor.
|
| But then they aren't indie hackers!
|
| Touche. But they are profitable. (=
| hobo_mark wrote:
| Or rather, "but then you have a full-time job again".
|
| I assume most of these people just want a more or less
| passive lifestyle business.
| Silhouette wrote:
| _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.
| NiagaraThistle wrote:
| 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.
| cercatrova wrote:
| I see you've also listened to the My First Million podcast
| episode with Levels.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| 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
| tothrowaway wrote:
| 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?
| NiagaraThistle wrote:
| 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.
| jon_adler wrote:
| As the saying goes "Revenue is Vanity. Profit is Sanity. Cash
| is Reality".
| jrumbut wrote:
| 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).
| [deleted]
| lancesells wrote:
| 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?
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| 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.
| rco8786 wrote:
| Because profit is a lie. I can have a business with $1mm in
| revenue, pay myself a $1mm salary and poof, $0 profit for my
| business.
|
| Revenue has its own issues obviously but as a quick and easy
| measure of how much money this business can generate its
| reasonably useful.
| danenania wrote:
| 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.
| NiagaraThistle wrote:
| 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).
|
| Key takeaway: Take lots of chances.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| 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.
| jiggywiggy wrote:
| There are different ways to do this. This is where the initial
| idea of pivoting came in.
|
| As long as you pick a profitable & big industry and stick to it
| 1-2 years, you can most of the time can find a way to make
| money.
|
| The startup mindset is focusing on "ideas" but probably easier
| to be successful if you think in terms of industries.
|
| Then there are the variables of costs, scalability,
| competition, etc. but this is the game.
|
| So if you are not heavy funded the best is to keep costs low as
| long as possible.
|
| If startups are really innovative there is a difference, but
| most companies are hardly innovative.
| mediaman wrote:
| 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.
| Flankk wrote:
| > 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.
| dinvlad wrote:
| 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).
| jimhi wrote:
| 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.
| deadcoder0904 wrote:
| the company (rovio) that built angry birds only succeeded
| after 51+ failed games.
|
| source: https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/how-a-bunch-of-
| angry-birds-...
| Flankk wrote:
| 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.
| runako wrote:
| "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.
| karterk wrote:
| Diversify initially to protect the downside but double down on
| your winner(s) to scale the upside!
| alksdeef wrote:
| I wonder what examples of those in the 'wearables' category might
| be that are putting them ahead of the curve?
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.indiehackers.com/products?category=wearables
| desireco42 wrote:
| 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.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| I've always wondered if a % of products on Indie Hackers make
| that amount of money purely from the social media & blog presence
| of their products.
|
| It seems that many of these successful products turn into the
| "self-help" of bootstrapping and make a living off of that
| shortly after.
| czbond wrote:
| 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.
| altdataseller wrote:
| 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.
| czbond wrote:
| I absolutely agree with you - thanks for the chime in.
| altdataseller wrote:
| What other areas are you exploring to move into?
| notlukesky wrote:
| 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.
| serjester wrote:
| 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.
| nomdep wrote:
| But how do you know someone is making money?
| gamerDude wrote:
| 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.
| dbancajas wrote:
| Dang 90K/month salary must be insane.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Ditto. My smaller purchases go through Stripe, but all of our
| large-revenue transactions are ACH or check.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| runako wrote:
| 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.)
|
| 1 - https://feinternational.com/blog/saas-metrics-value-saas-
| bus...
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| 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.
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