Lessons from 4 years of selling to indie hackers

Painful lessons.

I've been selling things to indie hackers for 4 years. It's my natural habitat, my crowd, my people. The people I thought I understood the best.

And whom I completely misunderstood until very recently.

If you're building a product or offering a service targeting indie hackers, creators, and very early stage solopreneurs, take notes. This was written in blood.

Indie hackers are a B2C market masquerading as B2B.

Indie hackers don't think of themselves as businesses, don't think like businesses, don't spend like businesses.

They don't experience problems and then look for ways to solve them with money (either earned or borrowed) like businesses do - they chase trends and try to DIY everything.

This means that the best techniques to figure out what to build are nearly useless. Even if you find a problem indie hackers actually have (because e.g. you've experienced it) it's likely you'll struggle to sell the solution for it.

It's a market for low cost hype-driven products and services that promise a lot, cost a little, and deliver infrequently (but enough to get good testimonials and sell even more).

The best selling products are those that don't require commitment or effort (or at least don't seem to), that promise riches without being too explicit about it (because engineers are super skeptical), and that are offered by former indie hackers who aren't indie hackers anymore (because they beat the odds and succeeded).

It's a market full of fairy tales ("build it and they will come"), survivorship bias (people who made it apparently without marketing), and misattribution of success (commit streaks, small bets, jQuery and PHP, a large Twitter audience, etc).

It's an insanely hard market to sell in even though it seems it should be easy - after all we are ourselves indie hackers.

It's saturated with every service, offer and product imaginable. And it's very resistant and even toxic to promotion (esp. on Reddit, but on Twitter and elsewhere too).

But -

It's also a tremendous source of innovation, it's growing like crazy (although what we call ourselves changes over time), the people are delightful, the energy to build, learn, discover and break free from traditional employment is palpable, and the density of IQ per square inch is mind boggling.

So I'm sticking around.

Not because it's easy.

But because it's where I belong.

(But I'm not betting my farm financially on this market anymore)