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Courtland Allen

Indie Hackers Community — Work together to build profitable businesses & side projects

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We're a few thousand founders and developers helping each other start profitable online businesses. The community is a friendly place to come share our experiences and projects, get valuable feedback, swap tips, and lean on each other for support.

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Courtland Allen
Maker
Hi Product Hunt! 👋 A year and a half ago, I launched Indie Hackers here as a side project. Back then it was a small collection of interviews with founders, and today it's become so much more. I'm excited to unveil the Indie Hackers Community — a place where founders work together to build projects, give each other feedback, and help each other solve challenges. If you've ever worked on a project and needed some advice or a second opinion on something, this community is for you. I'd love to hear what you think!
Todd Soulas
@csallen this is great Courtland! Have been watching your site grow and enjoyed the journey. One of the things that has often held my own projects back has been finding others with a similar passion so I look forward to seeing this concept grow 👌🏻
Dario D
@csallen One of my favourite website. Keep up the good work, cheers!
Antonio Orlando
@csallen Also the podcasts are fantastic and they have the text version too, very useful when I don't get something from the speech as a non-native English speaker. Everything feels so well designed both technically and in terms of "empathy", and when you're around in IH there's always this warm feeling of a overall good place with so much care in how everything is designed and made.
Mike Ritchie
@csallen I'm looking for beta users for a product I'm launching in a couple weeks, but I need people with a specific "stack" (i.e. on a Mac, uses Slack and Google Sheets, and knows SQL). It'd be awesome if in your IH profile that you could tag that you're willing to help out with beta testing products and could add tags to your profile that would be relevant to know for people looking for testers (e.g. "Mac", "Designer", etc.). Testers could then sign up to get a push when a new beta product met their tags. I'd imagine beta testing would be a pretty strong use case for this community.
Sam Dickie
@mike_seekwell checkout BetaTesta on Product Hunt - doesn’t provide the detail you mention regarding the specific stack but may be of help.
Ryan Hoover
You've done an awesome job building an organic, genuine community, @callen and @channingallen. 👏🏼
Courtland Allen
Maker
Thank you for the support @rrhoover! Product Hunt has been a huge inspiration.
Sasha Koss
Indie Hackers made me realize that building a company isn't that hard, that it's ok to not want to become a unicorn and it's not necessary to beat all the competitors if all you want is a stable income. The podcast and the forum been with me since I've left my job (not an advice), launched my first products and learned how to market those. Now I'm one step from getting my first $ from a product that people want and ready to pay for. Thank you @csallen and @channingallen for all your work!
Courtland Allen
Maker
Congrats on your progress so far @kossnocorp, been enjoying your updates so far and I'm looking forward to seeing where you can take your business and maybe interviewing you one day :-D
Abadesi
Great to see you here @channingallen @csallen! As @kossnocorp touched on, so many tech stories focus on the unicorns and big players and what makes Indie Hackers so great is that it's incredibly accessible and relatable. Ordinary people working hard, making money and learning lots along the way. I love that. How has the Stripe acquisition changed things (if at all)? And what exciting things do you have planned for the community in 2018?
Channing Allen
Maker
@csallen @kossnocorp @abadesi In short, the Stripe acquisition simplified our mission: to become the best knowledge-sharing community for internet entrepreneurs. Prior to the acquisition talks, we spent most of our time negotiating with ad vendors. We were even on the verge of pay-gating the interviews or the forum (or both)!
Courtland Allen
Maker
@abadesi My take is that the Stripe acquisition made us much more ambitious. We went from having a 2-week vision to crafting a 2-year vision. Indie Hackers should be the best place for early-stage founders to directly support each other in starting new businesses and overcoming specific challenges, and in 2018 I want to concentrate on building tools to help them do just that.
Federico Pascual

So much to learn from Indie Hackers, IH podcasts, the interviews and the community. A breath of fresh air from the 'traditional' startup talk (glorified VC funded startups).

Pros:

Best podcast about startups out there, also great community and interviews

Cons:

none

Dre Durr💡
Dope 🚬🚬 Huge fan of Indie Hackers. It seems that 2018 is all about pushing more people to become Makers. What separates Indie Hackers Forum from other Slack and Maker centric communities?
Courtland Allen
Maker
Great question @dredurr. The Indie Hackers forum is built around a pillar of 250 interviews with experienced entrepreneurs (https://goo.gl/KCmQ7r), many of whom participate in the comments on a regular basis. It has a bent toward developers, which on average raises the bar for the kinds of products you see people making and discussing. And the fact that it's a forum, not a chatroom, makes it much easier for large numbers of people to get quality advice at the same time. In the long run, we're planning to add lots of ancillary tools to the forum that augment everyone's ability to connect with and help each other out. This is why I built the forum from scratch instead of going with an off-the-shelf solution — I want to customize it to be the best that it can for this particular group of people. Expect to see lots of changes in 2018!
Federico Pascual
Thanks Courtland and Channing, you guys are a breath of fresh air from the 'traditional' startup talk (glorified VC funded startups) and an inspiration. Keep rockin'
Paul Dessert

I love what IH is becoming. Moving the forum front and center was a great idea. I love all the content, but the community is why I keep coming back.

Keep up the good work guys!

Pros:

Great community! Great content!

Cons:

None

Will Jones
A great inspiration. This is driving a growing movement of people who are able to escape the traditional path of subjugated employment, and who can live life and create value on their own terms. Something I aspire to be a part of!
dennis
Wow, I have been inspired a lot of by Indie Hackers. This definitely the best place for us indie developer and side project enthusiast to communicate.
Ilya Libin
IndieHackers is my top source for inspiration, knowledge and important discussions. Interviews and podcasts there are pure gold!!! IndieHackers inspired me to build my own business. Thank you @csallen and @channingallen for creating such a great resource!
Steven Rueter
Love this!!
Erick Barron
This looks like a great community to join 😎
Daniel Ravina
I will not be here if it wasn't for IH. THANK YOU! love everything you guys do.
Justin Jackson
@csallen I love this. I wish the forum software you developed was open source so I could use it! It's beautiful!
Courtland Allen
Maker
Thanks @mijustin! Maybe one day…
Greg 'X' Willis
@csallen I just realized... I can't favorite threads or wishlists. I think this has been one of my issues with Reddit/Hacker News style systems like this. Sometimes you don't want to comment, but still follow a discussion. I may be wrong...
Courtland Allen
Maker
@greg_x_willis It's on my to-do list, thanks for the suggestion!
Cory Zue

<3 Indie Hackers.

Pros:

Great, helpful, friendly people offering loads of useful bootstrap startup advice.

Cons:

Can't think of any.

Abadesi

I discovered Indie Hackers last year through the podcasts and enjoy the conversations that unfold on the forums. I've learned a lot there but have also been inspired to do better in my side hustles.

Pros:

It's an incredibly inspiring community where I've learned a lot from a diverse range of makers. Makes me want to be a better entrepreneur.

Cons:

None so far.

Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen

There is way too much rah-rah in the startup/ entrepreneurship space. (For this reason I did not think I would like Indie Hackers, but I like the site and community. ) Indie Hackers publishes interviews and income on projects, so it can easily slide into rah-rah, but does not. Here are interviews with founders, learning from mistakes and sharing this.

Pros:

Interesting interviews provided an excellent and entertaining way to learn from school of hard knocks

Cons:

None

Will Stumpf
Really love what @csallen has been doing with Indie Hackers, its an inspiring community to be apart! Keep up the good work.