Lessons Leading to IH Site Changes

Great question. I'm out having fun in Buenos Aires at the moment, but will answer this when I'm back in.

Okay, back!

After I joined Stripe, my vision for Indie Hackers substantially increased in ambition for obvious reasons. A bigger and more impactful IH is better for everyone, and also more attainable with additional resources at my disposal. The big question since then has been: what should Indie Hackers be that's worth growing?

Our first shot at this was a misfire. We wanted to take the inspiring content from founders that made IH great and scale up the volume. I made it so anyone could publish a Medium-style article, and I changed the homepage to showcase the new content. We ended up learning a lot in the process — e.g. that the community here is consistently good at upvoting the best articles and letting the bad ones sink — but there were some problems.

First, it's difficult to scale a content site without a large team. Finding talented authors and articles is a full-time job. Additionally, being a founder with valuable lessons to share and being a great writer are very different things, and the long-form article format puts undue importance on writing ability. This was something I'd already learned after doing hundreds of text interviews, which often required hours of editing, which was not a scalable option for the articles. Instead, we'd have to forgo editing, source as many articles as possible, and only promote the top 10% or so.

Could we make that work? Possibly. We tried, and were seeing the numbers move in the right direction. But the glaring issue, the one that put the nail in the coffin, was that this whole approach wasn't particularly good for anyone. We were essentially just relocating articles that would've appeared elsewhere on the web. And the requirement to be a great writer meant most people with something to share or teach wouldn't be able to do so successfully. Nobody was excited about this approach, ourselves included. It wasn't something worth growing.

Around October, we decided to shift our focus to the community underlying Indie Hackers, for numerous reasons. For example, the forum had begun to grow rapidly, in large part as a side effect of one thing we started doing to promote the articles. (Any guesses as to what? 😝)

I feel much better about this direction for Indie Hackers. I'm confident that the community here can become the best place for early-stage founders to support each other in starting new businesses and overcoming specific challenges, as well as learning from experienced founders. In the long run, I'd like this to be true both online and off, and I've got plenty of ideas in mind for making that happen.

I'd barely touched the forum since coding it in 2016, so I spent the last few months of 2017 making some infrastructure improvements. The most visible ones were better user profiles and a new concept of products as first-class citizens (example), but a lot has changed under the surface as well. The result is that I should be able to develop more rapidly in 2018 in support of the community vision for Indie Hackers. Moving the forum to the homepage and making it the core of the site is one of many developments to come.

As one of the writers who went through all writing and editing process, I agree it's time consuming for both sides. And forum topics quite often have indepth answers worth as much as a full 2000 words article would be. So good direction overall.

The only thing I'm not sure - in 2017 I remember at least a few founders mentioning a goal of "put their products on IndieHackers" as a success badge, kind of. So would that still be a thing?

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