3 year hiatus, everything has changed

I've been away for a while (3 years to be precise) - but happy to be back to indie-hacking. And so I thought I would share a few of my findings about the space in general.

5 quick thoughts.

1. Building in public is a lot more dangerous than it used to be.
   Obviously, it's great to attract an audience, but it's a very different climate when anybody in your audience can vibe-code a copy of your startup. If they've got better distribution than you, then things get really tricky.

2. Trust nobody.
   You're not just competing with indie hackers or startups. It feels like every product you're building is likely also in competition with the big AI labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, X, etc.

3. Every single market is more saturated than ever before.
   Websites, app stores, socials... Everything's noisy. Startups have always had to figure out how to cut through the noise. But it's definitely never been anywhere near as bad as this.

4. SEO isn't dead, but man, it's different.
   Getting surfaced by LLMs seems to be the big thing now. That also means Google search is no longer as dominant, and stuff like Reddit is a lot more important than ever.

5. Direction over magnitude.
   Building anything is possible. Figuring out the right thing to build is more important than ever. You could very easily move quickly in the wrong direction.

How is everyone coping with the change?

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🗣️ This post was dictated using yaps.ai