5+ years of IH interviews: a data-driven analysis of the founders & products

As someone fascinated with the opportunities that come through the democratization of development capabilities, I recently dove into the corpus of the 498 written interviews on IH to develop a better idea of the founders and their ventures. Here's what I came up with using a little bit of web scraping and data analytics 👨‍💻

Founder demographics

With Indie Hackers primarily being a English site that got inspired by stories on the Silicon Valley-affiliated tech forum Hacker News, it’s no surprise that the majority of interviewed founders have a U.S. background (111 out of the 270 founders who provided their location). Nevertheless, Indie Hackers come from a variety of places from all around the world, Europe being the second most common continent:

As you can see from the age distribution below, the average interviewed founder is in his early thirties (34,5 years to be exact):

With only 10% of interviewed founders being younger than 28 and only 10% of the founders above 42, Indie Hacking seems to be a venture requiring a certain level of experience as well as available time and energy. My pet theory is that especially in the American Indie Hacking scene, it is common to first get a job out of college for a few years to pay back students loan before taking the plunge into entrepreneurship.
I also tried to reverse-engineer gender stats from first names, but came to no reliable conclusion due to a large amount of not classifiable names 🤷‍♂️

Founder background & employees

Looking into the average team size, about 37% of interviewed founders have no employees at all and 82% of founders have less than 10 overall employees. This can be traced back by the indie concept mentioned above: valuing their independence, Indie Hackers often decide to operate entirely bootstrapped (with no outside funding/ venture capital), and with salaries usually being the primary cost factor in early-stage software ventures, many of the interviewed founders rely on contractors but not full-time employees.
Furthermore, a slight majority of founders founded their venture solo, while 45% of ventures where founded by a founding team. Three out of four founders claim that they code for their business, which is no surprise given the software-centric nature of Indie Hacking. Nevertheless, one quarter of the interviewed founders don’t code at all, oftentimes leveraging modern tools like platforms and no-code tools for their products and services.

Business fields and revenue numbers

The above query analyzes the tags for the businesses of interviewed founders (with multiple tags being an option): Aside from pure software offerings in the form of Software-as-a-Service models, content products like newsletters, Youtube channels, etc. as well as e-commerce solutions are a favorite among Indie Hackers.
Following the Open Startup philosophy, one key pillar of the IH community is transparent milestone-sharing, often breaking down their user numbers and monthly revenues. Popular among online businesses is the concept of monthly recurring revenue, short MRR, which you can see broken down into quantiles in the following query:

The bottom 10% of interviewed founders earn 150$ or less with their products or services, which isn’t even close to being ramen profitable in most countries. This is a side effect of interviews being held while founders are within their entrepreneurial journey, not years later in hindsight, making things much more approachable for aspiring founders. The average venture nevertheless brings in 15000$ dollar a month, which is past the quit-your-job milestone for most western developers. On the top end, the top 10% of ventures have a revenue of 112 000$+ with some ventures growing to 50+ employees.
In part two of this analysis, we’ll take a closer look at Indie Hackers stories and the insights provided by the interviews itself. Follow me here or on Twitter to stay tuned!

A word of caution

The above analysis is based on self-reported facts and figures by the interviewed founders. Revenue numbers may not necessarily equal the revenue at the time of the interview since interviews where held in the span of 2016–2021. Out of the 498 interviews held, only 480 could be accessed using web scrapers for this analysis. Data has been manually cleaned by me, all interpretations are up for debate (let me know what you think in the comments!). If there are other things you’d like to know about the data-set or about how I did the analysis, feel free to shoot.