From Our Desks: 12 Days of “Ship-Mas”

Welcome to From Our Desks, where the people behind Indie Hackers share the stories behind the headlines. This week, we talk we talk “12 days of ship-mas,” investigative reporting, founder diversity, and more.

@krhignett (Katie Hignett, journalist):

I watched the start of OpenAI's “12 Days of Ship-mas” with excitement. Well, mostly. The know-it-all inside me wants to remind readers the 12 Days of Christmas start on Christmas Day and not before.

Pedantry aside, the firm went big on day one with the launch of the full version of o1. Testing it out for our write-up, I was genuinely shocked at how fast it ran compared to o1-preview — which was so slow I barely used it.

I don’t know what will come next in the calendar (an autonomous AI agent? GPT-4.5?) but tech media is pretty sure Sora will appear over the next two weeks. To be honest I hope it won’t, as good quality AI-generated video scares me more than any other medium when it comes to disinformation.

I’m hoping it will be hammy for a long time to come.

@ChanningAllen (Channing Allen, co-founder and editor-in-chief): A couple months ago, my focus for the Indie Hackers newsroom was quantity: "Can we draft and publish 5–10 pieces of news every week?" But now that this milestone is long behind us, the focus has shifted to quality.

One dimension of quality is "audience relevance": making sure we're capturing stories that indie hackers want to read about. To this end, we've done a good job of interviewing founders and capturing superficial community gossip — e.g. Marc Lou's ups and downs, the melodrama at WordPress, and that one time that Pieter Levels tried to save Europe, etc. — but I want us to go deeper and more original with our stories.

So we're increasingly working on pieces that are more investigative and research-intensive. For example, indie hackers like Pieter Levels and Jon Yongfook have been pretty vocal about their thoughts on the online dating scene lately. So we've started doing some outreach and public polling to dig a little deeper on it. We've also got some harder-hitting pieces coming out soon that are a bit more under wraps.

@IndieJames (James Fleischmann, journalist): I love that every indie hacker’s story is so different. This week, I spoke with three founders. One built a 3.6M/yr service company and now, years later, he’s getting into the SaaS game. Another went straight into building a 7-figure SaaS right after breaking out of his $15/hr job. And another built a dev marketplace and sold it before starting her AI SaaS.

Each founder is killing it in their own way. And they’re all successfully doing SaaS. But how they got their was completely different.

We talk about the “how” a lot. But ultimately, it doesn’t matter how you do it. It matters that you do it.

@StephenFlanders (Stephen Flanders, journalist): James is completely right about the "how" not being the most important factor for success. There's a lot of ways to skin a cat.

But I do think when you'll find a lot of commonalities when you look at the founders themselves. They are all smart, inventive, creative, and, above all else, gritty as can be.

This is why VCs often say that the founder themselves is the key determinant as to whether they invest or not. Ideas will come and go. But, the right founder will always find a way to "luck" their way into success.