Are indie hacker's companies startups?

I think startups are often defined as companies that are designed to grow quickly. Some Indie hacker businesses fit that definiton. But a lot of them don't.

It depends on your definition of a startup. Many people still think AirBNB is a startup.

In the end, the following definition always made the most sense to me: "a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model". Aka any company, whether it's led by a one-man army or a team of 8, can be a startup.

Once you have a repeatable and scalable business model, you'll be considered a scale-up.

But, the definition of startups/scale-ups seems to be different to a lot of people for some reason. Some say your company is a startup for the first 3 or 5 years, and some just consider any consumer tech company to be a startup.

I like the definition ‘company looking for a sustainable product-market fit.’ On the other hand, calling a company a startup seems to imply that it intends to grow rapidly and challenge much larger corporate incumbents.

Small business owner sounds like a good fit for most Indie hackers.

The defining trait of startups is that they aim to dominate an exponentially growing market. This is necessary because usually they rely on taking money from investors, whose portfolio can only be profitable if the companies in it have the possibility of growing exponentially.

If an entrepreneur is not looking for a market with potential exponential growth and is not taking money from investors, I would not consider the company a startup, but rather a bootstrapped business or a regular company or something like that 😀

I feel like the word "startup" has gotten a negative connotation lately. Too many companies that have raised all sorts of money, hired a bunch of employees, and then failed. So I will take any chance I can get to not be considered a "startup".

According to Paul Graham: "A startup is a company designed to grow fast. A good growth rate during YC is 5–7% a week. If you can hit 10% a week you're doing exceptionally well. If you can only manage 1%, it's a sign you haven't yet figured out what you're doing. The best thing to measure the growth rate of is revenue."

If we're going with this definition, then I think most IHers are not startups. I think most don't even want to become startups.

I think it's more apt to call the majority a SaaS.

Interesting question. To me, they definitely are. A startup is a company starting up, experimenting with a new product in either a newly created or existing market, trying to solve a problem that is not or inadequately solved by existing products until it can create sustainable revenue.

The actual question I often ponder is if VC-backed companies are startups. The lack of focus on revenue and sustainability makes me feel they are less definable as startups than businesses created by Indie Founders.

Hello "mysterious individual" how's it going? I'm Simon from Hunter and we're a company that has been running for almost 10 years now. When we started back in 2010, we hit the ground running, winning clients and making $100,000s because we understood the industry, what clients needed and were small and nimble. As new kids, we also received media attention, publicity, etc so grew fast. But like most startups, we didn't know how to handle scale. We were scrappy and leaning on the job.

Having said all that... we've come full circle and the last couple of years have been about rebooting ourselves and finding our groove. We cut back our staff (and clients), have become super nimble and dare I say it... feel like a startup again.

I call them microstartups