Ask IH: how can a non-programmer be an indie hacker?
Hey guys, Most of the guys on Indie Hackers are programmers I believe, so coding up their own gig does not require them to be dependent on someone else.
If a non-programmer has a software product idea , then I think there are 2 major hurdles as per my research:
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Cost: getting a software product developed from a freelancer could be expensive, especially if you just provide them high level requirements.
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IP Theft: If the product is outsourced offshore, the software product (self service simple saas product) can be easily copied & changed little bit by the developer, re-branded and sold on the market as their own.
Are there any non-programmer indie hackers here?
What advice does the IH community have for an aspiring non-programmer indie hacker with regards to these 2 issues?
Thanks in advance.
Can I turn around the question? Why is it assumed that a programmer can bootstrap a successful product alone?
To answer your original question, yes I think it is possible for a non-programmer to be a successful indie hacker.
What does Indie Hacker mean to you? For me it is actually just building websites and (hopefully) making money. Your website may have a technical component (let's say you are building a SaaS) but you may also as well build a community / forum / blog or even a productized service which almost do not require coding work but only business development work.
If you do decide to go to the route of building an actual SaaS here is what I would do in your case:
Build a MVP, a simple HTML page with a buy button or even make pre-sales of your MVP to validate demand. This it the first step you need to do before thinking about building anything: Will my customers pay for my product?
Once you either have cash or a serious confirmation of demand: Hire a good full-stack developer to build features but do not stop talking to your customers.
I recently talked to a SaaS founder and I asked him "Are you also going to build this feature?". He told me "Yeah it's a great idea, but let me first ask customers, and I'll see whether I built it". It's so easy to get into confirmation bias and building things just because you think it will work. Talk to the customers, they have all (or most) of the answers.
Great advice, thank you for your response.
Almost all IH interviews that I read here are with programmers who bootstrapped. They got organic traffic, or used Google ad words etc, they did not employ business development guy, or special marketing consultants . Once their product took off and they grew they added team members. The recent IH example is the domain buying guy whose service involves buying domains expiring soon. Another massive example is founder of Plenty of Fish or mobile games guys, etc. Well I am not arguing what you saying , there are so many possible different scenarios .
But as the " indie" name indicates { talking about mini / micro software businesses , not massive future operations taking on VC etc}, if someone has to go in solo , then I believe the game is biased towards developers as compared to non-programmers.
The bias is there for sure. Learn to code is the only solution if you can’t tap into the talent yourself, either by paying or partnering. What are you’re skills? Do they compliment what developers typically lack (sales, marketing, etc). If so. Try to find a cofounder.
Yes! I've built a whole range of products and have done minimal coding on all of them.
If you earn plenty of money doing something else that makes it easy to pay for a developer then yes, of course you can outsource a software project. However it is really hard to be completely reliable on paying or waiting on someone else to fix the simplest of issues. The kind of software projects that work the best are the ones that are are self-contained, reasonably stable and require minimal updates. Or built from existing software services that you can manage yourself.
Please don't worry about IP theft. All software is replicable if people cared enough and people only care about their own ideas. If having a competitor pop up is the worst thing you can think of, then you'll find it de-moralizing when you find 10 other products that already exist that are just like yours. Look at competition as validation of a good idea.
I would recommend you start with a no-code project first. Find a need then see what you can build yourself - there are so many tools out there that you can link together without needing a developer. Youll figure out so much that way. Then you can take that experience into a software project that you feel confident about putting money into.
To me, an indie hacker makes an income by selling products online. They don't focus on selling their time. Software as a Service is one type of product and is what most people look to sell.
Two options come to mind to get going fast with revenues upfront.
Option 1:
You have to be pretty good at sales and confident that you are building the right product to pull off this strategy but it has been done a number of times by entrepreneurs.
Option 2:
If your goal is to make revenues, having a market / community that knows, likes, trusts you is more important than your initial idea. They'll collaborate with you to help you find out how to best serve them with software.
A lot of people do things like write ebooks, make video courses, sell physical products through Amazon's FBA, or build up a blog to where it can support a member's area. All of these things except the members area can and do get copied from time to time, but they can still be viable businesses.
You definitely don't have to code to succeed, but it is a great way to get leverage. Even if you just learn enough to throw together a really bad MVP is a huge edge.
This is a bit confusing, maybe I understood it all wrong, but isn't the hacker in indie hacker precisely defining that the person can code?
So the straight rough answer to "how to become an indie hacker" would be to first learn to hack. At least I understood this community as hackers/programmers who want to build a business out of their own CODING skills.
Don't get me wrong here, I'm ok that the community is not only made of hackers, but it just feels like some people are misunderstanding the idea of indiehackerism by bootstrapping in general. Bootstrapping subsumes indiehackerism, not viceversa. It's for @csallen and @channing to decide what this community becomes and how wide they want to make it, but you cannot be an indie hacker without hacking.
"non-programmer indie hacker" sounds outright wrong to me.
You can hack systems together without coding! Being a hacker is just using technical knowledge to solve a problem. There is already enough software out there there is no longer the need to re-invent the wheel.
Look at all the apps you can link together with Zapier and the power of WordPress and all of its plugins! I've built technical products that manage users, collect data and take payments, none of which needed a line of code!
Software developers calling themselves "hackers" sounds wrong to me--comical, even--in the first place. Most people recognize a hacker to be one who can exploit vulnerabilities in an asset.
The point of the word "hacker" in regard to software development means hacking code together, implying it's not pretty or refined. If we maintain this definition, I think that anyone who "hacks" together anything (ie. a business) is an indiehacker.
It's not for me to judge how comical/correct is it for software devs to call themselves hackers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker). I was just making the point that this site (if I'm not wrong) did indeed start using hacker for that purpose, similarly to hackernews or producthunt. The essence was more about how to market/monetize your sideproject. So someone needing to do the a big part of the sideproject for them doesn't really sound like a sideproject. But hey, I don't want to sound like a puritan here. I really don't mind. Hope OP can find someone.
I'm not a programmer - I have a background in IT, using analytics tools to create reports etc. I wanted to build a website that hosted analytics solutions.
I used wordpress (.org) with a bunch of plugins to deliver the functionality that I needed.
It felt a bit 'hacky', and I have outgrown it now, though it is revenue generating with happy customers.
Right now though I'm learning .net core so that I can grow the application and make it more versatile etc.
This is good example of 2 hurdles I mentioned in the first post. Had you, not used the plugins to create the product and outsourced the specs to a low wage offshore location, what would have stopped that developer from not re-branding & selling your product ?
( assuming potential customers could be found online )
Not a lot, though programmers are notoriously pretty bad at marketing. Also, I haven't heard of this happening. When you are working with international suppliers, the cost of protecting the contract would far outweigh the cost of the work in the first place.
Hey -
So I'd be super interested in talking to you - I'm basically making something to do exactly that - allow non-coders to build their ideas themselves.
I've already built a product that allows you to build a complete backend without code (www.worktools.io) and am working on a code-free web builder to make that full-stack.
I'd love to chat to you to talk about your idea and ask a few questions!
Interested in this, signed up for the beta. How do you compare what you do with bubble.is?
Thanks for signing up – I'll be in contact soon!
So firstly, I'd say bubble is a really fantastic product, and I really love what they've done.
I think the big difference is that Worktools is really coming at it from a strongly "data powered app" direction – for us, the behind-the-scenes back office app is a much as a focus as the front-facing web app, which I think makes it more suitable for certain types of projects (e.g. marketplaces, transactional platforms, communities etc.). I know bubble can store data, but the focus there isn't really giving you tools to work with that data.
We also have really focussed on allowing you to write business rules (e.g. – "when a order is created and it's bigger than $200 then send them an email to thank them") without having to think about wiring that all the way through the app (e.g. you don't have to write that on every page that can create orders!)
Finally, if you do know a bit of code (or have someone who can help you), you can extend the platform by adding javascript on the frontend (just like in Bubble) but also snippets of Python for the backend, which is good if you want to integrate with something that Zapier doesn't have.
On the other hand, Bubble has done really well on creating very powerful custom logic for the frontend, and has all sort of options for things like animations etc. that are still some way on our roadmap.
Basically, my summary would be that if you're just looking for something with a frontend, Bubble is great, but if you also plan to run a business and integrate with other SaaS apps, then Worktools lets you do that as well.
If you want to poach some of bubble's users away I'll tell you what would do it with me. If you create a really easy, flexible and user-friendly front-end development tool, like tilda.cc and have that integrate with the backend that would be a real competitive advantage. I can build the back end easily in bubble but have a hard time creating a good looking responsive front end
I've not come across Tilda before - that's really neat. The team really have a great design eye.
Yep. Its a great website builder. The limitations are a lack of integrations and backend. No database, no way to get users to log in. Can't work with apis. No multi-page forms. Solve that and it would be a killer application
Better yet, make an integration with tilda.cc. If you could build a simple backend with the ability to use apis onto a good website builder it would be a game changer. I've searched exhaustively for something like that and theres nothing.
This looks great. Can you use Ruby to expand on it or just Python?
There are two jobs in starting a business. After you start, there may be other jobs, but when you start there are only two.
Making a thing, and selling the thing. They're very different and you can't do both at the same time-- even if you could do both, you have to switch between them.
If you can't make the thing, you sell the thing. Selling is a very valuable skill and doesn't get nearly the credit that it deserves IMHO.
So there's your answer-- selling a product.
Now a lot of folks will say "How do I sell a product if I haven't made it yet?" This assumes, erroneously, that the only things in the world to sell are original, exclusive creations. Sure, selling stuff you made is a wonderful business to be in and may be your ultimate goal, but it requires capital, connections, skills, personnel, et cetera, that you may not have at this point. A lot of people get hung up because they want to leap to the end without going through the steps.
I would really encourage non-technical founders to get involved in marketing, get involved in SEO, get involved in selling consulting services for other developers. Find a good freelancer and offer to market their services for a fee. A lot of people would jump at the opportunity to pay somebody a pure commission to go out and sell their services-- a great many creative types and engineering types don't love being salespeople. Do that a couple times and you just launched an agency. Do it a couple more and you've got a full time developer on the payroll. Keep at it and you've got an in house developer with enough free cycles to devote to launching your own products, and the industry experience and connections you got through managing all these business relationships is going to serve you well in choosing products to create that WILL sell.
Don't assume you can skip all these business building steps. Don't assume that you're READY to skip them either. Go out and put one foot in front of the other consistently, and you can do great without needing to write a line of code, ever. But above all, do the work. Where folks fall into the Dunning-Kreuger trap is not being willing to prove themselves, and instead demanding that skilled professionals work for unproven entrepreneurs on spec.
There are lots of other ways around this, but at the end of the day, there are only two jobs. If you're not a maker of things, you're selling the thing somebody else made. So get good at it and you'll be fine.
Thank you for this post! As a non-technical guy myself, I think we could all get technical and talk about the true definition of an "indie hacker" but in my mind, it's just someone who wants to build something online themselves, usually bootstrapped.
I've run into the same two hurdles myself trying to develop SaaS apps.
What I've realized though in listening to countless podcasts and reading articles is that many indie hackers really struggle with marketing. Marketing is my trade, so that's not the hard part for me. I've heard many times of indie hackers who end up outsources development anyways.
Like anything, the toughest part is almost always time and money. If you're a developer, you have to commit a lot of time. If you're a marketer, you have to commit a lot of money.
I see two solutions as a non-technical wannabe founder:
Yes! I'm have featured on Indie Hackers a few times as well as launching two successful product on Product Hunt with no programming experience whatsoever! There are so many tools out there now for non-tech indie hackers. I actually built a free website documenting hundreds of them - you should check it out, it would be perfect for you! www.nocode.tech - would love to know what you think!
If you don't want to learn to code, you could check out bubble.is. There are a lot of different applications you can build without code