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8 Comments

Holy heck maybe this isn't that hard

Inspired by this recent post I decided to look at the data myself.

The post compared the number of people registered on Indie Hackers to the number of products that make more than $2000 per month. The result was a "shockingly" small number.

As many pointed out in the comments, this is not really a fair comparison as most people are lurkers. Moreover, products are to people what apples are to oranges.

So let's compare apples to apples. There are 998 products with Stripe-verified revenue on Indie Hackers. Only 48.7% of them make $0. This is a lot more encouraging.

Of course, there are many caveats to consider. The main problem is that only a specific subset of makers register their products at indie hackers. Moreover, only an even tinier subset make sure that their data is Stripe-verified. This is the same problem as with political polls since only specific types of voters take part in them.

One interpretation is that makers who make sure their revenue is verified are serious about making money. In particular, hobby projects that are not intended to make any money are excluded. If more than 50% of all projects that are serious about making money, make money, that's very encouraging!

I'd love to hear how you interpret the data!

  1. 4

    You should correlate that to time on project

    1. 1

      Great idea! I'll try to collect the launch dates.

  2. 3

    Great work with the data! The other thing to remember is that we're only talking about products.

    A lot of individual products fail but founders that keep trying often go on to make successful products in the future by learning from their mistakes.

    Rob Walling talks about how he failed many products before finding success. Markus Persson created over 30 games before making Minecraft. I'm sure there's many more examples.

    It's hard and it's a long journey. Pretty much everything worth doing in life is.

  3. 2

    I love what you have done here 🙏

  4. 2

    One interpretation is that makers who make sure their revenue is verified are serious about making money.

    A simpler interpretation is that makers who choose to add verified Stripe revenue (vs. self-reported revenue) have significant Stripe revenue.

  5. 1

    One thing to consider is that only Stripe users can be verified. A huge portion of the world, my self included, cannot use Stripe due to where we live.

  6. 1

    The Stripe-verified data is underreporting the true revenue. It leaves out anything that is not set up as a Stripe subscription. Some of my customers want manual invoices, for example. If your SaaS has recurring revenue through an intermediary such as a marketplace, that also doesn't show up.

  7. 1

    This comment was deleted 7 months ago.

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