How has macro-economy affected your business?
With the U.S. CPI reaching a historic high and the Fed raising the interest rates, I was wondering how it affects us as Indie Hacker. Are you currently making adjustments? Do you see opportunities or threats?
Selfishly, this downturn has been really good for me.
A comment that I received a lot was "it's easy to make money in a bull market" but now that we're on the precipice of a recession, we've continued to find stocks which increase by a very healthy percentage.
If you're asking how it affects us all as Indie Hackers, then I'll say that you should expect prices to continue increasing. Your ramen budget is going to increase, putting strain on your business. Offerings such as AWS will look to increase their prices should this last more than 4 months, which, again, adds more strain. And customers will be less willing to part with money because they're feeling the same pressures that we are.
I'd look at this as motivation for practising minimalism. Remove everything that does not make the business better. Cut the fat. Cut like you're Jack the Ripper.
Thanks for the comment! Like what you're doing at Feetr. Is it using sentiment analysis with a combination of other things? Is it expensive to maintain the models?
Thanks, I really appreciate that!
The first aspect of Feetr is data gathering, we use a touch of sentiment analysis to determine whether any particular comment is positive/negative but the main thing that it's looking for is the reach that any particular comment has, and trying to understand how many people are/could be swayed by it. We're looking for instances where there is going to be a huge increase of buying power, such as GME this week.
It's actually really cheap to run. It's currently housed on a AWS server in Ohio that costs me about $5 per month (something like that), alongside the RDS Postgresql DB which is more expensive at $20ish. I use a programming language called Common Lisp which gives me full control over the language and the runtime, giving me the ability to emit really efficient code.