How meaningful is your indie hackers career?
Dear fellow indie hackers,
Like many of you, I admire the successful founders that have been featured on this site and I’m aspiring to follow in their footsteps.
Yet, every so often I’m wondering if an indie hacker career is really such a noble ideal :)
Many stories in this community are about „breaking free“ from corporates or academia to „finally be free and work on the things I like“. At the same time, I think an honest assessment of the products built by this community would come to the conclusion that most are neither very innovative nor very meaningful. Most products make this or that thing on the web a bit more efficient - often for niches that are not valuable enough for bigger organizations. And all that makes perfect sense. Despite some great tooling these days, there is only so much we can do as bootstrapped individuals.
This sounds very critical so please don’t get me wrong. I just started my third project and it’s essentially yet another e-mail newsletter service :) I’m excited to work on it and I think I might do a good job building and marketing it. I just occasionally wonder: Shouldn’t I try to work on a more essential problem in this world? Shouldn’t I rather join a Deutsche Bahn (German railroad) and contribute to low-emission mobility for millions of people every day? Shouldn’t I join a Siemens that builds the tools we need for 100% renewable energy in the future?
I would love to hear if you have similar questions and how you might have answered them for yourselves.
Cheers,
Johannes
Hi Johannes,
I also deliberate this same problem and societal value opportunity cost that you talk about almost every day when splitting time between my day job in the renewables space and my side project which isn’t necessarily in that space.
One of the anecdotes that I remind myself is thinking about Elon Musk. Wouldn’t you say Elon has done a lot for a cleaner environment? He is working on cleaner transportation (Tesla, Boring Company), space accessibility SpaceX, and renewables/storage (Tesla/SolarCity). Do you know how Elon got some of his initial capital to pursue these value add services? It wasn’t through an innovative greentech company. It was through building and selling Zip2 an online city guide, followed by what is now known as PayPal a digital payment service.
I would argue most people don’t think of zip2 nowadays when they think of Elon but in my personal opinion it is what freed Elon up for financial independence and with it the freedom to pursue and ability to employ others in riskier and uncharted ventures.
My personal opinion is that someone with financial independence, tech know how, and the drive to deploy larger amounts of capital towards admirable causes can actually do more faster and at scale than someone filling the seat of an analyst or already budgeted position at an established public company.
If Elon hadn’t pursued a seemingly boring online city guide with his brother as a somewhat indie hacker and sold for millions to gain capital for later deployment in Tesla, I would argue he wouldn’t have been able to make a dent in the auto manufacturers today. They would not have felt the pressure to make billion dollar investments in electric vehicles as quickly as they might have without Tesla eating market share.
Conclusion: I personally believe an owner/operator freed from the constraints of a day job and with substantial capital can actually move an entire market when properly deploying that capital. I would argue indie hacking is one path to making greater societal changes by enabling greater risk/reward opportunities later.
Hey! Thanks for your detailed reply and sharing how this applies to your job and side project. So basically you're saying that a side project can be "just" a means to an end. I like it! Somehow puts me at ease to think that focusing on business success is enough, because it hopefully enables me to do other things later (I just have local politics coming to mind :) ). Thanks again!
yeah, maybe you should join one of those companies.
everyone's different. there's no right way to do it.
for me being an IH'er buys my freedom. that's the first step in my plan.
Hey Johannes!
I think that you underestimate the impact you can have in a niche. A niche product can be incredibly successful and create a lot of value for the customers and wealth for you, provided that it solves a very painful problem.
You are right, most products are not meaningful or innovative, but that is because they don't solve painful problems. Some don't serve problems at all, they're just exercises in programming or a solution looking for a problem. Those products usually go nowhere, because there is a lot of passion in the product, but little passion in the market.
When I founded FeedbackPanda with @daniksimpson, she was an online English teacher, and we built a product for herself to use, as it would allow her to shave off hours of administrative work per day. Hours per day! That is a painful problem. The moment we took the product to market, it was immediately met with passionate enthusiasm, because we really found an extremely particular niche that no-one else ever had spent any energy on. We were profitable within a few weeks. We have thousands of customers now after two years.
To me, being an indie hacker or bootstrapper IS a noble aspiration. It's important to remember that you are building a business, and if you provide value to customers, that business will create wealth for you. Big companies do the same thing, but if you join those, you will work on small, isolated projects for a long time before you get to impact thousands of people in a meaningful way.
My advice: dig deep for a very painful problem that you or someone close to you care about. If you can't find it, join DB (I know from a previous job they're working on very interesting IoT stuff with the LoRaWAN radio technology) or Siemens, and keep a lookout for a project to start when the opportunity is right.
Hi Arvid! Thanks for sharing your story, very impressive! And nice to hear from a project in Berlin. I guess I was wondering about how to have a meaningful impact beyond your personal success. In your case, you could argue that you are making language learning more accessible by allowing those thousands of teachers to do more actual teaching, right? That sounds really nice.
Yes! That is exactly what we built!
It came from a very personal pain: my partner would teach for half a day, and then still have 2 hours of additional work to do, which was unpaid but required to actually get paid.
So building a solution to make this much faster was very selfish, and once it reduced those two hours to a few minutes through automation, it was a personal success, as my girlfriend had much more free time.
From there, it was clear to us that every single other teacher in that industry would be able to gain the exact same outcome. So we rolled it out.
And now there are thousands of families who have their mom or dad back for two more hours a day, or who's monthly income has increased by 10% due to those hours being used for more teaching. And that is just on the teacher side. For the students, allowing teachers to have more insights into previous classes and their student history has helped build better, stronger and deeper relationships between student and teacher.
You can't know what it's going to become huge.
When Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft, people believed it was a niche for hobbyist. They almost achieved their mission of putting a PC on every desk in the world.
When Steve Wozniak was working to HP, he proposed to build portable computers and wasn't supported.
Jeff Bezos started an online bookstore.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page wanted to sell google for $1 million and nobody gave it to them.
The Facebook's founding team talked about how cool would it be to start a company, when they were months into Facebook.
Those five are the biggest companies in the world and not even their founder expected them to be.
You can't decide on paper that you are going to change the world. There are too many variables and even working for a big company give you that guarantee. At the end of the day, you are one of tens of thousands employee, how big your impact can really be?
I would argue that it is easier to start an impactful business than it is to reach to top positions in a huge corporation (the position that actually make the difference).
This is a purely rational take. You have also to consider the fact that you couldn't like to have a job. And a person who doean't like his job has really low chance of being truly happy and this has a negative impact on all the people that surround him.
I think you need to find your own meaning in what you do.
I work on deprocrastination.co because I think there's a lot to improve on existing time-tracking/site-blocking solutions.
I find connecting productivity with game dynamics a) interesting and b) potentially powerful solution that drives real changes in behavior of our users, leading them to focus more, be less distracted and make progress in their life faster. Because they chose to use my project. That's meaningful to me.
I'm seeking and getting feedback from our users and a handful have expressed that they love the extension, that's reason enough for me to keep going.
Do whatever you want to do Johannes. If you feel like joining Siemens and they want you let's do it, why not?
In the other hand, you are assuming that you cannot work on big problems from an indie approach?
I think these thoughts were triggered in part by the recent moon landing anniversary. Something like: If I were an old man, would I have liked to work on my own business rather than being part of the Apollo program? So yeah, it does feel like going indie limits the size of the problem you can tackle.
Apart from that, I don't feel like joining Siemens for now :)
I don't believe in essential problem anymore. If you were to start a traditional business, you would not solve an essential problem. You would start another me too business. Another pizza joint, burger joint, car wash, property rental, clothing store, barber salon, and the list goes on. People are starting the same businesses every day and making profit. Why must software be different? Wanna make money? Doing something is better than nothing, doing the same thing other's have done is better than attempting to "doing the unknown essential". Sure, if you have a concrete idea that's unique and you exactly how to make it work go for it. Else, just do it!