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I compiled 5,178 Indie Hacker profiles & twitter accounts, categorized by follower metrics, products & activity (list available)

I spent the last week compiling a list of 5,178 indie hacker profiles with Twitter accounts, then filtering the data in separate lists on Twitter.

Motivation

I'm very new to Twitter & IH. I only set up my Twitter profile at the beginning of August. I try and provide value in my tweets, but still, Twitter is an incredibly lonely place when you're just getting started (I currently only have 50 followers).

However, I noticed my engagement increased when I engaged with similar people of a similar follower count. Therefore, I set about making a list of people to interact with regularly.

In doing so, I felt the data and lists would probably be useful to other indie hackers. So here we are.

The data

Once I compiled the IH data, I built a script to loop through each user and gather relevant Twitter/tweet data.

The full data includes:

  • Name
  • Number of products (up to 3)
  • Product names, taglines & URLs
  • Twitter handles
  • Twitter name
  • Twitter bio
  • Twitter created at
  • Twitter followers
  • Twitter following
  • Twitter follower ratio
  • Twitter tweet count
  • Twitter listed count
  • Twitter last tweet date
  • Twitter tweets thread %
  • Twitter tweets "en" %
  • Twitter tweets (organic without retweets) %
  • Twitter tweets (standalone without replies & retweets) %

The filters

Using this information, I built another script to sort Twitter users into different lists worth following on Twitter.

Here's a screenshot of the script:
IH filter script

Firstly, to ensure a baseline level of quality, I whittled down the initial 5,178 users into 2,085 users by filtering for:

  • Minimum of 50 tweets
  • The last tweet was no more than seven days ago.
  • The majority of the tweets were English.
  • 2/3 of tweets were NOT retweets (either organic or replies)

After this, I filtered the data into four separate lists.

  • Indie Hackers with less than 1k followers (no products on IH)
  • Indie Hackers with more than 1k followers (no products on IH)
  • Indie Makers with less than 1k followers (at least 1 product on IH)
  • Indie Makers with more than 1k followers (at least 1 product on IH)

I also created a smaller list for fun, called "Under Valued Indie Makers," which filtered for:

  • All of the above
  • Minimum of 200 tweets
  • At least 1 product on IH
  • Is under 750 followers
  • At least 3/4 of tweets are NOT retweets (either organic or replies)
  • At least 3/4 of tweets are English

The lists

The lists can be found on Twitter here:

A note on the data

Obviously, these lists and filters are entirely arbitrary. I was unsure of how best to break up the list.

Also, the data is not perfect. There are probably a lot of indie hackers with products that aren't registered on IH.

I am open to suggestions of how better to sort the data and create new lists. Like for example, using tweet ratios and tweet engagement as indicators. If you are interested in this, please let me know.

Access to the full list + raw data in Google Sheets

If you are interested in accessing the Google Sheets of all 5,128 indie hackers & the raw data:

Please reply to this Tweet (with literally anything) & I'll DM you:

(FYI, you'll need to follow me first so I can DM you)

P.s. The Twitter data was gathered 3 days ago, so the last tweet date will be three days old.

Let me know if you have any comments, ideas, suggestions, or feedback!

  1. 2

    Impressive work @ankleio !

    I followed all the lists and I'll be engaging with indie hackers outside of my direct network, thanks!

    I like the nice touch with the under valued IHers, and have you considered a list for the "big names" ? It's be interesting to script that out.

    1. 1

      Thanks man.

      Yeh definitely a good shout. I'll make one more for the top names. What follower count do you suggest?

      Probably should go off a ratio too. To siphon out the people who use follow unfollow bots.

  2. 1

    Wow, great work! This is such a cool and useful dataset. Nice work building the collection scripts. Thanks for providing this data publicly!

    Do you have any plans to update this list regularly/periodically? Just curious, with the rapid growth of the IH community and builders in public, a year makes a big difference.

  3. 1

    wow this is major effort. agree on 'Twitter is a lonely place' part. I'm like at close to 0 and not really sure what to do there.

  4. 1

    This is your moment of tweetsplosion man! I feel it.

    Awesome work, and your code in the screenshot looks like poetry!

    I was thinking about building lists on twitter to create followlists, your approach can be applied to mediums other than indiehackers.

    Great work, and will follow you on Twitter in an instant!

    1. 1

      Thanks, man. I am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to code layout 😂 🤫

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

    1. 2

      You've got an Interesting IH history 😅
      Whats your twitter handle? would love to connect there

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        This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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            This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

    2. 2

      Thanks!

      Wow, checked out your comments.

      I did wonder if this data was contentious. I'm definitely not interested in selling it like you were and made sure to only compile public Twitter data plus the public product information on here.

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        This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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          True. When you say difference, do you mean the total number? They are probably mismatched because I didn't try and compile everyone.

          Yeh, I totally get what you mean. Sometimes, I guess it's just the luck of the draw.

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    This comment was deleted 3 months ago.

    1. 3

      When you follow someone on twitter, you get noticed by them (specially by accounts below 500 followers)
      tweet some tweets, follow some people who would be interested in your tweets. oh! concise bio helps people know if you have same interest as them :)

    2. 1

      It's hard. I am finding it difficult to gain traction starting from 0 too.

      I figured if I put in a lot of effort into my tweets/work, it will eventually pick up. Do things for free (like this) and give advice on what I'm really good at.

      I have made 101 tweets so far with 3 time-consuming threads:

      These have taken me weeks to make and almost of them, when posted, received NO attention, like tweeting into the void.

      I'm no expert, but it's clearly hard miles early on. I plan to keep showing up and keep trying to make cool content.

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      This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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