I'm a crowdfunded 'content creator' trying to act more like an indie hacker

Hey folks, first post. I was a professor of political science for 5 years but after my creative intellectual work on the internet started to gain traction (and some income), I eventually decided to leave academia. That was in March.

My content operations + some freelancing (survey experiments & data-science-type gigs for businesses) earn enough to pay our bills (just barely), but I'll need to grow our income substantially if I'm to avoid another traditional career track. So I'm now experimenting with some more indie-hacker startup pilots! Hence why I'm posting here.

I suppose I'll give you a quick TLDR on the financials of my content operation since leaving academia.

I make about $600/month on Patreon.

I make maybe $100/month, if that, on average from Youtube.

I make just a few bucks a month on Amazon affiliate links, because I don't really do them.

I wrote and published a short philosophy book, which took about 100 hours and earned about $1800.

The only indie-hacker thing I've really accomplished so far is a monthly seminar I launched about a year ago. I used Memberful to setup a monthly subscription offer, and I have about 10 people paying me $25/month. In return I facilitate 2-hour, small-group video conferences every month, where people take turns presenting their original intellectual work (philosophy, science, creative writing, etc.). It's pretty much styled after a graduate-school seminar.

So if you count that as a little startup, then I guess I can say I've been doing about $250 MRR for the past several months. I haven't really marketed it at all, but the churn is pretty low and people seem to value it — so now I'm planning to double down on it, improve it, rebrand it a bit, and try to build that out into a more ambitious enterprise. I'm actually doing this right now pretty hardcore, but it's all in private beta so I'll share my first results in a later post!

If you add my seminar service to my content operations, and you think of them all together as a solo bootstrapped enterprise, I guess you could say my whole enterprise is doing about $950 MRR.

Listening to the IndieHackers podcast religiously over the past few months has pretty much taught me everything I know about business lol. It's really helped me reorganize how I see my systems and how I'm planning to improve and grow my projects. I'll post again when I have something to show for it. ;-)