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Indie hackers are making 60 million in Stripe-verified ARR

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    Going to write up a blog post about how I did this analysis with some cool graphs as well.

    edit: adding distribution curve

    image

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      Cool. Would love to see the distribution curve (e.g. how many are $0-5k, 5k-10k, 10k-50k, 50k-100k, 100k-500k, 500-$1m, $1m+ etc.)

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        That‘s actually a neat idea as a feature of IH. Could motivate a lot to see that curve and automatically updated stats on the products section.

        Or too far from what you want in the products section, @csallen?

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          Could motivate a lot to see that curve

          I'm actually not so sure this would motivate most people. It would likely follow the Pareto principle, with just 20% of indie hackers earning 80% of the overall revenue.

          I've noticed that people who see themselves as the 80% (or as the pre-80% in the case of aspiring founders) tend to lose energy, not gain it, in the face of these kinds of distributions.

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          Yeah I'd love to see this. I'd be a bit more granular at the lower end though, e.g. $0, $1-$100, $101-$1k, $1k-$2.5k, $2.5k-$10k etc. Otherwise probably 99% will be in the 0-5k bucket.

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            Yeah, that's a good point. I like your buckets.

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        Check out the distribution in the second tweet (it's a thread!): https://twitter.com/DBredvick/status/1440521192767516681

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          The chart is pretty hard to read... I assume each skinny column is one company? But that's really hard to count. Also hard to see 0-5k and 5-10k.

          The more I think about it, 0 isn't a great starting point. Maybe $100-1k should be the starting point.

          $1k-5k is a good benchmark for "getting traction and on the right path"
          and $5k-10k is good for "getting close to financial independence"

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            Yep this is a rough first draft for a longer blog post. I agree the chart is hard to read, but it does give a sense of the differences in scale for each company.

            I'll likely bucket into 5 different buckets for my upcoming blog post.

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              Sounds great. Check out the buckets that @charlierward proposed above... that would be super helpful for indie hackers who are just starting out. Thanks for doing this and I look forward to the post!

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        This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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    This is cool! What's the average per project?

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      The average MRR is $7,619.95, but keep in mind averages are easily influenced.

      The median is only $500 in MRR.

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    Here's the distribution:
    image

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    At first I thought Indie hackers (platform) is making that much. Then I read the tweet :)

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    Interesting, I wonder how you managed to get all revenue data. IIRC Algolia's public search endpoints only allow up to 1000 results. If there is another index sorted in the opposite direction, makes it 2K results max.

    I believe there are nearly 15K products listed here and almost 5K of them reported revenue more than $1. I remember enumerating them by name, if there is an easier way I'd feel so dumb. 🤦‍♂️

    Anyways; before you write up your blog post, I'd suggest you to take another look into results. As I've seen before there are products probably linked to the same Stripe account which is yielding the same revenue numbers for multiple projects.

    e.g.:

    Sad part of the story as @channingallen mentioned; not 20% but only 3.6% (49 out of 1387 stripe verified accounts) generating the 80% of that chunk.

    ps. I assume the calculation of ARR is the last month's revenue * 12. Which I believe is a bit misleading.

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      Happy to share the code, it's very simple and not limited to 1k as you suggest. I don't want to increase the number of people spamming IH APIs, so likely will share this privately. DM me on Twitter with your Github username and will happily share.

      This is a product by product basis, I have no way to tell how many products you've linked to your Stripe account, so likely not considering that path.

      ARR is indeed MRR x 12 in this post. Compression for Twitter, headlines, etc.

      The thesis of my blog post: power laws hold true, even in IndieHacking. Don't follow the crowd's advice.

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        I'd love to learn how you did it. It's github/anilkilic

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    Thats interesting, would definitely love to know more. Waiting on that blog post.

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    Awesome! Power to the IH's community!

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    That's pretty cool. It's exciting to see the impact made by indie hackers.

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    This comment was deleted a year ago.

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      Yeah or at least be able to toggle it on/off.

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