From Our Desks: Escaping a Lonely Thanksgiving

Welcome to From Our Desks, where the people behind Indie Hackers share the stories behind the headlines. This week, we talk Thanksgiving travels, AI reasoning, loneliness among founders, and more.

@ChanningAllen (Channing Allen, co-founder and editor-in-chief): I've spent the past couple Thanksgiving holidays at my apartment in NYC, but this week I changed things up. Courtland and I flew to our childhood home outside of Atlanta to spend time with family and old friends.

On most trips like this, we tend to spend more time working than socializing. But we broke from our workaholism and took a couple half-days off for a change. I think Michal Kankowski's writeup on the loneliness epidemic among founders may have had something to do with it…

@krhignett (Katie Hignett, journalist): AI “reasoning” became a trend in AI this week, with two Chinese companies releasing models to rival OpenAI’s new o1 family. The models to consider their responses step-by-step, providing much better answers to difficult questions than older models.

On paper, they’re a huge step forward for math and science. But for most casual users, the models will provide similar responses at painfully slow speeds.

Elsewhere in AI, OpenAI is reportedly working on a browser that would integrate features from ChatGPT. The firm didn’t respond to Indie Hackers’ request for clarification, but reports say it’s already striking deals with other companies in relation to the project.

@StephenFlanders (Stephen Flanders, journalist): My Strava story on its API changes was the first time I really dug into the app, and it was a revelation in multiple ways. For starters, I had no idea how absolutely massive Strava is. 120 million users is insane for an app that you basically never hear about unless you use it yourself.

However, the more interesting thing was the sentiment that Strava is falling prey to enshittification. In other words, Strava is making you pay more and giving you less. The API changes are a perfect example. Walling off people’s personal health data is textbook enshittification.

I was actually so inspired by these findings that I started a competitor. It’s called Phyt.fun, and it’s an app that rewards you for running. Think STEPN, but more degenerate, and thus, more fun. It’ll be worth it to be early, so join the waitlist ASAP.

@zerotousers (Darko Gjorgjievski, journalist): Here are a few of the interesting things that caught my attention this week:

• X became more aggressive with attracting advertisers

• AI companies like Claude got more invested into "agentic AI"

The biggest trend is that more and more big companies are cutting their "loss leaders." Hetzner drastically reduced its bandwidth for many servers (which was probably a loss leader). Spotify also cut access to many API features which, according to many people, were loss leaders.

So we're setting a greater push towards profitability, even for big tech companies.

@IndieJames (James Fleischmann, journalist): This week I interviewed two indie hackers who made huge pivots at pivotal moments. They saw an opportunity and did what indie hackers do best: They moved quickly.

In both cases, the pivot was a risky move. But in both cases, it paid off because they timed it right and went after a real — validated — gap in the market.

@Michal_kanka (Michal Kankowski, journalist): Loneliness is a big deal for indie hackers, and yeah, it's practically a meme at this point. But honestly, I didn’t realize how under-discussed it was until now. From our poll, turns out almost 50% of Indie Hackers feel lonely most of the time. And it’s not just a vibe — studies show it can seriously mess with your mental health. Luckily, a lot of people are fighting back by making connections IRL, one meetup at a time.

On a different note, there’s been a lot of buzz about how different places treat startup founders. Norway? Feels like they’re allergic to startups with their “wealth tax” and “exit tax” making life hard for entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, Japan’s rolling out the red carpet with their new Digital Nomad Visa — six months to dive into Japan’s entrepreneurial scene. And over in the EU, they’re stepping up with better funding and simpler rules to make the startup life less of a hassle.