From Our Desks: Living up to the Label

Welcome to From Our Desks, where the people behind Indie Hackers share the stories behind the headlines. This week, we talk subscriber content, AI's plateau, Gen Z's top downloads.

@ChanningAllen (Channing Allen, co-founder and editor-in-chief): We finally got around to adding labels — the little green + signs all over the homepage — to paid IH+ content! This should make it easier for readers to distinguish posts written by the official IH newsroom from posts written by the IH community.

Anyway, last week we said farewell to Otto Nagengast, an awesome journalist from our newsroom, as he moved on to focus more on his own startup. But this week we got to onboard a new journalist to the team: Michal ("Mike") Kankowski.

Like Otto, Mike isn't just a journalist, but also a founder in his own right. He runs Kickstart Side Hustle, where he's published, among other things, a massive library of case studies featuring history's most successful marketing campaigns.

Something we discovered early on while running Indie Hackers was that good founders tend to be really good writers as well. So it's no surprise that our entire newsroom is filled with what I would call founder-journalists. Katie Hignett runs EasyFOI, a platform that makes it easier for journalists and researchers to send bulk freedom of information (FOI) requests public organizations. Stephen Flanders run Raffle Leader, a WordPress plugin that lets users create customizable product giveaways directly on their sites. James Fleischmann runs SaaS Watch, a newsletter that curates micro-SaaS acquisition opportunities. And Darko Gjorgjievski runs Growth Trends, where he shares software ideas.

@krhignett (Katie Hignett, journalist): It's the second week in a row for me covering what seem like endless feature updates for LLMs like GPT and Claude, and tools like Cursor.

I've been wondering if this glut of updates is anything to do with the fact that the capabilities of some models is reportedly plateauing. Maybe companies are trying to sell us on the breadth of applications for their models, because they're not sure how much smarter they'll actually become.

Still, increased utility is not to be sniffed at. I can't wait to try out Claude's computer use capabilities. I can't wait to get ChatGPT to read my codebase directly from my computer, rather than pasting multiple scripts to try and figure out a bug.

LLMs have already come so far in just a few years. They're better at creating apps, debugging and improving security than many real life developers. If that capability curve is slowing down, can we really complain?

@StephenFlanders (Stephen Flanders, journalist): My big story this week was about the indie hackers killing it on TikTok, and it was by far my favorite story that I’ve worked on so far.

I love Twitter, but it does seem, at least from the indie hackers' perspective, a bit of an ouroboros. You’re told to build in public so that you can build a following which will make it easy to sell, but if you do that, what are you going to be building? Obviously tools for indie hackers, who are, let’s be honest, not the greatest target market. It’s kind of a depressing reality that has lots of talented builders feeling like indie hacking is a rigged game.

But then I started working on this story and met these young people just going about things in a totally different way, and it’s like a breath of fresh air. They aren’t trying to make peanuts by selling the 532nd version of ShipFast. They are making tens of thousands of dollars a month by posting memes and selling consumer apps, and they are having lots of fun while doing it.

So, if you haven’t read the story yet, I really recommend it. Even if you don’t become a TikTokker yourself, there’s a good chance your love for building will be reignited.

@zerotousers (Darko Gjorgjievski, journalist):

I was surprised this week to learn that the e-commerce giants are doing so well despite months of headlines on tech company layoffs, worse-than-expected earning reports, and so on.

Those days are (luckily) behind us.

Also, there are new players in the mobile space. This week I covered a report on the top-downloaded apps for Gen Z this year. Some of the results will surprise you.

@IndieJames (James Fleischmann, journalist):

I interviewed two indie hackers with very different businesses this week — a scheduling SaaS and a business coaching platform. Totally different models and markets, but I noticed that both stressed one attribute that seems to be important no matter what: Speed, particularly when it comes to decision making.

The 800-pound gorillas in your market probably require sign off from multiple decision makers on every new idea. And that gives you a big advantage.

Often, those speedy decisions will go wrong and you’ll have to backpedal just as quickly. But — at least according to these guys — it’s a net positive.

Any one of those rash decisions could be the factor that keeps you punching above your weight.