What I Learned from Indie Hackers 1.0

I know the story of Indie Hackers, how Courtland Allen started the website by interviewing founders and sharing their stories. Courtland is very open about his beginnings, and despite knowing all of that, it’s easy to look at this vibrant community and think that this is how it started.

I think as founders or aspiring founders we make the mistake of comparing our beginnings to someone else’s success. We forget that they didn’t start there. They started like most of us do, hustling.

It’s one thing to know something, but it’s another thing to really know something. Despite knowing the story of how this site started, I’m a visual learner and seeing it for myself really helped me. I'm sharing my thoughts with you.

I did some Internet Wayback Machine sleuthing and found the first version of this website that was publicly crawled. I’ll provide links too, but I’m providing screenshots to make it easier and more obvious. This was from August, 2016.

The Home Page

https://web.archive.org/web/20160811221549/https://indiehackers.com/

Well, for one the color hasn’t changed. This dark blue website is Indie Hacker trademark by now.

The most obvious difference is that there was no forum. The community, which is what I believe keeps most of us coming back, was not live yet. There is no link to a forum either. The home page contained links to interviews with successful founders and that’s it.

The tagline was different and at the top by the navigation.

It’s a good tagline, but it’s not as polished as the current one at the footer, which reads, “Learn from the founders behind hundreds of profitable online businesses, and connect with others who are starting and growing their own companies.”

That’s a little more polished, a little more SEO friendly. Again, that’s not where Courtland started.

Even the Title tag was different.

Then it read: “Make Money from Your Apps and Be Your Own Boss.”

It's interesting that Apps seemed to be the main focus of this website, or at least the type of audience it was trying to reach in the beginning.

The About Page

Now, the About page was crawled in February 2017, so it seems that by then Courtland had added a Forum link.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170218101054/https://www.indiehackers.com/about

Here’s part of the About section.

Transparency

https://web.archive.org/web/20170218100949/https://www.indiehackers.com/blog

Courtland also had a Blog, where he mainly kept his audience abreast of any revenue change, or affiliate links and the link. In essence, he was modeling what he wanted and expected his interview subjects to divulge. By leading by example, he made it easier for other founders to be transparent with their finances and tactics. I know we all appreciate that very much.

He had a pretty clear Call to Action for people to subscribe to his email list.

Forum

Okay, I know you’re curious about the forum.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170218100957/https://www.indiehackers.com/forum

It’s not as fancy as it is today. But, it was functional, to the point and it had (still has obviously) that addictive upvote feature that we all love. There was even a link for Sponsors to contact him to advertise on the site.

Conclusion

I hope that you enjoyed reading this deep dive into Indie Hackers. My hope is also that it encourages you to keep working on your side project and to realize that you just need to start and launch something.

Let it grow organically. Don’t compare yourself to Apple, Amazon or any other big company. That’s not realistic. Start small and see where that takes you.

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