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What indie hacker alternatives to big tech products do you want to see?

Hey everyone, I'm Bobby.

I'm starting this new series called Indie Alternatives. I want to help highlight some of the indie hacker alternatives to established products. You can sign up for it here:

What indie hacker products exist now that are challenging big tech incumbents? What products would you like to see alternatives to that don't exist yet? Please share any of your ideas or thoughts!

Shoutout to @RosieSherry @alex_b_h for the idea!

  1. 4

    I’m probably alone here, but more than anything, I wanna see decentralized/federated social media.

    The concept of Twitter, for example, I just don’t like the fact that we have to give up all of our privacy and overall digital lives.

    Mastodon has surpassed 2.7 million users as of Nov. 2019 IIRC, so it’s still a drop in the bucket compared to Twitter’s 186 million “monetizable” users.

    If I could basically copy-paste my network from Twitter, that’d be sweet. Or at the very least be able to interact with Twitter users through Mastodon entirely so that I can still reach out the Twitterverse while still being within Mastodon in control of my own data.

    There are other alternatives that exist for Instagram (PixelFed) and Facebook (Diaspora, MeWe) as well, but because networks effects are so powerful, they haven’t gone mainstream yet. I’m hoping little by little, and then at once, as these networks often do.

    Search is another big one. You can use Startpage or DuckDuckGo for conducting more private searches, but Startpage uses Google’s indexing, and DDG uses Bing’s, respectively. With Apple jumping into the search game, it’ll be interesting to see how it indexes, how devs might be able to build on top of it (perhaps unlikely given Apple’s closed-source ecosystem), and what the privacy policies are like given Apple’s privacy stance.

  2. 2

    personally, what matters the most to me is not even the product, but the ecosystem around it.

    for example, I use Google Sheets a lot and even there was a free indie alternative, I wouldn't use it because there's already so much content to help me with GS that it will always be ×100 easier for me to use it.

  3. 2

    Sweet! Such a good idea. For anyone just checking this out I posted a couple Indie Hacker projects in a comment, asking for some kind of featured posts, I guess Bobby is now running with it.

    I've signed up, looking forward to see what's next

  4. 2

    This is a really interesting topic to me—I actually ran a poll last year of bootstrapped founders, asking them how much they care about using products built by other bootstrapped founders as they build their business.

    I was expecting the answer to be "A lot! Let's support other indie businesses like ours."

    75% of respondents said "I could care less."

    I was personally a little disheartened by this (I don't feel this way), but the overarching sentiments was "Building a SaaS product is hard enough, the last thing I need is to be relying on unproven technology."

    My own product (www.outseta.com) is designed to displace a tech stack of:

    1. Firebase or Auth0 for authentication
    2. Hubspot or Pipedrive for CRM
    3. Chargebee or Recurly for subscription management
    4. Zendesk, Intercom, or Drift for help desk

    I think it's a good thing to look to use other Indie products whenever possible.

    1. 1

      This is sad. We are also a bootstrapped startup, in the middle of development and launching by next year. We are planning to use Billsby (Startup) for plan management, Crisp for CRM and Marketing (Another Startup) and Canny for Feedback, gitbook for knowledge base.

    2. 1

      This is super helpful. Thanks, @GeoffRoberts I was curious about this as we discussed the concept. Good to keep in mind.

      Another idea I'm curious about within this topic is related to founders' lessons/strategies as they attempt(ed) to challenge an incumbent. How'd they start? What are their short and long-term strategies?

  5. 1

    @bobburch Thank you for doing this! I'm working on an open source alternative to an established player in the site search space (Algolia), called Typesense:

    https://www.indiehackers.com/post/show-ih-we-built-an-open-source-alternative-to-algolia-elasticsearch-d9c3659bb9.

  6. 1

    This is great topic, infact as a self funded startup, we alwas feel to use startup products. May be someday we also will be in your list. :)

  7. 1

    How did you create that subscribe button? And what happens if I click it?

    1. 1

      You will get email updates :)

  8. 1

    Seems a lot of norms are changing around email privacy? So I'd be interested in indie alternatives to email marketing services like Mailchimp that avoid using e.g. spy pixels and other tracking mechanisms.

    1. 2

      I personally would want to have a database of alternative indie hacker projects. Always good to support the little guy. AlternativeTo is everything

        1. 1

          Well yeah 😅that's basically it. Didn't know about that page.

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