What kinds of posts would you like to see more/less of on Indie Hackers?

More

• Detailed progress reports from people who are actually running businesses or side projects (profitably or unprofitably)

Less

• "I am offering anyone on IH free [whatever] as a backdoor way to promote my own work!"
• "Ask IH: What are people's opinions on [subjective thing that's fun and unproductive to argue about]?"
• "Give me feedback about my project"
  • I'd like to see some of this, but I almost wish there was some kind of credit system where you have to invest a bit in the community before you're allowed to ask for favors.
• Generally any kind of post where OP is putting in low effort and the value comes from high-effort replies

Why

Kind of self-serving. I like to write about my own progress on IH because just writing it out helps me think about my strategy. But I also like seeing other people think through their problems.

It's fun seeing a "normal" week/month/quarter because most people only think of posting when they have extreme experiences (e.g., "I had an amazing launch on ProductHunt!"). But I'm interested in the more everyday problems. Like your MRR is $100 this month. How do you plan to get it to $200 next month? How do you want to grow your traffic? How do you prioritize new features with bugfixing?

Just my opinions:
More posts for the purpose of good back-and-forth discussion. I think there's a pattern of people using IH just to drop their blog posts / self-promote. I think it's a hard challenge for IH to allow promotion and content linking while still keeping it genuine, so I don't have any ideas for solutions.
I think the daily update threads that @Harlem has been posting are good because they get people talking about the concrete aspects of running an indie business, which is a major selling point for me.
It might cool for IH to compile a list of stickys/faqs about best practices for different aspects of starting a business. You'd basically be keeping IH's finger on the pulse of the startup meta (you like Starcraft according to twitter, so I figure I can use that word :) ). I think ProductHunt tries to do this but they're too promotional for a reader to be able to cut through to whatever the truth is, IMO.
I think some of this stuff, like the discussions, will improve automatically as the userbase grows.

1. I like to hear what problem Indie Hackers are having with their projects. (Eg. Finding customers, unable to focus, losing revenue, etc)
2. Story about, how I hacked X to solve or overcome a problem.
3. I'm assuming most people here are programmers, it would be nice to see some marketing hack or growth hacking related post.

A SaaS business is 60% marketing, 8% admin, and 32% technology. We need more marketing posts.

At a high level, I'd like to see more attempts to create value and fewer attempts to capture value. Here are some specifics:

I'd like to see fewer posts...

• trying to sell stuff, especially random mass market stuff like diet pills and sex enhancers (both of which I've seen on IH this past week)
• that try to disguise marketing as a question
• asking for advice about their business but not revealing much about what their business is, thus making it very hard for us to be helpful
• that are proclamations of "one true way" to succeed. E.g., "you MUST build a SaaS"
• "would you buy X" questions
• listicles
• articles or links shared by any new users who don't comment

I'd like to see more posts...

• asking genuine questions that the community can help with
• sharing detailed experiences about their business that don't sell to IH readers
• linking to high quality articles and podcasts created by others
• talking about high quality free resources for indies that have no connection to the poster
• linking to or discussing MOOCs like edX or OCW that are relevant to at least a good number of people here
• about successful companies the poster has created and is no longer running (and thus can't be made for the purpose of selling)

More podcasts

Not so much of the kind of content per se (as different members of the community might derive value from different types of content), but a better way to categorize the type of post.

Eg. Show IH, How I grew X by Y over Z timeframe, Ask IH, Technical Q&A/How I did it

If there was a way to consistently categorize this (? perhaps ask the poster at the time of submission), members could just filter based on their preferences.

More:

• Real stories sharing some non-trivial knowledge, which doesn't simply reiterate on statements from growth hacking books and other motivational bullshit from LinkedIn etc. Would be perfect if they followed the formula: “Here's what I decided to do, here's why I decided to do this, and here is the outcome (numbers)”
• Generally more spotlight for product updates. For me, maintaining my product page is the most fun part of IH: that's where I share my business ups & downs, post my slides and talks on the matter, and also it makes me feel more accountable. I'd love to read valuable updates by other makers as well, but they're hard to discover: many makers simply post short meaningless updates on each version bump. I wish IH specifically surfaced valuable ones.

Fewer:

• Duplicate posts that were probably asked dozens of times before. Not only this makes it harder to look for original content, but devalues those posts themselves. Why would I engage in the discussion when I know that it will be buried, and the same topic will be created again in a week? Perhaps you should implement a search feature like on StackOverflow and some subreddits: search for similar titles when trying to create a post.
• Low effort self-promotion posts. Let's be honest, we all want to promote our products. But there's a difference between doing it in a smart way providing value (even if it's simply by setting an example of good content marketing copy), and blatant in-your-face spam.

P.S. Oh, and while we're at it, let's maybe be more friendly towards those who don't build SaaS and who sell their products not as a subscription? It seems like most of the talk these days is about MRR, and even IH nudgrs you to share monthly revenue. Well I've sold more copies in the launch month and fewer in the following, which is expected — and yet this devalues me.

Hi Courtland,
this is a great question, thanks!
What I would like to see:

1. How somebody works on his/her project - which results he/she has even if they are not too big. Which difficulties he/she overcomes, how. Real life stories.
2. Founders' diaries - and not only when they hit $10,000/month but when they can't earn a cent or just little - what they are doing, how, where.
3. Questions and discussions on marketing strategy, experience, thoughts.
4. More feedbacks requests.
5. More "show IH" posts.

What I wouldn't like to see:

1. Offtopic questions like "How to solve the problem with Swift/Angular erc...?" - stackoverflow is for it.
2. Repetitive questions like "How to create a landing page?", "How to stop procrastinating?" etc. I wouldn't mind to see such questions once but not all the time - it looks annoying.
3. Topics like "I've created and run my blog for 3 days!" or "I've created a SaaS for 3 weeks!" Well... that's good for you... but what's the point of such topics?

Hey Courtland,

I usually don't comment on the forum, but since you asked, hope this will be helpful.

More

• Podcasts. Podcasts are, above and beyond, the highest quality content on Indie Hackers. I would like to subscribe to an email list without having to get the weekly 'interview and forum' email, if at all possible. Forums are OK, but unfortunately there's too much self marketing, and too many posts that are largely devoid of any meaningful content. As it stands, it's very low SNR.

  In fact, while I do understand why you're doing this the current way, I would honestly split the Indie Hackers Podcast into its own brand, at least until the forum and the rest of the establishment catches up in quality, because the rest of Indie Hackers and the podcast are of a vastly different grade. Podcast is AA, the rest of the whole thing is a C- at best.

Less

• Self-promotion on the forums. These aren't bad per se, it's just that it's not what I want to see when I come in and try to find something. Consider splitting the forum into topics, there can be 'take a look at what I built', 'watercooler' (for chitchat and emotional support) 'ama', and a forum to let people ask you specific questions. This not only prevents people from giving them grief (i.e. if you don't want to see emotional support posts, don't go to 'watercooler' topic) for legit questions, it also prevents submarine marketing in the form of asking a question, and realising halfway through your response that the asker isn't actually asking a question at all, s/he's just looking for attention / marketing. That leaves a really bad taste in my mouth, and makes me much, much less likely to offer help in the future.

I think this problem would solve itself if posts with more points stated at the top of the page longer. The posts with lots of points are usually the most interesting and have sparked some good discussion. Right now I think they move down too quickly.

More

• People talking about what they built asking for feedback
• Post mortems / writeups
• Questions that fit

Less

• Spam posts :/ Notice quite a lot of them lately, i guess that's natural for a page like this but would be nice to see less of it if possible.

Great question. I find that IndieHackers is most valuable in the following ways (and which I'd love to see more of):

• Learning: Posts about how others identified a market, acquired customers, overcame challenges and grew their products/businesses
• Community/Motivation: Seeing daily tasks & thoughts of others with similar goals of running a profitable, indie-businesses is motivating

The new "stories" on the site in addition to Instagram. :)

@csallen AMA's from Indie Hackers would be awesome!

The post below was from yesterday, it seemed to get a nice discussion going.

https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/my-product-went-from-0-mrr-to-3-3k-mrr-in-10-months-ama-1f90b3c0dc

@csallen how about a separate gallery-type page for landings feedback? Drop your link + comment, crawler gets a screenshot for the thumbnail.

Maybe 5 best ranked (by whatever measure) are posted as an insert into the main feed.

Content that talks about how someone chose to spend x amount of mins on y and why they chose to spend that time on y rather than z.

What were the roadblocks? If they figured out an alternative/way to save money instead of purchasing a product to solve their marketing problems, what was that alternative? Was it worth the time it took rather than the money they would have spent?

Content with detail that shows what's going on through someone's head when they're working on something. What makes them stop working on something? At what point does someone switch to a different channel?

Biggest regrets, problems with working with people, anxiety, what stresses people out, what motivates them to do certain things, etc.

Would be cool if there was a way to filter the torrent of posts coming at me based on subject/tag or something..

I.E. marketing posts are cool, but I’m the build stage / mindset. Want to read posts where people are at my stage..

Definitely less of the (weekly it seems) "What stack are you using?" posts. It doesn't matter.

Podcast! Audio content is really a great addition to the site.

Case Studies and marketing growth stories

Polls.

I would love to see polls.

I think subject specific weekly threads like a marketing Monday, technology Tuesday etc. Would be a wonderful addition.

Personally, I like the current mix of posts.

The nice posts
-Ask IH/feedback
-Progress updates
-Show IH

The bad posts
-Random spam posts with only links

The dilemma is with the show IH posts, the majority of these posts are genuine and I feel there is nothing wrong in user aiming to drive traffic to their website as soon as the resources are given are valuable to the community. There are the odd posts by users who blatantly aim to promote their website without any value for the users.

I can understand IH users have different preferences. A solution to tackle it maybe has a set number of tags so when a user publishes a post, the user needs to select a minimum of three tags and a maximum of five tags.

IH readers can click on tags to read relevant posts.

I'd like to have IH iOS app :)
As I'm iOS developer, I can contribute for making IH iOS application.

Posts for when people need advice or help

This comment was deleted 7 years ago

This comment was deleted 4 years ago

This comment was deleted 4 years ago

This comment was deleted 7 years ago