What's New: The truth about dating as an indie hacker

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Here's what you'll find in this issue:

• 30% of indie hackers won't even try dating. Here's why.
• Postmark, a popular transactional email service, has faced prolonged outages, account deactivations, and "malicious" links.
• $24K MRR. After selling MicroConf and Startups for the Rest of Us, Mike Taber launched several new projects and diversified his income.

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The truth about dating as an indie hacker 💞

About 30% of US adults are single, and nearly half of those single adults aren't actively looking for a partner. How does that stack up against the Indie Hackers community?

A recent poll on the Indie Hackers X page dropped some interesting stats:

• 60% of indie hackers are in a relationship.
• 10% are single and actively seeking.
• 30% are single and not looking.

So, indie hackers are slightly more likely to be single than average (30% of US adults vs. 40% of indie hackers). Also, single indie hackers are way less likely to be putting themselves out there (50% of US single adults vs. 25% of single indie hackers).

Let’s break it down further and explore the dating world for indie hackers, sharing more data, stories, and tips that actually make sense for this crowd.

Read the full article →

Founders are falling out of love with Postmark 📧

Transactional email service Postmark has long been an essential part of the indie hacker starter pack. It offers a special package for bootstrappers, and even brands itself as "the best email provider for bootstrapped startups."

But, after a series of recent missteps (including a nearly 10 hour outage over an expired SSL certificate), founders have started to question things. Are grumblings in Telegram chats, and rants on social media, signs that founders are falling out of love with Postmark? Bootstrappers spoke with Indie Hackers to share their experiences and help answer that question.

Read the full article →

The Build Board 🪧

Every day, indie hackers post updates about the products they're building. Here's what the community voted to the top yesterday!

1. CodeFast: Learn to code in weeks, not months.
2. Gumroad: Creators deserve to get paid for their work. We make it easy.
3. CoupleFlow: Weekly AI chat insights for a stronger, happier relationship.
4. CustomPod: Podcasts about what's going on in your world.
5. Devcinch: Subscription-based Software Development-as-a-Service.

Enjoy building in public? Post an update to your product page on Indie Hackers, and it will automatically be added to the daily leaderboard.

Years after selling MicroConf, Mike Taber hit $24K MRR 💰

Early in his career, Mike Taber cofounded MicroConf and Startups for the Rest of Us, with Rob Walling. Then, he built FounderCafe and Bluetick, which currently bring in roughly $24K per month. Now, he's working on InboxFusion.

Conventional wisdom says that you should build an audience first, but Mike says the subtle nuance is that you need to build the right audience, one that’s specifically interested in your product. If they opted into your marketing for any reason other than the product you were offering, chances are it’s not a good fit, and won’t result in any sales.

Read the full article →

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Michal Kankowski, Katie Hignett, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing