Who was Indie Hackin' during the great recession?

My husband had a niche consultancy type business that he ended up shutting down, we got off lightly in the end, but it wasn't fun.

It took us years to recover from it, but it was a blessing and it was the start of the journey of becoming more focused on our finances to be better with money and get rid of our debts (apart from our mortgage).

He ended up getting a remote and well paid consultancy gig that got us through it and back on track.

I've been freelancing in the SMB market since the mid 90s. Even though I was in the "IT" business at the time, the dotcom bust didn't phase my business at all. My client base was diversified and my clients were specifically not impacted since they weren't in the IT business, so I just kept rolling along.

The housing bust OTOH was a much different story. Because it affected just about every business sector out there, it also affected me. I had a bad year, but then ended up falling into a lucrative multi-year contract thanks to some business connections.

What I wasn't prepared for was what to do after that long term contract ended (actually it was a series of consecutive short-term contracts that we kept getting). By then, my previous business model and client base had eroded to the point of being unrecoverable enough to be sustainable by itself. To this day, I'm still trying to figure out a viable long term business model for myself.

To be fair though, I'm much more picky about what I take on now compared to 20 years ago. I have more of an internal need to actually enjoy what I work on than now rather than just taking on anything that comes my way. Probably because I have more of an opinion as to what I like and dislike about different type of projects and technologies.

I did! In 2012, at least.

In my estimation, little changed between then and now.

1. A community existed, if not with the same profile it has today. Hacker News seemed to be the watering hole of people writing about indie software businesses, remote work, growth hacking, software frameworks, etc. - it's certainly where I learned to put it all together.

It was already established that:
-You could go it yourself and eschew the venture funding
-You could work remotely
-You could do just enough business to please customers and just enough code to be dangerous
-You could Google your way to victory

2. The stack of choice was Rails, Bootstrap, Postgres and Heroku. It was easier then.

3. It was so worth it, even when my project stopped growing. (I built a learning site with my brother, a professor of music theory.) He learned enough business from me to escape the awful rat race that is academia for the arts and start his own business. I learned enough code on my own to get onto the software engineering pay scale, work with engineers, and thrive in a more technical career than I was ever formally educated for.

I'd also like to hear experiences with the matter.

Some say that Covid19 will speed up announced 2021/22 recession.