Indie Hackers
Learn from Profitable Online Businesses
Everyone's using AI to build games, thanks to Levels' flight sim.
It looked fun, so I used AI to build a game I've always wanted to have on Indie Hackers — a mini crossword puzzle.
It turns out, not every game is so easy to make with AI. Crosswords have a lot of moving parts that the AI just couldn't one-shot:
- user interface with lots of keyboard shortcuts that need to function intuitively
- algorithm that can actually generate valid crosswords, AI got this wrong over and over
- giant lists of valid words, with ratings on each, so the algorithm will know which words are too uncommon to use in a puzzle
- custom keyboard to render on mobile, bc native mobile keyboards suck for crossword puzzles (blew my mind that this was necessary)
- AI to generate clues for the finished puzzle, and to make sure clues aren't too hard or too easy, and ideally are clever and fun
- UI for you to edit clues when the AI's clues suck
I ended up having to do a lot by hand, but I got it working in the end:
👉 https://www.indiehackers.com/indie-mini/daily
My takeaway is to put a lot more thought into when vibe coding works well vs doesn't. What seems impressive to humans might not take a lot of code (a 3D flying sim on a single map), whereas what seems simple to humans might have a lot of difficult components (a daily mini crossword). If all you have is a few yours or a day, you're better off vibe coding the former rather than the latter, at least for now.
Valuable lesson to learn for sure.
This is definitely the coolest thing I've made in years.
Everyone has startup ideas and feature ideas. But it's hard to know if they're "good" ideas. And sanity checking them against some sort of idea validation checklist is a long and tedious process.
So in January I built something called the Idea Board. It's quick, fun, and easy to see if your idea makes any sense, and it even gives you tips for how to improve your idea:
It's quick: Entering 1 or 2 sentences about your idea is enough to get feedback.
It's smart: The tool structures your idea in a way that forces you to consider important aspects that you might otherwise forget, like the market, channels, revenue, etc.
It's fun: I built it like a game, and there's even a leaderboard where you can compare your scores to others' scores.
Right now it's still in beta. There are lots of features missing. But I think it's promising, and it's already useful.
You can give it a try here: https://www.indiehackers.com/idea-board
Let me know your feedback! (There's a feedback button in the app.)
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Well done! This tool is fun, super accessible, well thought out and useful for improving weak point in your business model! Also great design and gamification.
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Who is providing the feedback? An automated pre-programmed list? A trained LLM? Other human founders who read and reply (with some incentive)?
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Really neat idea and love the simple UI! I've always wanted something that can accurately rate ideas before actually having to build them.
But how does it work? Or if you're keeping it as a trade secret, how can we trust the accuracy of the scores?
EDIT: Ok I tried it, here's how it works. You get a deck of playing cards, for example "Viral Loop", and you have to explain how your app will obtain a viral loop. Then the AI analyzes your answer and will increase your dollar score. It's actually really cool! It forces you to answer important questions on how your app will succeed in the market.
Now that meetups are up-and-running, I've finally been able to redirect my attention back to these product pages. Today I finished adding some sorely-missed social features — specifically, the ability to "like" and comment on product posts. You can try it on this post itself!
This is just step #1 of a bigger process of changing the way we share and converse with each other on IH. The forum has some inherent limitations that get worse as it grows. For example, only a small percentage of posts make it to the top every day, and many of the rest get ignored. While that's fine for, say, link-sharing communities like Hacker News, it's not ideal for a community built around as many people as possible giving and receiving help with their businesses.
What's the most useful and impactful community of entrepreneurs online? There aren't any forums that stand out. Personally, I think the answer is Twitter. There are better conversations going on there than anywhere else, and part of that is due to the social feed format. It's superior to a forum in encouraging lots of people to do a lot of talking, and in making it easy to skim through and read lots of posts from the people you care about.
But Twitter has some glaring issues around holding substantive discussions. For example, you can only respond to tweets with tweets, rather than threaded comments. And there is no real niche, so many discussions devolve into arguments and politics.
I hope to turn IH into something better over time, and these product post changes are just the start!
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Testing new comments feature... wow it works! congratulations :D
Seriously though, Indie Hackers is a great place. Lots of inspiration and lots of real entrepreneurs here. I remember wanting to build my own community to connect me with people who can take a look at how I'm building apps and get some feedback.
When I found Indie Hackers, I saw that you've already done this for me and I felt thankful. So here goes: thank you!
Seeing that you want to make this all better is a great thing to hear. The comparison you make with Twitter is legitimate, but we need a discussion platform that goes beyond threads somehow.
How can people discover important posts that people posted along time ago, that got covered quickly with other posts? This is one of the things to ask, and when I get some ideas on what could improve IH, I will share it here.
All the best
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How can people discover important posts that people posted along time ago…
It's an interesting problem, and it affects any conversation-based platform, including conversations in real-life. There's a strong bias toward focusing on what's being said now, even though the vast majority of important conversations happened in the past.
I think part of this is biological — we're wired to care about what's new and what's active. But part of it is practical, too. Finding past conversations requires actively clicking, scrolling, browsing, searching, filtering, etc. Dropping in on recent conversations, however, requires very little effort. A good example is that even though we've surfaced the top conversations from the forum, people rarely click over to that tab.
Books have somewhat solved this problem in real life. They're collections of information organized by topic rather than by date, and they're refined to only include the best info (well, the good ones are, anyway). We're doing something similar with our round table articles, which will eventually consist entirely of timeless posts made by product page owners.
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Summary: tags and allowing others to contribute to IH's code.
Just checked out a round table. I love how one can filter businesses based on some criteria, I can find articles that are more applicable to how my business. Can't comment on them though (by design? why?).
I came here to suggest something that I think already crossed your mind: tags.
There is much about running a startup (even if just a small indie project): from sales & marketing, technology stack, how to find and talk to customers (sales networking), finding and communicating with potential partners, service providers, investors (another kind of networking), building a website, finding images, hiring a designer (HR), freelancers vs interns vs employees, etc.
I already built my product, have a decent site and product (at least that's what I think/hope), getting final approvals for Stripe Atlas, and now I'm at the marketing and sales stage. There are many people here with diverse interests, models, stages, etc.
Their posts don't apply to me at the moment (although I wouldn't mind taking a quick look since I might learn something).
To focus my use of this site, I would love to be able to search for "sales" related posts, for example. Whether they are articles, questions, or even comments, I want to see those in the search. Comments deserve some emphasis here because sometimes they are more valuable than posts.
I then realize that I need to improve my site's design because it's affecting "funneling" stuff on my site. So now I start searching for content with "web design" "UX" "funnels" and or "sales".
Do you ever consider opening IH's code to others? I wouldn't mind contributing to a site that is helping me. Imagine a GitHub repo where IH members (maybe filter by some ranking mechanism and tech experience) can submit pull requests.
Cheers
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Now that meetups are are up and running, we thought it'd be great to get people involved in organizing meetups in a more official capacity, and do what we can to support them.
If you're interested in organizing meetups in your city, you can apply here: https://airtable.com/shrH3FggzE27LVgLL
It's become clear over the past 6 months or so that many hundreds of indie hackers have been meeting up in real life in cities across the world. I think this is great, and I've wanted to do something to help encourage more of these meetups, as well as promote them so more people will attend.
Today we launched a very simple MVP of our meetups feature. 🎉
I had elaborate plans for it at first, and all the myriad problems it could solve, but it would've taken months to build, so I pared it down to the most basic functionality possible: post a link to an event that you created elsewhere (Meetup.com, Facebook, Eventbrite, Google Calendar, etc.), and we'll show it in a list and send it out in our newsletter.
Excited to see where things go in the next few months, and hoping that the number of meetups really takes off. It'd be really great to see lots of small events in small cities, too, not just formal meetups in big cities.
—Courtland
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Awesome feature!!
I finally launched the product directory today! We were getting a ton of traffic from @mtlynch's post about why he quit Google, so I rushed through some final development tasks to deploy the directory to production so all of these new visitors could see it.
Right now we're focusing heavily on improving our conversion rates. About 2.5% of visitors to Indie Hackers sign up to become members, but I'd like to get that up above 8% by the end of the year. 😬 The product directory is our first test to see what happens to conversion rates if we build something valuable, then limit the full functionality to members only!
I've been doing some thinking about how I can make an Indie Hackers membership more valuable. One way would be to provide free and discounted products. This is something that probably won't pan out until later in year, though.
I've had product pages on Indie Hackers for a couple months now, but only recently began working on a directory to make these pages more discoverable. Today I asked the IH community for some feedback on it:
We reconfigured Indie Hackers to focus on the community forum, which has been growing slowly but steadily over the past year and a half. We launched it on Product Hunt and got #1 for the day!
The majority of the conversations people are having on Indie Hackers revolve around the products they're working on. If I'm going to build things to help entrepreneurs this year, then product pages should really be a first-class citizen on the site, and everyone should be able to create one.
Going forward, every interview we do on Indie Hackers will be tied to a product page just like this one. I plan to go back and retroactively create product pages for all of our past interviews, too. And, eventually, everyone will be able to create a product page for themselves!
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