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The age of the indie founder has arrived! Today anyone can create something, reach thousands of people, and build a profitable business.
We created Indie Hackers to help founders like you.
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~10 words of ad copy (up to 50 characters) as a line item in the “In the News” section of the Indie Hackers newsletter.
250 words of ad copy in a full section in the newsletter, including a clickable cover image for that section. And a clickable version of your company's logo right at the top of the newsletter. Click here to place a Full Section ad.
50 words of ad copy in the intro section at the top of the Indie Hackers newsletter. Click here to place an Intro Section ad.
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To see our media kit, which has additional details on our audience, including geography, interests, etc., go here.
You can also email us directly for details: [email protected].
We're going all-in on growing and improving the newsletter, so prices will likely creep up in the near future.
For the longest time, your account page on Indie Hackers has been somewhat… lacking.
Sure, it tracks the history of your posts and comments on the forum. But is that something you'd show off to anyone? Does it direct people to your businesses? Does it explain who you are, what you do, and where you're at as an indie hacker?
Not really.
So this week I hacked together an MVP to fix this: Indie Hackers Profile Pages.
Your profile page is an entirely new page that represents your career and your portfolio as an indie hacker.
When your friends and family ask what it is you do? Link them to your IH profile. When your audience wants to know what they can buy from you? Link them to your IH profile. When you've built a gazillion different things and can't remember what you've done? Visit your own IH profile.
Of course, if you're an indie hacker, you can build your own profile page from scratch if you want to. But my thinking is that you've got more important things to do, and IH profiles can make this super quick and easy, so you can focus elsewhere.
Anyone with an Indie Hackers account can create one of these pages today, simply by navigating to your own user profile. 👌
Essentially, I'm making a niche website builder.
So far I've focused on making the UI simple, intuitive, and mobile-friendly. There's still some work to go on these fronts, but I think the basic structure is good.
Your profile page consists of sections stacked on top of each other, and you can easily add, delete, and rearrange sections.
Right now, everything is super minimal. I'm truly shipping an MVP. There are currently only two sections you can add: a bio, and a list of your projects.
From here on, I want to ship a ton! I'd mostly like to add new features and sections to make these pages more useful.
Your feedback here would be much appreciated. 🤗 What other sections would like to see?
For example: a section to link your socials, a section to link to feature posts and articles you've written, a section to highlight your best tweets, etc.
There are also some less obvious feature I can add, that leverage the power and size of the IH community. Think social features: an FAQ section built into your page where people can ask you questions, a resume that I can plug into a cofounder matching tool, a directory of IHer profiles to help you all find each other, etc.
There are also the obvious premium features: custom themes, the ability to host this page on your own domain, etc. I'll eventually charge for this kind of stuff, so I can make money and keep IH alive and thriving.
I'd love to hear your feedback and ideas!
It feels so good to be shipping again 🔥
Exactly six years ago (to the day!), Stripe acquired Indie Hackers to help us grow and inspire millions of people building online businesses.
Today, I'm happy to announce that @channingallen and I are indie hackers again!
Specifically, this means we're back to running Indie Hackers as a standalone business, owned by the founders. Although we're no longer part of Stripe, Stripe continues to be supportive of IH as an investor to help us get going.
This has been about four months in the making. Branching out on our own is something we mutually decided on with Stripe, and we're excited about it!
It goes without saying that I'm incredibly grateful for Stripe's belief and support of Indie Hackers over the years. It still blows my mind that @patrickc reached out and took a chance on us when we were just a tiny bootstrapped company ourselves, that we were able to run freely and autonomously despite being part of a much bigger company, and that we now have the chance to own Indie Hackers again. Stripe couldn't have handled things any better, and I want to personally thank @patrickc and everyone else at Stripe for their support through the years.
So what now?
Well, if we want to survive and thrive, we're going to have to generate revenue just like any other business! I'm an entrepreneur at heart and always have been. In fact, working at Stripe was my first and only salaried job.
Right now we're sitting at exactly $0 in MRR, so the journey is just now (re)starting.
I'm fired up!!! 🔥🔥🔥
EDIT: Click here to listen to the Indie Hackers podcast episode where we discuss the spin-out in depth.
Probably one of the hardest things on Indie Hackers is to know what to post. It's also one of the most important.
I want the site to have better posts, and so I want to do a better job of helping people brainstorm what to write and guiding them with how to write it.
To that end, I just launched an MVP version of what I'm calling "post prompts." When you click to create a new post, you'll see something like this, and have the opportunity to select a prompt to help guide you:
Very few people actually browse popular posts from the past to learn what works well on Indie Hackers, but 100% of people will have to at least consider using one of these prompts due to the way the UI is designed, so I'm hoping to see some good usage.
I'll monitor usage for a couple weeks, and probably do another iteration on the prompt content after that depending on which prompts people are/aren't using, and how the posts are turning out.
Feedback welcome!
For years, we plateaued at ~30K. But two years ago, we broke through and never looked back. A few details:
Here's how we did it!
Our newsletter didn't grow until we got serious about content quality, and it's no wonder! Today's attention economy pits us against Twitter, Netflix, daily "breaking news," etc.
Even in the startup newsletter niche, The Hustle, Morning Brew, and others have raised the bar. So, two years ago we decided that our newsletter needed to deliver value that was high-quality, immediate, effortless to consume, consistent, and novel.
Here's our formula for a high-quality newsletter:
Magazine-style issues that intersperse long-form educational content with bite-sized, fun content for quick dopamine hits.
We brought on a top-notch editor and graphic designer to make this format sing.
The playbook we've used to get to 100K newsletter subscribers has three chapters:
Let's dive in a little deeper.
Value optimization:
Newsletter readers need immediate value or a lot of them will bounce. In the context of an email inbox, readers are in "make the stress go away" mode, not "read thoughtful content" mode.
Yet, our emails are long AF! So, each issue begins with a tl;dr summary of the entire email:
Originally, our newsletter took a lot of effort to read. It was basically a list of links to forum posts on our site. We were optimizing for clickthroughs and website traffic, not for value.
Now, we bring the forum content directly to our readers' inboxes, and growth is exploding. Here's a harsh reality about newsletters: You're only as good as your last performance. There's no 80/20 rule for consistency. You simply have to shoot for 100%.
We do three issues a week. The 2-3 times we've had mixed feelings about quality? Yeah, we skipped those issues.
Another harsh reality: Most tech and business newsletters get old quickly, even if they're high-quality. This is because they deliver a steady drumbeat of the same good content until it goes from good to stale.
So, we mix in tech news, unique founder stories, recent trends, and other novelties.
Community crowdsourcing:
Without crowdsourcing content from our community, we never would have crossed 1K subscribers, let alone 100K.
In reality, this isn't a thread about how I grew the Indie Hackers newsletter to 100K, but about how the Indie Hackers community grew the Indie Hackers newsletter to 100K.
It's for indie hackers, by indie hackers. Up to 20K amazing founders visit the Indie Hackers forum every day, and hundreds of them write cutting-edge posts about their startup journeys, learnings, failures, etc.
Then, our newsletter editor picks the best ones and polishes them for the newsletter. Credit and backlinks always go to the authors. In startups and finance, you're supposed to talk about leverage, so let me put it this way: There's no longer lever than a community whose incentives are aligned.
Partnerships:
As our newsletter's reach has grown in recent years, other elite content creators have taken notice and agreed to join forces.
These days, one out of every five content sections in a given Indie Hackers newsletter comes from an influencer like Dru Riley, Harry Dry, and Steph Smith, with our news section coming from Priyanka Vazirani over at Volv.
And that's that! Thanks for reading, subscribing, sharing, and commenting. More exciting things to come!
Unsurprisingly, one of my favorite people to talk to on the planet is my twin brother and Indie Hackers cofounder @channingallen.
So I talked him into co-hosting the podcast with me from now on 👀
Or, at least… we're trying it out as an experiment.
We're going to be experimenting with formats as well. We'll likely still do founder stories and interview, but mix them in with some Q&A and also just riffing off each other.
So why don't we start with some Q&A right now. If you've got a question for us, or you want some advice for your startup, post below, and we might read and respond to your comment on the next pod 🤙
I slapped a fresh coat of paint on the Indie Hackers homepage today. Or more specifically, to the "social feed" component, which exists in the middle of the homepage + on group pages + the /newest feed + the /following feed. So all of these other places have gotten a redesign, too.
Why?
I wanted a cleaner design that would draw more attention to the center of the page, while also being less intimidating to newbies. Reddit-like forums are very natural to developers and internet veterans, but can be a bit overwhelming to others. So I wanted to strike a balance between the text links you see on forums and the friendlier "cards" you see in most social media apps.
I also just think it looks nicer :)
From a functional standpoint, making the feed bolder also allows me to add other items to the sidebar without drawing too much attention away from the posts in the middle.
Some further changes I'm considering adding to the homepage, especially the sidebars:
I shipped some small improvements to posts and comments, just to make the experience of talking to other people on Indie Hackers a more pleasant one.
Unlimited Indentation. Typically, comments are confined to a small column in the middle of the page that's 700 pixels wide. This is super limiting when you start having a long conversation, as indented comments have to get skinnier and skinnier. So I got rid of the right edge, and now instead of shrinking, indented comments just extend beyond the right edge of their container, all the way to the right right edge of your browser window if it's wide enough.
Scroll to Comments: Now when you click the "# comments" link in the main feed on the homepage, you'll automatically scroll down past the body of the post and directly to the comments. This is useful for lazy people like me who feel entitled to leave a comment having only read the title of a post.
Boosting New Comments: New comments will now get an artificial boost, and for a short time window they'll be shown above older comments that have more upvotes. This gives latecomers a chance for their comments to be seen.
Link Posts with Text: When you make a link post, you can now accompany it with up to 280 characters of text. This is good for setting the context of a discussion, and explaining why you're sharing the link.
Better Sorting: The algorithm I use to sort posts and comments will now weight engagement from older users a little bit higher than engagement from newer users. Older users are less likely to engage with repetitive content that's been on Indie Hackers a million times already, whereas newer users don't have the tenure to even see it as being repetitive. So the idea is to tip the scales in favor of engagement on more unique content.
My next priority is to give a bit more visibility to groups and to products on the homepage. Because the main homepage feed is too competitive for a lot of the niche posts found in groups and in the product directory to successfully make it there, but those posts nevertheless deserve some attention. Suggestions welcome!
I just configured Indie Hackers to require an invite code for signup.
My primary motivation is to fight spam. Hundreds of companies and individuals create dozens of accounts every day for the express purpose of posting spam. Playing whack-a-mole is annoying and feels un-winnable, but an invite system should stop new spammers from joining instantaneously (or allow us to track down the spammers who are inviting them).
There are secondary benefits, too. I'm only granting invite codes to product owners who are actively making useful posts to the community. Chances are, the people they'll invite to Indie Hackers will be more helpful than average.
(Note that earning invite codes is an automatic process that happens daily.)
I admit that it'll also be cool to see people asking for and sharing invite codes on other websites, like Twitter.
The downsides: Making IH more exclusive when I've always erred on the side of radical inclusivity, and of course, decreasing signup rates.
I'm not so worried about the signup rate. Growth is a function of both signups and retention, and I suspect this change may do more to boost retention (by improving site quality) in the long run than it does to hamper new signups.
As for timelines, I plan to keep things invite-only for at least a couple of weeks to see how things shake out and to give us time to discourage spammers. If it's a disaster, I can easily reopen signups. And if it's great, I can always keep the new system as long as I want, or even indefinitely.
Please let me know your thoughts below!
Indie Hackers should be much faster nowadays… at least for some of you!
In the past week, the PageSpeed Insights score for our homepage on mobile jumped from 24 to 78. On desktop it jumped from 40 to 97. Not too shabby!
We had similar improvements on post pages, which are just as important (if not more): from 22 to 79 on mobile, and from 57 to 98 on desktop.
The vast majority of the speedup came from two improvements: (1) serving static pages, and (2) optimizing images.
Indie Hackers is a single-page application (SPA) with server-side rendering. When you visit the site, you have to wait a few seconds for the JS to build the single page app in your browser. For some routes we have server-side rendering, so at least you'll see the full page of HTML while the SPA boots up. On others, you just see a random quote to distract you from how slow it is. 😈
However, It turns out that static HTML is all we really need for anonymous visitors. They don't actually need the SPA to boot up. So I wrote some code that lives on the edge nodes of our CDN. It modifies the HTML response to simply strip out our SPA JS. It also strips out lots of JS and CSS that were only used for the SPA, and replaces them with smaller page-specific JS and CSS.
The result is that, for anonymous visitors, the homepage and post pages load almost instantaneously when they're cached in our CDN. They take a second to load when you get a cache miss, but I've set the cache to last for 7 days, so it should be rare for popular posts. I've also got some good cache invalidation going on, where I'll refresh a post page in the cache when it gets new comments, edited, upvoted, etc. This kind of stuff is a pain to code and maintain, but it's necessary for a dynamic site with lots of visitors to pages that change frequently.
Anyway, this was the vast majority of the speed improvement. In the future I'd like to do the same for logged-in users, but that's a bit trickier, since there's a ton of JS in the SPA that deals with logging you in and allowing you to interact with various components (e.g. leaving comments and upvoting things).
"But Courtland, why did you make IH a SPA to begin with?"
Because it was a fun hobby project when I started it, and I didn't know it would get big leave me alone okay jeez.
This was a relatively simple fix, but it took a while. When you upload an avatar to your IH profile, I've got some code it automatically resizes it down to 72x72 pixels. However, I never got around to wring similar code for product and group icons. And if you look at the homepage, it's absolutely littered with lots of these icons, which makes it bright and happy, but also super huge. If you're on a slow mobile connection, the last thing you want is to download 3MB of images every time you visit the site.
So I spent some time optimizing all of these images. First, instead of merely shrinking them to one size, I'm shrinking them to 3 different sizes, and using the smallest possible size wherever I can get away with it. For example, group icons have a 28x28 pixel size for use in the social feeds around the site:
Second, I'm also converting these images to WEBP, which is a better compression algorithm than both JPG and PNG. The homepage still has way too many images, but now they're just a few kilobytes each on average, whereas before they were often dozens or hundreds of kb each.
Besides the above, there were a lot of smaller things, too. And my list of potential speed improvements is still super long. But I'm happy enough with the progress so far to move on to other things for a little bit.
The age of the indie founder has arrived! Today anyone can create something, reach thousands of people, and build a profitable business.
We created Indie Hackers to help founders like you.