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Analyzing Indie Hacker Products with Verified Revenue

173 points by mateuszbuda 4y ago

ameister14 4y ago
I don't really think that's an "only" statistic - 1 in 20 products there is a strong lifestyle business or more? That's amazing. They're comparing it to a full-time programming job but I think almost all of these are side projects until they hit a sustainable number for MRR.
- pineconewarrior 4y ago
  Agreed, 5% seems like a huge, encouraging number!
  - weird-eye-issue 4y ago
    There is a big difference between revenue and profit. So nothing encouraging about this at all
    - wahnfrieden 4y ago
      i don’t come across many low margin indie hacker projects
      - weird-eye-issue 4y ago
        How many of those are making over $100k? And how many are 100% honest about their costs?
        wahnfrieden 4y ago
        no clue mate. professional experience these days does certainly teach people to give vendors a lot of rent to get the job done
      - elsewhen 4y ago
        Are you considering marketing (eg GAds) spend?
- acover 4y ago
  > there were total of 937 products with Stripe verified revenue The stripe requirement filters a lot of zero revenue side projects.
  - rco8786 4y ago
    And lets through a lot of low revenue side projects
  - runako 4y ago
    It also filters out projects by older people, who are socially less likely (IMHO) to share how much money they make with strangers. Also -- with SaaSes I've started, the bigger customers all paid via non-Stripe means (ACH, check, etc.) and would not show up in these stats. Would have made those businesses appear smaller than they were.
- personjerry 4y ago
  1 in 20, that know about the Indie Hackers website, posted on there, and use Stripe, so that's a hugely biased number already
  - jrumbut 4y ago
    Sure, but that's not the highest bar to clear.
stuckinhell 4y ago
This is a sobering wakeup call especially in combination with all the other AI stuff on hackernews these days.
- sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago
ChicagoBoy11 4y ago
That's actually substantially higher than I would have imagined. Bootstrapping a business by yourself (and especially doing it like most of those people where it is not something you aren't usually committing full time to) to that mark is incredibly impressive.
- hackitup7 4y ago
  Had exactly the same reaction, every one of these projects is probably life changing for the founder(s). It's hard work but those stats are still way better and much more satisfying than a lottery ticket.
- some_random 4y ago
  I had the exact same reaction, I expected the "made any money at all" category to be closer to 5% than this. Edit: They filtered out any businesses without stripe verified revenue, which makes these numbers a lot more believable.
- game_the0ry 4y ago
  Same reaction here - 5% sounds pretty good, especially considering indie hackers usually boot strap on their own free time while working. I'd be happy working on a 8-hour-a-week project if it was making 2-4K/Month.
- buf 4y ago
  I wrote about this extensively here: https://siliconvict.com/articles/5-lessons-starting-a-500m-a-5m-company-in-5-years https://siliconvict.com/articles/5-lessons-starting-a-500m-a... It took me nearly a decade to get to where I am today ($700k / year), and half of that time I had a full-time job. The most important thing to keep in mind is not to stop.
  - texasbigdata 4y ago
    Not stopping for 5 years straight on top of your day job, while you’re are the sole on call pager duty engineer (through holidays and work crunches, etc), is kindly very very difficult and kudos to you but probably borderline unachievable for mere mortals.
5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
i wonder if those 5% have anything in common
capableweb 4y ago
Without any indication of where these indie hackers live, the income statement is almost useless. If you earn $100k/year while living in Bratislava, Slovakia, that would put you in the upper bracket when it comes to income, while if you live in San Fransisco, US, you're not exactly making a killing.
- nobody0 4y ago
  It's not a killing definitely a living though..
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    it’s likely mostly passive income if R&D slows to a minimum. that affords a lot of flexibility with one’s time vs comparing with wage labor where free time is never earned
  - cuu508 4y ago
    IIUC $100K is the revenue number, you also have to take into account operating costs, overheads, taxes.
- judge2020 4y ago
  Apparently it's "Stripe verified revenue" which is based on this[0]. I imagine it's all USD but you're right that it doesn't indicate the living situation of the humans running the operation. 0: https://www.indiehackers.com/products?revenueVerification=stripe&sorting=highest-revenue https://www.indiehackers.com/products?revenueVerification=st...
- dinvlad 4y ago
  Exactly, a lot of them live in remote areas like Bali with low costs of living, and have better housing etc. compared to a lot of salaried employees here.
dbg31415 4y ago
Right, well it's not really by design that they make so little... but the way most of them they run their businesses, is it any wonder? A lot of people do these as side projects. A way to sort of build a model train in their basement, free from all the complexities and compromises of "real" software development... They are trying to avoid product managers, sales people, designers, testers... countless others... getting a say in what they build. And, as a result, there's no business plan past a dream of, "If you build it, they will come." Hard to see any "indie hacker" project that wouldn't be improved with more testing, more marketing, more UX design... more customer research... but most of the time, it's just some guy with a boring day job trying to make $5 selling a widget nobody asked him to build in the first place. Anyway not to be negative... but like, if you're a small indie hacker who is trying to make a buck, remember that all of the software we use today has a village of people involved in the creation and support of it. If you're trying to do it all on your own... man, that's an up-hill battle. Bring in others as soon as you can. Then make sure you have a business plan that has the capacity to reward everyone, and be patient. A lot of people in tech... we're early-adopters. This means we do things well before a lot of people even know they exist, and by the time an audience has grown we've already moved on thinking our ideas were a flop. Sometimes they just take a little longer to pan out. (=
- altdataseller 4y ago
  >> Bring in others as soon as you can. But then you're no longer profitable. Barely any of these projects can sustain 1 person, let alone 2 people.
  - dbg31415 4y ago
    Takes money to make money... Have a valid idea. Build a business around it. Get an angel investor. But then they aren't indie hackers! Touche. But they are profitable. (=
    - hobo_mark 4y ago
      Or rather, "but then you have a full-time job again". I assume most of these people just want a more or less passive lifestyle business.
notlukesky 4y ago
Just as a gut feeling I would normally say that much less than 1% of indie projects ever make more than 100K/year in revenue. Their pool is of indie hackers with the caveat of: "At the time of our analysis, there were total of 937 products with Stripe verified revenue. The information we gathered to make this analysis are revenue and product's categories." I assume there are 10s of thousands of listings that don't have Stripe verified revenue on Indie Hackers (owned by Stripe). Just look at Product Hunt and track to see how many of the Product Hunt of the day fail in less than 2 years. And how much of that revenue gets eaten up by the other services is another story ranging from Google ads to AWS to other SaaS offerings like the scraping fish (the authors of the post). (Please buy more shovels from us for the gold rush.) I still hope people follow their passion and dreams. Just good to keep in mind that the odds are stacked against you and to try to succeed accordingly.
- gamerDude 4y ago
  I was going to say this as well. I have two companies listed on IndieHackers. One of which is stripe verified and does about $2k/mon. The other which is not stripe verified because our price point is much higher and we do checks not credit cards, makes $90k/mon. Just an important point there is a business model that is excluded here. General SaaS offerings though, I would imagine would be Stripe Verified if they wanted to publicly share though.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    Ditto. My smaller purchases go through Stripe, but all of our large-revenue transactions are ACH or check.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dbancajas 4y ago
    Dang 90K/month salary must be insane.
- serjester 4y ago
  As a counterpoint, I avoid adding a revenue figure to some of my businesses. Why? There’s certain niches that you can make a killing on for short periods - the last thing I want to do is attract attention. As an example, during the last refinancing boom I stumbled into an opportunity and a couple weeks later I had an MVP. Very quickly we had customers willing to pay 5 figure sums for our product. There’s no incentive for me to go around bragging and attracting copy cats. How do I know this? Because I have no shame in launching a competitor if I see someone’s making money and I think I can outcompete them. As a second point, most indie hackers are cycling through ideas until they either give up or stumble into something. If your business fails, you quickly move on. Across 5 years you could have tried 10 things and only the last one made money. But it doesn’t matter since business revenue follows a power law. So (theoretically) you retire on the last idea while your batting average remains below 10%. Not necessarily a bad outcome? Regardless I do agree the overwhelming majority of indie hackers are wantreprenuers that will never make a dime. Just don’t discount the professionals.
c16 4y ago
ScrapingFish ... ScrapingBee?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- altdataseller 4y ago
  ScrapingBee sounds much more trustworthy. You can't trust fish.
  - mateuszbuda 4y ago
    This is fishy.
    - jonatron 4y ago
      "Buy Request Pakcs" hmmm
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
codegeek 4y ago
Depends on where you live and your cost of living. For someone living in small town in India, even 20k per year is good. I think if you are able to create good enough income for you as an indie hacker, that is success. So the better metric would be to find out what percentage of indie hackers are full time with their gigs and have enough to live ok.
giantg2 4y ago
That's about an order of magnitude higher than I thought it'd be.
tothrowaway 4y ago
Why is revenue the prevailing number used for measuring a business? I see revenue cited almost universally these days, with no mention of profit. A hardware company that makes $100k in revenue (with no profit) is very different than a SaaS product that makes $100K with 90% profit. Why don't we just use profit?
- NiagaraThistle 4y ago
  IT's funny you mention this. There has been talk on twitter among a lot of Indie Hackers the past couple weeks (months?) saying the same thing. Especially now with a potential recession looming. I've always thought the same. But I think the reason revenue is used most often stems from VC backed businesses (and those seeking funding) trying to show that they are viable and have customers so they can raise more funds even before they have profit - think Twitter and Facebook as big examples.
- jrumbut 4y ago
  Profit is a tricky concept in any business, particularly a small software business. A lot of very successful businesses have zero or near zero profit (considering that paying the CEO reduces the profit, reinvesting reduces the profit, etc).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rco8786 4y ago
  Because profit is a lie. I can have a business with $1mm in revenue, pay myself a $1mm salary and poof, $0 profit for my business. Revenue has its own issues obviously but as a quick and easy measure of how much money this business can generate its reasonably useful.
- danenania 4y ago
  If you make 100k but reinvest half in marketing, your profit is 50k, but it would be misleading to equate your business to another one that makes 50k and doesn't reinvest any of it. What you're looking for is gross margin, but even that is hard to pin down exactly since there can be a fuzzy line between whether an expense is required or discretionary.
NiagaraThistle 4y ago
From following Pieter Levels for years, this article coincides with exactly what Pieter says about his own products: Only 5% of his 70 projects have ever made any real money. Therefore it's a better idea to build a lot of small things fast (to test traction and profitability) instead of focusing on one huge project and hope it takes off. Obviously this is general advice and there are outliers that will break the mold, but from a lot of this data and indiehacker anecdotes, the more shots you fire the better chances you have of one of them being big. THe key is to spot the losers quick and move on to something different, and then spot the ones that are gaining traction quick and then double down on your efforts for that/those one(s). Key takeaway: Take lots of chances.
- karterk 4y ago
  Diversify initially to protect the downside but double down on your winner(s) to scale the upside!
- Flankk 4y ago
  > A person who chases two rabbits catches neither. -Confucius. A low success rate is not a sign you're doing things right. If you're solving a real problem people will not have an issue paying you. There is a real opportunity cost to starting a business and I would not advise anyone to use this strategy. For starters, I don't see how anyone could possibly have 70 projects. I can only assume they are a con artist.
  - jimhi 4y ago
    It’s software. Most of the time consuming work can be copied after the first time. User accounts, payments, etc. There is also a fair amount of stories out there in hit based industries (startups, games) where people have documented their 50+ projects. Its hard yes. It can also make a lot of money. Few people are willing to do it or it would be more common.
    - deadcoder0904 4y ago
      the company (rovio) that built angry birds only succeeded after 51+ failed games. source: https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/how-a-bunch-of-angry-birds-turned-around-a-failing-startup-b39f2fe1adca https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/how-a-bunch-of-angry-birds-...
alksdeef 4y ago
I wonder what examples of those in the 'wearables' category might be that are putting them ahead of the curve?
- Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
  I was curious too, Here are the products under wearable categories[1] on indie hackers. Very few of them which make revenue has something to do with apps/data on wearable, Most them listed in that category have nothing to do with wearables. [1] https://www.indiehackers.com/products?category=wearables https://www.indiehackers.com/products?category=wearables
thenerdhead 4y ago
I've always wondered if a % of products on Indie Hackers make that amount of money purely from the social media & blog presence of their products. It seems that many of these successful products turn into the "self-help" of bootstrapping and make a living off of that shortly after.
- Existenceblinks 4y ago
  Also, it really sucks that "marketing tools" sold like crazy as well. Shovel for losers is a huge market. If the internet is atmosphere, marketing tools are something that emit CO2/CO.
sixQuarks 4y ago
Take all of this with a grain of salt. I’ve been making over $100k/year with a handful of my indie projects and would never publicize it for fear of copycats and/or targeting by patent trolls
buf 4y ago
According to this data, I'm doing better than 99% of Indie Hackers (I make $700k a year). To me, this tells me that Indie Hacker members are busy networking pretending to build companies, and not actually doing it. I say this because I don't think I'm that remarkable. I'm just going along trying to build a small business without much glamour about it. But I can see the appeal. There is almost cult-like mindsets all hyping each other up.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  are you doing the labor or hiring it?
  - buf 4y ago
    I'm doing the labor but it's saas so mostly it's automated.
    - wahnfrieden 4y ago
      nice work
- jdmoreira 4y ago
  If you want to share more about your journey and what you know works ping me at joao_at_jdmoreira.me I'm a huge fan of learning from others experiences so I would love to pick your brain. Of course you are probably way too busy building your business and focusing on what matters (just like you wrote) and I totally respect your mindset. But still, worth the try!
  - buf 4y ago
    I don't write often, but when I do I share it here: https://www.siliconvict.com https://www.siliconvict.com
- gnicholas 4y ago
  Or Indie Hackers companies are earlier stage than you. In a different comment you mention working on your startup for nearly a decade, so folks who are earlier-stage would be less likely to have as much revenue as you. But honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me that $700k ARR is the top 1% of Indie Hackers. I would have been surprised if it was much lower than that. Congrats on your success!
prometheus76 4y ago
"Business owners rediscover the Pareto distribution! Film at 11!" I genuinely don't understand why this comes as a shock to people. 80% of the results (or revenue or productivity or whatever you're measuring where human output is the foundation of what you are measuring) will come from the top 20% of the producers. This is a normal, predictable phenomenon that continually blows the minds of people who think it's somehow a product of "systemic bias", or who think it should all be a relatively flat, uniform distribution. Here's the "paradox" that takes this phenomenon even further: the more choices people have, the less uniform the distribution is, and the more it favors the top producers.
- bambax 4y ago
  > where human output is the foundation of what you are measuring While Pareto was indeed a sociologist, the Pareto distribution can be observed in many, many natural phenomena. It's literally everywhere.
- thorw73m 4y ago
  > Here's the "paradox" that takes this phenomenon even further: the more choices people have, the less uniform the distribution is, and the more it favors the top producers. How do you explain the pre and post netflix years. More movies produced more people get rich post netflix. Fewer movies produced less people got more rich before netflix.
  - prometheus76 4y ago
    To me it sounds like "more people get rich" is a line in the sand. There are more movies to choose from, but the top movies gross more now than they ever have and the "middle-performing" movies, relative to the others, make less than they did 40 years ago. If you draw a line and say "more movies make over 100 million in revenue now than before", that is a natural byproduct of there being more movies to pick from now, and more people watching movies now. Pareto distribution also explains wealth distribution and "income disparity". There are simply more people now, so the separation between the median and top 1% is going to be greater now than it ever has been. There's nothing political about this. It's a natural manifestation of a Pareto distribution, and as another commenter pointed out: this distribution shows up all over the place in nature.
desireco42 4y ago
Especially for other countries that are not USA and EU, people can live well off of projects that make much less. Which is opportunity to get really good services while somebody is having a decent lifestyle of independence and creativity.
czbond 4y ago
For those who might have significant style revenue of the indie hacker style, here's a question. Do you feel that in 2022+ the SaaS/software/e-comm niche generally has too little of a moat, now too much competition, and small startup costs? I've been in the "life-style" for a while now - but getting that feeling to move out to other areas.
- altdataseller 4y ago
  Having started 2 SaaS products in the past 9 years (1 exit and 1 profitable but nothing big), i would say definitely Yes. There are much less greenfield niches available. All the low hanging fruit ideas are gone and the ideas left are much harder to execute on, and may not even yield the same ROI. In short, you need to work harder for lesser gain.
  - czbond 4y ago
    I absolutely agree with you - thanks for the chime in.
    - altdataseller 4y ago
      What other areas are you exploring to move into?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
warrentr 4y ago
I see MMR in here a couple times. Do you mean MRR? Edit: Awesome write up!
- pawelkobojek 4y ago
  Yes, we meant MRR, thanks for pointing up the typo
squirtle24 4y ago
I wonder how many of those people are actually following Russ Hanneman's advice. To be fair there is some sense to it. "If you show revenue, people will ask 'how much' and it will never be enough. I don't want to make a little bit of money, every day... I wanna make a f-k ton of money, all at once. ROI!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
runako 4y ago
Marrying this analysis with the FE International valuation spectrum for SaaS businesses under a $2m valuation[1] gives some interesting results: - ~6% of these founders have built businesses that could likely be sold for > $500k today - ~4% have built businesses they could likely sell for > $1m - ~3% have built businesses they could likely sell for > $2m And for those that want to go bigger, having enough revenue that one could exit for 7 figures makes pitches to investors much stronger. (Some of these companies are doing better financially than VC-backed firms that have raised tons of money. Fast.co, which raised over $100m and produced only $600k in revenue, comes to mind here.) (I give credence to the FEI valuation spectrum because they were the broker when I sold my last SaaS, and their valuation advice led to a successful sale. I highly recommend them, and will likely use them again in the future.) Lower-value exits are somewhat harder to value, but I do find it striking that of the analyzed firms, perhaps 10% have built businesses they could sell for $250k or more. (And likely more of the analyzed first simply haven't gotten to that point yet, since this analysis doesn't analyze time-based cohorts. 5-year-old firms are in the same bucket as companies that joined this week.) 1 - https://feinternational.com/blog/saas-metrics-value-saas-business/#valuationspec https://feinternational.com/blog/saas-metrics-value-saas-bus...
dinvlad 4y ago
I think revenue comparisons with non-indie companies miss the point, because a lot of Indiehackers live a different lifestyle altogether, where their "Ramen profitability" of $1-2k MRR can already allow them to live very comfortably in a remote area compared to many salaried employees here. And they have more freedom etc. in terms of what and when to work on, which is hard to measure in money, but that resource (time) is arguably our most precious thing in life.
js4ever 4y ago
I have a bootstrapped business started in 2016 doing something like 12k/month in MRR but also doing 35-50k/month in consulting around it. The consulting side is not at all MRR but it's pretty stable. So even if MRR is not great sometimes it's still interesting because of consulting or even reputation. If it was only about MRR it would not make sense compared to a full time job in IT. But all in all it's better because I was able to start other businesses, hire, and be my own boss.
- doppp 4y ago
  Can you elaborate a little more on your business?
  - js4ever 4y ago
    Sure, it's a serverless CMS (Visual builder) & Backend (API + SQL DB) based on AWS Lambda & Aurora. It's used by startups & enterprises to build scalable web apps & mobile apps backend. The consulting part is all about helping customers to implement what they need. You can check it here: https://appdrag.com https://appdrag.com
    - doppp 4y ago
      Very cool. Thank you!
4pkjai 4y ago
I'm in this data set. I've shared the Stripe revenue for my web app with Indie Hackers. It brings in about $3000 USD a month. It's not a big amount of money, but I keep going because I believe the app has potential to do much larger numbers. Also because I generally dislike working for other people.
wenbin 4y ago
Please also note that some products from "Indie Hackers" are actually from a small team (e.g., 5+ people) that raised a"tiny" family & friends round (e.g., $500k) :) In the purest form of "indie hacker" (i.e., a single person team + use your own saving + maybe part-time outside day job), % of $100k+/yr revenue is way lower than 5%.
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
The ones who are making real money don't come out publicly unfortunately. I personally know 2 solo devs making over 500k per month with apps. But they are in a b2b niche and have nothing to gain with sharing their story.
devmunchies 4y ago
This also biases towards indie hacker projects that weren't too successful, since when revenue gets too high, there is less incentive to share it (too many inbound marketers, etc). As an anecdote, my I took down my stripe verified revenue after my project passed $200k/month. Someone took a screenshot and shared it on twitter https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EXbNBVUX0AAotOo?format=jpg&name=4096x4096 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EXbNBVUX0AAotOo?format=jpg&name=...

173 points by mateuszbuda 4y ago

I don't really think that's an "only" statistic - 1 in 20 products there is a strong lifestyle business or more? That's amazing. They're comparing it to a full-time programming job but I think almost all of these are side projects until they hit a sustainable number for MRR.

pineconewarrior 4y ago
Agreed, 5% seems like a huge, encouraging number!
- weird-eye-issue 4y ago
  There is a big difference between revenue and profit. So nothing encouraging about this at all
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    i don’t come across many low margin indie hacker projects
    - weird-eye-issue 4y ago
      How many of those are making over $100k? And how many are 100% honest about their costs?
      - wahnfrieden 4y ago
        no clue mate. professional experience these days does certainly teach people to give vendors a lot of rent to get the job done
    - elsewhen 4y ago
      Are you considering marketing (eg GAds) spend?
acover 4y ago
> there were total of 937 products with Stripe verified revenue The stripe requirement filters a lot of zero revenue side projects.
- rco8786 4y ago
  And lets through a lot of low revenue side projects
- runako 4y ago
  It also filters out projects by older people, who are socially less likely (IMHO) to share how much money they make with strangers. Also -- with SaaSes I've started, the bigger customers all paid via non-Stripe means (ACH, check, etc.) and would not show up in these stats. Would have made those businesses appear smaller than they were.
personjerry 4y ago
1 in 20, that know about the Indie Hackers website, posted on there, and use Stripe, so that's a hugely biased number already
- jrumbut 4y ago
  Sure, but that's not the highest bar to clear.

stuckinhell 4y ago

This is a sobering wakeup call especially in combination with all the other AI stuff on hackernews these days.

sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago

ChicagoBoy11 4y ago

That's actually substantially higher than I would have imagined. Bootstrapping a business by yourself (and especially doing it like most of those people where it is not something you aren't usually committing full time to) to that mark is incredibly impressive.

hackitup7 4y ago
Had exactly the same reaction, every one of these projects is probably life changing for the founder(s). It's hard work but those stats are still way better and much more satisfying than a lottery ticket.
some_random 4y ago
I had the exact same reaction, I expected the "made any money at all" category to be closer to 5% than this. Edit: They filtered out any businesses without stripe verified revenue, which makes these numbers a lot more believable.
game_the0ry 4y ago
Same reaction here - 5% sounds pretty good, especially considering indie hackers usually boot strap on their own free time while working. I'd be happy working on a 8-hour-a-week project if it was making 2-4K/Month.
buf 4y ago
I wrote about this extensively here: https://siliconvict.com/articles/5-lessons-starting-a-500m-a-5m-company-in-5-years https://siliconvict.com/articles/5-lessons-starting-a-500m-a... It took me nearly a decade to get to where I am today ($700k / year), and half of that time I had a full-time job. The most important thing to keep in mind is not to stop.
- texasbigdata 4y ago
  Not stopping for 5 years straight on top of your day job, while you’re are the sole on call pager duty engineer (through holidays and work crunches, etc), is kindly very very difficult and kudos to you but probably borderline unachievable for mere mortals.

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago

i wonder if those 5% have anything in common

capableweb 4y ago

Without any indication of where these indie hackers live, the income statement is almost useless. If you earn $100k/year while living in Bratislava, Slovakia, that would put you in the upper bracket when it comes to income, while if you live in San Fransisco, US, you're not exactly making a killing.

nobody0 4y ago
It's not a killing definitely a living though..
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  it’s likely mostly passive income if R&D slows to a minimum. that affords a lot of flexibility with one’s time vs comparing with wage labor where free time is never earned
- cuu508 4y ago
  IIUC $100K is the revenue number, you also have to take into account operating costs, overheads, taxes.
judge2020 4y ago
Apparently it's "Stripe verified revenue" which is based on this[0]. I imagine it's all USD but you're right that it doesn't indicate the living situation of the humans running the operation. 0: https://www.indiehackers.com/products?revenueVerification=stripe&sorting=highest-revenue https://www.indiehackers.com/products?revenueVerification=st...
dinvlad 4y ago
Exactly, a lot of them live in remote areas like Bali with low costs of living, and have better housing etc. compared to a lot of salaried employees here.

dbg31415 4y ago

Right, well it's not really by design that they make so little... but the way most of them they run their businesses, is it any wonder? A lot of people do these as side projects. A way to sort of build a model train in their basement, free from all the complexities and compromises of "real" software development... They are trying to avoid product managers, sales people, designers, testers... countless others... getting a say in what they build. And, as a result, there's no business plan past a dream of, "If you build it, they will come." Hard to see any "indie hacker" project that wouldn't be improved with more testing, more marketing, more UX design... more customer research... but most of the time, it's just some guy with a boring day job trying to make $5 selling a widget nobody asked him to build in the first place. Anyway not to be negative... but like, if you're a small indie hacker who is trying to make a buck, remember that all of the software we use today has a village of people involved in the creation and support of it. If you're trying to do it all on your own... man, that's an up-hill battle. Bring in others as soon as you can. Then make sure you have a business plan that has the capacity to reward everyone, and be patient. A lot of people in tech... we're early-adopters. This means we do things well before a lot of people even know they exist, and by the time an audience has grown we've already moved on thinking our ideas were a flop. Sometimes they just take a little longer to pan out. (=

altdataseller 4y ago
>> Bring in others as soon as you can. But then you're no longer profitable. Barely any of these projects can sustain 1 person, let alone 2 people.
- dbg31415 4y ago
  Takes money to make money... Have a valid idea. Build a business around it. Get an angel investor. But then they aren't indie hackers! Touche. But they are profitable. (=
  - hobo_mark 4y ago
    Or rather, "but then you have a full-time job again". I assume most of these people just want a more or less passive lifestyle business.

notlukesky 4y ago

Just as a gut feeling I would normally say that much less than 1% of indie projects ever make more than 100K/year in revenue. Their pool is of indie hackers with the caveat of: "At the time of our analysis, there were total of 937 products with Stripe verified revenue. The information we gathered to make this analysis are revenue and product's categories." I assume there are 10s of thousands of listings that don't have Stripe verified revenue on Indie Hackers (owned by Stripe). Just look at Product Hunt and track to see how many of the Product Hunt of the day fail in less than 2 years. And how much of that revenue gets eaten up by the other services is another story ranging from Google ads to AWS to other SaaS offerings like the scraping fish (the authors of the post). (Please buy more shovels from us for the gold rush.) I still hope people follow their passion and dreams. Just good to keep in mind that the odds are stacked against you and to try to succeed accordingly.

gamerDude 4y ago
I was going to say this as well. I have two companies listed on IndieHackers. One of which is stripe verified and does about $2k/mon. The other which is not stripe verified because our price point is much higher and we do checks not credit cards, makes $90k/mon. Just an important point there is a business model that is excluded here. General SaaS offerings though, I would imagine would be Stripe Verified if they wanted to publicly share though.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  Ditto. My smaller purchases go through Stripe, but all of our large-revenue transactions are ACH or check.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dbancajas 4y ago
  Dang 90K/month salary must be insane.
serjester 4y ago
As a counterpoint, I avoid adding a revenue figure to some of my businesses. Why? There’s certain niches that you can make a killing on for short periods - the last thing I want to do is attract attention. As an example, during the last refinancing boom I stumbled into an opportunity and a couple weeks later I had an MVP. Very quickly we had customers willing to pay 5 figure sums for our product. There’s no incentive for me to go around bragging and attracting copy cats. How do I know this? Because I have no shame in launching a competitor if I see someone’s making money and I think I can outcompete them. As a second point, most indie hackers are cycling through ideas until they either give up or stumble into something. If your business fails, you quickly move on. Across 5 years you could have tried 10 things and only the last one made money. But it doesn’t matter since business revenue follows a power law. So (theoretically) you retire on the last idea while your batting average remains below 10%. Not necessarily a bad outcome? Regardless I do agree the overwhelming majority of indie hackers are wantreprenuers that will never make a dime. Just don’t discount the professionals.

c16 4y ago

ScrapingFish ... ScrapingBee?

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altdataseller 4y ago
ScrapingBee sounds much more trustworthy. You can't trust fish.
- mateuszbuda 4y ago
  This is fishy.
  - jonatron 4y ago
    "Buy Request Pakcs" hmmm
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

codegeek 4y ago

Depends on where you live and your cost of living. For someone living in small town in India, even 20k per year is good. I think if you are able to create good enough income for you as an indie hacker, that is success. So the better metric would be to find out what percentage of indie hackers are full time with their gigs and have enough to live ok.

giantg2 4y ago

That's about an order of magnitude higher than I thought it'd be.

tothrowaway 4y ago

Why is revenue the prevailing number used for measuring a business? I see revenue cited almost universally these days, with no mention of profit. A hardware company that makes $100k in revenue (with no profit) is very different than a SaaS product that makes $100K with 90% profit. Why don't we just use profit?

NiagaraThistle 4y ago
IT's funny you mention this. There has been talk on twitter among a lot of Indie Hackers the past couple weeks (months?) saying the same thing. Especially now with a potential recession looming. I've always thought the same. But I think the reason revenue is used most often stems from VC backed businesses (and those seeking funding) trying to show that they are viable and have customers so they can raise more funds even before they have profit - think Twitter and Facebook as big examples.
jrumbut 4y ago
Profit is a tricky concept in any business, particularly a small software business. A lot of very successful businesses have zero or near zero profit (considering that paying the CEO reduces the profit, reinvesting reduces the profit, etc).
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rco8786 4y ago
Because profit is a lie. I can have a business with $1mm in revenue, pay myself a $1mm salary and poof, $0 profit for my business. Revenue has its own issues obviously but as a quick and easy measure of how much money this business can generate its reasonably useful.
danenania 4y ago
If you make 100k but reinvest half in marketing, your profit is 50k, but it would be misleading to equate your business to another one that makes 50k and doesn't reinvest any of it. What you're looking for is gross margin, but even that is hard to pin down exactly since there can be a fuzzy line between whether an expense is required or discretionary.

NiagaraThistle 4y ago

From following Pieter Levels for years, this article coincides with exactly what Pieter says about his own products: Only 5% of his 70 projects have ever made any real money. Therefore it's a better idea to build a lot of small things fast (to test traction and profitability) instead of focusing on one huge project and hope it takes off. Obviously this is general advice and there are outliers that will break the mold, but from a lot of this data and indiehacker anecdotes, the more shots you fire the better chances you have of one of them being big. THe key is to spot the losers quick and move on to something different, and then spot the ones that are gaining traction quick and then double down on your efforts for that/those one(s). Key takeaway: Take lots of chances.

karterk 4y ago
Diversify initially to protect the downside but double down on your winner(s) to scale the upside!
Flankk 4y ago
> A person who chases two rabbits catches neither. -Confucius. A low success rate is not a sign you're doing things right. If you're solving a real problem people will not have an issue paying you. There is a real opportunity cost to starting a business and I would not advise anyone to use this strategy. For starters, I don't see how anyone could possibly have 70 projects. I can only assume they are a con artist.
- jimhi 4y ago
  It’s software. Most of the time consuming work can be copied after the first time. User accounts, payments, etc. There is also a fair amount of stories out there in hit based industries (startups, games) where people have documented their 50+ projects. Its hard yes. It can also make a lot of money. Few people are willing to do it or it would be more common.
  - deadcoder0904 4y ago
    the company (rovio) that built angry birds only succeeded after 51+ failed games. source: https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/how-a-bunch-of-angry-birds-turned-around-a-failing-startup-b39f2fe1adca https://entrepreneurshandbook.co/how-a-bunch-of-angry-birds-...

alksdeef 4y ago

I wonder what examples of those in the 'wearables' category might be that are putting them ahead of the curve?

Abishek_Muthian 4y ago
I was curious too, Here are the products under wearable categories[1] on indie hackers. Very few of them which make revenue has something to do with apps/data on wearable, Most them listed in that category have nothing to do with wearables. [1] https://www.indiehackers.com/products?category=wearables https://www.indiehackers.com/products?category=wearables

thenerdhead 4y ago

I've always wondered if a % of products on Indie Hackers make that amount of money purely from the social media & blog presence of their products. It seems that many of these successful products turn into the "self-help" of bootstrapping and make a living off of that shortly after.

Existenceblinks 4y ago
Also, it really sucks that "marketing tools" sold like crazy as well. Shovel for losers is a huge market. If the internet is atmosphere, marketing tools are something that emit CO2/CO.

sixQuarks 4y ago

Take all of this with a grain of salt. I’ve been making over $100k/year with a handful of my indie projects and would never publicize it for fear of copycats and/or targeting by patent trolls

buf 4y ago

According to this data, I'm doing better than 99% of Indie Hackers (I make $700k a year). To me, this tells me that Indie Hacker members are busy networking pretending to build companies, and not actually doing it. I say this because I don't think I'm that remarkable. I'm just going along trying to build a small business without much glamour about it. But I can see the appeal. There is almost cult-like mindsets all hyping each other up.

wahnfrieden 4y ago
are you doing the labor or hiring it?
- buf 4y ago
  I'm doing the labor but it's saas so mostly it's automated.
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    nice work
jdmoreira 4y ago
If you want to share more about your journey and what you know works ping me at joao_at_jdmoreira.me I'm a huge fan of learning from others experiences so I would love to pick your brain. Of course you are probably way too busy building your business and focusing on what matters (just like you wrote) and I totally respect your mindset. But still, worth the try!
- buf 4y ago
  I don't write often, but when I do I share it here: https://www.siliconvict.com https://www.siliconvict.com
gnicholas 4y ago
Or Indie Hackers companies are earlier stage than you. In a different comment you mention working on your startup for nearly a decade, so folks who are earlier-stage would be less likely to have as much revenue as you. But honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me that $700k ARR is the top 1% of Indie Hackers. I would have been surprised if it was much lower than that. Congrats on your success!

prometheus76 4y ago

"Business owners rediscover the Pareto distribution! Film at 11!" I genuinely don't understand why this comes as a shock to people. 80% of the results (or revenue or productivity or whatever you're measuring where human output is the foundation of what you are measuring) will come from the top 20% of the producers. This is a normal, predictable phenomenon that continually blows the minds of people who think it's somehow a product of "systemic bias", or who think it should all be a relatively flat, uniform distribution. Here's the "paradox" that takes this phenomenon even further: the more choices people have, the less uniform the distribution is, and the more it favors the top producers.

bambax 4y ago
> where human output is the foundation of what you are measuring While Pareto was indeed a sociologist, the Pareto distribution can be observed in many, many natural phenomena. It's literally everywhere.
thorw73m 4y ago
> Here's the "paradox" that takes this phenomenon even further: the more choices people have, the less uniform the distribution is, and the more it favors the top producers. How do you explain the pre and post netflix years. More movies produced more people get rich post netflix. Fewer movies produced less people got more rich before netflix.
- prometheus76 4y ago
  To me it sounds like "more people get rich" is a line in the sand. There are more movies to choose from, but the top movies gross more now than they ever have and the "middle-performing" movies, relative to the others, make less than they did 40 years ago. If you draw a line and say "more movies make over 100 million in revenue now than before", that is a natural byproduct of there being more movies to pick from now, and more people watching movies now. Pareto distribution also explains wealth distribution and "income disparity". There are simply more people now, so the separation between the median and top 1% is going to be greater now than it ever has been. There's nothing political about this. It's a natural manifestation of a Pareto distribution, and as another commenter pointed out: this distribution shows up all over the place in nature.

desireco42 4y ago

Especially for other countries that are not USA and EU, people can live well off of projects that make much less. Which is opportunity to get really good services while somebody is having a decent lifestyle of independence and creativity.

czbond 4y ago

For those who might have significant style revenue of the indie hacker style, here's a question. Do you feel that in 2022+ the SaaS/software/e-comm niche generally has too little of a moat, now too much competition, and small startup costs? I've been in the "life-style" for a while now - but getting that feeling to move out to other areas.

altdataseller 4y ago
Having started 2 SaaS products in the past 9 years (1 exit and 1 profitable but nothing big), i would say definitely Yes. There are much less greenfield niches available. All the low hanging fruit ideas are gone and the ideas left are much harder to execute on, and may not even yield the same ROI. In short, you need to work harder for lesser gain.
- czbond 4y ago
  I absolutely agree with you - thanks for the chime in.
  - altdataseller 4y ago
    What other areas are you exploring to move into?

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warrentr 4y ago

I see MMR in here a couple times. Do you mean MRR? Edit: Awesome write up!

pawelkobojek 4y ago
Yes, we meant MRR, thanks for pointing up the typo

squirtle24 4y ago

I wonder how many of those people are actually following Russ Hanneman's advice. To be fair there is some sense to it. "If you show revenue, people will ask 'how much' and it will never be enough. I don't want to make a little bit of money, every day... I wanna make a f-k ton of money, all at once. ROI!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo

runako 4y ago

Marrying this analysis with the FE International valuation spectrum for SaaS businesses under a $2m valuation[1] gives some interesting results: - ~6% of these founders have built businesses that could likely be sold for > $500k today - ~4% have built businesses they could likely sell for > $1m - ~3% have built businesses they could likely sell for > $2m And for those that want to go bigger, having enough revenue that one could exit for 7 figures makes pitches to investors much stronger. (Some of these companies are doing better financially than VC-backed firms that have raised tons of money. Fast.co, which raised over $100m and produced only $600k in revenue, comes to mind here.) (I give credence to the FEI valuation spectrum because they were the broker when I sold my last SaaS, and their valuation advice led to a successful sale. I highly recommend them, and will likely use them again in the future.) Lower-value exits are somewhat harder to value, but I do find it striking that of the analyzed firms, perhaps 10% have built businesses they could sell for $250k or more. (And likely more of the analyzed first simply haven't gotten to that point yet, since this analysis doesn't analyze time-based cohorts. 5-year-old firms are in the same bucket as companies that joined this week.) 1 - https://feinternational.com/blog/saas-metrics-value-saas-business/#valuationspec https://feinternational.com/blog/saas-metrics-value-saas-bus...

dinvlad 4y ago

I think revenue comparisons with non-indie companies miss the point, because a lot of Indiehackers live a different lifestyle altogether, where their "Ramen profitability" of $1-2k MRR can already allow them to live very comfortably in a remote area compared to many salaried employees here. And they have more freedom etc. in terms of what and when to work on, which is hard to measure in money, but that resource (time) is arguably our most precious thing in life.

js4ever 4y ago

I have a bootstrapped business started in 2016 doing something like 12k/month in MRR but also doing 35-50k/month in consulting around it. The consulting side is not at all MRR but it's pretty stable. So even if MRR is not great sometimes it's still interesting because of consulting or even reputation. If it was only about MRR it would not make sense compared to a full time job in IT. But all in all it's better because I was able to start other businesses, hire, and be my own boss.

doppp 4y ago
Can you elaborate a little more on your business?
- js4ever 4y ago
  Sure, it's a serverless CMS (Visual builder) & Backend (API + SQL DB) based on AWS Lambda & Aurora. It's used by startups & enterprises to build scalable web apps & mobile apps backend. The consulting part is all about helping customers to implement what they need. You can check it here: https://appdrag.com https://appdrag.com
  - doppp 4y ago
    Very cool. Thank you!

4pkjai 4y ago

I'm in this data set. I've shared the Stripe revenue for my web app with Indie Hackers. It brings in about $3000 USD a month. It's not a big amount of money, but I keep going because I believe the app has potential to do much larger numbers. Also because I generally dislike working for other people.

wenbin 4y ago

Please also note that some products from "Indie Hackers" are actually from a small team (e.g., 5+ people) that raised a"tiny" family & friends round (e.g., $500k) :) In the purest form of "indie hacker" (i.e., a single person team + use your own saving + maybe part-time outside day job), % of $100k+/yr revenue is way lower than 5%.

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

The ones who are making real money don't come out publicly unfortunately. I personally know 2 solo devs making over 500k per month with apps. But they are in a b2b niche and have nothing to gain with sharing their story.

devmunchies 4y ago

This also biases towards indie hacker projects that weren't too successful, since when revenue gets too high, there is less incentive to share it (too many inbound marketers, etc). As an anecdote, my I took down my stripe verified revenue after my project passed $200k/month. Someone took a screenshot and shared it on twitter https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EXbNBVUX0AAotOo?format=jpg&name=4096x4096 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EXbNBVUX0AAotOo?format=jpg&name=...