5 ms·

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 wit

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.
- nomdep 4y ago
  But how do you know someone is making money?

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.

nomdep 4y ago
But how do you know someone is making money?