Indie Hackers quantified: dissecting 498 interviews with online entrepreneurs
“Whether it’s $500/month on the side or $10,000/month to quit your job, it’s easier than ever to draw an income from your own projects.” — indiehackers.com/start
Earning money online has been a fascination ever since the creation of the public internet, drawing in people from all over the world in the hunt for business opportunities leveraging the web’s modern capabilities. With the growing public appetite for behind-the-scenes stories and insights into what makes online businesses successful, there has been a lot of curation efforts around interviews with online business founders.
One of the largest platforms/ communities around is indiehackers.com which was started by software developer Courtland Allen in 2016 and focuses on bootstrapped online businesses and the journey of their founders:
indie • hacker
1. person building an online project that can generate revenue
2. person seeking financial independence, creative freedom, and the ability to work on their own schedule
Ever since starting the community around a series of interviews with indie hackers such as the nomad guy Pieter Levels, Nathan Berry from ConvertKit and Emmanuel Straschnov from Bubble.io, the site grew to thousands of users and a total of 498 text interviews as well as countless podcasts episodes. As someone fascinated with the opportunities that come through the democratization of development capabilities, I recently dove into the corpus of 498 interviews from indiehackers.com to develop a better idea about the founders and their ventures, which we’ll analyze in this article!
Founder demographics
With Indie Hackers primarily being a English site that got inspired by stories on the Silicon Valley-affiliated tech forum Hacker News, it’s no surprise that the majority of interviewed founders have a U.S. background (111 out of the 270 founders who provided their location). Nevertheless, Indie Hackers come from a variety of places from all around the world, Europe being the second most common continent:
As you can see from the age distribution below, the average founder is in his early thirties (34,5 years to be exact).
With only 10% of founders being younger than 28 and only 10% of the founders above 42, Indie Hacking seems to be a venture requiring a certain level of experience as well as available time and energy. My pet theory is that especially in the American Indie Hacking scene, it is common to first get a job out of college for a few years to pay back students loan before taking the plunge into entrepreneurship.
I also tried to reverse-engineer gender stats from first names, but came to no reliable conclusion due to the large amount of not classifiable names.
Founder background & employees
Looking into the average team size, about 37% of founders have no employees at all and 82% of founders have less than 10 overall employees. This can be traced back by the indie concept mentioned above: valuing their independence, Indie Hackers often decide to operate entirely bootstrapped (with no outside funding/ venture capital), and with salaries usually being the primary cost factor in early-stage software ventures, many of the interviewed founders rely on contractors but not full-time employees.
Furthermore, a slight majority of founders founded their venture solo, while 45% of ventures where founded by a founding team. Three out of four founders claim that they code for their business, which is no surprise given the software-centric nature of Indie Hacking. Nevertheless, one quarter of the interviewed founders don’t code at all, oftentimes leveraging modern tools like platforms and no-code tools for their products and services.
Business fields and revenue numbers
The above query analyzes the tags for the businesses of interviewed founders (with multiple tags being an option): Aside from pure software offerings in the form of Software-as-a-Service models, content products like newsletters, Youtube channels, etc. as well as e-commerce solutions are a favorite among Indie Hackers.
Following the Open Startup philosophy, one key pillar of the Indie Hackers community is transparent milestone-sharing, often breaking down their user numbers and monthly revenues. Popular among online businesses is the concept of monthly recurring revenue, short MRR, which you can see broken down into quantiles in the following query:
The bottom 10% of interviewed founders earn 150$ or less with their products or services, which isn’t even close to being ramen profitable in most countries. This is a side effect of interviews being held while founders are within their entrepreneurial journey, not years later in hindsight, making things much more approachable for aspiring founders. The average venture nevertheless brings in 15000$ dollar a month, which is past the quit-your-job milestone for most western developers. On the top end, the top 10% of ventures have a revenue of 112 000$+ with some ventures growing to 50+ employees.
In part two of this analysis, we’ll take a closer look at Indie Hackers stories and the insights provided by the interviews itself. Follow me here or on Twitter to stay tuned!
A word of caution
The above analysis is based on self-reported facts and figures by the interviewed founders. Revenue numbers may not necessarily equal the revenue at the time of the interview since interviews where held in the span of 2016–2021. Out of the 498 interviews held, only 480 could be accessed using web scrapers for this analysis. Data has been manually cleaned by me, all interpretations are up for debate (let me know what you think in the comments!). If there are other things you’d like to know about the data-set or the Indie Hackers community, feel free to shoot.
Want to start your own side-project or online business?
Check out the site over at indiehackers.com. The interviews itself are all publicly accessible over at https://www.indiehackers.com/interviews
