tl;dr
1. stop selling your time as an employee
2. start buying time: quit the job, consume less entertainment, etc.
3. reinvest your purchased time into making things that make money
4. reinvest this money to buy more time
5. rinse & repeat until you own ALL your time
The most effective leaders I know are all relearners.
You have learners, unlearners, and relearners.
Most folks stop at learning.
A fraction go on to unlearn what they learned, but stop there.
This isn't an actual improvement until they start relearning.
I'll explain 👇
Learning to code is way harder than we all make it out to be.
I say this as a self-taught developer with plenty of experience teaching others.
Do you need a CS degree? Definitely not.
But do you need a community/mentor who can help you overcome unique hurdles? Most people do.
Don't become an entrepreneur because you want freedom.
There is no freedom as long as there are problems to solve.
Become an entrepreneur because you want to choose and control your *unfreedoms* rather than having them imposed on you by society.
Working for yourself 👇
Day 1:
Boom! Quit my job. No more boss. No more long commutes.
Earthlings, brace yourselves for what I'm about to build.
But first, a few episodes of that Netflix show everyone's been talking about.
Tomorrow… WE BUILD.
Day 30:
T…tomorrow we build?
Human psychology is wild.
I've seen it once a week for 6 years… never gets old.
An indie hacker's success story (👋
@tdinh_me
) hits page 1 and people feel so personally attacked that they create false realities as a coping strategy.
Positive-sum thinking is a superpower.
🚀 ALPHA is the new MVP 🚀
You can now launch on IH! It's free this week while we fix bugs. Soon it'll be a small fee, ~$20.
How: go to your product page, click "submit to top products" in the right sidebar.
3 launches scheduled for tomorrow so far!
As you become more competent and secure as a person, your ego shrinks and you crave less social approval.
So think twice before envying anyone who regularly brags about their accomplishments.
There's probably something they're not showing you.
🤯 HUGE milestone…
The IH newsletter just crossed 100,000 subscribers!
For years we plateaued at ~30,000. But 2 years ago we broke through & never looked back. Despite:
• $0 on ads
• no marketing
• only 2 part-time contractors (editor + graphic designer)
Here's how 🧵
Yikes. Matt Mullenweg just had WordPress conduct a hostile takeover of
@wp_acf
(popular WP Engine plugin).
WordPress powers 43% of ALL WEBSITES on the internet. And all are at the mercy of one guy with a vendetta.
The dark side of founder mode:
I'm looking to hire a couple of super talented tech/biz journalists.
They'll write for an
@IndieHackers
audience of 100,000+.
And the team they'll join includes writers published in Rolling Stone and the New York Times.
Know anyone?
(DMs open)
When you work on a difficult thing:
You'll generally overestimate its technical difficulty and underestimate its *emotional* difficulty.
To do a thing right, even once, you have to become good at it. But to become good at it, you have to do it wrong, repeatedly.
This is key 👇
Byproduct of this recession: *many* new indie hackers.
Why?
❶ *Millions* are newly unemployed. A small % (at least) will start companies.
❷ VCs are crunched right now! New founders will find bootstrapping more attractive than bad valuations.
❸ 👇
Heartbreaking story on IH today:
This guy Jay Tan got laid off from his bartender job back in 2020. Had a bunch of free time suddenly so he built a SaaS.
Because why not, right?
Then this thing (
@GetZlappo
) took off.
But… it was built on the Twitter API.
So he went from $0
@nico_jeannen
I really wanna fix PH,
Been watching their downfall for more than a year and I think it’s bad for entire startup world if they fall.
So we need to save them and make them great again.
I have a plan.
Wow. Twitter has been sitting on a goldmine for a decade, but they haven't been able to extract much of the gold.
That's about to change in a big way.
Quick thread… 1/
It's discouraging how much time it takes to make great things.
But it's encouraging how much time you can make for yourself by consuming fewer things made by others.
To compensate for our no-meetings culture at
@indiehackers
we have what we call the "water cooler" — a meeting room (via Horizon Workrooms) that's open 24/7 where team members can join or leave whenever they like and chat freely about work or play.
I still get DMs about this photo. Was 36 here. Best shape of my life.
People have been asking about my workout routine, my diet & sleep habits, etc.
Now I'm 37, and I'm fitter than in the pic.
Here's how I keep in shape (workout, diet, sleep) while running a startup:
1/2…
Does anyone else say "please" when typing commands to chatbots?
e.g. "Please make an image of XYZ."
Feels silly — I know it's 1s and 0s. But I actively struggle not to be polite.
Unconsciously I think I'm worried AGI will go around collecting receipts when it shows up?
Layoffs and new tools have made no-coders one of the fastest-growing groups of
@IndieHackers
.
They're uniquely entrepreneurial, but they also face unique revenue hurdles.
I wrote about these hurdles and how no-code founders are overcoming them here 👇
Relearning is real learning.
Hence Picasso's "Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist."
Relearners are the true innovators of all ages and all disciplines.
They're the doers and makers moving society forward.
Whenever I type "indie hacker" into Twitter search I have a hard time believing the results.
It's a major cultural identity with a life of its own.
A respectable force in the startup ecosystem.
We literally used to be a tiny blog like 7 years ago
A friend told me his hack for dealing with stressful events:
"The line from that Batman movie — 'I'm not trapped in here with you; you're trapped in here with me' — I literally say that out loud a few times."
I made fun of him (of course).
But I just tried it and… it worked?
New pod with Seth Godin is out!
Topics discussed:
1️⃣ How he finds new business ideas
2️⃣ Writing 9,000+ blog posts since 2002 (on top of 20 bestselling books)
3️⃣ Exiting to Yahoo for $30M
4️⃣ His secrets to productivity
And much more 👇
You know someone who's great at something you want to be great at.
Fixed mindset is when you envy their talent and stand still.
Growth mindset is when you envy their head start and get going.
Many are starting online education businesses these days: courses, newsletters, videos, etc.
If you are one of them and you want to make money, please internalize the following two points:
❶ people don't pay to learn
❷ people pay to *earn*
I love NFTs.
Not because of NFTs per se but because of the great awakening they're causing:
"So you're telling me these things are only valuable because everyone else believes they're valuable?"
"Oh, wait until I tell you about the tree bark and cheap metal called money!"
For best results when building projects:
Stop starting and start finishing.
For best results when consuming information:
Stop finishing and start beginning.
tl;dr
1. stop selling your time as an employee
2. start buying time: quit the job, consume less entertainment, etc.
3. reinvest your purchased time into making things that make money
4. reinvest this money to buy more time
5. rinse & repeat until you own ALL your time
Everyone talks about how hard entrepreneurship is. But no one talks about how long it takes to *become* a good entrepreneur.
Weird, right?
It takes years to get good at sales, or writing, or coding. Yet we're mum on getting good at all-of-the-above?
I blame VCs.
Hear me out:
HERE WE GO
Latest pod with
@csallen
is out! Just us, no guests. We talk about why Act 3 for
@IndieHackers
will smash Acts 1 and 2.
Plus:
- What it was like working at Stripe
- How we spun out & became indie… again
- 3+ ideas on our new product roadmap
@cmilesb
If you like this, I recommend Ken Wilber's books. No one's better at synthesizing complexity theory into a unifying vision.
Start with "A Brief History of Everything" or "A Theory of Everything."
If those hook you, upgrade to "Sex, Ecology, Spirituality"
In 2021 I read 60 books.
Ranked them from best to worst and found a surprising pattern: I discovered the best 5 books the same way:
🚫 bestseller lists
🚫 personal recommendations
✅ other books
When a good book referenced ANY OTHER BOOK, I bought that book on the spot.
Before the 2010s:
- "Are you seeing a therapist?"
- "Yes."
- "Wow, what's wrong with you?"
2010s/2020s:
- "Are you seeing a therapist?"
- "No."
- "Wow, what's wrong with you?"
Silicon Valley is backing a novel idea: Instead of charging students tuition, students go to school for free and are required to pay back a percentage of their income after graduation, but only if they get a job with a good salary
Online communities: historically difficult to monetize. Most target penny-pinching consumers.
But consumers are becoming more entrepreneurial! More are thinking & spending like businesses.
Add the loneliness of lockdown? New golden age for communities 👇
Hung out with a roommate I hadn't seen since college. He couldn't believe how much I'd changed.
I used to be a lazy goofball. Hated math. Procrastinated on everything.
Now I'm on the opposite extreme of all these qualities.
He asked me what had happened to bring about all
My 2 favorite concepts come from the Ancient Greeks.
No English terms quite capture their meaning:
1. "Akrasia": to know the best course of action yet not pursue it.
2. "Enkrateia": the opposite — to do the hard thing when it's the right thing.
Here's enkrateia via Dall-E
I have a work routine. It generally serves me well.
Except that time last month when my girlfriend's Swiss parents lectured me for being a stereotypical American workaholic.
Can't win 'em all.
Anyway, here's the routine. You be the judge:
🚀 The coolest feature on IH is getting a big update.
I just counted, and 19,300(!) indie hackers have pages in our Products database for sharing revenue & company updates.
Soon you'll be able to "launch" these pages to the community.
Expect that 19.3k number to go way up…
I made a book trailer for my novel using AI!
Still working on the final draft + there's a long process ahead with agent/publishers, so this was mostly just to play with new tech.
Video: RunwayML
Narration: ElevenLabs
Took ~6 hours, start to finish. Wow.
Companies of one (to borrow
@pjrvs
's term) are having their shining moment in this recession.
Not necessarily because of how well they're doing.
But because of how durable & adaptable they are even when things *aren't* going well.
This is by design! 👇
@david_perell
The best path to human flourishing is not through the pursuit of happiness, but through the happiness of pursuit.
(Personality psychologist
@DrBrianRLittle
expounds on this in his book "Me, Myself, and Us".)
How much money someone has tells you nothing meaningful about them.
How much status someone has tells you nothing meaningful about them.
Here's what actually matters:
The curve of the line graph connecting their past self, their current self, and their future self.
Relearning is seeing what a thing is made of and then building it back better than before.
Or trying, anyway. Because relearning is much harder than unlearning:
"Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one." —Sam Rayburn
I often feel mystified at all the disorder in the world.
Then I remember: Humans are hairless tribalistic apes who happen to be equipped with thousands of generations of accumulated cultural knowledge.
The real mystery: How we've created all this order in spite of ourselves.
Minimalism bores the hell out of me. So I go all the way in the opposite direction.
Maximalist workspace.
Maximalist home gym.
Maximalist daily routine.
⚡️
@ChanningAllen
co-founder of
@IndieHackers
"Overall, my workstation is a bricolage of spare parts I've accumulated over the years. Think Legos. I've experimented with different configurations and this is the best so far."
Question for no-coders (people building apps with tools like
@airtable
,
@zapier
,
@webflow
,
@bubble
, etc., instead of code):
👉 What is your main motivation for making no-code projects?
Just a few of the 🌍 indie hackers who met up this weekend in 🇰🇪 Nairobi, 🏴 Edinburgh, and 🇺🇸 Chicago!
This week:
🇪🇸 Barcelona
🇺🇸 NYC
🇺🇸 SF
And more:
When you cut corners on product quality in order to scale, you kill your golden goose.
Here are 3 basic guidelines we follow at Indie Hackers to keep the goose alive: 🧵
I'm so bad at vacations.
In a Costa Rican "cloud forest" after my most intense work year ever. It's beautiful here.
But.
I feel like a motorized toy car whose wheels keep spinning when you lift it off the ground.
I want this, except… a digital version.
Like Google Sheets with tiny lifeweek squares instead of cells.
Might whip one up in a couple hours over the weekend if it doesn't already exist
I call it "infinite entrepreneurship."
It's when you focus on ways to enjoy the process, not just the proceeds, of building a business. Which gives you the stamina to grow into the role.
I wrote a piece on what this looks like in practice: