191 Indie Hackers quotes

No no no, this is not for me. I'm never going to start a business. It's insane.

That was the goal: to not have to work for other people, and to create what I wanted to create.

Educate yourself about everything about business. Get that broad, universal perspective first. It doesn’t take very long.

You have to have a willingness to ask for help.

The first huge win was getting the first paying customer… I literally got $5 in my Paypal account, but I was jumping around the room.

My business is set to break over $1M in revenue this year, and I am the only employee.

The best decision I made was shipping my MVP even though it felt way too early.

Remember to talk about your company. People need to hear about what you’re doing.

Learn to handle failure. It's the hardest thing, but once you get over it, nothing can stop you.

Our ultimate goal is to get to ramen profitability, and be able to live off of our profits.

If you're waiting for the 'perfect time' to come along, it never will.

Don’t listen to people who say you can’t make it work as a single founder.

Don’t look to your competitors for inspiration. Get a sense of your market, but then push past it.

Do sales, not marketing. Even if you're giving your product away for free, start with one-on-one sales.

Once I hit $4,000 in monthly revenue, I quit my job to go full-time on CoderPad.

We are bootstrapping, living off of our savings, and building everything ourselves

I was profitable within the first year, making over a million in annual revenue.

If it's a good idea, you just have to suck it up, that it's going to get stolen.

It started out as just a fun side project to teach myself how to code.

Sell to other businesses if you can, customers that won't flinch at $200/month. Sell to people who have money!

My current goal is to get 1,000 customers signed up. It can be done.

A good hack for surrounding yourself by influential people, if you can't do that, is reading about them.

Given equal founder skill, e-commerce and mobile apps succeed much more frequently than SaaS startups do.

I've been noticing this theme of very small moments causing very large life changes in people…

Bubble has more than 100,000 users, a team of six people, and is still entirely bootstrapped.

The barriers for indie hackers nowadays are so low. Part of my motivation was simply not wanting to be a wantrepreneur forever!

You are where you are. What you do next is more important.

Don't worry about the technology you use — just ship the product as soon as possible.

We offered personal demos to every single person that signed up, during which time we attracted more than 800 users.

I'm a firm believer that almost any skill can be taught. You don't have to magically be born with it.

If you're a programmer, you're going to need to learn (or outsource) copywriting and marketing.

We bootstrapped from day one, and I'm so happy we did!

It began as a personal project, so I was the only validation I needed. I just coded it and used it personally. I'm still the only full-time employee.

This business basically started as a one-man show, and even today it's still just the two of us.

After a couple years working corporate, I really wanted to quit my job.

Get started with sales as soon as possible. We hackers never pay enough attention to how important sales are.

I had zero experience running a website, writing professionally, coaching, or building an online audience.

I was a bit of a fanatical saver at the time. I think I still had some birthday money from my 8th birthday party in my savings account. Which is great if you want to start a business straight out of college.

We had no one to answer to but ourselves, and that gave us the liberty to take as much time as we needed.

Focus on a problem you fully understand. Even if it's a tiny niche.

Do it on the side. Store up enough cash in reserve and give it a go before it's too late.

Start. That means develop your product and launch it. Don't wait for it to be perfect.

Listen to your customers! This turns them into loyal customers. And loyal customers bring you new customers.

Reach out and ask questions. You’d be surprised how many responses you get if you are candid, have integrity, and aren’t a pushy asshole about it.

I've been self-employed for basically all of my adult life, minus a 7-week lapse in judgment right out of college.

Ship stuff. Building a product and showing no one is the easiest thing in the world.

Believe in what you're building! If you don't, people's negativity will rip you apart more than anything else.

First think about how you're going to distribute your product, then work backwards from there.

Today, creating a website is easier, marketing is becoming easier, and accepting payments is much easier.

I kept building sites that ultimately failed, until I built sites that didn't fail. I just learned by trial and error.

Spend a weekend being as idealistic as possible—you can always study and learn later, but you can’t do it the other way around.

Getting Plutio off the ground was a challenge. While this series of failures demotivated me, they also fueled me to keep going.

Raise your prices. We have raised our prices three times and made more money.

If you fail, then start again, over and over, until you succeed.

Don't overthink it. Figure out what makes your product special and copy the rest.

Your first goal should be to get something tangible out there that people can use.

Always start by working your way back to your north star—what change do you want to bring to yourself and the world?

Getting some initial traction is the hardest. it didn't happen overnight. But we believed in the product, so we kept going.

Launching a SaaS is relatively easy. Making it a success is not.

Research your customers, understand their pain points, and build them something they already want.

Do what you enjoy and what you are passionate about. Those are the things you’ll master.

Do not plan! Do the trial and error process instead.

Start charging early and don't wait until the product is ready.

What really worked for me is building a small product. The big picture I have for Logojoy will take years.

When you bootstrap your business, you keep a lot more options for a successful outcome on the table.

Don't have twins while trying to build a startup.

Ideas are worth nothing unless you make it. Test your ideas quickly and keep improving.

Start small. When you're just getting started, make sure you get a few small wins under your belt.

Invest in your customers. Learn about them. Empathize with them. This is the most important thing you can do.

If we were just trying to fix a problem, we would have quit 2 years ago. We're trying to right a wrong.

Find something you love, and then just take a leap of faith.

I think your biggest asset is to know yourself, to know your strengths and weaknesses.

Being able to make a good living from this is our version of a unicorn.

Not every great idea has to be inspired by the mission that ultimately sustains it.

Always start with the question of, 'What's the actual problem?'

A lot of people want to spend a lot of time building something crazy technical or complicated. Don't.

I don't want to sound like a Nike shoe commercial, but just go do it. Just try it. That's the biggest thing.

Bootstrap. That should be the default answer. Almost all companies are bootstrapped and should be.

Be willing to try to do things your own way. You're going to fail if you try to copy the big guys.

Don't build stuff you don't need right away. Focus on your customer first.

There is no single book, podcast, or program that has been the silver bullet for my success.

Be a part of the community you want to build your products or services for.

It's just a question of what you want. You should filter things through a rubric of what you enjoy doing.

Be good with asking for advice. Preface it with what your goals are, and what your circumstances are.

Since anything can work, take the advice that really resonates with you.

Learning to code was just incredible. It let me move so much faster. You can get the idea out there and bring it to life.

I'm thinking about my business all day long. All weekend, all night, before I go to sleep, when I wake up, in the shower, when I'm working out, always. And there's nothing wrong with that.

We're not in medicine or accounting where there's real rules to follow. There's no rules here. So we get to invent them however we want.

Always start by working your way back to your north star—what change do you want to bring to yourself and the world?

All it takes is a few minutes of one-to-one, human-to-human interaction for a feedback call to turn into a first sale.

If there's anything valuable I learned these past few months, it’s that whatever you're struggling to do, do it in public.

I can't stress how important blogging is… my evergreen blog posts from 2013 continue to receive a lot of traffic today.

Try making something simple first. I know everyone says it, but they say it because it’s true.

Not every great idea has to be inspired by the mission that ultimately sustains it.

I continued to launch and continued to flop, but I never considered giving up.

Validate your idea before writing a line of code.

My approach has always been hackish. I paid little attention to best practices.

Stop talking. Listen. If the pain is strong enough, someone will pay you for it.

It's completely fine if you don't know what you're doing.

You can’t get anything out if you don’t put anything in.

I don't understand why most startups don't sell services or online courses on top of their software.

When everyone has a real stake in the outcome, things tend to get done, and to get done well.

Giving up a fraction of $1,000,000 is better than owning 100% of a company with zero revenue.

When everyone has a real stake in the outcome, things tend to get done, and to get done well.

My validation came mostly from speaking to developers on Indie Hackers and Reddit.

I realized that sometimes in order to make a project work it takes a lot of persistence.

It's completely bootstrapped with less than $100/month in running costs.

It's completely bootstrapped with less than $100/month in running costs.

Do only the things you enjoy doing and find someone who'll pay you for it.

When it comes to roadblocks, I view them as growing pains as opposed to obstacles.

My approach has always been hackish. I paid little attention to best practices.

My approach has always been hackish. I paid little attention to best practices.

Do only the things you enjoy doing and find someone who'll pay you for it.

Of course we made mistakes, but mistakes are how you grow. It's part of the game.

Analysis paralysis is way worse than taking a risk and failing, which is actually learning.

Analysis paralysis is way worse than taking a risk and failing, which is actually learning.

Validate your idea before writing a line of code.

Do only the things you enjoy doing and find someone who'll pay you for it.

I never imagined that this plugin could be monetized, mostly because I was building it for myself.

If you're just starting out, don't quit.

I continued to launch and continued to flop, but I never considered giving up.

It's completely bootstrapped with less than $100/month in running costs.

Be willing to test and see how things go. Then when you have some success, drill in and make it repeatable.

I don't do any press, PR, guest posts, content marketing, or even SEO.

I don't do any press, PR, guest posts, content marketing, or even SEO.

Do only the things you enjoy doing and find someone who'll pay you for it.

I've always believed that indie businesses should charge from day one.

It took me around eight weeks of evenings and weekends to put together a proper MVP.

I honestly never even considered that it would have any commercial viability.

My validation came mostly from speaking to developers on Indie Hackers and Reddit.

For what was supposed to be a passive revenue stream, IntroCave started out pretty damn active.

For what was supposed to be a passive revenue stream, IntroCave started out pretty damn active.

Having a product I can own and tinker on has been a good way to stay fulfilled at my day job.

Having a product I can own and tinker on has been a good way to stay fulfilled at my day job.

Never shipping means never knowing or finding any sort of market.

Never shipping means never knowing or finding any sort of market.

Your users are more forgiving than you think!

Trying and struggling looks like incompetence right up until the moment it looks like success.

GO FUCKING DO IT!

It doesn’t matter if you’re an artist, creative, product maker or a startup: the concept of "image" is dead. It’s the age of honesty.

You don’t need to act in a way or present yourself as different than you truly are. Be yourself. Reality works.

People want to ride along with you on your journey.

ICANN is like a SWAT team breaking into your house because your phone number isn’t up to date.

It’s not 1995.

In the last few years I’ve been all over the world...

Now let’s talk about what you do!

...you get the bullshit startup events, startup coaches, incubators that never deliver, people talking about synergies and networking events. And you REALLY stop getting ANYTHING done.

60% of coworking spaces actually lose money.

Gucci has 100 customers per day, Air Asia has 300,000 customers per day, but they make the same profit!

Automattic (makes WordPress) is the largest 100% remote company in the world right now.

Google will want a Bali remote campus in 5 years.

Good luck :)

In 1956 Constant Nieuwenhuys predicted "a society of total automation in which the need to work is replaced with a nomadic life of creative play"

our movement is not limited to a city, but spans worldwide, as travel to the other side of the globe has become commonplace for many.

Constant insisted that the traditional arts would be displaced by a collective form of creativity.

As our tools have become cheaper and easier, we’re now all photographers, film makers, designers and musicians and we create (and share) collectively on the internet.

The nomadic life is intrinsically creative. The places we go to feed us with inspiration from what we see, hear, feel and smell.

yes, after 60 years, we’re finally reaching Situationism.

Kill your dependencies!

studying entrepreneurship is like looking at paintings and thinking you’ll become an artist

corporate jobs ... are the most soul-sucking in the world with about as much creativity as the Sahara desert.

I can’t even wear a suit properly. I kinda look like Vincent Adultman from Bojack Horseman

I took the plunge and said fuck it I’ll do what I want.

Entrepreneurship, startups and freelancers became a giant part of what we call "work" nowadays.

DON’T BE SCARED
DO YOUR OWN THING!
IT’LL PROBABLY WORK OUT WELL
OR MAYBE IT WON’T
STILL DO YOUR OWN THING!

I feel universities are a scam now (especially in the US where they’re very pricey).

Learn design, copy other designers and start putting your own ideas in slowly.

Learn to draw on paper

learn to dance

Learn to write, start a blog and just write for yourself

Learn to market yourself on the internet

Learn to socialize, go to meetups (use Meetup.com), go out to bars and clubs and talk to lots of strangers.

When I’m with people I really like, I never get nervous.

Learn to love!

Love has the broadest dynamic of feelings I think.

If you’re a guy, don’t objectify women.

learn empathy

If you’re a guy, go to strip clubs just to experience it. Then make your judgement about it. This will probably learn you more about objectification and empathy.

great experiences don’t have to (and usually don’t) cost a lot of money. Having sex is free. Going for hikes is free. Talking to friends is free.

Materialism and consumerism is a farce. Stuff doesn’t really make you happy.

Happiness comes from intangibles, like experiences, relationships, activities, not stuff.

Move and travel to cheaper places

Most places outside the West let you live for $1,000/m as a king

If you think travel is expensive, you’re wrong.

See Asia, see South America, see parts of Africa.

See how you develop when you travel and how your identity is shaped by each environment with its own smells, people and buildings.

Save and invest into ETFs

Market tracking ETF funds have a higher average return than owning a house.

Owning a house is a cultural institution that’s ripe to be challenged.

Having a spare million on your bank account means freedom the rest of your life if you continue to live humbly.

There will be 1 billion digital nomads by 2035