Courses in indie hacking

Courses in this scene are info products. The usual buyer is someone who wants the seller’s outcome: a small software business, an audience, a launch. That is a real market. It is also a loop, the culture selling its own method. This page describes the loop and the offers that already have a public paper trail here. It does not rank a catalog, and it does not take a cut.

No affiliate links. No paid placement. If a price appears, it is because a cited page printed it, and the seller’s site wins when they disagree.

The shelf

From about 2023 to 2025, boilerplates and courses were the reliable customer: another maker. ShipFast sold the starter repo. CodeFast sold the lessons around building. The timeline calls that the boilerplate era, and it includes courses on purpose. When the customer is the audience, revenue can look strong while the underlying tool market is ordinary. That shelf is the crowded one.

By March 2026 Marc Lou said AI had hurt the coding course and the boilerplate. His month recap put CodeFast at $8,300 and ShipFast at $9,200, under TrustMRR and DataFast. A course that teaches steps a coding agent can perform has a shrinking reason to exist. A course that teaches judgment, distribution, or a network-specific craft might not. The split is the 2026 state of this shelf. It is not a claim that every course went to zero.

CodeFast

Marc Lou’s coding course. Indie Hackers reported that it made about $92,000 in two days after a 28 November 2024 launch. That figure is a launch spike, as reported, not a run rate and not a profit statement. The interesting structure is audience first, curriculum second: people who had watched the builds were the buyers.

The later chapter is the March 2026 line. $8,300 in a month, in his recap, next to a sentence that AI had hurt the course. Both numbers can be his and both can be true of different windows. The hub keeps the portfolio around them. Buy the course only if the current syllabus is still the thing you cannot get from an agent and from his free letters. Just Ship It and the free book at book.marclou.com are the primary sources that do not require a checkout.

The Attention Playbook

Rob Hallam’s course on growing on X as a founder. The pre-sale opened 24 September 2026. Videos were dated to unlock 31 October 2026. The price ladder, in the terms and the site logic the story records, started at $149 and rose $25 every 50 sales during the pre-sale, with a cap before launch pricing. A morning-after post showed a dashboard balance of $14,481.90. Later the same day the site’s counter read 105 sold at a $199 step. Those meters do not multiply cleanly. The pre-sale story is the careful version. Refunds exist before delivery, so a counter can move backward.

The course is about one network, by the founder of SuperX, a tool for that network. The terms, as reported in the story, say he will mention SuperX once and that you do not need it. Even so, the product and the curriculum share a subject. That is a coherent business. It is a poor general course in “indie hacking” if your buyers are not on X.

Books that do the same job without a cohort

Arvid Kahl’s books, Zero to Sold and The Embedded Entrepreneur, are the long version of his newsletter: selling a bootstrapped product, and building an audience that matches it. They are books, not a live cohort. They belong on this page because people shopping for a course are often shopping for that material.

Rob Walling’s The SaaS Playbook is the MicroConf-side version: pricing, marketing, and growing a bootstrapped SaaS past the first customers. The podcast is the ongoing form. A book is easier to judge than a pre-order, because the pages exist.

Getting Real, from 37signals in 2006, is the ancestor: small teams, shipping, charging. It is not an indie hacking course. It is the argument the scene later wore as an identity. Read it if you want the roots. Do not expect it to name TrustMRR.

How to read an offer

Ask who the buyer is. If the buyer is “people who want to be you,” you are looking at the maker-to-maker loop. That can be worth the money as apprenticeship and still tell you nothing about whether your SaaS has a customer who is not in the room.

Ask whether the result you are shown is a launch week, a pre-sale, or a year. Ask whether refunds are still open. Ask whether the steps are something a coding agent now does. Vibe coding is why syntax courses got weaker. It did not automatically weaken a course about getting seen, which is why Hallam could pre-sell one in the same year Lou’s coding course was smaller.

Ask whether you need it. Starting is a small product and a first customer. Interviews on Indie Hackers are free. A course that promises the customer, rather than a skill, is selling a result it does not control. Info products are a fine model for the seller. For the buyer, they are a purchase, not a plan.

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