Glossary

These are the words this site uses, in the sense it uses them. A longer page exists for the ones people argue about. Founder-reported means the maker said the number. It does not mean an auditor signed it.

Indie hacking

Making a living, or a real attempt at one, from a product you own. Customers or your own savings fund it. Venture capital is the exception. The practice is older than the phrase. The phrase took off when Indie Hackers launched in 2016. Full page: what is indie hacking.

Indie hacker

The person in that picture. Courtland Allen’s test is customer revenue, not an employer. Cofounders, not coding, and having raised money can still fit his sentence. The feed is narrower than the sentence. Full page: what is an indie hacker.

Bootstrap

The company runs on revenue and the founder’s money. No venture round as the plan. A bootstrap can be a tiny SaaS or a larger firm that simply never raised. Indie hacking assumes this default and adds a product you own, kept small on purpose often enough that it became the culture.

Startup

In loose speech, any new company. In venture speech, a company designed to grow fast enough to return outside capital. The two meanings cause the fights. Full page: indie hacking vs a startup.

Side project

A schedule: nights, weekends, hours beside a job. It is not a business model. A side project becomes indie hacking when the owner tries to get paid by the product’s customers. Many lasting products started on that schedule. The schedule is not the identity.

Solo founder

One person on the cap table or in the operating seat. Common in this scene, not required. Carta’s reports measure solo founders among startups on its platform. That is a formation statistic, not a revenue benchmark.

Micro-SaaS

A small subscription product, often run by one person or a tiny team, aimed at a narrow job. The label is a size claim and a model claim. It is not a guarantee of profit. In 2026 people use it both for durable niche tools and for thin wrappers. Those are different businesses.

Indie SaaS

Bootstrapped subscription software as a culture: public MRR, small teams, customer funding. Wider than one product and narrower than all of indie hacking. Directories and info products can be indie without being SaaS. Full page: MRR and indie SaaS.

MRR

Monthly recurring revenue. Active subscriptions, normalized to a month. Not profit. Not cash in the bank. Not a lifetime deal counted twelve times. Full page: MRR and indie SaaS. The cultural doorway at $1,000 is its own page.

ARR

Annual recurring revenue. Often MRR times twelve, which is a run rate, not money already collected. Read the letters before you repeat the figure. A “$12k ARR” post may be a $1k month with a multiplier.

Churn

Customers or revenue that leave in a period. Gross new MRR minus churn is closer to a business than the new subscriptions alone. Launch threads prefer the gross number.

Lifetime revenue

Money collected in total, not per month. A TrustMRR snapshot cited on this site used lifetime revenue for its pyramid. Do not read that pyramid as an MRR chart.

Founder-reported

The maker published the figure. Specific and useful as a shape. Not an audit. Most revenue lines on this site are founder-reported unless they say Stripe-connected.

TrustMRR

Marc Lou’s directory of revenue connected with a read-only Stripe key, plus a place to list startups for sale. A response to fake screenshots in late 2025. Self-selected. Not a census. Ads and a transaction fee have both been part of his account of the business.

Build in public

Showing the product, the mistakes, and often the revenue while you work. A growth tactic in the early 2020s, later a crowded performance. A plain log is still a choice. Full page: build in public.

Audience

People you can reach again, usually because they follow you or joined a list. An asset and a channel. Not the same as demand. Full page: do you need an audience.

Distribution

Any path that puts the product in front of a buyer. An audience, search, a marketplace, a partner, outbound, a paid click. The scarce input once shipping got cheap.

Product Hunt

A launch square Ryan Hoover started in late 2013. A dated event, not a retention system. Useful as a record of when something went public. Weak as a plan if the crowd there is not the customer.

Boilerplate

A starter codebase that wires the repetitive parts of an app: login, payments, email. ShipFast is the 2023 example. The pitch got weaker when coding agents could do the wiring. The product did not have to go to zero to stop being the engine.

Vibe coding

Andrej Karpathy, February 2025: describe what you want, accept generated code, move on. He framed it for throwaway projects. The name now covers most fast, agent-heavy building. Full page: is vibe coding killing indie hacking. The method page is shipping fast with AI.

Moat

A reason a customer does not leave for a copy. Code used to be treated as one. Data, a workflow, a brand, and distribution are the reasons people still name. A moat is not a vibe.

MCP

Model Context Protocol. A way for an AI client to call tools, announced by Anthropic in November 2024. Postiz shipping an MCP server is the example on this site of a small product becoming callable by agents.

Agent

Software that takes a goal and uses tools. In the Postiz story, the agent is a new kind of user of a scheduler. A human still pays. “Agentic” is the adjective the scene uses when it wants the sentence to sound newer than “they added an API.”

Info product

A course, book, template, or paid explanation. Often sold to other makers. Real revenue, easy to confuse with the software business next to it. Full page: courses.

Monetisation

How the cash is shaped: subscription, one-time, listing fee, ads, info product, or a bid. The spelling on the models page matches the URL. The shapes are the same under the American spelling.

Ads

In this record, usually a sponsor slot on attention a publisher already has. Also, loosely, the traffic you buy on a platform. Those are different purchases. Full page: ads vs bidding.

Bidding

Pay-to-rank. The 2026 version is outbid.lol: pay more than the person above you, sit at number one, no proof required. Ancestors include the Million Dollar Homepage and highscore.money. A spectacle can be revenue. It is not MRR.

Verification

Showing revenue from a source the founder cannot freely edit, usually a read-only payments connection. The 2025–2026 answer to screenshot culture. TrustMRR is the product this site means.

Open source

Code people can read and, under a license, run. Postiz’s app repo is the example here. Open source is a distribution and trust choice. The paid cloud can still be the business. The license is not a revenue model by itself.

Pre-sale

Getting paid before the thing exists, with terms about delivery and refunds. Rob Hallam’s Attention Playbook in September 2026 is the documented case. A pre-sale balance is not a SaaS month.

Benchmark

A figure with a source, a population, and a unit. Carta’s solo-founder share, Atlas’s time to a first customer, ChartMogul’s odds of $1 million ARR, a TrustMRR lifetime-revenue snapshot. A founder’s MRR is an example, not a benchmark. Full page: revenue benchmarks.

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