What is an indie hacker?

An indie hacker is a person trying to make a living from a product they own. Customers pay them, or they are working so that customers will. The company stays small on purpose. Venture capital can show up later. It is not what makes the person count.

The work itself — owning the product, selling it, treating a funding round as the unusual chapter — is what indie hacking is. That page follows the word from a 2016 forum to public revenue posts and cheap shipping. This page is the person in that picture. The label is an identity people picked up. There is no license and no application.

Courtland Allen, who started Indie Hackers in August 2016, still publishes the short test on the site’s about page. You are an indie hacker if you have set out to make money independently: “generating revenue directly from your customers, not indirectly through an employer.” Then: “Other than that, there are no requirements.” The next lines are the stereotype and the correction in one breath. Indie hackers are often solo founders, software engineers, and bootstrapped, “but it’s totally okay if you have cofounders, can’t code, and have raised money.” The feed trained a narrower picture anyway: one person, a SaaS dashboard, a monthly number, no investors in the replies.

What they tend to share

They own the product. The company is theirs, or shared with a cofounder or two. When the money works, it comes from that product. A job can pay the rent in the early months. The job is not the business. A person can hold both for a while. The indie hacker part is the customer revenue.

They ship. The product is in the world, where a stranger can use it or refuse it. A deck, a waitlist, and a bio that says “building” are how a lot of people begin. The 2016 site attached the label to founders of businesses and side projects that already had a story, including revenue. The Hacker News thread that carried the name, on 11 August 2016, was titled as a way to learn how developers were making money.

They are revenue-minded. A free tool can be the start. The point of the identity is a living, or a real step toward one, from something customers pay for. That is why a profitable lifestyle business sits inside the word. The finish many of these people describe is enough: rent, a salary they pay themselves, a company that does not need a fund behind it. Allen’s about page is written for “profitable businesses and side projects,” not for companies that only count if they become enormous.

They usually skip venture capital. Bootstrap, here, means the company runs on customer revenue and the founder’s own money. A seed check is the unusual chapter. Allen lists raised money as allowed, and still outside the usual picture. The “indie” is independence from a process that expects a huge outcome. The practice page follows that bias through the history of the word. Most people who use the label are not pitching a round.

More companies are starting with one founder. That fact sits next to this label and is not the same fact. Carta’s Solo Founders Report 2025 says the share of new U.S. startups on Carta with a solo founder rose from 23.7% in 2019 to 36.3% in the first half of 2025. Carta is cap-table software, weighted toward companies in a venture-shaped system. It is not a directory of indie hackers. Whether that crowd is living from the products is a different question, and whether indie hacking is dead goes through the public revenue pyramid without treating any pull as a census.

What sits beside the label

A hobbyist builds because the building is the point. The same person can write the same kind of software an indie hacker writes. Allen’s test adds a purpose: money from customers. A weekend app that never charges anyone stays a project. It picks up this label when the owner is trying to make the product pay. Nights and weekends are a schedule, and many of these products begin there. The practice page keeps that distinction on the work. The hours do not decide the person.

A startup founder, in the sense Paul Graham set down in September 2012, runs a company designed to grow fast. “Startup = Growth” opens on that sentence. Being newly founded does not make a company a startup. Technology is not required. Venture funding is not required. “The only essential thing is growth.” A barbershop is his example of an ordinary business, because it is not built to scale the way a search engine is. Plenty of indie hackers have founded young companies, and casual speech calls those companies startups. The plans still split. One treats a small, profitable company as a finished outcome. The other treats that size as a step toward a return that pays a fund back. People cross the line in both directions. The words stop describing the same job once the plan is the fund’s plan.

An entrepreneur is the wide word. It fits a funded chief executive, a consultant selling hours, a franchise owner, and the person with a tiny software product. Allen uses both words on the same about page for different seats. Indie hackers are the people in the community. Entrepreneurs are also the readers who come to learn from them. Indie hacker vs entrepreneur is a difference of scope. The narrower identity wants a product the person owns, customers who pay them, and a company kept small enough to recognize. The wider word requires none of those three.

Arvid Kahl, writing after the “indie hacking is dead” line, kept the life and renamed the tactic: indie entrepreneurship, meaning distribution, a real niche, and expertise a clone cannot fake. That essay sits inside the death question. The person and the shortcut come apart. Someone can still be this person after the old way of getting customers stops working.

The label is also a business word, not a style of programming. The 2016 launch was aimed at developers. Allen’s later line says you can count if you cannot code. Generated code made the “I wrote every line” boundary weaker still. How that shift happened belongs with the practice. The person is whoever is still building, selling, and keeping the company.

Solo is the picture. A small team still counts

The picture people copy is one person and a laptop. In 2014 Pieter Levels set out to launch 12 startups in 12 months. Most of them did not last. Nomad List and Remote OK did. On 30 May 2019 he wrote that the two sites together were at about $83,333 a month, a million dollars a year, without a funding round. The figure is his, posted in public. What traveled was the shape: one founder, recurring money from the internet, no office. The practice page tells that chapter as history. It is still the portrait strangers mean.

Solo and bootstrap get glued together in that portrait. They are different facts. Solo is a headcount. Bootstrap is a funding choice. A solo founder can raise. Two founders can refuse to. A solo founder who bootstraps is the usual case people mean, and Allen’s “no requirements” line is the correction when the usual case gets treated as a rule.

The older ancestor was already a small team. In 2006, 37signals published Getting Real as an argument for calm, bootstrapped software companies, before this name existed. That history sits on the practice page. The useful point for who counts: the life was never reserved for a single name on the paperwork.

A later public case is Transistor, the podcast host. Justin Jackson and Jon Buda launched it together on 1 August 2018. In a 2022 anniversary note, Jackson describes an independent company whose other goal was “a good life for us as business owners.” They kept day jobs and worked the product on the side. They forecast five years to reach $21,000 in monthly recurring revenue. They write that they reached about $20,000 a month in about a year, and that this was what let them go full-time as cofounders. He calls the two of them indie entrepreneurs, set against what the same sum would mean at a funded Silicon Valley startup. They were the only full-time people until 2021, when they hired two more. His earlier note on the $30,000 month uses a slightly different clock for the same climb: a 60-month guess to $20,000, hit in 11.5 months, then a month near $30,000 with roughly half of revenue set aside for two salaries of $7,500. He calls them bootstrappers. Both posts are his account, not a filing. Two owners, customers who pay, a company sized for a life: that is a lifestyle business inside Allen’s test. A second name on the masthead does not push it out.

The solo version of a long pile of attempts is on this site as Marc Lou’s $3 million and 36 startups. He says the total is about a decade of work, solo and bootstrapped. The number is his. Many shots, a few that pay, ownership kept close. One person can look like that. Two people can look like Transistor. Both sit inside the same word.

Where the label shows up

Indie Hackers is still the place the name is defined: interviews, a forum, and an about page that states the test in public. Allen put the site on Hacker News on 11 August 2016. Stripe owned it for a stretch. He and his brother Channing later ran it again as its own business, with Stripe still an investor. The practice page has that sequence. People who never posted there still use the words.

On X, the label picked up a costume during the build-in-public years: the product, the mistakes, and often the monthly recurring revenue. A payments screenshot became a way to be recognized. The timeline shows whoever is loud, whoever is winning, and whoever is performing both. It hides the quiet product that sells through search, email, or a community the founder already had. Those people can meet Allen’s test and never appear in the argument. The death page goes through why that performance frayed. The identity did not require it.

MRR is the number the scoreboard likes, because a subscription is easy to compare month to month. The habit made bootstrap SaaS look like the only shape of person. A job board, a paid community, a directory, a one-time download, or an ad-supported site can fund the same life. The practice page lists those models. Screenshots were also easy to fake, so the scene grew products that connect a payments account and show the number with less theatre. That changes how the label gets proved in public. A founder who never posts a chart can still be one.

The person, held still

The costume keeps changing: nomad, forum regular, build-in-public account, boilerplate seller, someone shipping with generated code. What indie hacking is follows those chapters. The person underneath is steadier. They own a product and are trying to make money from its customers. They are usually alone or nearly alone, and usually unfunded, and neither is a rule. A small team with a profitable, deliberately small company counts. A hobby that never charges does not pick up the label by building alone. A company designed to grow fast on outside capital is a different job, even when the founder used to use these words.

If the doom posts make the whole role sound finished, the longer answer is whether indie hacking is dead. Shipping is cheap. Attention is the scarce thing. The label stays with whoever is still on the customer side of that bet.

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