Indie Hacking

Building small, profitable software products alone or in a tiny team, usually bootstrapped.

Also known as: indie hacking, indie hacker, micro-SaaS, solo SaaS

Indie hacking is building small software products solo or in tiny teams, funded by revenue, aimed at profitability over growth. Micro-SaaS tools, paid newsletters, niche utilities — businesses doing thousands to low millions in yearly revenue with almost no headcount. The internet’s long tail of needs, served profitably by people who stay small.

indie:   ship in weeks → charge from day one → support it yourself → keep margin

Engineers have unfair advantages here: zero build cost, direct distribution through communities, and the ability to maintain what they made. What indie hackers lack is usually marketing tolerance — the work is 30% building, 70% being seen, and engineers invert that ratio by default.

The classic mistakes:

Building in silence. Shipping without an audience means launching to nobody, repeatedly. Build in public, gather emails before code, sell before scale.
Prices from employee thinking. Charging $5/month because “$5 feels fair” while support eats hours. Price against value and your time — indie margins must cover a team of one.
Too many products. Five half-alive tools instead of one good one. Kill ruthlessly; attention is the scarcest resource at team size one.
No moat anxiety management. A big company could clone it — accept this, stay small enough to be uninteresting and close enough to customers to out-serve.

Graduation path: an indie product that outgrows its maker becomes a startup (hire, raise, scale) or a lifestyle business (stay small, profit). Decide when growth forces the question — see side project to startup.