New indie hacker playbook

There’s some talk last year how the typical indie hacker playbook is dead. Reading @Timb03’s indie hacker journey made me wonder if this is the new, better playbook in progress.

He got his social media scheduler SaaS to $74k MRR after working on it for 5 years (since 2019).

I’ve been enjoying his tweets, learning a lot from the tips he shared. He’s given me a lot of homework actually! I love his story. It adds a nice nuance and balance to the other familiar indie success stories:

• You don’t need a Twitter audience to succeed. Tim succeeded all without a Twitter audience. He only started on Twitter for 1 year, but so far, conversion is still from SEO, blog posts, affiliates and building/acquiring free tools.
• You can focus on one thing for years, instead of making many small bets. I mean, I love the small bets approach. It suits my personality, and I enjoy it. But I like the part of the story that if you find a proven idea that’s already been validated in the market, spending years to carve out your slice of the pie can be rewarding too.
• You can build something in a crowded market with huge existing incumbent companies (like Buffer and Hootsuite), be relatively unknown even in that product space, and yet still score a huge win. Pallyy is a such a good example of success despite the odds of so-called market saturation. In most typical lists of social media schedulers to try, Pallyy doesn’t often come up high, or at all. (thought it’s moving up fast now). You’d think you need to be No.1 in order to win. But no, you actually don’t. $75k MRR is a massive win already in my books. Even if it’s not on the “best of” list.
• You can make good profit from an idea that isn’t unique. Social media schedulers are plenty. The idea itself isn’t unique or innovative by any stretch. There’s no industry-disrupting, world-changing, curve-jumping angle here. Just another scheduler! Having mostly similar features. Yet, it’s at its price point it provides great value, nice support, serves the needs of a subset of customers well, and that was all that’s needed to succeed. Please punch me in the gut every time I stop myself from building a product just because “it’s already being done”!
• You can hire a team. Tim had been solo founder all along, and recently hired his first developer. I’m all for solo, even think I want to stay that way all the way. But his pragmatic, no idealism kind of approach is infectious and making me rethink. In the end, if you want to scale, hiring is going to be a critical unlock.

What do you think of this new indie hacker playbook?