Making a living
on your own terms.

On 11 August 2016, Courtland Allen launched Indie Hackers on Hacker News. The idea was easy to grasp: people could earn money from products they owned, instead of only from a job. Many worked alone, but being solo was never a rule.

The roots were older. Basecamp had argued for small, calm software companies in Getting Real in 2006. Stripe made internet payments easier. Product Hunt, launched in 2013, gave new products a place to be seen.

Stripe bought Indie Hackers in April 2017. Courtland and his brother Channing Allen ran it independently again in 2023. By then, “indie hacker” had become an identity.

Pieter Levels, a Dutch maker, tried to launch 12 startups in 12 months in 2014. One began as a spreadsheet of good cities for remote workers in Chiang Mai. It became Nomad List. Remote OK followed as a jobs board.

On 30 May 2019, Levels said the two sites together reached $1 million a year, about $83,333 a month, without ads or funding. The numbers told a simple story: one person, one laptop, recurring internet revenue.

He kept repeating the pattern. In July 2023, he said his newer product Photo AI was making $61,808 a month.

“Build in public” meant sharing the product, the mistakes, and often the revenue on Twitter, now called X. It made a private process visible. Followers could become early users.

The numbers were useful because they made a story concrete. They were also founder-reported. The audience usually had to take the maker’s word for them.

Marc Lou’s playbook captured the era: share the build, launch on Product Hunt, post the result, then sell tools to other makers who had watched it happen.

This made attention look like a business asset. A following lowered the cost of the first launch and gave every new idea a starting crowd.

But attention was not the same as demand. Lou wrote plainly that having an audience does not guarantee a startup will work. People can enjoy watching a build without buying the result.

ShipFast packaged the repetitive start of a software product: a Next.js app with login, Stripe payments, and email already wired up. Buyers could skip setup and launch faster. Many similar starter kits followed.

For a while, the most reliable customer was another person trying to become an indie hacker. Courses, templates, and starter code turned the method itself into a product.

By March 2026, Lou said AI had hurt both his coding course and his boilerplate. That month he posted $36,000 for TrustMRR, $21,000 for DataFast, $9,200 for ShipFast, and $8,300 for CodeFast. ShipFast was not dead. It was no longer the engine.

ChatGPT arrived on 30 November 2022. Soon, people who could not write much code were shipping small products in days. Copying got easier too, so successful ideas quickly filled with lookalikes.

In February 2025, AI researcher Andrej Karpathy gave the loose, prompt-led style a name: “vibe coding.” You describe what you want, accept a lot of generated code, and keep moving.

By July 2026, Levels argued that an app could cost about $20 a month in AI tools to build. The scarce thing was no longer code. It was distribution: getting the right people to notice and care.

Revenue screenshots had become a way to win attention. Some were fake. Around October 2025, Levels called out the problem in public.

Marc Lou responded by building TrustMRR in about 24 hours. Makers connect read-only Stripe access and display verified revenue. It became a directory and a marketplace where people can list startups for sale.

The attention around verification created its own ad business. Lou said sidebar ads made $20,378 in three days. He hoped a 3% acquisition fee could replace ads, but sponsor spots were still on sale in August 2026. TrustMRR is not a revenue-share ad network.