Building Profitable Online Businesses, with Courtland Allen

And how software relates to the Passion Economy

by Li Jin and Nathan Baschez

November 18, 2020

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For our guest this week on Means of Creation we are welcoming Courtland Allen, founder of Indie Hackers!

Indie Hackers is an online community that focuses on entrepreneurs who build profitable internet businesses. They describe themselves as individuals seeking financial independence, creative freedom, and the ability to work on their own schedule. Entrepreneurs in the community have built B2B SaaS applications, paid newsletters, and everything in between.

Courtland started Indie Hackers in 2016 and it was acquired by Stripe 10 months later. He now works for Stripe operating Indie Hackers and hosting their podcast. As of February 2020, the site was seeing about 1.5 million page views per month and the community had grown to 80,000 members.

Before creating Indie Hackers, Courtland spent several years working on software startups and graduated with a degree in computer science from MIT. In this interview, we talked to Courtland about:

The origin story of Indie Hackers
The best products and services that niche online communities can use to monetize
The types of businesses that have become more (or less!) popular to start during Covid-19
The traits of successful Indie Hackers
What the mainstream technology community misunderstands about Indie Hackers
The biggest issues Indie Hackers face
The most popular tools for Indie Hackers
And more!