July 25, 2018

Indie Hackers grew to $5,000/month and was acquired in 10 months

I was thinking of ways to generate revenues for content sites the other day. My focus is on interview based sites (for obvious reasons) and I remembered Indie Hackers doing a really good job about it. I thought I read a sort of income report on their site, but I couldn’t find them anymore, since the /blog section redirects now to the home page. I initially thought that since their acquisition by Stripe, they removed it. A “site:indiehackers.com/blog” search later, though, the articles were still available.

What is interesting for me in these blog posts is the fact that Indie Hackers started in August 2016, it was acquired by Stripe in April 2017 for un undisclosed amount, but by that time they were making around $5,000/month with not so much traffic on the website to speak of. They had a combination of revenue sources, from ads on the site to site sponsors and podcast/newsletter sponsors as well.

In case you want to read them, here they are, in chronological order:

Here’s also 2 answers from the founder on Hacker News and on the Indie Hacker Forum:

I hope they don’t remove the articles (they can still be found on archive.org, in case the links aren’t working anymore).

The photo is of a really curious and social cat that kept us company for about 2 weeks in an Airbnb in Portugal this summer. I feel that she was almost as curious and as social as an entrepreneur. Almost…