The indie hacker community is a beautiful trap.

I've built 15 projects in a year. Most failed. And my biggest lesson had nothing to do with code or product.

It was about who I was selling to.

Here's what happens: you start building for strangers, get no traction, and slowly drift toward building for other indie hackers. They understand you. They retweet you. They cheer in your replies. Feels great.

But these people are resourceful. They can build whatever you're selling. Selling tools to builders is like selling hammers at a carpentry convention.

Then comes the follower trap. You see big accounts posting Stripe screenshots getting 500 replies. So you start farming. "Share your project" threads. Follow-for-follow. Reply guying under big accounts 3 hours a day.

You end up with 5,000 ghost followers who showed up once and never came back. Meanwhile, the 3 hours you spent farming replies could've been spent on actual outreach.

I learned this the hard way. I built TrustViews. 400+ signups. 1 million views. Zero revenue. Because my entire user base was indie hackers grabbing a quick backlink and leaving.

The founders who actually make money? They all follow the same pattern:

They sell to people who can't build it themselves
They market on TikTok and YouTube where attention is cheap, not on X where 2,000 founders see your post
They did cold outreach first, content second
Their audience grew AFTER they had revenue to share, not before

We keep selling to each other and the money just rotates in the same tiny pool.

I'm not trashing the community. These people changed my life. But there's a difference between a great community and a great market.

I wrote the full breakdown with everything I've observed, my mistakes, what I'm changing, and what I think actually works.

Full article: [LINK]

Jeremy Lasne

Activity

Products

Recently upvoted

Posts