Collection
Indie hackers worth knowing
People who build software with their own money and answer to nobody.
The funded version of this job arrives with a board, a runway, and a story about the market. The indie version arrives with a laptop and whatever the founder can persuade somebody to pay. Several people below out-earn companies with twenty employees on the payroll.
Everyone here shipped something people pay for, mostly alone. A few of them publish exactly what they make each month, which the rest of the industry still finds faintly rude.
The indie hackers
12 profiled so far, newest first.
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Yasser Elsaid
Solo founder who never took the money
Yasser Elsaid announced Chatbase to sixteen followers and had a paying customer thirty minutes later
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Joseph Carlson
Founder of Qualtrim, host of The Joseph Carlson Show
Joseph Carlson spent six years telling 700,000 people how to buy great businesses, and quietly built one himself
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Abhishek Chakravarty
Engineer and co-founder, Youform
Abhishek Chakravarty spent a decade shipping other people's products, then built the form tool that made Typeform sweat
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Arvid Kahl
Founder of Podscan.fm, author of Zero to Sold
Arvid Kahl sold his company for seven figures and then gave away the entire playbook for free
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Davis Baer
Co-founder, OneUp and Youform
Davis Baer keeps co-founding profitable SaaS companies with people he met on the internet
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Jack Friks
Indie maker, Post Bridge and Lovelee
Jack Friks failed at making money online for four years, then couldn't stop
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Jesse Hanley
Founder, Bento
Jesse Hanley runs an email empire from Fukuoka like it's a neighborhood coffee shop
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Marc Lou
Serial shipper, ShipFast and DataFast
Marc Lou quit the corporate track to launch a startup a month, and somehow that was the responsible choice
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Pieter Levels
Solo founder, Nomad List and PhotoAI
Pieter Levels runs a multi-million dollar company that is just one Dutch guy with a laptop
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Tony Dinh
Indie hacker, TypingMind
Tony Dinh quit his job with 100 followers and built a one-man product empire in public
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Jason Zook
Professional weirdo, calm-business evangelist
Jason Zook made a million dollars wearing other people's t-shirts, then learned the hard way what enough feels like
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Jeff Li
Design engineer turned builder-in-public
Jeff Li did not want to be a creator. He posted every day anyway, and the posting became the business model
Common questions
- Which indie hackers are profiled on Cool People Stories?
- Cool People Stories profiles 12 indie hackers, including Yasser Elsaid, Joseph Carlson, Abhishek Chakravarty, Arvid Kahl, Davis Baer, Jack Friks, Jesse Hanley, Marc Lou, and 4 more. Each one has a full profile covering their story, what they have shipped, and links to their own sites.
- What counts as an indie hacker on Cool People Stories?
- Someone who builds and sells their own software without outside investment, usually alone or with a very small team. On this site it usually also means they are open about how it is actually going.
- How are people chosen for Cool People Stories?
- There is no submission form and no sponsorship. Everyone is picked because they were interesting enough to write about, and the profiles are researched and verified before they go up.
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