Indie Hackers is a community of founders building profitable online businesses, sharing revenue numbers, strategies and lessons in public.
Founded in 2016 and later acquired by Stripe, Indie Hackers pioneered the “build in public” culture. Thousands of founders post case studies, milestone updates and hard questions about pricing, marketing, churn and growth, and the community answers with unusually transparent, experience-based advice. Product pages let makers list what they are building and share verified revenue through Stripe, creating a rare dataset of what small software businesses actually earn. Between the forum, interviews, podcast and local meetups, the site functions as both a knowledge base and a peer group for people bootstrapping outside the venture-capital track.
Founder Courtland Allen started Indie Hackers after building software businesses of his own, and Stripe acquired the community in 2017 as part of its mission to help more businesses get started online. Members routinely publish exact revenue figures, churn rates and marketing experiments, a level of candor that is rare on founder forums and makes threads unusually practical. The interviews archive doubles as a searchable playbook covering idea validation, first customers, pricing experiments and, eventually, selling a company.
Indie Hackers is completely free. Reading, posting, listing a product and joining the community costs nothing; the platform is operated by Stripe as a resource for founders.
Indie Hackers is for bootstrapped founders, solo makers and side-project builders who want honest numbers, practical playbooks and peers on the same path.