Indie Hacker

Indie hacker overlaps with solopreneur and micro-saas, but each term points at something different. Indie hacker describes an identity and a culture, built around the IndieHackers community Courtland Allen started, shipping fast, sharing revenue numbers in public, and usually writing the code yourself. Solopreneur is broader: it describes anyone running a one-person business, whether that's software, an agency, a newsletter, or consulting, and doesn't require writing code at all. Micro-saas isn't a person at all, it's the kind of product indie hackers (and plenty of others) tend to build: small, narrow, low-overhead software. You can be an indie hacker still shipping experiments with no product that qualifies as a micro-saas yet, and a two-person team that took a small round can run a micro-saas without anyone calling themselves an indie hacker. What the label implies in practice: technical enough to build the thing yourself, comfortable sharing metrics and setbacks in public (see build-in-public), and optimizing for a sustainable, controllable business over a venture-scale outcome. Revenue expectations are modest by VC standards, hundreds to a few thousand dollars a month is a normal early milestone, not a disappointment. Common path: side project nights and weekends, first paying customers validate the idea, founder goes full time once income covers living expenses, often described as going ramen-profitable.

Someone builds a small scheduling tool on weekends, posts weekly revenue updates on IndieHackers and X, gets to $3,000 MRR after eight months, and quits their job once that covers their rent and expenses.