Growth Ranker – Top-growing products on Indie Hackers
growthranker.comDo people really care about indiehackers? Only emails I receive from them are very rock-bottom bad websites created with codecanyon scripts. They are possibly paying indiehackers to expose those sites via email blast and their blogs. Not even one project from there looked good so far.
I am actively using Indie Hackers. It is a very supporting and nice community. It is very motivating for entrepreneurs. If you are building a product, you have direct access to a ton of like-minded founders who can tell you about their journey. It's for entrepreneurs.
Big +1 for this.
The only criticism I have of Indie Hackers is that sometimes discussion can get a little spammy (lots of people looking for early adopters). Not every conversation is like that, but some posts are.
As someone building a startup on their own (full time) I've found Indie Hackers a really supportive community. The stories there are often relatable, and far less sensational than typically seen places like HN. If you're going through the daily grind of trying to grow a small business / startup then it's a good place to drop by every now and again to help stay sane.
Indiehackers sounded like a group of people I could relate, but after I looked at that site I had the impression it's full of "I can't code but wanna make big moniez with tech"-hustlers....
Over time it seems to be decending more and more into the meta-entrepernal shyster hole. Learn how I made 1 million dollars with this 1 easy trick - buy my book to learn more.
To be fair, your customers rarely care what the code your product is written in is like.
They just care it provides the value they're looking for.
Sure thing.
But I wanted a community for devs that want to become entrepreneurs and not for random dudes that want to make money at all costs.
Some people like me, that have the same problems, some people I coule relate to.
If you're starting something out it can be very inspiring! I used to listen to their podcast nearly daily when I was getting started, but dropped it after things got started. That same source of inspiration can be a distraction, and even demotivating, when times are tough.
It was great when it first started and all the content was fresh. I used to read it every day; now I look at it once a week or so, ever since they obfuscated the actual founder stories and turned them into more generic interview. But FWIW it does seem like there is a nice community there, and it's probably inspired more than a few people to make the jump to entrepreneurship.
Yeah I signed up for the newsletter and read one or two before I realized they were all the same clickbaity junk.
"How I [risked everything, failed big, quit job] and built a [moderately big number]/month business"
Last 30 days is kind of a bad metric for growth, especially for B2B apps where Q4 can be kind of brutal. Would be cool if they did "all time" or something more encompassing (and had other sources aside from IH).
FWIW I run browserless, which is on IH, and has been growing pretty steadily: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/browserless/revenue
EDIT: Might also be cool to see growth in terms of customer growth vs MRR
You run browserless?
Gotta say, your customer support is top notch. I asked a question on a Saturday evening and got a response 15 mins later. I was stunned!
Thanks! I try and be responsive as possible -- I know how painful it is to sit and wait for a response. Appreciate your comment!
I think Indie Hackers is great but the best content you can get is the content you never got because you were too busy shipping.
Therefore I think that ranking and tracking what other people are shipping does nothing remotely useful. Maybe good for an entertainment, though.
What are they using to determine revenue of the companies?
The source is IndieHackers which is owned by Stripe. I'm assuming the startups must register and opt-in to have their revenue numbers published?
Yeah, you need to connect to your Stripe account when you create your product page on IndieHackers for it to track revenue.
Why would you want IndieHacker to track your revenue? I would thought that Stripe would provide the necessary information already.
This is cool but quite easy to game - all I need is a spare couple of thousand and I can jump to the top of the leaderboard by buying my own products. Of course I'll have to pay stripe's fees but it's probably quite a good ROI if my product's target market are people that read indiehackers.
Fun fact: In a round-about way you can estimate how much revenue these products are generating for Stripe if you measure the transaction fees against the reported numbers.