Ask HN: As a founder/entrepreneur, is Indie Hackers still valuable to you?

Feel free to email me with suggestions! courtland@indiehackers.com

EDIT: I should say that the navigation is a work in progress, and the interviews/podcast/etc will eventually be easier to get to.

It makes me pretty depressed, especially looking at my own startup. Hope this helps.

I feel the same. IH was a site I visited on a daily basis but now I rarely remember of checking it even once a week. I thought being acquired by stripe would be a great thing for Indie Hackers but apparently it wasn't the case.

I found out about IH later than you did so I don't know how it used to be. I liked their forum at first but now it seems to be a recycling of either a success story, a not always well thought out ask for help, or showcase of a prototype, etc.

Where I have found value is in the in-person community. Channing & Courtland hosted a meetup a couple months ago in SF and I got to meet some awesome people. There's definitely a lot of want-a-preneurs in the group, but once you get past them and to the serious members, you can make some valuable connections.

This might be odd but I've always stayed away from their success stories. Being in the game right now, I'm laser focused on a goal and have my compass locked tightly to a north star. I've found the stories, while inspirational, to throw me off course.

That "immature" community you speak of is one of the best parts of IH. As someone who joined IH and the maker community in general last year, there are few other places that I turned to beforehand to get basic and/or "dumb" questions answered about entrepreneurship. Hacker News is far too elite for that kind of environment.

For me, it's a place to feel "safe" to ask questions that might get ridiculed or passed on elsewhere. It's not just about the informative podcasts and interviews, but also about being around people who have the same goals as you, but are at different stages. It just so happens that many of us are at the beginning. And there's nothing wrong with that. We're all learning together!

simply stated: go back to the old format, it was better. Nothing says that you have to stay this direction. Sometimes things don't work.

I think IH switched to collecting sign ups too soon -- and they push it too hard. It used to be one of my favourite websites, now I do not visit at all.

If someone made a new version of IH that was more about the content and less about being a business, I would visit often.

I used to constantly refresh indiehackers in its early days just to see if there was a new interview. At that point, the website was straightforward; you have just stories of people who have built something and you get to know how they did that. They just lay it out in the open and you take whatever you seem fit.

Now, the site homepage just looks like a mashup of all the 'start scratching your own itch' books giving 'agile/practical' ideas.

I wish the homepage focussed on what the site was originally about (like it used to be) - stories on how people actually built a small(profitable) tech business. It should be left to the visitors to find their way to move to more subjective realms like forums, posts discussing 'practical business ideas' etc

The biggest problem to me is that while IH started out as a curated collection of interviews, it's turned into a forum where basically everyone has advice in the form of articles they want to share and success stories...even when they're brand new. The early content had a sense of authority and assuredness that the tips and successes were genuine.

There's a thread on IH right now called "Why would a company lie about their revenue on IH?" [0] that perfectly exemplifies this. Earnings mean absolutely nothing if people lie. One bad number can spoil the whole lot. It shouldn't because that's just how statistics works, but it calls into question every non-verified number on the site. It's not motivating that people claim to get $x thousands of dollars per month without something backing it. It just starts to look like fake critical mass.

As counter-intuitive as it is, I'd like to see less company names. More founder names, less companies. Less "here's how I got my first users for SUPER PRODUCT" articles, because it feels like it's all just a way to promote SUPER PRODUCT. SUPER PRODUCT made $100k a month (and you've never heard of SUPER PRODUCT). That might help cut down on fake revenue numbers and inspire more integrity. As it stands, it seriously does feel like a part time ad forum.

[0]: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/why-would-a-company-lie-a...

I only ever read Indie Hackers when something is posted to HN and makes the front page. And when I saw today's post, I clicked through, read several of the vignettes (which read like a hybrid of a story and an advertisement), and wondered:

Isn't this basically the same thing that I read on Indie Hackers last time it was on HN?

Perhaps I just got unlucky and it happened to be very similar to the last IH post I read about on HN, but this was my reaction. It made me slightly curious to know if there was more to IH than this (and I can see now that there is).

But mostly I felt like the linked post was not terribly valuable, and that it was upvoted by people who had written a story of their own in the HN comments, and then upvoted to get more exposure.

Sorry if this is too cynical, but it's my honest feedback.

Yup, I visit IH no more. I feel there’s way too much noise now.

I find IH to still be incredibly valuable. Sure, the interviews/podcast are still the best part but, despite being relegated to the footer, they're hardly hidden! It's not like they've gone anywhere.

Willing to give the community some time to build up steam: these things are hard and take a long time. Better that they're starting now and working on improving it.

I am still a very active member of IH, read a lot of the posts and comment often. The thing that bothers me the most is that it is currently shifting from a group of people that are helping out each other to a place for people to share their (success) stories. Don't get me wrong there is currently plenty of both but it's shifting towards a more egocentric vibe.

Someone created a popular thread a while ago (3th most popular post of all time) discussing this precise thing [0]. People with posts asking for help, or just starting out (often not the most exciting content) would get lost in the noise and disappear, I often scroll down the 'new' tab a bit to catch those 0 comments posts but sometimes I am just not in a position to answer these, often due to inexperience/lack of expertise on the subject.

I don't know what the solution for this problem would be, to be honest I don't even really know what is causing the problem, an excess of 'wantrepreneurs', a problem with the audience or if the more successful IH-ers got tired of summing up the ways to monetize your side project, I don't know if a very strict 'FAQ - READ THIS BEFORE POSTING' is going to solve this or if it just needs more of a personal community feel but I do think the quality of IH as a forum is degrading by the month and that I am sad to see it do so. Fortunately there are currently plenty of gold nuggets to find between the plethora of posts that sometimes seem to resemble what is in my Medium feed.

[0] https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/indie-hacker-etiquette-no...

Haven't used IH a lot, but I do remember reading few the blogs when posted here and enjoying the interviews. It felt authentic and different content that you would often read on other blogs or website.

A month ago, I actually went back to read more but I had similar reaction that many here mentioned. Where I am I, what am I supposed to look at here? Even in the learn section now reads like self-help section of bookstore or like some health forum where people give out their "10 quick ways to lose weight" "this is how I made to #1 product hunt", which is not the content I'm not really interested in.

Both PH and IH communities seem to be to be obsessed about promoting, rather than building. Obviously marketing is important to any business, but it seems some of the energy might be better spent on the actual business and product and not writing blogs posts in these forums.

Unfortunately the internet is pretty efficient at turning useful signal into “marketing channel” noise. Not sure about IH specifically but all things go this way.

As indie entrepreneur IH is super valuable to me. I find podcasts most useful amongst all the content. You get lot of genuine, practical advice from people who have done it before. I don't even have to visit the IH website to consume this content (PlayerFM app works).

I agree with your observation that the maker community is little immature and forum discussion are not super high quality. I look at it as an opportunity to encourage and help people who are just starting out. In return hopefully somebody much ahead in the game would help me out. Karma. That's what community is, ain't it? Plus I like the positive vibe in the conversation there (vs. HN where people seem to want to bite each other).

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The problem with all these communities is they quickly turn into "marketers growth-hacking to other marketers". Just like ProductHunt which is truly a joke now.

The irony is the discussions always stress so much about solving a problem and all that. Then the submissions are all garbage sites.

I think in 2018 there is room for a much more private community without upvote/downvote/ranking and with stricter limitations about posting links and stuff.

Basically take away the problematic incentives and create a discussion focused community.

You could just list the submissions based on time like the old school forums.

Maybe the original idea behind IH was to provide success stories to learn from. It seems to have evolved though.

To me, IH is a community of people going through the same struggle. Some are just starting, some are in the thick of it, and some have made it to the other side. All of which have their own role in a community.

I see a lot of blind leading the blind comments, but I don't think it's about leading and following. It's about doing something together with people doing something similar.

For that reason, I still find value from IH.

I agree. It is almost exactly the same as r/startups and it's just ebook authors and newsletter owners marketing to themselves. The value of the forums is incredibly low, and the signal to noise ratio even lower. The interviews and podcast do still have value though.. But the forum, is a cesspool imo.

For me, I think IH has increased in value in some ways. They are doing more meetups, so its nice to be able to converse face to face with people. The newsletter provides curated summary of the best content, so you do not have to spend a ton of time in the forums. In general, the forum is a great place to ask questions and get great answers. It is more niche focused than say HN so your chances of getting an answers are certainly higher. The podcasts for me were much better in the beginning, but I do occasionally listen to one.

At some point, if your going to build something, you have to get off websites and just get your hands dirty building it.

I used to check it every day. I stopped reading it when they changed the home page to not include the latest interviews (the only interesting content IMO) and put filtering of them behind a login wall.