The indie hacker scene was supposed to be a refuge — a place where developers could escape the startup grind to build sustainable, autonomous projects. Instead, it’s become a bootstrapped parody of hustle culture: growth hacks instead of blitzscaling, content calendars instead of pitch decks, audience-chasing instead of actual product insight.
If you’ve tried following the playbook and felt like you were spinning your wheels — it’s not you. The advice is broken.
1. Validation Theater
“Validate your idea before you build.” It’s treated like gospel. But most successful products didn’t begin with validation — they began with obsession. They were built by people who couldn’t not build them.
Validation, in practice, often looks like procrastination: fake landing pages, mock pricing pages, surveys to Twitter mutuals. It’s theater. The people insisting you validate first are often doing it because they don’t want to build.
You’re a developer. Your unfair advantage is that you can ship. Not run A/B tests on vaporware. The most honest signal is building something real and seeing what happens. Feedback is for refinement — not permission.
2. Audience-First is a Trap
Another sacred cow: “Build an audience first.” But no one tells you that audience-first often means product-second. You start building what plays well on Twitter — not what matters.
Your brain rewires to think in threads, not systems. You chase engagement over insight. You tailor your roadmap to fit a content loop instead of a real need.
It’s a dangerous game. It rewards mimicry and penalizes originality. Worse, it makes you dependent on platforms you don’t own. Building an audience is fine — if it supports something real. Content isn’t a business model unless you’re a content creator.
If you’re a builder, build. Let the audience follow.
3. Indie ≠ Bootstrap VC
Most “indie” advice is just Silicon Valley ideology with cheaper overhead. Same fixation on scale. Same addiction to MRR graphs. Just swap investor updates for income tweets.
But real independence isn’t about trading one treadmill for another. You don’t need to automate everything, maximize every funnel, or hit some imaginary ARR milestone.
You need freedom. Autonomy. The ability to wake up and work on something you care about, without pitching it to a committee.
4. Build Weird, Durable Things
The best indie projects are weird. Small. Personal. They solve a real problem in a way only the builder truly understands. They’re not designed to scale. They’re not optimized for virality. And that’s why they work.
They’re not competing with a hundred clones in the same niche. They endure because someone gives a damn.
Don’t chase what’s trendy. Don’t optimize for exit slides. Optimize for existence. Build something that shouldn’t work but somehow does — because it’s yours, and you care enough to keep it alive.
The real indie hacker edge isn’t lean validation or audience hacks. It’s independence of thought.
Build from that, and you’ll build something worth keeping.