Indie Hackers is a wonderful community for founders, a vast ocean of shared knowledge and a place to showcase your product journey. A lot of people are sharing their products there along with the revenue, often verified by Stripe. We analyzed the available data to check how much revenue are those products making and what are the most money making categories!
At the time of our analysis, there were total of 937 products with Stripe verified revenue. The information we gathered to make this analysis are revenue and product's categories.
Most of the products don't make any revenue at all
A prevalent thinking is that making money as an indie developer is hard and most of the products end up with no revenue at all. Products on Indie Hackers seem to confirm this as more than 54% of the products are not making any revenue at all.
You can play with the slider to see how quickly the number of products decreases as the MRR goes up.
Revenue histogram
Let's now take a closer look at those products which actually do make money. Here's how much monthly revenue products are making.
Best performing categories
A product on Indie Hackers can belong to one or more categories. The boxplot below shows monthly revenue per category. Categories are sorted by median MRR. Please note that some of those categories only contain a single product. Also, we have excluded outliers. Try checking the box to see how it impacts the plot!
Conclusion
It appears that success in the world of indie developers is an outlier business. In every chart you can see above, outliers completely overwhelm the data. Only around 5% of the products we analyzed generate a monthly revenue exceeding ~$8,333 (around ~$100k/year) which is not that hard to earn as a software engineer in a full time job. Nevertheless, starting own company around the product provides an excitement and still a lot of people are pulled towards it, including us!
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