The "indie hacker" part is underselling the value of hooking into these marketplaces.
The Atlassian marketplace is how we're able to make draw.io/diagrams.net free everywhere else. We don't have to handle any licensing or billing and it's a commercial market where users expect to pay.
We generate 8 digits annually there with 5FTE people, you can build a medium sized company around just one of these marketplaces.
It’s a smart move for entrepreneurs who aren’t VC-backed to leverage marketplaces. How was your experience with the Atlassian Marketplace in terms of integration and marketing? I’ve seen many big companies advertise that they help with marketing resources but I assume it’s exaggerated. I presume you’d still have to do the legwork, which is fine.
Ie. Building this thing where your platform gets essentially free product research data and can decide you are a feature they will build themselves at any time?
Are there agreements in place that provide meaningful protection against this?
Funny enough, I reversed engineered your numbers a few days ago. I guesstimated at least 3 million ARR with 2 - 10 FTEs. From revenue per FTE perspective you have the most impressive numbers I have ever seen!
I work directly with founders of B2B SaaS (run a design a [1] UI/UX design company with a focus on dev teams) which gives me a good idea of the landscape.
The biggest opportunities seem to be in the edtech space, remote working and any other type of category which facilitates remote work.
If you are looking for opportunities, try to map out where your skills and interest can contribute in a remote / wfh economy.
I’ve seen a number of companies scramble to keep up with growth. Others doubled revenue.
FYI there is a typo in the CTAs. It should be "Request Availability" instead of "Request Availibility". I'd fix that because it doesn't look very professional. Otherwise the concept is nice, makes a lot of sense.
I work with Salesforce,so I'm quite familiar with the ecosystem. I think a lot people on HN would have a hard time believing the kind of apps that exist on AppExchange and the number of companies that are willing to spend money on them.
I've not worked with Salesforce for a long time, but it used to have the worst language I've ever used. Some sort of crazy Java/SQL hybrid. And the dev tool for it was written in Adobe Air.
I work at one of the mammoth consulting firms doing Salesforce implementation work for Fortune 50 enterprises, and you would be amazed at the amount of client value derived (and the # of licenses sold) utilizing the AppExchange
Hey, I've done a lot of work in the Salesforce owned (adjacent) Heroku marketplace. I'd love to connect and chat sometime about the ecosystem if you'd be up for it.
Given the number of companies already leveraging the marketplace, do you still see opportunities for new companies to come in? And are most opportunities focused on a vertical niche?
I was looking through the Shopify marketplace a while back and I had the thought that channel partnerships/marketing is probably an amazing way to bootstrap a SaaS. Glad to see someone else had the same idea and did the due diligence to collect a good chunk of these. I'm bootstrapping something consumer facing now, but I've of course thought about "pivoting to B2B" if the opportunity plays out. It's nice to remember that these channels provide ample concrete space to help figure out the distribution side of things beyond paid acquisition. Now paid acquisition is great and all for VC backed companies, but for indie hackers, listening to and iterating /based/ off of the channel itself seems to be a real lifeline. You don't have to worry about the marginal acquisition costs that would otherwise price you out of the game entirely.
Looking at a couple of comments here, I'm seeing some eye popping figures from folks who pulled off using channel marketing for their SaaS. It's very heartening to see.
Correct me if I'm wrong but unless you're already an established brand that people actively seek out, or part of the first X listings in a category of a thing everyone wants (i.e. SEO, Ads, accounting for webshops), wouldn't you already be too late on these market places?
This is the definition of an indie hacker. They take established products/tools and then strip them to improve one area and sell it onto other indie hackers at an 'affordable' price which requires you to sell your soul for $8 per month.
Imagine having 10 paying customers giving you $80 per month. You need to provide some level of support, deal with charge backs which can get you MATCH banned so payment processing becomes near enough impossible, update the product and market it too.
There could be categories of things people want without many solutions in some marketplaces. For example, in the Hubspot marketplace, there are many WhatsApp widgets in their marketplace. Someone made one for the Pipedrive marketplace and it’s doing very well. There would be similar missing apps for Pipedrive, or there would be other platforms where a WhatsApp widget could do well.
Yes, this is definitely something to keep in mind. Especially when bootstrapping (what the post seems to be aimed at), building integrations with a marketplace can be a significant time investment, at the expense of working on other marketing or product improvements. Established marketplaces for popular categories are going to see diminished returns pretty quickly.
For example, we were one of the first to integrate with the Google Workspace Marketplace when it launched many years ago (called Google Apps Marketplace back then). It brought us a lot of leads in the early days. Today, discoverability has become a real problem. The "luck"-component in being featured in any search result or when browsing the marketplace is now so large that I'm not sure if for new products it would still outweigh the work of building the integration and keeping up to date with inevitable breaking API changes.
Overall it can be an amazing channel for growth though, so it's mostly about carefully picking one where customers might find you, rather than just going for something that looks promising because it's big. There's a big first-mover advantage when launching on a newish platform (and as the list proves, there's many new ones).
No. I created an app in one of these (a year ago). I have 5 serious competitors. Each are decent apps that have been in the game longer than mine - mine is not necessarily better, just with a slightly different angle.
It has about $3.5k MRR, is still growing and I spend maybe 5-10 hours a month on it.
Not necessarily. Also, there are lots of big players that don't care about small clients with their 'minimum 50 licences' approach. That's where the opportunities are.
We do a lot of work with SaaS businesses helping them with product design and if needed capital and development.
Our primary work is in remote work for non-desktop people and educational/video space plus live ecommerce which seems to be the areas that are really thriving right now.
Even if covid passes organizations will still be looking for tools that makes them resillient to that kind of disruption again.
So plenty of areas to dig into.
(P.s. If you have ideas and are looking for product design or seed capital just DM me would love to talk with you)
We are already listed on Slack marketplace and I can say that it allowed us to onboard several first users and still we are getting organic installs every day.
But one should mention that in order for such marketplace listings to be efficient you still have to work on SEO and other marketing channels.
I've been curating remote jobs from hundreds of remote job boards and directly sending it to job seekers to help during their job search. I'm trying to see how can I use this data to do B2B sales. Is there a market place that I can submit the remote jobs data that can be helpful.
Create a sense of camaraderie that comes from working with real people on your team, even if all remote. I am building a Clubhouse for remote teams, Drop-in audio for work, It’s the easiest way to spark a quick conversation with a single click.
https://tappy.so/?ref=rm
I would add Bitly in Marketing as well. They have more than $100 million revenue per year. Link shortening has got a bad rap but there is plenty of demand for branded links.
I have spent last few months talking to unsatisfied customers of Bitly and following this space and I see a general disappointment with UX, lack of flexibility and high costs associated with the platform.
My service https://blanq.io has tried to address these but I feel there is plenty of space left for more players to enter in. It is relatively easy to get started and scale the service. The barrier of entry is quite low.
But you would need to differentiate your platform - there are like a 1000 clones of Bitly that pretty much do the same.
I've found for my business marketplaces are key to get exposure to your potential users.
A few more you might add are package managers, such as NPM. If you have a dev focused company and provide SDKs, those are great places where your users can find you.
One of the hosts of this podcast (https://softwaresocial.dev/) is building a file upload widget and is getting most of their early trials from the Heroku marketplace. Worth a listen and maybe even reaching out to compare experiences
People define it differently, but generally I think of indie hackers as people, usually technical, who are building or are aiming to build smaller tech businesses. They generally either bootstrap or raise small amounts of money. A lot of indie hackers are would be happy with a business that makes 5-10k USD per month per founder
Generally speaking, someone who is starting a tech business with no intention of taking investment (esp. VC).
Many indie hackers are trying to avoid having a boss and/or trying to avoid selling time for money (as others have said), but some do want to grow relatively large businesses. I believe that DHH and Base Camp in general in its early days would have been considered “indie hackers”.
Someone who spends their free time building a single SaaS tool for other indie hackers needs. Then struggling to gain any traction and deciding to repeat the process over and over.
davidjgraph|5 years ago
The Atlassian marketplace is how we're able to make draw.io/diagrams.net free everywhere else. We don't have to handle any licensing or billing and it's a commercial market where users expect to pay.
We generate 8 digits annually there with 5FTE people, you can build a medium sized company around just one of these marketplaces.
tixocloud|5 years ago
shostack|5 years ago
Ie. Building this thing where your platform gets essentially free product research data and can decide you are a feature they will build themselves at any time?
Are there agreements in place that provide meaningful protection against this?
orolle|5 years ago
moltar|5 years ago
alex_duf|5 years ago
krm01|5 years ago
The biggest opportunities seem to be in the edtech space, remote working and any other type of category which facilitates remote work.
If you are looking for opportunities, try to map out where your skills and interest can contribute in a remote / wfh economy.
I’ve seen a number of companies scramble to keep up with growth. Others doubled revenue.
[1] https://fairpixels.pro
juliendc|5 years ago
k__|5 years ago
I want to build a B2B SaaS for remote work this year and next week I will start interviewing potential customers.
atlasunshrugged|5 years ago
aj_nikhil|5 years ago
[deleted]
cosmodisk|5 years ago
mattmanser|5 years ago
Is it still like that or have they moved on?
Workaholic_87|5 years ago
michaelbuckbee|5 years ago
My email's in my profile.
tixocloud|5 years ago
yowlingcat|5 years ago
Looking at a couple of comments here, I'm seeing some eye popping figures from folks who pulled off using channel marketing for their SaaS. It's very heartening to see.
dstick|5 years ago
melomal|5 years ago
Imagine having 10 paying customers giving you $80 per month. You need to provide some level of support, deal with charge backs which can get you MATCH banned so payment processing becomes near enough impossible, update the product and market it too.
khuknows|5 years ago
wim|5 years ago
For example, we were one of the first to integrate with the Google Workspace Marketplace when it launched many years ago (called Google Apps Marketplace back then). It brought us a lot of leads in the early days. Today, discoverability has become a real problem. The "luck"-component in being featured in any search result or when browsing the marketplace is now so large that I'm not sure if for new products it would still outweigh the work of building the integration and keeping up to date with inevitable breaking API changes.
Overall it can be an amazing channel for growth though, so it's mostly about carefully picking one where customers might find you, rather than just going for something that looks promising because it's big. There's a big first-mover advantage when launching on a newish platform (and as the list proves, there's many new ones).
danlugo92|5 years ago
albertgoeswoof|5 years ago
heyoo|5 years ago
It has about $3.5k MRR, is still growing and I spend maybe 5-10 hours a month on it.
Also, I had no brand before that.
cosmodisk|5 years ago
callamdelaney|5 years ago
marban|5 years ago
m00dy|5 years ago
ThomPete|5 years ago
Our primary work is in remote work for non-desktop people and educational/video space plus live ecommerce which seems to be the areas that are really thriving right now.
Even if covid passes organizations will still be looking for tools that makes them resillient to that kind of disruption again.
So plenty of areas to dig into.
(P.s. If you have ideas and are looking for product design or seed capital just DM me would love to talk with you)
fasicle|5 years ago
"Our primary work is in remote work for non-desktop people and educational/video space plus a live ecommerce"
sergeyone|5 years ago
We are already listed on Slack marketplace and I can say that it allowed us to onboard several first users and still we are getting organic installs every day.
But one should mention that in order for such marketplace listings to be efficient you still have to work on SEO and other marketing channels.
abinaya_rl|5 years ago
tabletzone|5 years ago
alex_duf|5 years ago
start123|5 years ago
I have spent last few months talking to unsatisfied customers of Bitly and following this space and I see a general disappointment with UX, lack of flexibility and high costs associated with the platform.
My service https://blanq.io has tried to address these but I feel there is plenty of space left for more players to enter in. It is relatively easy to get started and scale the service. The barrier of entry is quite low.
But you would need to differentiate your platform - there are like a 1000 clones of Bitly that pretty much do the same.
cosmodisk|5 years ago
jack_riminton|5 years ago
m12k|5 years ago
gbourne|5 years ago
A few more you might add are package managers, such as NPM. If you have a dev focused company and provide SDKs, those are great places where your users can find you.
ArturT|5 years ago
Anyone using Heroku Marketplace as well? Any ideas how did you approach promoting your add-on? Thanks.
khuknows|5 years ago
mherrmann|5 years ago
exdeve|5 years ago
bilekas|5 years ago
k__|5 years ago
I once had the impression that an indie hacker is a one person dev shop that sells a software product instead of their time.
But lately, I saw many people use that term for business people on the look for the next hustle.
purerandomness|5 years ago
Patrick McKenzie (patio11), who famously built and sold his "Bingo Card Creator", and blogged about the process, is a "prototypical" Indie Hacker.
The ecosystem consists of communities like [1] and [2], podcasts (search for "Indie Hackers"), and conferences like [3]
[0] https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_s...
[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/
[2] https://getmakerlog.com/
[3] https://microconf.com/
temp0826|5 years ago
khuknows|5 years ago
People define it differently, but generally I think of indie hackers as people, usually technical, who are building or are aiming to build smaller tech businesses. They generally either bootstrap or raise small amounts of money. A lot of indie hackers are would be happy with a business that makes 5-10k USD per month per founder
csa|5 years ago
Many indie hackers are trying to avoid having a boss and/or trying to avoid selling time for money (as others have said), but some do want to grow relatively large businesses. I believe that DHH and Base Camp in general in its early days would have been considered “indie hackers”.
melomal|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
Pete-Codes|5 years ago