How 150 personal emails sparked a community of 60,000 entrepreneurs 💻 Courtland Allen, Founder of Indie Hackers

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Episode at a glance:

GUEST: Courtland Allen

COMMUNITY: Indie Hackers

HOSTS: Bailey Richardson & Kevin Huynh

Show Notes

On this episode of the podcast, we’re talking to Courtland Allen, the founder of Indie Hackers, a primarily online community for independent entrepreneurs. By “independent” I mean these are people who are building businesses that make their money from customers. They’re not backed by investors.

Sitting down to learn from Courtland at Stripe HQ.

What started as 150 personal email invitations to Courtland’s friends and some strangers has grown today to a community of more than 60,000 entrepreneurs.

These people come together on Indie Hackers to share valuable stories and insights or tap each other’s inspiration and advice. Sometimes, they get together in person too. Last month there were 55 Indie Hacker meetups all around the world.

We sat down to talk to Courtland about getting his community off the ground, why they are open and explicit about revenue numbers with one another, and how he’s approached building a business with Indie Hackers.

While you’re listening to our interview with Courtland, key in on some of our favorite insights:

When you’re getting started, personal outreach is crucial.

In our interview, Courtland references Paul Graham’s startup wisdom to “do things that don’t scale” when you’re starting out in order to get inertia going, and the same advice applies to community building. Courtland spent hours and hours of his early days researching the first entrepreneurs he’d ask to interview and people to notify about his new community. These were people he knew would appreciate the space he built, and would show up for something new.

Put a spotlight on your community members.

A whole chapter of our book is about how communities tell stories. One common theme: great community leaders don’t tell stories about news at headquarters. They tell stories about their members in order to educate and inspire one another. The core value of Indie Hackers comes from this spotlighting of members. Courtland’s work revolves around surfacing independent entrepreneurs—revealing these otherwise hidden people and their stories to one another so they can share learnings and support.

People want to talk about the thing that’s not being talked about.

Courtland had a key insight early on: that entrepreneurs would benefit from knowing each others revenue numbers. This piece of information gives context to advice, allowing Indie Hackers to evaluate whether or not one entrepreneur’s insights are transferable to their business. Courtland couldn’t find these numbers anywhere online, so he decided to make sharing your revenue a requirement for Indie Hackers. Though a few established founders Courtland reached out to early on refused to share their revenue numbers, many others found his request for honesty deeply refreshing. The early Indie Hackers community grew out of this big, underserved group of entrepreneurs who agreed that financial transparency was collectively valuable.

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👋🏻Say hi to Courtland and Learn more about Indie Hackers.

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Get Together is produced by the team at People & Company.

We published a book and we’ve worked with organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider as strategy partners, bringing confidence to how they’re building communities.

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