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IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

indiehackers.com

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Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#191

Post by limelight »

ploggingdev wrote: post #15

First of all, congrats to csallen, I have been following your journey from the day you launched on HN and it was fascinating to follow along. If you haven't read his month in review posts, highly recommended. I hope it's not taboo to speculate on the acquisition price, so here's my take : * extrapolating a $5k/month revenue to a year = $60k/year * acquisition price is roughly 2-4x yearly revenue so $120k to $240k * P…

> * Plus a full time salary at roughly $120k/year

There's absolutely no way that's correct. It'd basically be pushing csallen to leave (he's an experienced YC founder, MIT grad, and full-stack developer). His market salary is way more than $120k/yr.

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#192

Post by fpgaminer »

mezod wrote: post #176
fpgaminer wrote: post #55

Congrats to csallen. This makes me ... feel weird. Not sure what it is exactly. Let me explain. I'm an aspiring indie hacker. Currently soaking in the relaxation of a much needed sabbatical following my previous 8 year long employment (what a ride that was). When I'm ready, I'm going switch gears and devote myself to starting a bunch of small "indie hacker" type projects. I've been on HN for quite awhile now and I al…

the word is "betrayed". And you are not alone in feeling in such way. IH outright lost its essence and what gave sense to it.

I don't feel betrayed, no. There are plenty of companies interviewed on IndieHackers.com that started as small shops and eventually got acquired. I've got nothing against that, obviously. It's a great opportunity to cash out and do something else fun.

It's just weird to have IndieHackers.com, which I sort of viewed as a bastion of the movement, suddenly no longer part of it.

At the end of the day ... I'd probably do the same thing as csallen, if I were in the same position. He talked several times about how time consuming it was to find sponsors for the site and podcast. As a consumer of the site, I started noticing more and more ads showing up and interrupting the content. Hopefully Stripe will help reduce that. It wasn't clear from the OP if they intend to do away with all sponsorship. That would be really nice!

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#193

Post by smacktoward »

econner wrote: post #152
csallen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I would personally love to share, there are of course other employees working at Stripe and other acquisitions that Stripe will make in the future, which complicates things. What I will do is try to be as transparent as I possibly can about what's going on behind-the-scenes, traffic numbers, product and growth strategy, etc. I've always thought it was cool that I got to talk about growing Indie Hackers its…

Why do those factors prevent you from sharing? Transparency is difficult, but isn't that the whole point of Indie Hackers?

The logical assumption would be that they gave IH a very sweet deal, much sweeter than they'd generally offer an acquisition target with similar financials. So if they release the details, future acquisition targets will expect similarly sweet deals, which Stripe has no interest in seeing.

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#194

Post by itwy »

willbw wrote: post #190
itwy wrote: post #189

Isn't it ironic the details of the acquisition isn't being transparently shared? From Indie Hackers site: "Anyone with a business or side project that's generating at least $300/mo in revenue. There's no upper limit. Of course, you have to be willing to share your revenue — the point of this site is transparency!" Source: https://www.indiehackers.com/submit I think we have the "right" to know what the transaction ent…

Why do you think you have that right? Honestly curious.

The product took off thanks to the HN community. Hence the "right". He is simply a hypocrite if he doesn't share that.

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#195

Post by [deleted] »

daveheq wrote: post #159

Hacker: "a person who uses computers to gain unauthorized access to data." This word is not a good connotation, and a company that's an online/mobile payment gateway buying a company with "hacker" in its name that doesn't seem to understand the definition of the word "hacker" doesn't look good. It wouldn't matter to me what IndieHackers did, I would have passed them up just because they use a nefarious word in their…

[deleted]

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#196

Post by AlphaSite »

posguy wrote: post #153
garaetjjte wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For example, Centurylink lets you pay online via debit card with just the card # alone. No CVV, address, expiration date, etc. WTF? It is amazing that card industry still works with such horrible security.

Debit networks are wholly separate from Visa/Mastercard, different ballgame entirely. You get to deal with a few hundred tiny debit networks that replace Visa/Mastercard/Amex/Discover for processing the payment. Centurylink has your name/address/SSN and can cut your services off at a whim if anything happens, so fraud would be inadvisable.

US debut networks. UK debit is via Visa, MasterCard etc typically.

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#197

Post by manigandham »

superasn wrote: post #46

One of my favorite sites that provided real value. I guess IndieHackers did a lot of things right which created such fast growth with a quick exit. 1) Great design. Really professional feel (even though it just a wordpress blog) 2) Regular updated content to keep visitors coming back. 3) Highly targeted to hacker community / product creators - no wonder it was featured over and over again on the front page 4) In buil…

It's a custom built app. The about section has the details: https://www.indiehackers.com/about

> Indie Hackers is an Ember.js app on the front-end. On the back-end, I'm using Ember FastBoot for server-side rendering. The app runs on a Node.js server managed by AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Most pages are cached via CloudFront. I did all the design myself. I built the blog from scratch. I built the forum from scratch, too, and I use Firebase to store the data and accounts. All of the blog and interview content is stored in JSON and Markdown files that I host on S3.

Re: IndieHackers.com acquired by Stripe

#199

Post by pharrlax »

hsod wrote: post #175

I've been reading HN for 5 or 6 years and this feels very strange to me. From the comments in here by the principles it kind of seems like Stripe is doing IH a favor. A few things that stick in my craw: 1. This seems like it would be damaging to IH's brand image (since it will now be perceived as a PR arm of Stripe, and it's all about independence) 2. Stripe's stated goal here is simply to ensure the success of IH in…

>IH was apparently very big on financial transparency, yet the principles are being decidedly opaque about financials in this thread.

Financial transparency about profit from a bootstrapped startup is a different from financial transparency about a contract between two parties. Secrecy around the latter is a little more understandable.

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