Thanks for the reply, csallen. I hope my comments don't detract in any way from how awesome this is for IndieHackers.com and yourself, and the potential good it could do.
Let me clarify what I mean by IndieHackers no longer being part of the movement. Obviously IndieHackers.com is still an invaluable resource for small businesses to share and learn. The difference now is that you, and IndieHackers.com, are no longer in the same position as those participating in the community. You won't feel the same pain.
That struggle to find sponsorships and keep the cash flowing is in many ways the beating heart of every small business. That's the major pain that everyone feels. You no longer experience that.
Obviously that's a great relief to yourself, and obviously that frees you to work more exclusively on the content, which is the soul of your business. So that's in many ways a great thing! But since you yourself won't be experiencing that pain anymore, you may, in time, end up introducing bias into the content. That's my fear and concern. That you'll forget how difficult it is for small businesses to keep the cash flowing, and so color your interviews, tending to focus on other aspects of business.
In particular your recent podcasts have enabled you to interject your own thoughts and struggles into the conversations (compared to the website interviews which are 100% focused on the interviewee's story). That's been great; you've always had something interesting to say. But that means that, going forward, since you won't be struggling with cash flow, what you interject won't be perfectly aligned with the kinds of things other entrepreneurs will be struggling with or need to hear.
I hope that makes more sense? Put another way ... it's like rap. Rap is most often about the struggles that young, improvised people face on a day to day basis. But ... most of the rap those people are going to hear is from successful rappers ... who have a ton of money and live lavish life styles. It's a bit ... weird. That's not _necessarily_ a bad thing. In many ways that gives people hope, that they too could crawl their way out of poverty and become successful doing something they love. But sometimes it can leave the rappers disconnected.
(I'm speaking more about rap from 10 or more years ago. Nowadays I feel like rappers just said "fuck it" and rap about their current lifestyles. Smokin' reefer, bangin' hookers, and hanging with Avicii ... stuff people can really relate to!)