The Indie Hackers Podcast & My Path to Authentic Building
The Indie Hackers Podcast
The Indie Hackers podcast is a full-stack community, encompassing entrepreneurs, creators and more. They haven't been producing podcasts openly anymore, but I fully recommend going through their episodes anyway—they're goldmines of real revenue numbers, honest failure stories, and practical strategies from founders who've actually done it.
I would especially recommend the two podcasts with Ghost founder, which is the platform I chose to build my website:
Why I Want to Become an Indie Hacker
My husband was my first serious boyfriend. I was 19 at the time and I thought most ideas around relationships were hypocrisies. I hated the games. In the first 6 months, everyone around me said that I should play games with him, to hook him. Instead, I showed myself fully vulnerable, calling him in despair when I felt insecure that he didn't want to be my boyfriend, even if I didn't believe in having boyfriends. I guess emotionally focused therapists would call those attachment requests. Normal people would just cal me crazy.
Instead of trying to research methods to follow other people's paths, I created my own. I decided if I hadn't failed in any relationship before, I would choose to fail this one my own way, learn, and then decide whether to follow others. We have been together for almost 20 years now, so I still haven't learned the importance of playing romantic games.
I feel the same about my business. I am doing things differently—I don't have a formal business plan, a clearly defined target audience, or even a traditional "purpose statement." But I want to be fully authentic. If I fail, I will learn and iterate.
This is why indie hacking calls to me. It's about creating your own path to freedom and building something meaningful without conforming to external expectations or giving up control to investors who might push you away from your authentic vision.
Ghost: Following Your Own Way
Ghost represents everything I believe about authentic building. Founded by John O'Nolan, Ghost is a distributed non-profit foundation which gives away all of its intellectual property under a permissive MIT license. The company has no investors and, in fact, no owners of any kind.
What makes Ghost's story so compelling is O'Nolan's fundamental approach. Instead of asking "What's the next unicorn I can flip for maximum profit?" John asked himself: "How can I build a company that I want to work for throughout my life?" He did things because they felt right at the time, not because he followed third-person recommendations or conventional startup wisdom.
They currently generate around $7.5M in annual revenue and have been profitable and sustainable for the past 12 years. As an open source believer, John found that combining the NGO model with open source in a profitable way created the ideal structure—not because some business guru told him to, but because it aligned with his values.
The company operates on a beautiful principle: Ghost was set up as a non-profit foundation so that it would always be true to its users, rather than shareholders or investors. Their legal constitution ensures that the company can never be bought or sold, and one hundred percent of their revenue is reinvested into the product and the community.
Like enlightened masters do with their disciples, O'Nolan recognizes his path might not be others' paths. He's living his dream instead of chasing "the" dream—proving that there's a different way to build meaningful, sustainable businesses that serve people rather than just maximizing shareholder value.
Now it is time I carve out my own path.