Career progression of the indiehacker

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Jul 16, 2025

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indiehacker-career-progression

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Problems are everywhere and always will be. Alfred Adler argued that every problem is an interpersonal one. So, even as living standards rise, people will still feel pain and will pay to stop it. For most of history, we’ve had middlemen (from feudal lords to managers) who organized those in pain with those who could help. But the layers have kept thinning. Lower barriers from software, the internet, and AI now allow one person to ship in a weekend what previously took entire teams months.

For centuries, a “career” meant a stable job and paycheck. Capitalists built wealth through labor arbitrage and leverage from branding, vendor lock-in, networks, and logistics. But that model is changing. Small teams, even just one person, can now solve problems directly for customers and benefit from this leverage. However, we've not really explored what a life of direct problem-solving entails. What does career progression mean for an indie hacker - if such a thing exists?

We’ll start at the beginning. Carl Jung noticed that the games that absorb us in childhood point to the work that puts us in a state of flow later on, and I suspect that’s as good a place as any to begin. Building tiny apps, joining weekend hackathons with friends, fixing small pains you feel yourself. Each attempt reveals which problems excite you and how users respond. Spending some time inside a team that already ships good work too; watching how they work, launch and talk fills gaps your own projects miss. In the end, you only need two skills: building something useful and selling it.

When you know the kinds of problems you enjoy solving, you can start climbing the leverage ladder. Freelancing swaps your hours for money just like an entry-level job. Running a small studio that uses other people’s hours is analogous to middle management. Owning a product that sells while you sleep is the indie version of senior leadership because systems, not people, do most of the work. You move up when the income from the current step covers the cost of exploring the next one.

A often overlooked benefit companies provide is structure, feedback, and colleagues, so indie hackers must recreate these supports on their own. A short list of user and revenue numbers becomes your manager. Friends from hackathons, Discord or WhatsApp groups become hallway chat. A quarterly meet-up or a solo retreat can replace the company off-site. The thread that runs through both paths is the same: keep learning and stay around people who sharpen you.

The timeline is familiar too. Years zero to two mirror a junior role: you release hobby projects, freelance for clients and maybe keep a part-time job while your skills grow. Years two to four feel like mid-level work: one project or client covers living costs and you drop the day job. Years four to six are senior level: you focus on the product that shows real pull, add great distribution and perhaps hire contractors. After year six you are effectively an indie director. You can widen the market, start a new product or teach what you know. The ladder keeps going, but now the rungs are yours to place.

We are in an era of great leverage. We will only continue to see more people swap payroll for products. At ElevenLabs we scaled to ~$50 m ARR with a core team of fewer than ten - and it could have been done with fewer than five. Many will bounce back to jobs, but enough will stick to make the world more interesting.