The indie hacker hierarchy is bullshit, and I fell for it anyway. I bought another domain this week. I don’t actually need it. I already have a business that works, one that pays me every month, serves a real audience, and has been running for almost a decade. Wtf. But I bought it anyway because brainstorming ideas with Claude and browsing Namecheap at night kinda feels like building. I tweeted about this recently and the gist was that the newsletters are the business and everything else is me trying to build something that feels more “legitimate” for no good reason. A lot of people saw it and the replies were full of builders admitting the same thing about their own situations. Sketching out a new SaaS idea feels like progress, like I’m doing something important. Meanwhile, the thing that actually pays my bills is sitting in my inbox, waiting for me to write tomorrow’s email. Sketching out a new SaaS idea feels like progress, like I’m doing something important. Meanwhile, the thing that actually pays my bills is sitting in my inbox, waiting for me to write tomorrow’s email. So I’ve been trying to figure out why a profitable, sustainable business that my co-founder and I built from scratch still doesn’t feel like enough. The Unspoken Hierarchy There’s an unspoken hierarchy in the indie builder world and it goes something like this... SaaS at the top, then apps, then marketplaces, then courses, then info products, and somewhere near the bottom, newsletters. The ranking has nothing to do with profitability. The ranking has nothing to do with profitability. A newsletter generating $10k per month in profit outperforms the vast majority of SaaS products that get celebrated on Twitter. But profitability was never the point of the ranking. The point is what sounds impressive when you describe what you do at a dinner party or in your Twitter bio. “I run a software product company” lands differently than “I send emails for a living.” Maybe I need to reframe that so I do sound more interesting at parties, I don't know. I’ve been building things online since 2005. I’ve shipped products in Rails, React, PHP, Nextjs, Go, you name it. I’ve built and sold a photography brand, I run multiple newsletters with a combined subscriber base in the tens of thousands. Hell yeah, right? Not so fast. Despite all of that, I’ve internalized this hierarchy so deeply that my own profitable business feels like something I should be graduating from rather than doubling down on. Researchers who study entrepreneurial identity have found that founders frequently define their legitimacy through the type of business they run rather than the outcomes it produces. entrepreneurial identity The social status attached to specific business models shapes how founders see themselves, often more powerfully than their actual financial results do. I know this intellectually. I’ve even written about the absurdity of revenue as a vanity metric, and yet my brain still won’t let me feel good about the newsletter being the main thing. absurdity of revenue as a vanity metric The Numbers Don’t Care About Your Ego Here’s what a newsletter business actually looks like from the inside. You write content, you network with other newsletter operators, you send an email to people who asked to receive it, some percentage of those people buy something, and money shows up in your account. The overhead is minimal, there’s no server scaling, no enterprise sales cycle, no customer success team, no onboarding flow to optimize. Compare that to the SaaS fantasy that keeps pulling me toward buying new domain names. You spend months building, then months marketing, and then maybe a handful of users trickle in before some of them churn immediately. Then you’re debugging edge cases and answering support tickets and realizing your unit economics don’t work because it costs you $80 to acquire a customer who pays $12 per month and cancels after three months. We’ve all seen the fucking MRR screenshots on Twitter. The $50k MRR number means nothing if it costs $45k to generate. MRR screenshots But a newsletter with low overhead and twelve years of audience trust behind it? That’s a business with real margins and real staying power. My ego doesn’t care about any of that though. My ego doesn’t care about any of that though. My ego wants to build a SaaS because SaaS sounds like a real technology company and newsletters sound like a side hustle. The math disagrees, loudly, every single month. Obviously, running newsletters is real work. From content writing to networking, affiliate partnerships, newsletter swaps, paid ads, and creating lead magnets and free assets, there's a lot of work involved into running a newsletter successfully. Why Brainstorming Feels Like Building I’ve been thinking about why I’d rather sketch product ideas than write tomorrow’s email, and I think the answer is embarrassingly simple. Brainstorming carries zero risk of rejection. Brainstorming carries zero risk of rejection. Nobody can tell you your idea is bad if you never ship it. You can spend an entire Saturday evaluating competitors, wireframing features, and picking a tech stack, and at the end of the day you’ll feel productive without having exposed yourself to any judgment from the market. Your newsletter, on the other hand, gets judged every single time you hit send. In my case that's every single day on some newsletters. Open rates tell you whether the subject line worked, click rates tell you whether the content delivered, and revenue tells you whether people trust you enough to buy. That feedback loop has been running for over a decade and the verdict has been overwhelmingly positive, but validated work feels like maintenance while speculative work just feels like ambition. There’s a well-studied tendency for people to prefer tasks with uncertain but potentially exciting outcomes over tasks with reliable but predictable ones, even when the predictable option is objectively more valuable. well-studied tendency We’re wired to chase the new thing because novelty triggers a dopamine response that routine competence simply doesn’t. That’s the trap though. Sending another email to my photography list doesn’t trigger the same neurochemical response as imagining a new product. So I keep chasing the feeling of building something new while the thing I already built does the actual work of generating revenue. Brainstorming is building’s stunt double. It looks like the real thing from a distance but it never actually takes the hit. Maintenance Mode Reckoning I recently tweeted that I’m putting a few projects in maintenance mode. Not because they failed (well, some of them kind of did) but because the attention they consume costs more than they’ll ever return. putting a few projects in maintenance mode This has been one of the harder decisions I’ve made as a builder. This has been one of the harder decisions I’ve made as a builder. Every product I shelve feels like a small concession, even when the math is painfully obvious. The endowment effect is real, and we overvalue things simply because we own them. endowment effect is real That bias is powerful enough with coffee mugs. When the thing you’re overvaluing is a product you built with your own hands, that you stayed up late debugging, that you remember the exact moment it first worked, the bias becomes almost impossible to override. I have products in my portfolio that I keep alive because killing them feels like admitting defeat. products in my portfolio The rational move is to let five things die so two things can thrive. But the rational move requires accepting that those five things, each of which has my fingerprints all over, aren’t coming back. And the two things that survive and thrive? They’re the newsletters. The thing I keep trying to move past. Letting go of projects is hard on its own terms. Letting go of them in favor of the business your ego doesn’t respect is a special kind of reckoning. What “Legit” Actually Means I’ve been using the word “legit” as if it means something objective, like there’s an authority somewhere who stamps certain business models as real and others as pretend. There isn’t. The word just means whatever the loudest voices in your peer group have decided it means this year. A legit business, if the word means anything at all, pays you consistently. It serves real people who are genuinely better off because of what you provide. It doesn’t require your constant intervention to survive a slow week. And it gives you the freedom to decide what you want to do next without asking anyone’s permission. My newsletters do all of that. My newsletters do all of that. A SaaS that burns cash to acquire users, requires constant feature development to prevent churn, and won’t turn a profit for eighteen months does none of it. Both can become great businesses eventually, but only one of them is working right now, and pretending it’s the lesser option because of how it sounds when you describe it is genuinely stupid. The indie builder community worships metrics that photograph well. MRR screenshots, user counts, funding announcements. The metrics that actually matter, like profit, freedom, sustainability, and how long the thing has been running, don’t make for exciting posts. You can’t screenshot twelve years of consistency. Nobody’s retweeting your low overhead. I’ve been playing a game whose scoreboard measures the wrong things, and I’ve been letting the scoreboard win 🤦 The Domain I Didn’t Buy I’ll probably buy another domain next month. The itch doesn’t go away just because you wrote an article about it. The indie hacker in me will always want to build the next thing, and that instinct is actually healthy when it’s pointed in the right direction. But the next time I’m browsing Namecheap at midnight, I want to catch myself long enough to open my newsletter analytics instead. Because the thing I keep looking for, the business that works, the one that’s actually legit, is already running. It’s been running for years. It makes money, it helps people, and it gives me a life I genuinely enjoy. I just keep looking past it because it doesn’t match the picture in my head of what a “real” builder is supposed to build. That picture is wrong. And it’s taken me longer than it should have to see that.

The Toxic Status Game Inside Indie Hacking

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