Building Indie Hackers with Courtland Allen

Software Sessions

Courtland Allen is the founder of Indie Hackers, a community for people who want to start bootstrapped and profitable businesses. It was acquired by Stripe in 2017.

We discuss:

• Why a SPA was the wrong choice
• Caching strategies
• Using firebase and algolia
• Fighting spam
• Why he hasn't hired another engineer
• Focusing on the right problems
• Being a part of Stripe

Related Links:

• Indie Hackers
• @csallen
• Stripe
• How to Build a Life You Love by Quitting Everything Else with Lynne Tye of Key Values (One of Courtland's favorite podcast episodes)
• Ember (SPA framework)
• Ember fastboot (Server Side Rendering)
• Firebase (Authentication provider and NoSQL database)
• Algolia (Provides search for posts)
• Render (Web Host)
• Dribbble (Site to find design inspiration)
• Egghead (Developer video courses, got started selling zip files of videos to mailing lists)
• Balsamiq (Wireframing tool, added inspirational quotes to their loading screen so that people wouldn't complain about loading time)
• Dan Luu (Popular tech blog with no styling)

Music by Crystal Cola: Orion

Visit the Software Sessions website for a full transcript of the episode.