The Indie Hacker Economy is a Pyramid Scheme
AI Didn't Kill Indie Hacking. The Closed Loop Did.
🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.
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If you spent any time on tech Twitter over the past few weeks, you’ll have seen the same growing panic.
People keep talking about how the indie hacker economy is collapsing.
Revenue is down for anyone building their own app, and the money is leaving the space.
And the reason why is simple: everyone points to AI. The more AI tools there are that can enable anyone to build anything, the less people need the tools built by indie hackers.
But I think the core problem here isn’t actually that the indie hackers are losing market share purely because of AI. I think it’s more because the indie hackers’ entire audience has always been other indie hackers.
Revenues are dropping because everyone in the indie hacker space is building for everyone else in the indie hacker space, who is already building for everyone else in the indie hacker space.
When builders keep selling to builders, they’re selling to the very people who are the most likely to build their own SaaS tools.
They’re selling SaaS to SaaS people, tools to tool makers. They’re selling products for people who would always rather build their own products in the first place.
That’s the core identifier of their whole scene.
Which means we now have an infinite supply of micro tools being marketed to a shrinking pool of genuine buyers, with more launch energy than there is market demand.
