The articles I posted until now were more theoretical than practical. With this one I’ll try to delve into the more practical side of the indie world, and start with highlighting some examples of indie businesses that make rather good money.

One of the things that discourage people from starting a business is the perception that you either need a unique revolutionary idea or you need to build an unicorn. But the indie hacking paradigm is changing that: start small, stay small and grow it to a size you’re comfortable with.

Here are 5 examples of how these businesses can look like and what kind of revenue they can produce. Keep in mind that tech businesses like these ones have a very high profit margin, in some cases up to 90%.

1. Pirsch Analytics - $7,485/month

Website:  https://pirsch.io/

A simple analytics tool is bringing in ~7.5k USD per month. It competes with Google Analytics, and it somehow still manages to find demand for a Google Analytics simplified alternative.

This is proof of an idea I put down in a past article: the big players in any field are complex, bloated, hard to use and have a steep learning curve. This means that there is some demand out there for a simplified and targeted alternative, that does fewer things and does them well.

This is the case with Pirch Analytics: a simpler alternative to Google Analytics that is more privacy focused and offers you the most important information for most use cases: page visits, events, browser/country breakdowns, etc.

2. EmailEngine - $7,257/month

Website: https://emailengine.app/

This indie business does a single thing and does it well: puts a HTTP API over a bunch of email servers, so you can interact with email inboxes from code much easier, without having to deal with the email protocols (POP3, SMTP, IMAP) or manage multiple sets of credentials. And also offers a very valuable feature that no email client offers: inbox monitoring.

They have a yearly licensing model, so its not the traditional monthly SaaS model.

But nevertheless, it seems that they found a niche market of developers and companies who are willing to pay for simplifying the development of email integrations. And I get it, because at Vuuh we also did it, but we did it the hard way, and we are still running into issues from time to time.

3. Angel Match - $9,257/month

Website: https://angelmatch.io/

This is an interesting approach to indie hacking that is gaining more and more popularity lately, and is about selling access to various useful databases. This one is just an example, but it seems that there is a huge market for databases.

There is a saying in the business world that “data is money”, which in this case proves to be more than true, since data itself is very valuable. And it’s not like the people who are paying for this can’t get this data themselves, but the data collection process is very time consuming and error prone.

But the good part is that once you go through all the hassle of compiling all this targeted information, you can sell access to it, because it literally saves people days or weeks worth of work.

Other similar database access business I have seen was:

• lists of niche publications (mostly for indie gaming or software startups)
• lists of investors (like this one)
• lists of small businesses (also known as leads) which are bought by various companies who then look to sell their services to these businesses.
• lists of tech startups in a certain niche (eg. fintech companies, health tech companies, etc)

All these lists are very valuable in the B2B space, and there are multiple companies looking for them.

4. Choppity - $12,570/month

Website: https://choppity.com/

This tool is highly specialized: you upload speech videos, and it creates short content for social media, especially for TikTok or Shorts.

There proved to be a demand for this kind of tool, as the content creation, if done reliably, becomes very time consuming, even if you have a specialized pipeline. Even if it takes 10 minutes for each produced short video, you have to put out hundreds of them and this adds up real fast.

This tool accelerates the process, and most people seem to find the price point acceptable for the value it delivers.

And they managed to grow it to ~13k USD/month. Although I expect the operational costs of running this tool to be on the higher side, since it deals with video and working with video is expensive, I am sure they still manage to get a few thousand dollars profit every month reliably.

5. PDFShift - $11,423/month

Website: https://pdfshift.io/

This one is pretty surprising, even to me: a tool that offers an API to convert HTML into PDFs is generating 11k USD revenue per month.

It’s insane to see how such a simple and targeted tool manages to find enough demand in the market, and more than that, to find so many paying customers that integrate and use that API.

Indeed, it theory it should be easy to do it yourself with some code, but in reality, it’s much more complicated. Working with PDFs is much more complicated than you’d expect, take it from somebody that worked with them and still does from time to time. They are hard to parse and almost impossible to extract the content you need from them in a reliable and structured way, without spending a lot of time to implement custom code for each case /rant

So, to some degree, it makes sense that this specialized tool managed to find demand for this.

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