Meet the indie hackers killing it on TikTok

X has long been the home for indie hackers. It’s where dignitaries like Pieter Levels, Marc Lou, Damon Chen, and Ryan Hoover first burst onto the scene. Shared their tips and tricks. Toasted their success. And poured one out for all of the failures. 

But nothing lasts forever. Building in public no longer shines as bright as it once did. And as such, the brightest stars of the new generation of founders are focusing their energy on the social media platforms of the new age.

Platforms where, with enough savvy and brain rot, it's possible for a 19-year-old to earn $50k/mo from a porn-recovery app, a Zoomer who spends 4-8 hours per day on TikTok to scale a Spotify bedroom app to 10 million users in just two weeks, and a designer fresh out of college to earn $20k/mo from a life reset app. 

I’m talking about none other than TikTok, Reels, and YouTube Shorts.

Everybody eats

Why are founders now prioritizing short-form video over X? Well, there are two reasons. The first is simple: these platforms have A LOT of users. YouTube has 2.5 billion monthly active users. Instagram, two billion. TikTok, a billion. X, just 368 million.

And, to sweeten the pot even more, these platforms are now where the kids hang out.

For the second reason, Levels, as he so often does, provided the alpha all the way back in 2023.

In other words, TikTok, Reels, and Shorts is a level playing field. As $50k/mo founder and short-form video expert Alex Slater puts it, “It doesn’t matter if your account is brand new or if you have zero followers—if you create content that hooks people, you have the same shot at getting picked up by the algorithm as anyone else.”

Combine the massive audiences and level playing field, and you have the perfect arena for a new age of founders.

Young, not dumb

The main thing to know about these founders is that they do not fit the stereotype of an indie hacker. They aren’t launching on Product Hunt. They aren’t coders at heart who dread marketing. And they definitely aren’t building B2B SaaS. 

Raised by the internet, these founders were forged in the social media fire. They speak in memes, have a thumb that practically scrolls on its own, and, perhaps most different from the indie hacker of yore, almost exclusively build for the general consumer. In this way, they are more similar to the OG app builders than the typical indie hacker. 

However, it is also this relentless focus on the consumer that makes these founders so powerful and relates them to the typical indie hacker. Like the great indie hackers of the past, this new age of founders is building for themselves. It’s just that they are building looksmaxxing apps instead of SaaS boilerplates. 

Method to the madness

If you watch enough TikTok and Reels, you’ll begin to notice patterns that the most successful marketers use over and over again. 

First and foremost, they post A LOT. You’ll be hard pressed to find a successful brand that doesn’t post every single day, and many of the most successful ones post multiple times per day from dozens of accounts. 

For example, take the legal Delta-8 edible company Baked Bags. They used 19 different accounts to post 2,721 Reels. The result was a billion views and almost a million followers. 

The next thing you'll find is that almost all of their videos are short. I'm talking a few seconds long, like this Reel from Rise that netted a cool 14.5M views and 536,000 likes, or this TikTok from Answers AI that pulled 1.3M views and 29,000 likes. A few seconds is all they need to reel you in, convey their message, and get you to convert.

The best marketers also happen to be funny. 91% of consumers want brands to be funny, so no surprises here. But, what’s notable here is “how” these marketers are funny. They aren’t like Dave Chapelle cracking jokes, but instead memelords who have what seems to be the perfect meme for every situation, whether that’s “No Nut November” or Tommy fooking Shelby. 

However, they aren’t always the ones telling the jokes. They write it, sure, but they often employ creators to actually deliver the lines. This is a trick that David Park, the CEO of the $4M/ARR Jenni AI, talks about a lot. 

The idea is to put a spin on the traditional way influencer marketing is done. So, whereas before, you’d pay the creator to post advertisements for you on their page, these founders have creators post videos directly on their brand page. This way, the “pitch” will appear authentic, giving the brand account much better odds of going viral.

Jenni AI used this method to turn a $4000 investment into over 7M impressions, and it’s not just restricted to “indie” startups. Even big brands like Perplexity and ChatGPT make use of creators. 

Another thing you’ll notice is that once they find a type of video that works, they use it over and over. In football terms, they run the same play until the defense stops it.

For example, Daze Chat, the Gen Z-targeted messaging app taking over TikTok and the App Store leaderboard, posts the same kind of video literally every single day. Death Clock AI does the same thing, as does Getahead, who was actually so successful that their competitor Urfuture straight up copied their format, and it worked for them too!

Ultimately, you can only go as far as your product can take you, which is why the best marketers are almost always working with products that are inherently shareable. In other words, people make videos of the product on their own accord. Think of it like SEO. You can do all of the link-building you want, but you’ll never be able to compete with someone who receives backlinks every time someone uses their product.

As Jamie Cho from the Spotify bedroom app Verse puts it, “No trend truly becomes a trend until people we didn’t hire start making videos.” As you can see, that happened in droves for Verse. 

These lessons all converge on a single point: the best TikTok marketers are absolute wizards at grabbing your attention. Every hook, cut, sound, and meme is fine-tuned with the sole purpose of forcing you to stop scrolling. It’s not an easy job. But once you find the formula, you have basically found the formula to print money.

If attention is the most valuable resource on the internet, then these marketers are the modern-day oil barons.

What about us?

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re not a 20-year-old spending 6 hours a day on TikTok. So, you might be thinking that this is a waste of time that wouldn’t work for you.

You’d be forgiven for thinking this. It really does seem that there aren’t many “traditional” indie hackers dominating TikTok. If you go through the Indie Page leaderboard, which ranks 50 indie hackers by MRR, the only ones really killing it with short-form videos are Samy Tolba, Zach Wilson, and Bridesmaidforhire. Most of the rest don’t even have TikToks, let alone make content.

But, that doesn’t mean all hope is lost. There are some “traditional” indie hackers taking advantage of short-form video:

• Cody Schneider, founder of a AI content marketing startup, is all over short-form videos on LinkedIn.

• Nic Conley, a founder in the B2B sales space, is also a LinkedIn video aficionado. 

• Edward Sturm, one of the great indie marketers of all time, has posted to TikTok and Reels literally every single day for the past two years. He now has over 100,000 followers on each. 

If you look at their videos, or the content of Samy Tolba and Zach Wilson, you’ll notice that they have a much different style from our wiz kids. It’s mostly just them talking to a camera talking about something they learned or find cool. 

Yet they are still killing it. Why?

Because even though they don’t use memes, trending sounds, or fancy cuts, they are still very, very good at grabbing your attention. Simply put, their videos aren’t boring. 

This is the beauty of short-form video, and why indie hackers who have never uttered skibidi in their life shouldn’t write it off. It’s a level playing field.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a meme video, a faceless video, or just you chopping it up, and it doesn’t matter if you have no followers or a million followers. If your video is good, it will get attention.

Places to learn more

The best way to learn more about short-form video will always be spending hours in the trenches. So that means both watching videos and making videos until you find what works for you.

However, if you don’t yet have the time or mental fortitude to scroll for hours on end, I recommend following:

• Guillame 

• Walid

• Jamie Cho

• Edward Sturm

• Alex Slater

• Desmond

• Joseph Choi

• Viral TikTok Tracker

• Murata