Will AI end Indie Hacker dreams?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know Chat-CPT and AI artwork generators have been taking the world by storm. By the world, I mean social media because obviously, that represents everyday people reliably.
Most people have been amazed by what technology can do. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen posts about how this is the end for content creators and digital artists. The reality in the short term is much less dramatic. The AI creation tools are useful but not mature enough to completely replace the human touch.
In the longer term though, the potential for AI to make everything a bit too easy is a fascinating one. Online tools can already write decent code but imagine a world where Indie Hackers can ask an AI bot to create the product for them and then they just bring it to market.
At first thought, it might sound great but when it’s this simple then how can you possibly create a sustainable income from a product anyone could make?
Creating value
Many of you are creating SaaS and Micro-SaaS businesses.
This is smart because your effort in building the product can scale massively with little extra work per customer. In economic terms, a SaaS company will have mostly fixed costs so once it breaks even then future customers are almost pure profit.
We all see all the success stories of those who nail their product market fit and seemingly print money. The problem you’re fixing doesn’t have to be big, it just needs to be useful to enough people who are willing to pay.
The challenge is if a SaaS company is making tons of profit then it attracts other people to build a similar product to take some of the pie for themselves. Copycatting is already a real danger for builders though some Indie Hackers bring it on themselves by boasting about how much money they are making!
Staying ahead of the pack
Ok, so you have a great product and everyone else is trying to copy you. How does anyone make money?
The answer is in the barriers you have.
For SaaS products, most people don’t even know what SaaS stands for let alone how to create a product themselves. Other technical people might know how to recreate what you’ve built but they’ve got to be willing to invest enough time and effort in replicating it.
The greater amount of effort it is to create your product, the safer you are from the competition.
The other way you can protect yourself is through how trustworthy your brand is. If you have a thousand 5-star reviews then people feel safer spending their dollars with you. You can vary the language in your marketing to speak to a specific audience’s needs which makes them choose you over everyone else.
AI will break down both barriers
Some Indie Hackers talk about how it’s a long time before AI will be able to build and market apps on their own. They’re right. AI will still need a human to direct it and give it the right context. A great human developer will be better than an open-source AI code generator for some time.
Yet this misses the point.
AI doesn’t need to replace humans for it to be a threat to your SaaS product. All it needs to do is reduce the effort barrier for other people to decide it’s worth entering your market. This is through both making it easier to code and making it faster to create marketing material.
Let’s say you are making $100k ARR. If I thought I’d need to dedicate 1000 hours to take 10% of your market share then I’d pass. Yet if with AI, I thought I could take 10% of your demand for just 10 hours of work then it’s a no-brainer. These numbers are extreme to illustrate a point but you get the idea.
I predict AI will significantly mess with the financial incentives of starting a project and will dramatically increase competition.
Price wars
A secondary effect is it will be hard to keep prices with a heavy premium.
Look at the online course world. The early adopters could charge ridiculous prices because they could claim to be gatekeepers to vital information. Now everyone and their neighbor’s dog has a course on how to grow on Twitter. When there are so many courses, then prices need to come down to attract customers.
The same could happen for Indie Hackers. If someone can make the same product as you, sell it for $5 less per month, and steal a ton of your market share, they’re probably going to do it.
This will be amazing for consumers but suck for builders.
What to do?
Worrying about a future that might not come to pass definitely isn’t the best idea. Yet you do want to prepare for a potential AI-generated tool battle royale for every profitable niche.
While AI can analyze all the data, it can’t yet understand the human side of problems and the nuances behind the numbers. This is where a deep understanding of your target customer and a trustworthy reputation can differentiate you.
Obviously, code is only one part of the equation, and knowing your tech in depth and how the stack complements each other can help you to give a better overall experience to an end user.
Some of the easier money may disappear in the future but the true Indie Hackers will still find a way to beat the machines.
Are you worried about this at all? If AI-assisted coding makes coding too easy, how will you defend your product?
Protect your momentum like your life depends on It
How do I change my username on Indie Hackers?
My projects are mainly for fun not to become rich so I'll still enjoy coding even if AI can copy me in 10 seconds.
Love this :)
Unless we have close to true AGI, I don't see people being able to just create a product be talking to an AI. And if we have true AGI, I would image society radically transforms such that anything being said here becomes irrelevant.
But in general? There will definitely be more competition on average throughout everything. But you'll need to be more specific, because some markets will be affect worse than others.
New markets will always emerge with less competition.
Take a look at writing tools. It's become quickly oversaturated in terms of AI writing tools.
But wait, what has really changed in the grand scheme of things? You'll just have to compete on the other aspects that make a writing tool good now, but it was like that before anyways, so nothing really changed.
Though I think most of the benefit with AI tools comes from those providing the tools to make AI tools. For example, it's what Evoke, something I'm building, does.
I agree with this!
Way I see it now is that not all people can use AI to program for them if they don't have the fundamentals on how to build a program.
Exactly. And if AI gets to the point where it can write an entire functional app with just a few sentences of prompting, then we'd likely have AGI and any other predictions become irrelevant.
As with most tech, it will make jobs obsolete, but at the same create new jobs. How exactly time will tell.
But with the potential AI has, it's a good thing to be skeptic about it. Don't blindly embrace/praise it.
I think AI is inevitable and the important thing is diversifying your skills so you have the resilience to take on the newly created jobs :).
No. I think it will enable a new wave of indie hackers as it becomes simpler to manage certain aspects of building single handedly.
I guess this feeds into the competition part of what I mentioned in the article. When it's a lot easier to manage the building parts then there will be more competition and your strategy/marketing becomes much more important.
David Epstein discussed this in his book "Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World". In summary, AI and humans will always have opposite strengths and weaknesses, AI will always be better at repetitive practices or tactics, while humans will be better at strategy (especially the current iteration of AI for many decades). AI can possibly write better code but the job of a software engineer goes way beyond writing code, it involves making long-term decisions in more complex environments termed "Wicked worlds", so I don't think AI will end the hacker dreams.
I broadly agree with this, the key part is Indie Hackers have to start beefing up their strategy skills because while it's already important, it will only become more important in an AI world.
As someone who started out selling 1-on-1 in-person workshops for $97 a weekend and grew to sell those at $2,497 two years later, then moved on to $2,000 courses in 2010 and grew to a million-dollar company selling $10,000 training programs, I beg to differ on this quote:
This is, in my experience, incorrect.
People will pay for value and "price wars" are less of a problem than you think.
The risk is rather that entire use cases might disappear.
For instance, if I can use ChatGPT to generate an article by writing the same prompt I would have fed into Jasper.ai, then I (the user) might choose ChatGPT because it's both a more versatile tool and easier to onboard ; rather than for price reasons.
I don't think people use Canva.com over Photoshop because it's cheaper. In fact if you use the pro version, it's not much cheaper ($110 a year vs $140). But you'd choose Canva because it does all the work for you. The design is already done, all you have to do is input your product name where it says PRODUCT NAME.
In the same vein, we at Nuro.video are building a fully automated AI video editor and we are not aiming to compete on price. It's probably much more expensive than "video editing software" (lots of those are free online). But since the AI does all the video editing for you, it removes the entire use case of needing to hire a freelancer or spend a weekend to edit together a 10-minute video. So we're side-stepping the price war entirely.
AI won't replace writers, but the writers who use AI will replace the writers who don't. AI tools don't write as creatively or emotionally as humans – yet – but they can certainly contribute to better content through other tasks – research, editing, and rewriting, to name a few.
Mm you're right about technical barriers getting smaller, but there are other barriers like reputation and existing users. People don't change platforms as easily as you think. As long as it's not a very small tool (screenshot app, for example), people like to stick to what worked so far. Unlike indie hackers such as ourselves, who like to adopt new things and technology, most people are not actively looking for alternatives.
i don't think so
Interesting article. There is always one component that AI will never replace, that is human thought process backed by emotions. That is the greatest strength that separates us from animals and also AI. If we tap into that we can always help others and make money no matter what.
Hi i am in to programming from around more than 12 years. I am very much interested in development as well as digital marketing. I learned digital marketing also very well but now I would like to change my field i would like to become a hacker now. I just develop one site and successfully ranked this site would like to share with you guys.
https://www.nootracare.com/
Up!
How can I utilize this tool?
I love this initiative very helpful for all.Though I think most of the benefit with AI tools comes from those providing the tools to make AI tools. For example, it's what Evoke, something I'm building, does.
So surely will create unemployment for those who prefer to be on regular job than be independent.
AI tools have the potential to be incredibly beneficial, particularly in terms of reducing the barrier between effort and outcome and lowering the barrier to entry for beginners. This is especially true in the realm of SaaS and other markets, as AI may encourage people who were previously uninterested in these areas to begin exploring them. This, in turn, could lead to even more innovation and progress in these fields. Overall, the use of AI tools is a very interesting and insightful topic, with the potential to have a significant impact on the way we work and create.
Indie Hacker is amazing software it is very helpful and valuable
Super interesting and insightful. Another aspect of AI tools will be, like you said, not only reducing the barrier between effort and outcome but also the barrier to entry for beginners. I feel that AI will lead to many people that were not interested in SaaS or other markets to begin to look into it, which will likely continue to lead to new innovations
loved your post....
Thank you!
Literally being started my journey as a coder.... loving the process...
Good luck!
Is AI a threat ? Talking about closed/specialized AI's, i don't believe so. We're only at the very start of open AI.
Moreover, when creating a product/Saas and trying to monetize it, you have to think in terms of barriers to entry. Some may copycat you, still you have to have an uncopyable differentiator: users, a community, a market, a technical feature very hard to copy, a good/reactive timing. Will AI increase competition ? indeed. It may also fragment our tasks to be a lot smaller. That's something we'll have to monitor.
Personally, on the tech/product side, i don't worry a lot about the challenge presented by closed AI's/ChatGPT as building blocks for indies. They are creating a lot of market opportunities ! A bit more complex on the ethical side.
It’s way harder to find the right market, niche and create a unique offer to serve those needs than it is to execute it. So I don’t think at all that AI is a threat…
It might make it simpler for novice hackers to create a good.
Precisely
I think this is true. AI will make the process of building products easy.
The only indie hacker who'll win the game here is the one with a great online distribution
Exactly, it's the skills beyond the pure coding which Indie Hackers need to focus on
In all honesty, I don't think so. Artificial Intelligence is broadening and quickening what is possible for Indie Hackers. We're just getting started.
It will be interesting to see how everything plays out, I agree there's so much more to come!
It can make it easier for new hackers to make a product
Definitely
Agreed,
Indie hacking is a passion then no need to worry about it.
Keep doing what you love :)
No , AI will not
Even if we get to a near-utopian "post-scarcity" world, the human drive to achieve will still exist. It will just strive for something that isn't 2020s style tech entrepreneurship.
In other words, you'll still have dreams. But your dreams will change.
For every door that closes, a new one will open. We can't see what they are yet, but there is definitely something cool on the other side of AI.
I want to strat indie hacking and the new trends in ai really worry me
Very much agreed, it's showing us the importance of building strong barriers to entry and developing a good product to stay ahead.
Exactly, there's no point in panicking but it is useful to think about what skills you can build to stay ahead if AI makes some tasks much easier.
Feels like a clickbait title.
AI can do lots of stuff.
Machines can do lots of stuff.
Will machines end business dreams?
Will AI end business dreams?
No it will open new markets. It will help. Certain kinds of dreams will die.
If you dream of being a horse and buggy manufacturer, cars killed your dream. But it opened others.
The title was asking a question not making a declaration and a common Indie Hacker dream of building a Saas product that is sustainably profitable will be affected. Whenever there is disruption, there are winners and losers and as we know AI will keep advancing, the key aspect is how to keep ahead :).
AI might be able to start the project and get it all running but still, there's always human input everywhere, some features might be non-trivial and some might even be novel. AI is primarily common knowledge gathered from other people's papers and general knowledge we collected so far, sure some businesses might be affected, however, it's actually a good thing as those businesses will either adapt or stagnate and close.
The paper vs Digital documents revolution is a good example, paper companies are still doing good but obviously, their market share is much less as digital documents are a lot more convenient but we're still using paper nowadays.
TL;DR it will absolutely affect some areas but it won't be a complete game changer, even those areas affected will be fine if they accommodate the technical progress and accept it instead of shying away from it
Agreed, it's all about adapting to new realities. If you can prepare in advance rather than go down the path of Kodak then you're in a better place :).
This doesn't worry me for the next few years but I am worried about the long-term viability of a lot of the projects that people pour their lives into. Tech is improving so fast that all your hard work could be replicated easily by AI one day.