At the risk of sounding melodramatic, it feels like the end of an era. Or at least the end of the familiar formula that indie businesses relied on to build, launch, and grow over the past decade. Something has quietly changed. It’s probably been happening for a couple of years, to be fair. But recently it feels impossible to ignore. The reasons are pretty obvious. What’s less obvious is what comes next. And maybe every generation of builders feels like this.
The tools available today have probably never been better, although I‘m also wading through plenty of sewer shit. We’re building software and shipping feature updates at an absurd pace, and at a much lower development cost, at least in the short term. Yet unless you’ve managed to build an audience, every product launch these days feels harder than it used to. Not because a product necessarily lacks quality or value in its own right, but because we’re drowning in software. You either have a million competitors, or your potential customers now have the tools to build a rough version themselves, whether they have technical skills or not. SaaS is far from dead, but the abundance is staggering. And the old assumptions around product roadmaps, paid advertising, and organic discovery no longer feel reliable.
We can now build more refined products with fewer resources. But each improvement to a product seems to have less influence on whether anyone discovers or buys it. I’ve been feeling this most directly through 099 SPLY. We started by making digital assets and mockups for designers. More recently, we built a browser-based 3D editor that lets people create still and animated product mockups without specialist software. It‘s comfortably one of the most capable things we’ve made. But the editor has also been one of the hardest things to get people to care about. I knew it was a risk, though. Browser-based mockups are very niche, but it‘s an experiment I have zero regrets about. Maybe the positioning is wrong. Maybe we simply haven’t found the right audience. It‘s tough to know. But I also don’t think our experience is unusual. Plenty of small teams are now discovering that being able to build something is no longer much of an advantage in itself.
Cutting through the noise has always mattered. It just feels much more pertinent now. For years, SEO offered some kind of safety net. You could publish a useful product, write about it, optimise content, and gradually find an audience through search. It was never easy and it tested your patience, but there was at least a recognisable path. But search today is dog shit. Results are crowded with ads, aggregators, AI summaries, and content written primarily to occupy space. An increasing number of searches end without anyone clicking through to an external site, and taken to their logical extreme, they point towards what some call “Google Zero”. There’s a label for everything, isn‘t there?
Then we have social media, which tends to favour founders who are comfortable performing in public, have the time to publish constantly, or already have enough attention to generate more of it. The product can start to feel secondary to the content wrapped around it. Each release needs its own miniature marketing campaign, and even then the response can disappear within a day. But I also respect the grind and energy some founders put into making that work. Distribution has always required effort.
So where does that leave indie hackers? Honestly, I’m not sure. I don’t think the answer is to stop making software, and I certainly don’t think small digital businesses are finished. But relying on the same combination of product quality, SEO, launch platforms, and occasional social posts feels increasingly naive.
Maybe the next phase is less about finding another universal playbook and more about building in ways that are harder to replicate or make interchangeable. Or maybe it‘s about building a stronger rapport between founder and customer. I’m trying to think more experimentally myself, with less attachment to any particular format. And more willingness to test strange ideas, abandon weak ones, and follow whatever appears to have genuine energy around it.
None of that makes the current landscape less frustrating. But if your launches feel quieter, your growth has stalled, or a project that once looked promising is beginning to decline, I doubt you’re alone. It might not mean the work is bad. It likely means the conditions around it have changed. For the time being, I‘ll keep listening, learning, and adapting. Maybe I‘ll even start a YouTube channel or something.
If any of this resonates, feel free to continue the discussion over email or DMs with me.