Over the past decade, “indie making” has come to signify a particular vision of autonomy on the internet. Emblemized by Pieter Levels’ much-cited experiment to build “12 startups in 12 months” and amplified by the Indie Hackers community, the practice promised a break from the startup treadmill. The lone developer could build, launch, and sustain profitable products without venture capital, corporate hierarchies, or managerial overhead. It was a refusal of scale as dogma and an affirmation of independence as a viable business model.
This figure of the solo builder—the hacker with a laptop in a cafe, shipping projects into existence—has become iconic. Its images circulate endlessly in blog posts, podcasts, and community forums: screenshots of monthly recurring revenue, case studies of rapid iteration, and the trope of one person “bootstrapping to freedom.” It is an image that resonates deeply in digital nomad circles, where the promise of location-independent income aligns seamlessly with the dream of a borderless, mobile life. Indie making is framed as the economic infrastructure for nomadism: one can live in Lisbon, Medellín, or Bali, sustained not by corporate salary or client work, but by a self-built product.
The story is compelling, and in many ways generative. Indie making has indeed created livelihoods outside extractive systems. It has demonstrated that scale is not the only route to viability, that profitability need not depend on investors, and that autonomy is possible at small scale. It is no surprise that Levels, Indie Hackers, and the broader solopreneur culture have become touchstones in conversations about creative independence.
But the story, as it is told, is incomplete. It presents indie making as synonymous with rugged individualism: the heroic individual who builds alone, owns alone, and succeeds alone. This narrative, while seductive, obscures as much as it reveals. It overlooks the collective infrastructures—technical, cultural, and social—that make solo building possible in the first place. It also sidelines emerging forms of indie making that are organized not around the lone builder, but around groups, labels, and collectives.
These collective practices—exemplified by projects like Metalabel, which frames creative work as a “release” made together rather than a “launch” owned by one; The Dark Forest Collective, which experiments with multi-author publications and cultural production; and a range of worker cooperatives and federated platforms—expand the meaning of indie making. They demonstrate that independence need not mean isolation. They shift the unit of analysis from the individual entrepreneur to the commons of practice.
The question we need to ask, then, is not whether indie making matters. It clearly does. The question is: what kinds of independence do we want to valorize? Do we continue to celebrate only the figure of the self-made hacker, laptop aglow in a global coworking space? Or can we also celebrate forms of independence that are interdependent—projects built and owned together, infrastructures that distribute rather than concentrate value, and practices that measure success not only by individual recurring revenue but by livelihoods-in-common?
The last decade gave us the icon of the solo builder. The next might give us something else: collective indie making as both economic model and cultural orientation. By situating Levels, Indie Hackers, and the solopreneur archetype—as real and important, but as fragments within a wider constellation of possibility—we can open space for other stories to surface. Stories that ask: what happens when indie making is built for the commons, not merely for markets?
The decade of the solo shipper
Indie making's founding mythology can perhaps be traced back to Pieter Levels’ declaration in 2014 that he would build 12 startups in 12 months. The idea was audacious in its simplicity: instead of laboring for years on a single product in search of elusive product-market fit, he would produce, release, and iterate at speed. Some of the projects failed, others lingered, but a few became durable fixtures: Nomad List (later Nomads.com), a platform ranking cities by their attractiveness to remote workers; Remote OK, one of the first widely used job boards for distributed work; and Hoodmaps, a collaborative map annotating urban neighborhoods. Each was lightweight by design—an MVP spun up quickly, then refined based on user response.
Levels’ approach crystallized a new ethos. It made clear that a single person could do the work once thought to require a small startup team. The availability of low-cost infrastructure—cloud hosting, open-source libraries, payment processors, templated design systems—made it possible to build and launch products in weeks rather than months. By aggressively “shipping in public,” Levels also cultivated an audience: every update, every experiment, and every failure became content. In the process, the act of building itself became a performance, and the indie maker emerged as both engineer and narrative entrepreneur.
This performance resonated in digital nomad circles, where Levels was already an influential figure. Nomad List, after all, was built as much for him as for the community it helped create. It aggregated cost-of-living data, internet speeds, and quality-of-life metrics into rankings that quickly became canonical among remote workers deciding where to live. Indie making was thus directly linked to nomadic life: the product not only enabled mobility but emerged from it. Building while moving and shipping while traveling became part of the indie maker imaginary.
By 2016, the practice had its agora: Indie Hackers, founded by Courtland Allen. Indie Hackers provided what Levels’ experiment lacked: a structured space for stories, discussion, and community. Makers could share product launches, post revenue breakdowns, and narrate their journeys. The site quickly became a repository of indie lore, each post a case study in independence. Screenshots of monthly recurring revenue served not merely as accounting but as proof of viability—currency in both the literal and symbolic sense.
The community’s success was notable enough to attract attention from Stripe, which acquired Indie Hackers in 2017. Stripe’s rationale was obvious: a community of independent developers and small businesses was also a community of potential customers. The acquisition was widely debated within indie circles—was independence compromised once the forum became part of a billion-dollar company? Courtland Allen’s stewardship reassured many, but the ambivalence lingered. Independence, after all, is not just about funding sources; it is also about control over infrastructure. The irony of a space dedicated to indie making being owned by a payments giant was not lost on its participants. In 2023, when Indie Hackers returned to independent ownership, the cycle felt instructive: independence lost, then regained, a parable about the difficulty of sustaining alternative infrastructures in an ecosystem dominated by platform capitalism.
By this point, “indie hacking” had become an identifiable movement, with its own podcasts, meetups, and canon of best practices. Its ethos was clear: bootstrap rather than raise capital; prioritize profitability over growth; build small, focused products; remain lean, autonomous, and in control. The narrative was explicitly positioned against Silicon Valley’s obsession with unicorns and blitzscaling. If venture-backed startups celebrated scale, indie hackers celebrated sustainability. If startups valorized exits, indie makers valorized independence.
And yet, even in this oppositional framing, a new orthodoxy emerged. The archetypal indie maker was always a solopreneur, often male, technically skilled, and narratively savvy. The celebrated image was the individual who built alone, shipped quickly, and reached profitability without external help. This was the “decade of the solo shipper”: a cultural moment in which the lone builder became emblematic of an entire movement.
The emphasis on solo building had practical roots. Many indie makers were, in fact, working alone. The economics of small-scale software often made it impractical to hire teams. The appeal of autonomy—freedom from co-founder disputes, investor pressure, or employee management—was genuine. But the dominance of this narrative also obscured other possibilities. Collaborative projects, cooperatives, or collective ownership structures rarely received the same visibility. Stories of shared authorship or distributed governance were less likely to go viral than a screenshot of one person’s revenue graph.
In digital nomad circles, the solo shipper became an aspirational archetype. Forums and blogs circulated tales of individuals building products in Chiang Mai or Medellín, sustaining global mobility through self-made income streams. Indie making was framed as the economic counterpart to nomadism: just as nomads sought freedom from geographic constraints, indie makers sought freedom from corporate and investor constraints. The two identities often overlapped, reinforcing one another. To be a nomad was to be free of place; to be an indie maker was to be free of employers and/or investors. Both identities rested on autonomy as their central value.
Looking back, the decade of the solo shipper represented both a critique of and a continuation of startup culture. It critiqued venture capital’s demand for scale, but reproduced its celebration of the heroic individual. It rejected the excesses of unicorn-chasing, but retained the language of shipping, growth, and hustle—albeit at a smaller scale. It created real alternatives, but also entrenched a myth: that independence meant going it alone.
This myth has power. It has enabled many to exit extractive systems, to build sustainable livelihoods, to live otherwise. But it also narrows the horizon of possibility. It makes invisible the collective infrastructures that underpin indie making, and it sidelines models of independence rooted in cooperation rather than isolation. The decade of the solo shipper should be understood, then, as both achievement and limitation: a generative story, but an incomplete one.
The narrative dominance of rugged individualism
The story that circulated most widely in the decade of the solo shipper was not simply one of autonomy—it was one of rugged individualism. The indie maker was framed as a lone figure: resourceful, self-sufficient, able to conjure sustainable products out of nothing but code, willpower, and a laptop.
This framing is powerful because it speaks to real frustrations with corporate life and venture-backed startups. Against the backdrop of managerial bloat, toxic workplaces, and investor capture, the image of one person working without bosses, boards, or funding rounds is liberating. It restores dignity to small-scale work and validates the idea that profitability without scale is not failure but success.
The valorization of the self-made entrepreneur is a long-standing trope in capitalist societies. Silicon Valley, too, has long celebrated the lone genius founder—often overlooking the teams, communities, and systemic supports that make innovation possible. Indie making, despite its oppositional stance toward venture capital and unicorn-chasing, inherits elements of this mythology. It substitutes small scale for large, and sustainability for growth, but it retains the centrality of the individual as the unit of value. The celebrated figure becomes a frontier subject—self-sufficient, untethered, answerable to no one.
The dominance of this narrative narrows the imaginative horizon. It encourages newcomers to conceive of independence as synonymous with working alone. It sidelines cooperative arrangements, shared ownership structures, and collective infrastructures, which often struggle to attract the same attention or prestige. When revenue graphs and solo success stories dominate the discourse, models of interdependence remain obscured.
For digital nomads, this narrative has been particularly resonant. Independence from employers and from place appear as parallel forms of freedom. But both risk reproducing neoliberal ideals of the atomized subject: mobile, flexible, self-reliant, responsible only to themselves. The possibility of collective practice—of shared risk, shared credit, shared livelihood—rarely features in the aspirational imagery of the indie maker.
This is not to bag on solopreneurs like Pieter Levels (we actually love and actively use his products). Solopreneurship has enabled many to find viable livelihoods outside extractive systems.
The critique here is not that solopreneurship is illegitimate or without merit. The critique is that its narrative dominance obscures other possible models, which narrows the imagination of what indie making might be, and of what forms of independence might deserve celebration. By centering the lone hacker as the emblem of indie making, other stories are left untold. Stories of co-ops, labels, and federated infrastructures; stories of independence achieved through collaboration rather than isolation. To recover those stories is not to diminish the achievements of solo makers, but to broaden the scope of what independence can mean.
Collective forms of indie making
The past several years have seen the emergence of models that trouble the narrative of the lone hacker. These collective forms of practice are not speculative ideals but working infrastructures. They expand the imagination of what independence can look like: not isolation, but shared authorship, shared value, and shared survival.
Metalabel is perhaps the clearest departure. Founded by Yancey Strickler (co-founder of Kickstarter) and others, it proposes the “release” as the basic unit of cultural production. A release is what a group publishes together—a zine, a record, a tool, a bundle of artifacts. The emphasis is not on a singular launch or a solitary founder, but on collective contribution. The catalog becomes both archive and commons: memory is distributed, authorship is shared, and financial structures are designed to split revenue transparently. Where the indie hacker narrative valorizes the lone ARR chart, Metalabel measures success in the circulation of credit and the durability of group endeavors.
The Dark Forest Collective publishes on Metalabel. Drawing its name from Liu Cixin’s “dark forest theory” of the internet—the idea that culture retreats from public platforms into quieter, trust-based spaces—it functions as a label for multi-author projects. Its anthology of internet writing, its essays, and its live sessions foreground collaboration. By releasing under a collective name, the Dark Forest resists the cult of personality. Authority accrues not to an individual founder, but to a network of writers and thinkers committed to shared production. The form is infrastructural: a label that protects space for collaborative authorship within an economy that typically rewards individual branding.
The Elysian, founded by writer Elle Griffin, offers another instructive example. Organized as a publishing collective for independent authors, it reimagines the infrastructure of literary production outside the logics of both legacy publishing and self-publishing-as-isolation. Collaborators release their work under a shared banner, pooling visibility, readership, and support. Griffin herself has pushed the model further with her forthcoming book We Should Own the Economy, structured so that investors can hold shares in the book itself. The experiment reframes publishing not just as storytelling, but as collective ownership and risk-sharing—challenging the assumption that authors must either rely on corporate publishers or go it alone.
Worker cooperatives extend these principles into the terrain of labor. In publishing, design, and small-scale media, co-ops structure ownership and governance collectively. Decisions are made by members, revenues are shared, and the risks of precarity are distributed. Unlike the indie hacker working alone, the co-op demonstrates that small-scale production can sustain livelihoods when responsibility and reward are pooled.
Federated platforms, meanwhile, challenge the centralization of digital infrastructures. Projects like Mastodon, a federated social network, or Are.na, a platform for collaborative curation, embody a different orientation to scale. They prioritize interoperability, community autonomy, and user stewardship over growth-at-all-costs. For indie makers, they model how tools can be built and sustained as commons rather than commodities. Their existence complicates the narrative that independence requires private ownership; instead, independence can mean shared custodianship of federated systems.
These collective forms do not negate the achievements of solopreneurs. They extend them. They remind us that independence need not be synonymous with solitude, and that the infrastructures of small-scale production can be designed for cooperation. They demonstrate that autonomy can be entangled with relationships, and that viability can be measured in livelihoods-in-common rather than in individual revenue dashboards.
If the last decade trained us to picture the indie maker as a solitary figure, these collective forms invite us to picture something else: groups releasing together, co-ops distributing value, and federated platforms sustaining commons. They are not footnotes to the story of indie making. They are alternative chapters—ones that suggest the future may be less about going it alone, and more about building otherwise, together.
Such practices are prefigurative. They enact in the present the kinds of futures they seek: livelihoods-in-common and sovereign interdependence. They shift the frame from independence-as-isolation to independence-through-relationship.
Blueprint and invitation
If the last decade of indie making was defined by the image of the solo shipper, the challenge of the next is to broaden the field of what independence can mean. This does not require discarding the achievements of solopreneurs; it requires supplementing them with other models, so that independence is no longer equated solely with rugged individualism.
What would it mean for collective practices to occupy the same cultural space as Pieter Levels or Indie Hackers? To be celebrated not as niche exceptions but as emblematic models of indie making?
The playbook might look different.
Instead of solo launches, groups would organize releases—shared moments of publishing and distribution that allow for pacing, collaboration, and reflection.
Instead of celebrating revenue dashboards as proof of success, we might measure the stability of shared livelihoods and the resilience of commons-based infrastructures.
Instead of narrating independence as heroic isolation, we might narrate it as relational autonomy: the capacity to sustain oneself without severing ties to others.
Such a shift would also alter the relationship between indie making and digital nomadism. If nomadism has often leaned on indie making as a tool for individual sovereignty, collective models suggest another possibility. Imagine nomadic infrastructures not just as platforms for individual choice, but as cooperative arrangements—co-owned coliving and coworking spaces, federated publishing networks, and labels for itinerant creators.
This reframing would not eliminate the appeal of working alone. Many will still choose to build solo, and those projects will remain important. But the celebration of independence could shift: from the solitary figure of the shipper to a spectrum of practices that includes collective independence. This is less about rejecting solopreneurship than about provincializing it—understanding it as one model among many, rather than the emblem of an entire movement.
If the first decade of indie making taught us that one person could build viable products, the next decade might teach us that groups can release viable commons. The shift requires not only new infrastructures but new imaginaries: stories that foreground shared credit as much as individual gain.
For those who want to practice this future now, we'd like to extend an invitation explicitly. We invite you to visit our Create with us page, where you'll find a call to participate with us in building tools, texts, and infrastructures not just for markets, but for commons.
The narrative dominance of the solo shipper will likely endure, but the future of indie making may depend on telling another story alongside it: one in which independence is not a synonym for isolation, but a condition made durable through relationship.
