David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…I mean, they're Indie Hackers. They don’t mostly have billion dollar ambitions. They're the underdogs, but a lot of them I think once they get started, realize, I'm making some side income. In a few months they’ll go, wow, I can quit my job. At some point, you're making a lot of money and you're thinking, what do I want to do? Do I want to retire at a beach somewhere or maybe what I want to do is build something even bigger. A lot of Indie Hackers I talked to are no longer even Indie Hackers. They’ve raised money, they're building bigger companies, that's where their life path took them. That's what I think is so cool about this, unless you disagree. You're the authority, but I don't think being an Indie Hacker means you don't want to raise money or you don't want to build something big. You want to build something that people want and the customers will pay you for and go from there. Sometimes, those become Notion, or sometimes they become Indie Hackers. Sometimes they become just a business that makes you a couple hundred thousand a year. Yeah, exactly. I don't like to juxtapose Indie Hackers as a counter argument to raising money so much as a counter argument to having a boss, working a desk job, and wondering what if for the rest of your life. Being an Indie Hacker is really about the idea that you can achieve your own freedom. Whatever that means to you. Maybe that's financial freedom, maybe that's creative freedom so you can work on whatever you want, maybe that's time freedom so you can work whatever hours and schedule you want. Being an Indie Hacker is really this confidence in yourself. You can create something that’ll make your life better, make other people's lives better in the process, and give you that freedom. Maybe that looks like raising a ton of money in the future.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.