I'm currently building the product for my startup - I'm hoping to launch in the next few months. I'm very grateful to IndieHackers for showing me how to make that happen, but when I look at the website now, I can't help but feel that it's jumped the shark.

At the top of the page, there's a link labelled Starting Up that takes you to a page with links to articles that taken together form a Guide to Starting Up. Those links, and those articles, represent the entire value of the IndieHackers website. There's a lot of value in those articles, but the rest of the website provides no value.

Members of the IndieHackers community talk about their 'shovel companies' - typically things like AI-powered marketing services, or the like. This is nonsense: the real shovel companies in the SaaS space are cloud providers and payment processors. Indie hackers claiming to have made a shovel company aren't Levi Strauss selling sturdy trousers to prospectors, they're urchins offering to help dig in plots in exchange for a bit of bread.

IndieHackers itself has become one of these urchins, exhibiting increasing desperation to show ongoing relevance. Skill at software development isn't the thing that's holding most indie hackers back; what's holding them back is that they don't know any good problems to solve. There's an awful lot of money out there waiting to be spent on simple CRUD apps that don't yet exist. You don't need to push the limit of what's possible with computers to make money; you just need to go out into the world to find an actual problem.