Calling all indie thinkers (literally)

Over the past week, I’ve conducted more than ten private Skype interviews with a diverse group of internet intellectuals, “content creators” of the higher-brow variety, cancellation-vulnerable professionals, and lesser-known upstarts aspiring to be one of these…

The reason I organized these Skype calls is that I spent the past month studying all the best practices that have emerged from lean/agile tech-startup culture. After nearly exhausting all the relevant Y Combinator and Indie Hackers content, it became apparent that one of the most important ways to succeed in building something effective and financially sustainable on the internet is to talk with the people for whom you plan to build it.

In my case, all I know is that I seem to find myself at the center of something quite new (conducting a financially sustainable academic career purely on the internet) and a decent quantity of people are now contacting me for various forms of advice. This seems to suggest I am in a position to create something of value for people, but I’ve never seen myself as an entrepreneur or “founder” and I’ve never really had any visionary business ideas.

But I really need to start making money lol. I’m now fully 6 months out from exiting academia and, while Patreon and freelancing odd-jobs are currently enough to pay the bills, it would be nice to put some caviar on my nachos.

So I figured I would learn everything about how and why startups succeed/fail, and then transfer that knowledge to the “content creator” game.

I still don’t know what, exactly, I’m going to build. So I’m just doing the one thing that everyone in-the-know says you should absolutely do first: I’m having one-on-one conversations with people in my orbit about their “pain points” (I know you like that business-speak baby). I’m trying to figure out the problems encountered by other internet-based intellectuals, cancelled or cancellable academics, and higher-brow “content creators,” and then I’ll try to solve them with something that people want to pay for.

I have no idea if this will work. After talking with people, I honestly now feel like I’m starting to see a vision of something that could really work, but entrepreneurs are notorious for their irrational over-confidence. Discounting for that, I feel utterly clueless about whether I’m really onto something.

So I’m just going to keep moving forward, in very small steps, trying to converge on an objectively data-driven idea. I’ll keep you posted, of course.

One positive result that’s already emerged from this exploration is I’ve come upon a possible catch-phrase to summarize this weird, pregnant-but-not-yet-born niche I’ve been theorizing. It’s simple, natural, short, and unpretentious. It is at least 10x better than all the awkward and cringey phrases I’ve been using until now, for lack of any better options. Instead of repeatedly saying things like “internet intellectuals, content creators of the higher-brow variety, and cancellation-vulnerable professionals,” from here on out I’m just going to refer to us all as indie thinkers.

By the way, if you feel this describes you, I’m still conducting interviews. Contact me if you’d like to setup a short Skype call. I'll just ask you a few questions about your problems. Who doesn't want to vent about their problems?