Most people that have expertise on agriculture, oil drilling, saw-milling etc where there are real opportunities don't know much about startups or know how to build an app.
Two things come to my mind:
1) "indie hackers" are way easier to get a relation started with than companies or even start-ups. And forget about big enterprise if you don't have an angel investor or some other experienced and well-connected guidance.
2) With smaller users, you're more likely to get better testing and feedback. In companies of all sizes, it's rare to have a "we have an issue with vendor X's software" pipeline that goes straight from the affected user to the vendor, in most cases every report or feedback question will take six to seven steps in between.
They’re influencers. That’s why people want their attention.
I think it kinda has the look of a cool lifestyle from the outside (to some). They’re digital nomads and they travel to cool places and meeting cool people and tweeting big graphs that go up and to the right. They disavow lots of possessions (again a nomad) while professing being all tech all the time. Once upon a time tech-entrepreneurs might have rented a shack in Palo Alto, but now they tweet while couch surfing in Lisbon. Silicon Valley is too crowded when you’re solo.
I would take a house in Palo Alto over an airport lounge and an AirBnB du jour but the nomadic life is honestly cheaper and seems attainable, if only I can build that indie business.
What is an indie business?
A key theme for many is building lifestyle businesses that collectively provide “passive income” and financial independence. But unlike “FIRE” it’s “financial independence, casually work while enjoying life”
A common and well known person is Pieter Levels:
The actual business seems to be taking photos of yourself on the beach and making money as an influencer, while telling people you made money from your startup though.
At least that’s my impression. Maybe there are counter examples.
You're more likely thinking of Instagram, Twitter or YouTube influencers.
Mostly video courses, job board websites, affiliate link hustles.
I was looking at some forums and it seems that the first question after someone arrives in a new place is "where do i meet you guys (digital nomads)". It seems to me that it's a closed group of people selling things to each other.
Tbc, I don't have anything against this kind of living, and in fact i d like it to be easier to work in other countries. Unfortunately, even within the EU you can't work in another country.
For digital nomads, that community has to be online, which is a difficult landscape. You are competing with every online business across the globe, and it's difficult to gauge the desire for what you're selling. Just being online won't do it, and even if you find some customers, have you found all of them? Maybe you missed a connection to a broader community that needs what you sell. You'd never know.
But from my thrown made of failed SaaS products, the biggest mistake I see solo-entrepreneurs make, often they don't know what they're selling. They know what they're building, and they conflate their solo-SaaS business with venture capitalist powered startup. VC startups aren't businesses yet, they're proto-businesses, they can afford to be a lofty idea and the money can happen later. Solo-entrepreneurs, you don't have that luxury. You have to have the "business" part, the money flow, figured out already.
My advice for someone who is trying to bootstrap a solo-business on the net: have a product that someone can buy as soon as you quit your paying job. If no one can give you money, you're just counting down the days until you can even begin being a business.
Developers are cheap bastards (I'm still fighting over whether I should shell our $99 for Panic's Nova editor or not - even though it would be the perfect fit for my editing needs. But I'm a cheap bastard and VIM is good enough so...)
I guess "indiehackers" aren't much different. Only maybe they have less disposable income that old fart developers?
Dev tools is one of the hardest segments to tackle.
Developers are notoriously cheap and every one of your developer-customers (falsely) assumes they could build a better version of your product over the weekend.
Developers will always compare your fully-featured, supported product to a shitbag OSS "free" alternative they found on GitHub (abandoned by some dude who tried to build a clone to a real product over the weekend and then discovered that is actually not possible...)
Developers will take great pains to overstate the case for building internal tools as it gives them more control and embededness in an organization.
Selling to developers is not for the faint of heart -- and ironically, takes MORE* sales skill than, say, selling marketing automation tools to marketers. No sales/marketer will say to you on a sales call:
"You know, I could build that if I wanted to...."
First-time entrepreneurs who happen to be developers often attack devtools because that is all they know.
*This is a weird self-esteem insecurity tic.
Am a developer and can confirm. I am a cheap bastard.
They get to maintain one version of the app, with a reasonable number of feature flags, and users get to pay when something adds value.
Just like being an author, it's hard to make a living writing (books : software) unless you're either very skilled+lucky (Brandon Sanderson : Jetbrains) or sell to companies (HR/marketing position at a company : either making B2B software or working for a software company yourself).
You can use that stuff safely if you can survive losing it and continue reasonably (e.g., switch to Emacs or Jenkins). If you can't, it's a huge risk.
This has nothing to do with proprietary software. Sublime Text, for instance, is proprietary software, but there is zero lock-in because it operates on plain text files. This argument is invalid.
But yeah many developers look at prices badly. Will it save you more time/effort than the price? That's the threshold. Not some abstract idea of "worth the money."
I strongly doubt OP wants advice.
Here's some advice: if you want to make money selling a software product, sell to people who are able and willing to spend money on it.