... product and spend years making it successful. This makes sense when you are building a venture-backed company and trying to create one huge outcome. But I am not sure it is the best strategy for indie hackers. The alternative is what I call the many-donkeys thesis . Instead of betting your entire career on one product becoming a unicorn, you build a portfolio . You might create ten products. two eventually make $10K+ per month five make between ... ... Marc Lou followed a similar path. In 2017, he spent a year building one startup that made $0. In 2023, he launched ten products and made $263,000. In 2025, his portfolio generated $1.032 million across products such as ShipFast

... that has to exist before your core product does ever feels like a tax: auth, billing, permissions, user management, that kind of thing. A few things I'd love to know: Are you starting from a boilerplate or template (ShipFast, SaaS Pegasus, etc.), rolling your own, or reaching for standalone tools like Clerk or Stripe? If you use a template, does it actually solve the problem, or do you find yourself fighting it as requirements evolve? Same question for standalone ... ... tools: does Clerk or Stripe get you where you need to go, or do you find yourself working around them? How much of your early building time would you say goes to "the thing" vs

... sharing, but more selectively. As for favorite makers, Greg Isenberg is definitely on my list, and of course Marc Lou, though you already mentioned him. I find it interesting that a big part of Marc s success comes from ShipFast and CodeFast, essentially a course on how to build and launch profitable apps. It reminds me a bit of the selling the shovels approach, where instead of just building, you also teach others how to do it. That being said ...