Courtland Allen is the founder of Indie Hackers, a community for people who want to start bootstrapped and profitable businesses. It was acquired by Stripe in 2017.

We discuss:

Why a SPA was the wrong choice
Caching strategies
Using firebase and algolia
Fighting spam
Why he hasn't hired another engineer
Focusing on the right problems
Being a part of Stripe

Related Links:

Indie Hackers
@csallen
Stripe
How to Build a Life You Love by Quitting Everything Else with Lynne Tye of Key Values (One of Courtland's favorite podcast episodes)
Ember (SPA framework)
Ember fastboot (Server Side Rendering)
Firebase (Authentication provider and NoSQL database)
Algolia (Provides search for posts)
Render (Web Host)
Dribbble (Site to find design inspiration)
Egghead (Developer video courses, got started selling zip files of videos to mailing lists)
Balsamiq (Wireframing tool, added inspirational quotes to their loading screen so that people wouldn't complain about loading time)
Dan Luu (Popular tech blog with no styling)

Music by Crystal Cola: Orion

Visit the Software Sessions website for a full transcript of the episode.

Building Indie Hackers with Courtland Allen