Question 1

Ask specific questions that reveal the real role

Flavius D. · Accepted Answer

Generic interview questions ("tell me about yourself," "what are your weaknesses") produce rehearsed answers and almost no signal. Two questions that consistently produce the opposite are "What does a typical day look like in this role?" and "What separates a great hire from an average one?" The first forces the hiring manager to describe the real job instead of the job description. The second forces them to articulate the dimension on which people actually succeed or fail. Use the answers to design the rest of the interview. If a hiring manager cannot answer either clearly, the role is not ready to be filled.

Question 2

Build your own agent harness, even as a side project

Vlad · Accepted Answer

Most developers assume an agent harness is something you buy or install. In practice, a working harness for your own workflow is a weekend project, not a quarter-long one. The payoff is that every future agentic feature you build sits on primitives you actually control: your own prompt format, your own tool interface, your own logging and trajectory replay. Even if you never ship it as a product, the harness compounds: it is the thing that makes every downstream experiment cheap. And as [Vlad](/people/vlad) put it at the end of his demo, it is genuinely fun to build, which is a signal in itself.

Question 3

Agency experience is a superpower for shipping fast

Mircea · Accepted Answer

If you've spent years building software for clients, you already have the hardest skill in indie hacking: the ability to ship. You know how to scope, build, deploy, and handle payments. Stop thinking of agency experience as a disadvantage. Mircea built SingleFax in a weekend because he'd already solved every technical problem it required, just for other people's businesses.

Question 4

Stop polishing code, start finding customers

Vlad · Accepted Answer

As an engineer, your instinct is to keep improving the product. Resist it. A mediocre product with great distribution will outperform a great product with no distribution every single time. Vlad spent months polishing sisif.ai before realizing that nobody knew it existed. The hardest shift for technical founders is accepting that code quality doesn't drive revenue.

Question 5

Twitter and ProductHunt are slow for unknown founders

Vlad · Accepted Answer

Building in public, Twitter threads, and ProductHunt launches all share the same assumption: someone is already listening. If you have 12 followers, tweeting into the void won't generate customers. Vlad tried the standard playbook for months and got nothing. These channels compound over time, but if you need traction now, you need to go where attention already exists.

Question 6

Build from personal pain, not market research

Raul · Accepted Answer

Raul didn't do market research or competitive analysis. He built exactly the thing he wished existed when he was fired and job hunting. Personal pain gives you an unfair advantage: you know the problem deeply, you can tell real solutions from fake ones, and you won't lose motivation when growth is slow because you genuinely care about the problem.