The indie hacker narrative is seductive: one person, one product, full control. It makes for a clean story. But it’s not how we work, and after running this way for a while, I don’t think we’d have it any other way.
We’re three people with a fixed core. I handle engineering and architecture. We have someone who thinks in products — user flows, positioning, what a feature actually means to the person using it. And someone who understands the operational side: distribution, relationships, how money moves. None of us does the other’s job well. All of us have tried.
Why the solo model breaks at the edges
Solo founders talk about being “default alive” and moving fast. What they often mean is: they ship the part they’re good at and quietly neglect the rest. A technical founder ships the product and ignores distribution. A business-first founder gets users but ships something half-built. The gaps don’t disappear — they just get deferred until they’re expensive.
Running as a studio forces the conversation earlier. When I’m building something, I have someone in the room asking who is this actually for and how do we reach them. Not six months later. During the build.
Small is intentional
Three people is not a constraint we’re working around. It’s the structure we chose. We can make a decision in an afternoon. We don’t have coordination overhead. When something isn’t working, we can change direction without a meeting about the meeting.
We extend this with specialists — designers, researchers, domain experts — brought in when a project needs them. But the core stays small. The moment a team gets large enough to need management, it stops being a studio and becomes a company. That’s a different game.
What this means in practice
Products ship as products, not prototypes. We don’t publish half-finished work and call it an MVP. If something isn’t ready, it stays internal until it is.
We work across hardware, software, and AI not because we’re unfocused, but because the interesting problems often live at the intersection. A power supply design and an AI video pipeline are different domains, but the thinking is the same: what’s the simplest system that solves the actual problem?
The studio model is slower to explain than “indie hacker” or “startup.” We’ve made peace with that.