DEV Community: Gbenga Odukoya

Founders Today vs Indie Hackers for SaaS Founders

Gbenga Odukoya — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 21:46:57 +0000

If you build a SaaS product, you have probably posted on Indie Hackers or thought about it. Founders Today is a newer community that overlaps with it in some ways and differs in others. The short version: Indie Hackers is better for long, open stories about building a business, and Founders Today is better for a launch page that stays listed and for quick feedback in a feed. Most SaaS founders get more from using both, for different jobs, than from picking one.

This guide compares them on what SaaS founders actually need: useful feedback, a launch, access to buyers, and a post that does not vanish in a day. It also says where each one falls short, including Founders Today, which is younger and smaller. If you landed here looking for an Indie Hackers alternative, start with what is actually missing for you. The answer changes which platform helps.

Founders Today vs Indie Hackers at a glance

	Indie Hackers	Founders Today
Format	Forum threads, groups, interviews, and a podcast	A feed of launches, discussions, and opportunities
Strongest at	Open revenue stories and long build logs	Launch pages that stay listed, and fast builder-to-builder talk
Product pages	Product pages with milestones and updates	Launch pages with media
Launch day	No ranked launch day: you post and engage	A launch system, currently in beta
Extra reach	Podcast and newsletter	Publisher widgets and a weekly newsletter feature
Track record	Running since 2016, bought by Stripe in 2017, independent again since	Newer, still early
Cost to join	Free	Free

The Indie Hackers column comes from its own product pages, podcast, and press coverage. The Founders Today column comes from Founders Today's own pages. Both sites change, so check them for anything new before you decide.

What Indie Hackers is best at

Indie Hackers started in 2016 as a place where founders share real revenue numbers and explain how they got there. Stripe bought it in 2017, as TechCrunch reported at the time, and it later returned to independence. Today it is a mix of forum threads, topic groups, interviews, a podcast, and product pages where you can post milestones and updates.

For a SaaS founder the strongest part is the culture of showing numbers. A post that says you went from 12 to 40 paying customers and shows what changed fits the site better than a polished announcement. If you can share your MRR, your churn, a pricing test that failed, or an acquisition channel that cost more than it returned, you are speaking the local language, and people tend to reply in kind.

The archive is the other asset. Years of interviews and build logs mean you can research how someone in your niche reached their first thousand dollars a month before you write a word of your own. Few communities have that depth.

The limits are mostly about format. It is a forum, so a thread gets most of its attention in the first day or two. If you cannot share revenue yet, you have less to talk about. And a bare link with no story or question attached gets ignored.

What Founders Today is best at, and where it is still early

Founders Today is a feed with launches, discussions, opportunities, and toolkits, plus a member directory where you can follow people and message them. For a SaaS founder the useful pieces are the launch page, which stays listed instead of rotating off a one-day leaderboard, and the discussion feed, where a short question can get answers without a long essay first.

It also runs distribution outside the feed. The publisher program places product widgets on partner blogs, and a weekly tools list goes out through newsletter partners. Treat those as channels to measure, not guarantees. Put a tracking link on your launch page and see what actually arrives.

It is fair to say what is not there yet. Founders Today is younger and smaller than Indie Hackers. The launch system is in beta, and push notification partnerships are still being built. There is no deep archive of revenue case studies like the one Indie Hackers has built over years. If archive depth and brand recognition are what you want, that is a real gap, and you should weigh it honestly.

Founders Today vs Indie Hackers on what SaaS founders care about

Getting useful feedback

Feedback quality depends more on how you ask than on where you ask. Both communities respond to specific questions: is this pricing page clear, which step of onboarding lost you, would you pay this much for this. The difference is format. Indie Hackers threads suit longer replies from people who have run a business, so a detailed critique usually comes from there. A feed suits quick reactions, so five fast opinions on a landing page are easy to collect on Founders Today.

Whichever you use, ask one question per post and say what you plan to change based on the answers. People reply more when they can see their reply will matter.

Launching a product

Indie Hackers gives you a product page and a post. There is no ranked launch day, so your launch is whatever you make of the post and the conversation under it. That suits founders who like to tell a story and stay in the comments for a couple of days.

Founders Today gives you a dedicated launch page with images and media that stays listed after launch week, plus the distribution described above. That suits founders who want a page to point people to long after the post has aged.

Either way, prepare assets first: a one-line description, three screenshots, a short demo, and one clear call to action. If you are comparing launch options more widely, the Product Hunt alternative page and the list of free startup launch platforms with active communities cover the rest of the field.

Reaching buyers, not just builders

Be honest about who is reading. Both audiences are mostly builders. If you sell to developers, indie founders, or other SaaS teams, you are posting in front of possible buyers, and either platform can send real signups. If you sell to dentists, recruiters, or HR managers, these communities will give you feedback, credibility, and links, but your buyers are somewhere else.

In that case use founder communities to sharpen the product and the pitch, then spend your selling time where your buyers gather. The best SaaS founder communities list and the SaaS community page can help you find those other rooms.

Founders Today's publisher widgets are the one feature aimed at readers outside the founder crowd, since they sit on third-party blogs. Whether that reaches your buyers depends on which blogs carry them, so ask which ones before you count on it.

How long your work stays visible

Every feed and forum pushes old posts down. On Indie Hackers a thread is live for a day or two, then lives on mostly through search and your product page. On Founders Today the launch page stays listed, but a feed post ages the same way. Plan a follow-up update a week or two later instead of relying on one post.

Credibility and track record

Indie Hackers has history. People know the name, the press has covered it, and a profile there carries weight with some audiences. Founders Today is newer, so its name means less outside its own members. For a SaaS founder, credibility mostly comes from what you show anyway: a clear product, real numbers, and steady updates over months.

Community culture and tone

Indie Hackers leans toward long, personal, number-heavy posts, and a lot of members share what they earn. Founders Today leans toward shorter posts, quick questions, launches, and discussion threads about tools and news. Neither tone is better, but copying the wrong one costs you replies. A three-paragraph business update with figures reads as normal on Indie Hackers and a little heavy in a feed, while a one-line question can look thin on a forum. Read ten recent posts that got plenty of replies on each platform before you write yours, and match the length and the level of detail.

Time cost

Both are free to join, so the real cost is your time. Fifteen minutes a day of useful replies on one platform beats a big post on two. If you have to choose, pick the one where your likely users already spend time.

Which one fits your stage

Idea stage. You need to know if the problem is real. Post a question about the problem, not a pitch for your solution. Ask how people handle it today and what they pay for. Both communities work for this only if the people answering could be your users.

Pre-launch. You need a handful of people who will try the product on day one. Spend a few weeks commenting on other people's posts before you post your own. People check profiles, and a profile with nothing but your own link looks like an ad.

Launch week. You need a page to point to and some people who see it. This is where the two differ most: Indie Hackers for the story, Founders Today for a page that stays listed. Doing both in the same week is fine as long as the posts are different.

First 100 users. Feedback matters more than traffic here. Ask specific questions, like which onboarding step confused someone, and answer every reply. Write down what you hear and what you changed.

B2B pipeline. Use both for credibility and early adopters if your buyers are founders or developers. If they are not, treat both as places to learn, not places to sell.

Three examples of how this plays out

These are made-up scenarios to show the decision, not case studies.

A developer tool. Say you built an API monitoring tool. Your buyers are developers, so both communities sit close to your audience. Post a build log with real numbers on Indie Hackers, then launch on Founders Today so you have a page that keeps listing. Either one can send trial signups, and you can compare them with separate tracking links.

Vertical software for non-founders. Say you built scheduling software for physiotherapy clinics. Founder communities will critique your pricing and onboarding well, but clinic owners are not reading them. Take the feedback, then bring the product to clinic groups, professional associations, and local forums where the buyers are.

A small solo micro-SaaS. Say you make a few hundred dollars a month. Indie Hackers still welcomes small numbers if you are specific about how you got them, and a launch page gives you something to link from your profile everywhere else. You do not need big revenue to be useful in either place. You need a clear story and the patience to reply to people.

How to tell if it is working

Pick three numbers and check them every Friday for a month: signups from each tracking link, replies that included a specific suggestion, and visits to your product or launch page. Replies like 'nice work' feel good but do not change your product. Replies that name a problem do. If a platform gives you suggestions you act on, it is working, even when signups are small. If it gives you neither signups nor suggestions after a month of steady posting, change the format of your posts before you leave.

A four-week plan for using both

Week 1. Set up your profile and product page on both. Write one plain sentence on what you do and who it is for. Spend about 15 minutes a day replying to other people's posts.

Week 2. Share one specific lesson from your build, with a number in it. For example, what you changed after a user interview and what happened next.

Week 3. Ask one pointed question you really need answered, such as whether your pricing page is clear. Reply to every answer, even short ones.

Week 4. Launch. Put the full launch page on Founders Today. On Indie Hackers, tell the story of the launch as a post and link to your product page instead of pitching.

Two rules for all four weeks. Never paste the same post in both places, because the formats reward different things. And use a separate tracking link for each community, so after 30 days you can see which one sent signups and not just visits.

Mistakes that waste a post

Posting a link with no story or question attached.
Asking for upvotes instead of asking for feedback.
Posting once and disappearing, instead of staying in the comments while the post is live.
Making claims without numbers, like 'growing fast' with no figure behind it.
Treating a founder audience as your buyers when your product is for someone else.
Judging a platform after a single post. Give each one a month of steady replies first.

Which one should you start with?

You can share revenue and want long-form credibility: start with Indie Hackers.
You are about to launch and want a page that keeps listing: start with Founders Today.
You sell to non-founders: use both for feedback, then put your selling effort where your buyers are. The list of free places to promote your startup is a good next step.
You have no product yet: neither. Talk to ten people who have the problem first. The guide to networking platforms for new founders can help you find them.

For a direct side-by-side with feature rows, see the Founders Today vs Indie Hackers comparison page.

FAQ

Is Founders Today an Indie Hackers alternative or a replacement? Neither, exactly. They do different jobs. Indie Hackers is stronger for long-form transparency and has a much deeper archive. Founders Today is built around launches and a feed. Many founders will want both.

Can I post the same thing on both? You can, but it works badly. Rewrite it for each format. A long build log suits a forum thread. A short update with a link to your launch page suits a feed.

Which is better for B2B SaaS? Neither is a buyer channel by default. If your buyers are founders or developers, both can send signups. If they are not, use both for feedback and credibility and sell elsewhere.

Do links from either community help SEO? Check the link attributes yourself before counting on it. Even where a link is followed, a community post is worth more as a place to get feedback and early users.

How long before I see results? Give each platform a month of steady replies and one launch post, and track signups per link. One post is not enough to judge either.

Is it free? Both are free to join as of writing. Check each site for current plans.

Pick one thing you want feedback on this week, write it as a question with one number in it, and post it where your users spend time. If you have a SaaS ready to show people, you can submit your launch on Founders Today for free.

How to Get 100% Free Traffic Today for Your Product - Here’s How

Gbenga Odukoya — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:12:15 +0000

How to Get 100% Free Traffic for Your Product Today - 5 Places Most Founders Overlook

If you're launching a SaaS, developer tool, AI product, side project, or indie startup, don't rush to spend money on ads.

There are several product discovery platforms where you can submit your product and potentially get traffic, backlinks, and new users for free.

Here are 5 worth trying:

1. Product Hunt ⭐

Still one of the biggest places to launch a new product.

The competition is high, but a good launch can put your product in front of thousands of people in a short period. The key is having a strong launch page and getting genuine engagement.

2. Founders Today ⭐

This one is interesting because it's much more selective about what gets published.

They don't seem to accept low-effort or obviously AI-generated product descriptions, so you actually have to explain your product properly.

I also like that product pages can have strong visibility in Google, which means the benefit isn't necessarily limited to launch-day traffic. A well-written product page can continue getting discovered through search.

*3. Uneed
*
A simple product discovery platform that's particularly useful for SaaS, AI tools, apps, and digital products.

4. Peerlist

Good for developers, makers, and people building in public. It's especially useful if your product has a strong technical or developer-focused angle.

5. BetaList

Worth trying if you're launching an early-stage startup and looking for your first users, early adopters, or feedback.

The part most people get wrong

Don't copy one generic AI-generated description and paste it everywhere.

Different platforms have different audiences, and low-effort submissions are easy to ignore.

Write a genuinely useful description:

• What problem does your product solve?
• Who is it for?
• What makes it different?
• Why should someone try it?

And submit before you desperately need traffic.

Getting discovered takes time.

If you're building a SaaS or indie product right now, save this list and work through all five.

You might be leaving free traffic on the table simply because you never submitted your product. 👀

Best Online Communities for Indie Hackers in 2026

Gbenga Odukoya — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 22:23:09 +0000

Finding the right community as an indie hacker is one of those things that looks easy from the outside and feels surprisingly hard once you are actually looking. There are hundreds of forums, Discords, Slacks, subreddits, and platforms that describe themselves as communities for indie hackers and founders. Most of them are either too noisy to extract any signal from, too quiet to feel worth the effort, or populated by people who are at a completely different stage than you are.

The communities that actually move the needle for indie hackers share a specific set of qualities. The people in them are genuinely building things, not just talking about building things. The feedback culture rewards honesty over politeness. The discussions are searchable and persistent, so something posted six months ago is still discoverable. And the audience is specific enough that when you share what you are working on, the people reading it actually understand what you are talking about.

Here are the communities that consistently deliver on those qualities in 2026.

1. Indie Hackers

Best for: Long-form progress updates, revenue transparency, and founder-to-founder feedback.

Indie Hackers is the original home base for bootstrapped founders and solo builders. Built by Courtland Allen and later acquired by Stripe, it has maintained its character as a place where founders share real numbers, real lessons, and real failures in a format that actually gets read.

The product interview format is what made Indie Hackers initially famous. Founders with working products walk through how they got their first users, what their revenue looks like, and what has been harder than expected. These interviews are still among the most honest pieces of founder content available anywhere.

The forum is where the ongoing community life happens. You can share a product update, ask a specific question about pricing or customer acquisition, or post a milestone and get responses from people who have faced the same problems. The audience skews toward software products, SaaS, and content businesses, which means the feedback you receive is from people who understand the mechanics of what you are building.

The strength of Indie Hackers is the quality of the long-form content and the searchability of the archive. A question about churn rates or cold email that someone asked two years ago likely has a thread of genuinely useful responses still sitting there waiting to be found.

Weakness: Activity levels in the main forum have softened compared to a few years ago as the community has spread across other platforms. The signal-to-noise ratio is still good but finding the most active conversations requires some navigation.

Best way to use it: Write a genuine progress post once a month. Answer questions in threads where you have direct experience. Read the product interviews systematically if you are early-stage.

2. Founders Today

Best for: Product discovery, launch visibility, and connecting with founders who are actively building.

Founders Today is a rising community in the indie hacker and startup builder space that has been gaining traction among founders who want a focused environment without the noise of larger platforms. The community is built specifically around product launches, founder updates, and early-stage builder discussions, which means the audience showing up there is concentrated in exactly the right demographic for most indie hackers.

What makes it worth paying attention to is the engagement quality relative to its size. Smaller, focused communities tend to produce better conversations than larger ones because the people there have more in common and less reason to perform for a broad audience. Founders Today sits in that category right now, while it is still early enough that showing up consistently puts you ahead of the crowd that will arrive later.

For an indie hacker launching a new product or looking for feedback from other builders, it is a community worth adding to the regular rotation alongside the more established names on this list.

3. Reddit — r/SaaS, r/startups, r/entrepreneur, r/indiehackers

Best for: Honest feedback, validation, and finding people who have solved the specific problem you are stuck on.

Reddit's startup-adjacent communities collectively represent one of the largest concentrations of builder feedback available anywhere online. The culture varies significantly by subreddit, but the common thread is that Reddit users are more willing to challenge your assumptions than most online communities.

r/SaaS is particularly useful for founders building subscription software products. Revenue discussions, churn problems, pricing strategy, and customer acquisition questions all get substantive responses from people running actual SaaS businesses.

r/startups is broader and works well for general founder questions. r/entrepreneur skews toward small business as much as tech startups but has useful discussions around bootstrapping, hiring, and operations. r/indiehackers mirrors some of the Indie Hackers forum content and is worth monitoring even if you are already active on the main site.

The self-promotion rules in most startup subreddits are strict, which is both a limitation and a feature. You cannot simply drop links and leave. You have to participate genuinely, which means the people who are active in these communities have usually been around long enough to have real experience to share.

Weakness: Content disappears quickly in the feed. A question posted yesterday is effectively invisible today unless it gained significant traction. The communities are also large enough that low-effort questions get ignored.

Best way to use it: Ask specific, narrow questions rather than broad ones. Participate in other people's threads before posting your own. Use the search function before posting something that has been covered extensively.

4. Product Hunt

Best for: Product launches, early adopter acquisition, and building initial social proof.

Product Hunt is where indie hackers go to launch. The platform surfaces new products daily to an audience of early adopters, investors, journalists, and other founders who are specifically there to discover and try new things. A strong launch day on Product Hunt can produce hundreds of signups, early reviews, and the kind of initial momentum that is genuinely hard to manufacture through other channels.

The community element beyond launch day is more limited. Product Hunt has discussion sections and a makers community, but the primary value for most indie hackers is the launch itself rather than ongoing community engagement.

The mechanics of a good Product Hunt launch have become well understood. Building a following on the platform before your launch, lining up supporters who will vote and comment on day one, and timing the launch for Tuesday through Thursday during US morning hours all make a meaningful difference to how high a product places.

Weakness: The audience is concentrated among the tech-savvy early adopter segment. If your product serves a mainstream audience, the people discovering you on Product Hunt may not be representative of your actual target customer. High placement on launch day also does not guarantee sustained traffic afterward.

Best way to use it: Treat it as a launch event, not an ongoing channel. Prepare weeks in advance. Engage personally with every comment on launch day.

5. Twitter/X — Indie Hacker and Builder Community

Best for: Building a personal audience around your product journey, finding collaborators, and staying current on what the builder community is discussing.

The indie hacker and vibe coder community on X is real and active, even as the platform's overall culture has shifted. The founders who have built the largest audiences there share a consistent approach: they document the journey honestly, post about specific problems and how they solved them, and engage genuinely with other builders rather than broadcasting into the void.

The distribution potential of X is higher than any other platform on this list. A single post from the right account at the right time can reach tens of thousands of people overnight. That same unpredictability is also the platform's central weakness for community building: the conversations are ephemeral, the algorithm is opaque, and the engagement that feels meaningful one week can disappear entirely the next.

For indie hackers, X works best as a distribution layer on top of a primary community rather than as a community itself. Share your Indie Hackers posts there. Announce your Product Hunt launches there. Engage with other builders there. But do not mistake follower count for community.

Best way to use it: Post consistently about the specific problem you are solving and how you are solving it. Engage with other builders genuinely. Use it to amplify content that lives somewhere more permanent.

2. Hacker News

Best for: Technical founders, developer products, and reaching a high-concentration audience of engineers and technical decision-makers.

Hacker News is not a community in the warm, welcoming sense of the word. It is a link aggregator and discussion forum run by Y Combinator where the comment culture is blunt, the standards are high, and a post that lands on the front page can send more traffic in 24 hours than most content efforts generate in a month.

For indie hackers building developer tools, technical products, or anything that appeals to a technically sophisticated audience, Hacker News is the highest-leverage community on this list. The "Show HN" post format lets you launch a product directly to an audience of developers and technical founders who will tell you exactly what they think about it, usually within an hour.

The feedback is not always pleasant. The HN audience has no patience for marketing language, vague value propositions, or products that do not work as described. But the founders who have gotten genuine traction from Show HN posts consistently describe the feedback as some of the most useful they received in their entire early-stage journey.

Weakness: The community is not designed for ongoing relationship building. You post, you get feedback, and then the conversation is over. Building a sustained presence requires posting consistently good content over a long period of time.

Best way to use it: Use "Show HN" for product launches and significant milestones. Submit genuinely interesting technical writing. Read the comments on your own posts carefully, even the harsh ones.

7. Slack and Discord Communities

Best for: Real-time conversations, niche founder groups, and async collaboration with a specific type of builder.

The niche Slack and Discord communities that have grown around specific topics, programming languages, product categories, or geographic regions have become some of the most valuable spaces for indie hackers in 2026. They are harder to find than the platforms listed above, but the conversations inside them are often more relevant than anything happening on a general forum.

Some worth knowing about: Online Geniuses for marketing and growth, Designer Hangout for product design, Ramen Club for bootstrapped SaaS founders, and various language-specific developer communities that often have channels dedicated to product discussions and founder feedback.

The limitation of Slack and Discord is discoverability. Conversations that happened two months ago are effectively inaccessible. The knowledge generated inside these communities does not compound over time the way a searchable forum does.

Best way to use it: Find two or three that match your specific niche rather than joining twenty and being active in none of them. Lurk for a week before contributing. Build relationships with specific people rather than broadcasting to the channel.

How to Actually Get Value From Any of These

Being a member of a community and getting value from it are different things. The founders who consistently benefit from online communities share one behavior: they give before they ask.

That means answering questions in threads where you have direct experience, sharing honest updates about what is working and what is not, and engaging with other people's launches and milestones before you need them to engage with yours.

The communities on this list have different cultures, different audiences, and different strengths. Pick two or three that match where you are right now and show up in them consistently. The connections and the feedback that matter will follow from that, not from being a passive member of fifteen platforms simultaneously.

Build in the open. Share what you know. Ask specific questions. The rest takes care of itself over time.