In recent years, a very strange phenomenon has emerged in Chinese programming communities.
A programmer gets laid off.
They spend several months looking for work and find nothing.
Or they find a job, but the salary is too low to satisfy them.
Or they are getting older, their technical skills are nothing exceptional, and they are becoming less competitive in the hiring market.
Then, suddenly, they announce:
I’m going to become an indie developer.
No more looking for jobs.
I’ll build my own products.
An app, a website, an AI tool, a Chrome extension, a mini program, a SaaS product.
I don’t need to make much each month. A few thousand yuan will do.
Ideally, I’ll eventually have several products, each making a little money, enough in total to cover my living expenses.
Then I won’t have to go to work, appease a boss, sit through pointless meetings, or worry about layoffs.
It sounds wonderful.
Even AI often gives you this advice:
You could try building your own product.
Start with a small need.
Validate quickly.
Find a niche market.
Build your own source of income.
The problem is:
This narrative may be one of the biggest scams in the entire world of programming careers.
It packages something much harder than finding a job, much harder than working for an employer, and in many cases even harder than joining a startup team, as a “fallback” for a struggling programmer.
But indie development has never been a fallback.
It may actually be the hardest path of all.
This is the most ironic part of the whole issue.
What would the normal logic look like?
Someone is exceptionally capable.
They have sound product judgment.
Industry connections.
Customers.
An audience.
Accumulated technical expertise.
An understanding of a particular field that others lack.
Perhaps people are already willing to pay for what they offer.
So they say:
I don’t want to keep working for a company. I’m going to do this myself.
That makes sense.
But in reality, we often see the exact opposite sequence:
Layoff → Unable to find a job → Disillusionment with the job market → Decision to become an indie developer.
In other words, indie development is not the natural result of accumulated capabilities.
It is often psychological compensation for failure in the job market.
Nobody in the labor market is willing to pay enough for your skills, so you decide to bypass that market and make money directly from consumers.
But here is the question:
Why would the consumer market be more forgiving than the hiring market?
When a company hires a programmer, at least HR, a technical lead, and a business lead assess the candidate together.
When users buy your product, they ask only one question:
Is this worth my money?
There are no consolation prizes.
No credit for “a great attitude.”
No credit for “good learning ability.”
No credit for “working very hard.”
Users do not care how many nights you stayed up building the product.
They only care:
Why shouldn’t I use a free alternative?
Why shouldn’t I use a big company’s product?
Why shouldn’t I use a competitor’s?
Why should I pay you right now?
That is much more brutal than an interview.
We can put the question even more directly:
If a commercial company won’t pay enough for your labor, why would you suddenly believe that the entire market will recognize your value better than a boss does?
Previously, you were at least selling your labor within an organization.
That organization handled branding, distribution, sales, customer acquisition, product direction, legal matters, operations, finance, and infrastructure for you.
Now you leave all of that behind and say:
I’m no longer selling my labor.
I’m going to package my labor into a product and sell it to more strangers.
Of course, that is not impossible.
But you should at least explain one thing:
Why would your capabilities become more valuable after you lose the organization supporting them?
The biggest misconception many programmers have about “indie development” is this:
Indie development = Writing code alone.
Not at all.
Real indie development means simultaneously taking on at least these roles yourself:
Product manager, programmer, designer, tester, operations engineer, marketer, salesperson, customer support representative, growth specialist, accountant, and even legal adviser.
Writing code may actually be the easiest part.
One situation programmers love to imagine is:
I’ll build it first.
This is the most dangerous sentence of all.
Programmers naturally like turning problems into engineering problems.
There aren’t enough features yet.
The UI isn’t attractive enough.
Performance could be improved.
The architecture could be refactored.
Add another AI integration.
Add another dashboard.
Build a mobile version too.
Then three months pass.
The product becomes more complete.
The user count remains zero.
This is what many programmers call “indie development.”
Essentially, it is a sophisticated form of entertaining yourself.
Bad at the game, but addicted to playing.
That does not mean their coding is bad.
It means their business skills, understanding of users, market judgment, and ability to distribute a product are weak, yet they love immersing themselves in the technical world they know best.
Technology offers certainty.
When the code is written, it is written.
When an API works, it works.
When the tests turn green, they turn green.
Markets do not work that way.
The market does not reward you merely for trying hard.
It may not care about you at all.
Many indie development projects bear a striking resemblance to one another.
To-do lists.
Expense trackers.
AI summarization.
AI writing.
AI PDF tools.
AI bookmarks.
AI RSS.
AI knowledge bases.
AI interview tools.
AI resumes.
Developer tools.
Browser extensions.
Every kind of dashboard.
Why always these things?
Because they are easy to imagine and easy to build.
Notice that neither condition has anything to do with “users being willing to pay.”
Programmers often make a fundamental mistake when building products:
I need it, so other people need it too.
Or:
This feature is convenient, so someone should pay for it.
That is not how it works.
There is an enormous gulf between “having a need” and “being willing to pay.”
And another enormous gulf between “being willing to pay” and “being willing to keep paying.”
More brutally:
Even if a need really exists, that does not mean it belongs to you.
Google can serve it.
OpenAI can serve it.
Notion can serve it.
WeChat can serve it.
ByteDance can serve it.
Hundreds of other indie developers can serve it too.
Why should you get the users?
Many indie developers have not even considered this question when they start.
All they think about is:
Can I build it?
Rather than:
What gives me a right to win?
This is something many indie developers have never really figured out.
What exactly are you selling?
Code?
No.
Your working hours?
No, not those either.
Users do not care whether you spent three days, three months, or three years.
Writing 100,000 lines of code does not make it worth 100,000 yuan.
Writing only 500 lines does not make it worthless either.
The market never prices things by the amount of labor involved.
What users actually buy is an outcome.
Saving time.
Saving money.
Making more money.
Reducing risk.
Convenience.
Entertainment.
Information.
Status or identity.
Emotional satisfaction.
Access to some scarce resource.
One of the easiest mistakes for programmers to make is therefore:
Mistaking the code itself for the commodity.
It isn’t.
Code is a production tool.
It merely packages some form of value.
What determines a product’s worth is never how complicated its code is, but:
What scarce thing do you actually control?
Exclusive data?
A distribution channel?
Relationships with users?
Industry knowledge?
A brand?
A community?
Network effects?
Switching costs?
A supply chain?
Trust?
Resources?
Or some specialized capability that others struggle to replicate?
If you have none of these and all you can say is:
“I wrote this software.”
That usually isn’t a moat.
Suppose your indie product really succeeds.
It consistently makes 2,000 yuan a month.
Or 5,000 yuan.
Or 10,000 yuan.
You immediately face a very practical question:
Where is your moat?
Technology?
Business capabilities?
Resources?
Branding?
Distribution?
Data?
Customer relationships?
Network effects?
If you have none of these, why should your profits last?
Many people say:
Big companies won’t bother with my tiny market.
True.
But big companies have never been the only danger.
There are also tens of thousands of other programmers.
Developers in India.
Developers in Eastern Europe.
Open-source projects.
AI agents.
An existing SaaS product casually adding your offering as a feature.
Something you spend a month building today may take someone else three days to copy with AI tomorrow.
So the real question is not:
Will Tencent copy me?
It is:
Why can’t someone just like me build something similar at a lower cost?
This leads to another question.
Suppose your revenue model can scale.
One customer pays 50 yuan.
Ten customers pay 500 yuan.
A thousand customers pay 50,000 yuan.
Ten thousand customers pay 500,000 yuan.
What does that tell you?
That your business model can be replicated.
And once it can be replicated, it attracts competition.
If the profits are clear, demand is real, and replication costs are low, why would you be the only person to discover it?
Startups will enter.
Other indie developers will enter.
Existing platforms may casually swallow your offering by adding the same feature.
Conversely, suppose you say:
Nobody else can replicate this.
Then you have to explain:
Why can’t they?
If the reason is not technology, capital, resources, or distribution, it often comes down to something intensely dependent on you personally.
Your personal brand.
Your taste.
Your service.
People’s trust in you.
Your relationships.
These things can certainly make money.
But here comes another problem:
They are often difficult to scale.
Indie developers therefore encounter a brutal contradiction:
Things that are easy to scale are often easy to copy.
Things that are hard to copy are often hard to scale.
Many people imagine an exceptionally perfect business model that is extraordinarily hard to find in reality:
You can build it alone.
It requires no funding.
No sales.
No distribution channels.
No team.
It is hard to copy.
It grows automatically.
You can keep charging for it.
And it makes money consistently every month.
That is not a business model.
It is a wish list.
Building a startup is already extremely difficult.
Anyone who has actually participated in one should know how many resources a company often needs to make a product succeed.
Founders.
Product managers.
Designers.
Frontend developers.
Backend developers.
Operations staff.
Business development.
Marketing.
Distribution channels.
Investors.
Industry connections.
Customer relationships.
Office resources.
A brand.
Capital.
Even with all of this, many startups still fail.
Some teams burn through millions or tens of millions of yuan in funding and end up with nothing.
So here is the question:
Why would an ordinary programmer sitting in a rented room, writing code for three hours each evening, suddenly be able to beat them?
At least a startup has funding.
At least it can buy traffic.
At least someone helps with sales.
At least someone handles product management.
At least someone shares the cost of mistakes.
At least it can try a few times.
What does an indie developer have?
One person.
One computer.
An idea in their head.
Perhaps ChatGPT as well.
Then they think:
Making 5,000 yuan a month shouldn’t be hard, right?
Quite the opposite.
Making 5,000 yuan consistently may be much harder than you imagine.
It means you actually have to complete an entire business cycle:
Identify a need → Build a product → Find users → Get users to pay → Keep users using it → Get users to keep paying → Keep customer acquisition costs low enough.
If any link breaks, revenue is zero.
This is the sentence I see most often.
Many people say:
I’m not trying to build a startup.
I’m not trying to create a publicly traded company.
I just want a small product.
Two or three thousand yuan a month is enough.
That sounds very modest.
But it contains an enormous logical error:
The business world will not automatically reduce the difficulty to a 2,000-yuan level just because you only want to make 2,000 yuan.
A product earning 3,000 yuan a month does not mean it only requires 3,000 yuan’s worth of skills.
You still face the full force of competition.
You still pay server bills.
You still need to acquire customers.
You still need customer support.
You still need maintenance.
You can still be copied.
You can still be banned by a platform.
An API price increase can still kill your business.
A single feature from a big company can still replace your entire offering.
The market does not say:
This young person doesn’t ask for much. Let’s give them 2,000 yuan a month.
There is no such mechanism.
Being content with modest prosperity is a life goal, not a business model.
You can want to make only a little money.
But the market will not lower the barriers to commercial competition because your desires are modest.
To be even more realistic:
If a business is truly stable, standardized, easy to copy, and consistently profitable, competitors have no reason to ignore it forever.
So “I only make a little, therefore nobody will compete with me” is itself an illusion.
I once heard a line about entrepreneurship that I have always considered remarkably accurate:
Entrepreneurship is society testing your understanding of the world with real money.
You think users have a particular need.
The market tells you whether they do.
You think users will pay 99 yuan.
The market tells you they will pay only 9.9 yuan, or nothing at all.
You think an industry offers an opportunity.
Two years later, the market tells you that the industry doesn’t even exist.
You think you understand a trend.
Your account balance ultimately tells you that you don’t.
When you are an employee, an organization can absorb your mistaken understanding of the world.
If the company gets its strategy wrong, it may not be your responsibility.
If a product fails, you still get paid.
If you implement the wrong requirements, you still get paid next month.
If a project is canceled, you can switch teams.
Even if the company goes under, you can look for another job.
Entrepreneurship is different.
It converts errors in judgment directly into money.
Into your savings.
Your time.
Your opportunity costs.
Your age.
Your energy.
Eventually, even your confidence.
The more you misunderstand the world, the more tuition the market may make you pay.
Why is entrepreneurship so difficult?
Because it does not just test your technical skills.
It tests:
Whether you understand people.
Money.
Markets.
Organizations.
Communication and distribution.
Supply and demand.
Competition.
The times you live in.
Even luck.
It is a comprehensive examination of your entire framework for understanding the world.
And indie developers often sit that exam alone and unprepared.
This is what I find most problematic about the “indie developer” narrative.
If someone tells a person with extensive industry experience, customer connections, distribution channels, and a clear understanding of demand:
You could consider indie development.
That is fine.
But much of the content now spreads like this:
Can’t find a job?
Become an indie developer.
Facing the age-35 career crisis?
Become an indie developer.
Laid off?
Become an indie developer.
Tired of the rat race?
Become an indie developer.
Low salary?
Become an indie developer.
Hate your boss?
Become an indie developer.
As though every failure along a career path can ultimately be redeemed by “building your own product.”
That is absurd.
Your disadvantages in the job market do not automatically disappear when you become an indie developer.
Quite the opposite.
Previously, you only had to compete with others for a developer position.
Now you have to compete with the entire business world.
Your company used to handle customers, branding, sales, cash flow, legal matters, distribution, and product direction for you.
You just had to write code.
Now all of those problems are yours.
Yet this path is advertised as:
Freedom.
Lightweight entrepreneurship.
A one-person company.
Being a digital nomad.
Making money while you sleep.
Passive income.
Micro SaaS.
Being a solo founder.
Each phrase sounds more seductive than the last.
Strip away all these labels, though, and only one sentence remains:
You are planning to start a business alone.
Since AI arrived, this narrative has become even more popular.
One thing really has changed:
The technical cost of building a product has fallen.
Previously, a solo developer might need a month.
Now AI can help them build it in three days.
Many people therefore conclude:
The age of indie development has arrived.
That is a classic case of seeing only half the picture.
AI reduces production costs.
But it also reduces everyone else’s production costs.
You can build it in three days.
So can someone else.
Previously, a SaaS product might have had some technical moat.
Now it may be copied in one night.
Previously, “I can build it” was an advantage.
Increasingly, it won’t be.
The focus of competition shifts even further beyond technology:
Branding.
Traffic.
Trust.
Distribution channels.
Industry connections.
User insight.
Sales.
Content.
Community.
These are precisely the things many programmers are worst at.
AI has not made indie development easy.
It has only made “building the thing” easy.
And “building the thing” has never been the hardest part of entrepreneurship.
We can go further:
The stronger AI becomes, the harder it is for development skills alone to constitute a moat.
If your entire competitive advantage is:
“I can code this feature.”
That advantage is rapidly losing value.
The valuable question has become:
Why must you be the one to provide this value, and why can’t someone else provide it at a lower cost?
You always see the people making money.
Someone builds a SaaS product earning $20,000 a month.
Someone makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from a Chrome extension.
Someone quits their job, builds an app, and now travels the world.
These stories certainly exist.
But nobody interviews the tens of thousands of people who spend three months, six months, or a year building something, earn zero yuan, and quietly shut down their servers.
Failure has no value as a story to spread.
Success does.
The feed eventually creates an illusion:
It seems everyone around you is doing indie development.
It seems any product can generate income.
It seems a programmer only needs “strong execution” to make money.
This is fundamentally no different from the entrepreneurship myth of a decade or more ago.
It used to be:
Anyone can start a business.
Now it is:
Anyone can become an indie developer.
The office has merely been replaced by a rented room, the startup team by one person, and the fundraising pitch deck by an AI coding tool.
This is a brutal paradox.
Who is usually best suited to indie development?
Someone who may already find it easy to get a job.
They have good technical skills.
They understand business.
They think in terms of products.
They communicate well.
They understand their industry.
They have resources.
They have users.
They may have worked in a particular field for many years.
They simply realize:
If I keep selling these capabilities to a company, I can only earn a few hundred thousand yuan a year; if I turn them into a product, they might be worth more.
So they start developing independently.
Their logic is:
I have the capabilities, so I leave the organization.
But much of today’s indie development narrative has become:
Organizations don’t want me, so I’ll prove I don’t need an organization.
These sentences look only slightly different.
The realities behind them are completely different.
This is where misunderstandings arise most easily.
I am not saying:
Unemployed people can never succeed.
People with ordinary skills can never build products.
Of course not.
People can learn.
They can change direction.
They can suddenly find an opportunity.
Life is full of chance anyway.
The point is:
Do not treat the identity of “indie developer” itself as the answer to your problems.
If you cannot find a job, the real questions are:
Why can’t I find a job?
What capabilities am I missing?
Is something wrong with the industry?
Are there opportunities in another industry?
Can I enter a better market?
Can I improve my English?
Can I move to another country?
Can I switch fields?
Can I build industry connections?
Can I learn sales?
Can I engage with real customers?
Can I find a problem people genuinely want to pay to solve?
Those are the questions.
Not:
I’ll just build an app.
Building an app is not the answer.
Writing code is not the answer.
Becoming an “indie developer” is certainly not the answer.
If your underlying capabilities remain unchanged and you merely replace “unemployed programmer” with the nicer-sounding identity of “indie developer,” reality will not change as a result.
That is why I increasingly believe:
“Indie developer” may be one of the biggest scams facing programmers in our time.
The danger is not that this path does not exist.
It is that an extremely difficult path, with a very high failure rate and exceptionally broad requirements, is packaged as a fallback any ordinary programmer can choose at any time.
Unemployment becomes freedom.
Being unable to find a job becomes not wanting to work for someone else.
Having no income becomes “still getting off the ground.”
Having no users becomes “validating product-market fit.”
Someone writing software nobody uses, alone in a rented room, suddenly acquires a beautiful identity:
Independent Developer.
The name changes.
The problems do not.
They may even get worse.
At least when you fail to find a job, you know you have failed.
The most frightening thing about indie development is that it can leave you spending six months, a year, or two years thinking:
I’m just one more product away.
I’m just one hit away.
I’m just one Product Hunt launch away.
I’m just one real need away.
I’m just a little luck away.
This narrative lets someone postpone their reckoning with reality indefinitely.
Indie development is certainly not fake.
There really are people in the world who live off their own products.
Some have indeed built one-person companies and gained lives that are freer and wealthier than employment could offer.
But precisely because these successes are real, they can so easily create illusions.
Winning the lottery is real too.
Getting rich from a startup is real too.
Getting rich from trading is real too.
The question has never been:
Does anyone succeed?
The real question is:
What gives you a reason to be the one who succeeds?
What do you actually possess that others are willing to pay for?
What scarce value do you actually control?
Why must you be the one to provide it?
Why can’t others copy it?
Why can’t others provide it at a lower cost?
Why will users keep paying you?
If you have no answers to these questions, “I’m going to become an indie developer” may not be a career plan at all.
It may just be something you say to comfort yourself.
And this is where society’s real cruelty lies:
It will even create a beautiful vocabulary for you,
so that while you are failing,
you can still feel that you are moving toward freedom.