I finally managed to get through the almost 4 hour marathon conversation between the extraordinary interviewer Lex Fridman and indie-hacker OG, Pieter Levels. I’ve always been impressed with Pieter’s ability to get things done, especially when it comes to launching software products that make money. It comes as no surprise that the core pillar of their conversation revolved around delivering products without getting bogged down with technical details and software complexity. When you’re starting out with an unproven product-market fit (PMF) and the resources of a single person, you can’t afford to obsess over the complexity that the modern software engineering zeitgeist often recommends as standard out of the box.

Pieter mentions that most of his projects are simple PHP scripts with jQuery for front-end interactivity. This might shock many modern developers, but it makes sense for him. There are often questions on Hacker News about which tech stack to choose for a new product, and the most upvoted answer is always: whatever stack you are most productive in. The idea is to prove there’s a market for your product before worrying about anything else. As Pieter points out, he wants to put a Stripe payment link up within a couple of days and start seeing money roll in before he spends more time on polishing.

Given the candid nature of their conversation, it was also interesting to see how much they don’t know about web development given my experience in the domain. I often use a lack of complete knowledge as an excuse to avoid action — falling into the classic analysis paralysis trap. On the other hand, they never expressed an aversion to learning — it’s just that their current knowledge and tools are sufficient for the kind of projects they’re working on right now. If Pieter ever wants to create a product that can’t be built using his current toolset, I’m sure he’ll dig into whatever tools are needed to experiment, just as he did with LLMs (again, without getting bogged down in understanding the internals of how they work).

I highly recommend everyone listen to the entire podcast. It’s a refreshingly honest call to action for indie-hackers, one that requires a certain amount of resistance to the ever-increasing complexity being piled onto modern web development.