How do you learn about indie hacking?

I've learned a lot from reading, observing, making predictions and assessing my predictions.

I've found long-form content like books and multi-hour interviews far more useful than blog posts or tweets (for people other than @naval). Finding an iterative loop of learn->build->learn->build is also huge.

My main advice is to be fearless. I wasted years watching from the sidelines thinking I didn't know enough or wasn't connected enough with the right people. At the time, I could have done so much!

Now I have some moderately severe physical limitations (RSI that makes using a keyboard or especially a mouse or a phone a big problem). But just lowering my bar and putting something out there about 5-10 hr/week for the last 18 months has made a world of difference. My project covers my rent, over half my living expenses and lets me spend less time coding and gives my tendons a chance to slowly heal.

Talking to your peers, building and testing, reading books etc. At the end of the day, success comes as a result of everything accumulated. Anyway, here are some tips from my experience:

1. If you are reading a book, a medium post, or watching tutorials, even youtube, if you are not taking notes that's entertainment, not research.
2. As long as you keep learning without applying, you won't achieve the thing you are studying for.
3. Sooner or later your glass will fill up and you'll need someone to empty it for you. Not necessarily a co-founder (no, you don't need a co-founder to be an indie hacker) but you need a friend, a colleague, an employee, someone to be close to while you're going against the world :)

We just dove in.

We thought "who are we to do this?? We're not the experts, and we'll be ridiculed for building a community and newsletters for microbiology (specificially bacteriophage, a kind of virus that kills bacteria and can be used as an alternative to antibiotics) experts" but we've been only getting encouragement from the community, and more and more people are thinking about ways how we could bolster the research community. We're still not sustainable or profitable yet, but there's lots more engagement, through our newsletter, our site, and collaborators. It's been a really amazing journey as someone outside of science (I'm a designer/engineer), but my partner&partner is a phage microbiologist, and we're finding all kinds of ways we're helping researchers who are fully invested in their own research.

I think the best thing that you can do is just dive into building and testing. It's really the best way to learn!