Indie hacking can feel isolating

Busy can still feel lonely

The World Health Organization separates social isolation from loneliness. Isolation is about having too few social connections. Loneliness is the painful gap between the connections you have and the ones you want. [1]

That difference matters when you work for yourself. You can spend the day answering customers and talking to people online, then finish work feeling like you haven’t had a conversation about how you’re doing.

Posting an update can help you meet people. But there’s also value in a private conversation where you can say you’re stuck before you’ve worked out what the lesson is.

What the surveys found

In a survey published by Founder Reports, 26.9% of 227 entrepreneurs and business owners across 46 countries selected loneliness or isolation as a challenge they faced. Marc Shorb’s report also records that 25.6% said they lacked a support system for talking openly about mental health struggles. [2]

That figure applies to the people who answered this survey. The report doesn’t establish that they represent indie hackers more broadly, and the question grouped loneliness and isolation together.

Work can also take up the time you’d otherwise spend with people. In its 2019 report, Going it Alone, the Canadian Mental Health Association surveyed 476 entrepreneurs and interviewed 20. It found that 66% reported difficulty maintaining work-life balance because of entrepreneurial stress. [3]

Those participants had been in business for at least a year and had at least one other employee. They were recruited through a non-probability sample, so this survey also cannot give us a loneliness rate for solo software founders.

Both reports include founders who were struggling to fit relationships around work or find support. The percentages answer different questions, though. Adding them together would tell us very little.

Isolation can wear down motivation

Loneliness also appears in research on burnout. Claude Fernet, Olivier Torrès, Stéphanie Austin and Josée St-Pierre followed 377 French owners and managers of small and medium-sized businesses across four waves over eight months. Their 2016 paper found that occupational loneliness helped explain the link between management stress and burnout. The strength of that link varied with how strongly the owners pursued innovation and took a proactive approach to risk. [4]

These businesses had 3–250 employees. The owners could have people around them at work and still feel lonely in their role. The study was observational, so it cannot prove that loneliness caused burnout.

Fei Zhu, Wei Yu, Shea X. Fan and Jason Gabriel Jonathan studied entrepreneurs in the UK and Indonesia for a 2023 paper. In both surveys, greater loneliness was associated with lower entrepreneurial passion and stronger intentions to leave the business. They measured intentions to leave; they didn’t track whether those businesses closed. [5]

When you’re losing interest in a project, it’s easy to spend all your attention on what to change in the product. It’s also useful to look at how you’re spending your days. Who can you talk to when work is going badly? How long has it been since you did?

Make time to talk to other founders

Before starting Indie Hackers, Courtland Allen considered how the business would affect his social life. In Questions to Ask Before Starting a Business, he says he wanted something:

“easy to explain friends and family, because I’d be lonely if I couldn’t talk about it”

He describes choosing work that would bring him into contact with other people. It’s a personal account, so we can’t treat it as evidence that his approach would work for everyone. [7]

Peer connections and mentoring also come up in Maren C. Umdasch and Elisabeth S. C. Berger’s review of 163 papers, published online in 2025. The authors found limited empirical evidence about how well interventions work. [6]

A short call or an afternoon working alongside someone is a small way to try spending more time with other founders. See whether you want to do it again.

Put a call in the calendar

Ask a founder you like talking to if they’d be up for a weekly call. Twenty minutes is a reasonable place to start. Catch up on whatever you’ve both been working on, then leave time for the problem you keep putting off.

Keep the appointment when there’s nothing impressive to report. Otherwise, the weeks when you most want to talk can become the weeks you skip.

Make the invitation easy to answer

“We should connect sometime” leaves both people with a job to do. Try asking for something small: “Would you look at my pricing page with me for fifteen minutes?” Or suggest a time to work together: “Want to cowork on Friday morning?”

Follow up on their work too. If they told you they were about to launch, ask how it went. You’ll have more to talk about the next time you meet.

Work alongside someone

You don’t have to spend the whole session talking. Meet at a library or share a desk for an afternoon. You can each get on with your own work and take a break together when you’re ready.

Talk about the unfinished work

A call gets tiring if you feel you have to arrive with a success story. Bring the pricing decision you haven’t made or the sales email you don’t know how to answer. Give the other person room to do the same.

Keep a life outside your project

It’s easy for a founder group to become another place where you talk about work. Keep seeing the people you know through other parts of your life, too. You should have somewhere to go where nobody asks about your revenue.

Make a regular plan with them if that helps you follow through. A dinner every other Thursday is easier to keep than repeatedly saying you’ll catch up when the launch is over.

If loneliness persists or starts affecting your sleep or ability to work, consider talking to a qualified mental health professional. A peer group can offer company and shared experience; professional care offers a different kind of support.

Find someone to talk shop with

You don’t need to put together a whole community before reaching out. Ask one person you’d like to hear from again whether they want to catch up next week. If you get on well, make it a regular thing.

We built 4builders to help with that first introduction. It matches you with three other solo builders in a private Telegram circle, where you can talk about what you’re working on and ask each other for feedback.

The introduction is only the start. If someone mentions a difficult week, ask about it next time you talk.