Cory Zue
coryzue.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2017
Cory Zue is an indie developer who writes about his profitable side projects, finances, free time, and family life.
What HN saysHN commenters cite him as an inspiring indie hacker and link his posts on Bluesky comments and why he stopped sharing his numbers publicly.
28HN people shared it
7linked it in comments
45stories submitted
1.0Kstory points
5 months agolast shared
2017people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Show HN: Four years of profitable side-projects3 people · 145 points · first shared 2020 · 33 comments on HN
- 2What to do when no one tells you what to do anymore3 people · 18 points · first shared 2021 · 2 comments on HN
- 3A Five-Year Journey to Financial Freedom and Beyond3 people · 15 points · first shared 2022 · 1 comments on HN
- 4Time Wealth: Why having more free time can be better than becoming rich3 people · 12 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
- 5Farewell, Building in Public3 people · 6 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 6Writing3 people · first shared 2018
- 7Adding Bluesky-powered comments to any website in five minutes2 people · 17 points · first shared 2024 · 1 comments on HN
- 8Headspace Is Perishable2 people · 15 points · first shared 2025 · 1 comments on HN
- 9Rescuing the Art of Disagreement2 people · 10 points · first shared 2022 · 2 comments on HN
- 10When the line stops going up2 people · 4 points · first shared 2025 · discussion on HN
- 11Stop worrying about edge cases2 people · 2 points · first shared 2019 · 1 comments on HN
- 12Homepage2 people · first shared 2023
- 13Using coding skills to make passive income1 people · 259 points · first shared 2025 · 141 comments on HN
- 14How to Train an AI Image Model on Yourself1 people · 207 points · first shared 2025 · 42 comments on HN
- 15Lessons from Running a Sale That Earned 3 Month's Profit in a Week1 people · 186 points · first shared 2020 · 42 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
czue · 2026-01-15
https://www.coryzue.com/ mostly a blog about my indie hacking journey with a slice of life and parenting mixed in
mtlynch · 2024-02-16
Cory Zue writes about similar topics, and I draw a lot of inspiration from him:
https://www.coryzue.com/
Suket Karnawat also left Google to pursue a similar path, and he writes regular updates about his progress:
https://suketk.com/
jslakro · 2025-08-07
Another interesting bluesky integration as blog commenting system from some months ago https://www.coryzue.com/writing/bluesky-comments/
hn_throwaway_99 · 2025-01-14
Do you have more evidence of this? I'm genuinely curious. I read the whole post, and perhaps I missed it but I didn't see a breakdown of his income streams.
I say this because, at first blush, I was glad that a bunch of the products he listed that he built seemed generally like real products that I could imagine people finding useful. I say this because it feels like, in contrast, so often in these solopreneur posts they're selling some kind of scammy SEO or ad-spam tool.
So yeah, I'd be bummed if this guy turned out to be the tech equivalent of "Buy my real estate investing course!", and just curious if that's really what this is.
Edit: Nevermind, I saw https://www.coryzue.com/open/.
spiffytech · 2023-08-26
Cory Zue wrote about why he stopped sharing his numbers in public: https://www.coryzue.com/writing/building-in-private/
I've also seen Jon Yongfook remark that public revenue can become misleading for readers once you have employees or cost-of-goods. You have to really spell out the profit/loss details (like Michael Lynch does), but people will still be tempted to do an apples-to-oranges comparison of your top-line revenue vs other public founders.
randymonday · 2020-03-24
I totally agree, and while we are not there yet, you see companies like baremetrics, ghost and nomadlist which started this movement. But if you take a closer look at smaller companies like placecard.me you will see more detailed blog posts covering their progress with almost complete view on how the founder develops his/her startup as well as metrics such as revenue and work hours (check https://www.coryzue.com/open/ ). I hope this will grow to more startups as it does instills a stamp of trust.
vivan · 2019-01-28
My biggest inspiration is https://www.placecard.me/ by Cory Zue (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=czue).
He has been documenting the whole process very well both on Twitter (https://twitter.com/czue/status/958993008543830017) and his blog (http://www.coryzue.com/writing/).