TeardownHQ – Indie Startup Playbooks

A searchable directory of indie startups with verified revenue numbers and detailed teardowns of their GTM strategies, pricing, and growth channels. Solves the problem of finding real, actionable startup growth stories instead of polished marketing narratives. Target users are founders, indie hackers, and startup enthusiasts.

Indiehackers.com proved there's sustained demand for verified revenue transparency, but it's evolved into a broad community rather than a structured, searchable knowledge base — leaving a clear gap for something more like a database than a forum. The closest substitute is Starter Story, which does narrative teardowns but skews toward lifestyle businesses and buries the tactical signal under long-form interviews. A $2k–10k/mo ceiling makes sense as a bootstrapped media-data hybrid: think sponsorships from tools targeting founders, plus a paid tier for deeper filters or exports, though neither monetization lever is large without serious traffic. The real kill condition is content freshness — verified revenue numbers go stale fast, and if the curation process relies on manual outreach, the operation becomes a part-time job before it becomes a business.