Lynne Tye

Lynne Tye is a Seattle-based solo founder and one of the indie hacker movement's best-known examples of a profitable one-person business. An MIT brain and cognitive sciences graduate, she entered a neuroscience PhD program at UCSF but dropped out, then took a famously non-linear path that included rideshare driving and producing EDM concerts before teaching herself to code in 2015 and freelancing as a developer.

While searching for an engineering job herself, she found the hiring process uninspiring and opaque, so she built Key Values — her first ever product — a job board that helps software engineers find teams whose culture and values match their own. Companies pay to be profiled, and job seekers can filter teams by values such as work-life balance, diversity or engineering practices.

She bootstrapped Key Values with her own savings, had to list companies for free at first to solve the marketplace chicken-and-egg problem, and taught herself sales along the way. On the Indie Hackers podcast in early 2019 she shared that the business, then about two years old with no employees, had done around $80K in a quarter and was on track for roughly $300K–350K that year. She is also a three-time Ironman finisher.