If you want to understand where the money in indie software actually goes, do not look at the leaderboards. Look at the projects that are not on them.

That is the lesson from a small data exercise by Jason Zhu, who pulled every project listed on TrustMRR.com through its official API: all 11,303 of them. TrustMRR is a directory where small software projects report their revenue, and where some projects choose to hide their listings from public view. Comparing the hidden ones against the public ones produces a picture that contradicts almost everything the public lists suggest.

Start with the headline numbers. Hidden projects are a small minority: 919 out of 11,303, or 8.1 percent. But over the last 30 days, those hidden projects took in 24.2 percent of all revenue on the platform, $10.37 million against $32.53 million for the public ones. The median hidden project earned $372 in the last 30 days. The median public project earned zero. Read that again: the typical project you can see makes nothing, while the typical project you cannot see makes something. Any analysis built only on public listings is not just incomplete. It is pointed in the wrong direction.

The skew gets stronger as revenue rises. Among projects earning more than $10,000 in the last 30 days, 35.1 percent are hidden. Among the top 100 projects by revenue, 41 are hidden. The richer the project, the more likely its owner has decided you should not know about it. This is not a rounding error. It is a behaviour pattern, and it should change how you read every "top indie projects" list you have ever skimmed. Those lists are not a map of the market. They are a map of the market's least successful segment plus a few exceptions that did not bother to hide.

The strangest finding concerns the projects that do not even fill in a category. Among uncategorised projects, 34.5 percent are hidden, yet that hidden minority takes 79.9 percent of the group's revenue. Think about what that means. The most lucrative hidden projects are not merely private. They are undescribed. They do not tell you what they do, what niche they serve, or what category they belong to. If you are hunting for opportunities by browsing categories, the best opportunities have removed themselves from your search path entirely. Among projects that do list a category, mobile apps hide at the highest rate, 16.2 percent, which fits the pattern: app store competition is visible and copyable, so the incentive to stay quiet is higher.

The data also covers projects that are for sale, and here the pricing tells its own story. The median asking price is 2.3 times annual revenue. But the multiple depends sharply on size. Projects earning under $1,000 a month ask 4.6 times annual revenue. Projects between $1,000 and $10,000 a month ask about 2.0 times. Projects above $10,000 a month ask only 1.8 times. Small sellers demand the highest multiples, which looks backwards until you think about who is buying. A tiny project is cheap in absolute terms, so a high multiple still means a small cheque, and the seller is pricing in hope: the buyer might grow it. A large project is priced by investors who do the maths. If you ever consider buying a small project, that 4.6x figure is not a bargain or a rip-off on its own. It is the market telling you that small-project prices are set by optimism, not by cash flow.

Jason Zhu's earlier post in the same thread adds a diagnostic worth keeping. A product whose revenue keeps declining is usually facing one of two things: demand is shrinking, or competition is intensifying. That sounds obvious, but it is a useful filter. Founders love a third explanation, usually involving marketing or timing or a feature that will fix everything. The data rarely supports the third explanation. When the line slopes down for long enough, the market is telling you something, and the honest move is to listen.

He ends with a question he leaves open: why do owners hide at all? The data cannot answer it, but the plausible reasons are worth listing, because each one implies a different strategy. Some owners hide to avoid copycats in a niche where the idea is the whole moat. Some hide because their employer does not know about the side project. Some hide while preparing a sale, keeping the numbers out of competitors' hands. And some hide simply because they do not want the attention. If you are building something yourself, the question is worth asking in reverse: at what revenue level would you hide, and what would you be protecting? The answer tells you what your real moat is. If hiding protects nothing, you may not have one.

Three practical takeaways follow. First, treat every public indie leaderboard as a biased sample. The absence of competitors in a niche you are browsing proves nothing, because the winners in that niche may be hidden by choice. Second, if you evaluate projects to buy, anchor on the size-adjusted multiple: around 2x annual revenue for a real business, higher only if you are explicitly paying for potential rather than cash flow. Third, declining revenue deserves a blunt diagnosis before it gets a marketing budget. Check whether demand is shrinking or competitors are multiplying, and act on whichever answer the evidence supports.

None of this data is mine, and I have not independently verified TrustMRR's raw figures; the numbers here are Jason Zhu's API pull, reported as he published them. But the pattern is robust enough to act on even with that caveat, because it does not depend on any single number being exact. It depends on the direction of the skew, and the skew is large: a small hidden minority taking a quarter of the money, with the share rising as revenue rises. The indie world you can see is the tip of an iceberg, and the part below the waterline is where most of the money sits.

I write about indie building, data, and the business behind small software over at Airgrix (https://airgrix.com), where I also run a small independent store.