[HN Gopher] The rise of the one-person unicorn
___________________________________________________________________
The rise of the one-person unicorn
Author : kiyanwang
Score : 258 points
Date : 2021-08-15 08:47 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nothingventured.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nothingventured.com)
| xwdv wrote:
| Any developer through sheer will can mold himself into a one man
| startup that builds a powerful product that normally requires the
| efforts of a massive team.
|
| Where things typically fall apart is when it comes time for
| maintenance and support.
| granshaw wrote:
| I'm sorry, yes, any dev can build a product, but is it
| something people will pay money to buy? That is 90% of the
| problem. If you have to do support, count yourself lucky cause
| that means you actually have customers
| abz10 wrote:
| Lol, this is me, a 100x dev, screwed over by big co employer.
| Decide to go solo and slowly build a company to compete with
| them. Started part time 12 years ago. I think I could easily hit
| $1B valuation within 10 years. It is already super profitable and
| still growing. Eventually I'll cost the competitors so much
| business that it'll be much cheaper for them to buy me out for
| $Bs. If not it'll still throw off $Ms in cash per year.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Congratulations. What are you working on?
| abz10 wrote:
| It's one of those secret but profitable niches.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Oh yeah, _those_. Heard a lot about them. Good luck!
| everybodyknows wrote:
| >throw off $Ms in cash per year.
|
| >secret
|
| What sort of businesses fit within those constraints? The
| only ones that come to mind are illegal ...
| abz10 wrote:
| Cash, as in free cash flow. Maybe not the best usage of
| the term, but better than revenue. And secret in that
| people in this niche don't advertise the opportunity as
| new competition would cut into profits.
| Rezwoodly wrote:
| Ahhhh, the Internet.. I too am a 100x dev who is on the fast
| track for a billion dollar pay day
| soneca wrote:
| Are you 100x more productive than an average dev? Is that what
| _"100x dev"_ means?
| riku_iki wrote:
| By my definition 10x/100x dev means a person who makes
| decision which require 100x less resources to execute to
| achieve the same goal. For example, one can build clean,
| maintainable and monitored codebase/infra, which will support
| business goals and rapid evolution in long term, while some
| group of mediocre engineers can build overcomplicated system,
| over-polluted by bugs and technical debt, which will be
| significant liability rather than useful asset.
| abz10 wrote:
| I'm amused that the 100x dev caught more flack than a
| likely solo $B bootstrap. In my view developer ability
| follows the Pareto distribution.
|
| I was born to program and have done it all my life and it's
| all I do. I've been formally trained and have worked at
| world leading research institutions. I've always been
| considered a bit of a freak by my peers.
|
| I currently have two direct competitors, both have 100s of
| developers and are staffed by thousands. Despite starting
| after them I was able to ship a key feature long before
| them.
| cornel_io wrote:
| That's probably what it means but it's also a weird thing to
| measure because depending how you define "average" you can
| juke the stats any way you want. If I said "hire" to a random
| resume that comes in for a job, the value of either the
| median or mean developer is likely very close to zero if not
| negative, and that's probably true even if you just look at
| devs who are actually employed writing code for generic
| companies. If you restrict to better companies you _quickly_
| climb the productivity curve, and at places like Google it 's
| pretty rare to find someone who is a 10x dev as compared to
| company peers (though you can have 10 or 100x _impact_ pretty
| easily if you 're good at almost any part of business other
| than writing code and know how to thrive in a bloated
| corporate environment).
| abz10 wrote:
| Yes, I would rate my development productivity to be roughly
| 100x of an average developer.
| deworms wrote:
| This is an advertisement, it's admitted at the very end of this
| "article".
| [deleted]
| aww_dang wrote:
| I like the idea of solo development. However, I don't see the
| value in the solutions offered. A marketplace for css components?
| A headline generator or optimizer?
|
| Maybe I am just too close to the technology to appreciate what
| people are buying.
| madamelic wrote:
| > A headline generator or optimizer?
|
| Headlime used GPT-3 so you could write a prompt and it would
| produce copy for your landing page.
|
| It may have been niche, but it would really well and helped
| rather than having to brainstorm my own.
| jFriedensreich wrote:
| that is kind of part of the equation. these super successful
| one-person shows build things that sound extremely niche,
| trivial to sometimes even stupid. But that is the reason they
| can grow their companies under the radar. the key part is that
| they know about a real pain their audience has and that
| audience happens to be much much bigger than outsiders or even
| the founders themselves thought/think.
| peterthehacker wrote:
| Finding a market like that sounds really difficult to do. How
| does someone discover a market like this without a ton of
| luck?
| ren_engineer wrote:
| by being directly involved in other areas and seeing the
| problems that non-developers wouldn't know how to fix
|
| the problem with most software engineers is they only know
| tech. Most of these "niche" businesses are created at the
| intersection of tech and marketing/design/business
| kjksf wrote:
| You say it's luck.
|
| I say the universe is sending you lots of signals.
|
| Most people ignore those signals. The "lucky" ones are
| simply perceptive.
|
| To give you a concrete example.
|
| There was this app Screenhero that was acquired by Slack in
| 2017.
|
| There was a HN thread about it and it erupted with people
| saying "oh no, I'm using this and it'll go away. how
| awful!".
|
| The thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15552042
| 333 points, 147 comments
|
| Just from that thread you could tell:
|
| * there's an app with obvious business model (monthly pay
| per user), immune to piracy (everything is mediated by
| their servers; no account, the app doesn't work) * the
| functionality was deemed valuable enough by Slack to
| acquire a startup that barely got off the ground * people
| love this app
|
| The Universe sent a clear signal.
|
| Hacker News is supposed to be a breeding ground for hackers
| that are interested in building software businesses.
|
| How many of the people that read the Slack HN acquisition
| thread fired up Visual Studio or XCode and started building
| a copy of Screenhero?
|
| Zero. Everyone ignored the signal.
|
| It's even worse than that. I actually made that point in
| 2017, in that same HN thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15555488
|
| I spelled out the obvious opportunity for the tens of
| thousands of people who must have read that post. It was
| even the top voted comment.
|
| Everyone ignore the signal.
|
| BTW: "clone Screenhero" opportunity is mostly gone. Not
| completely but there are at least 2 startups cloning it.
|
| I'm pretty sure it took at least 2 years before they
| started copying Screenhero (one of the startups is actually
| by a guy from the original team, I think).
|
| So for at least 2 years there was a clear opportunity to
| build a multi-million dollar business by a very small team.
| peterthehacker wrote:
| But your example, Screenhero clones like Pop
| (https://pop.com/), are in a large, competitive market.
| That doesn't fit the qualifications of a small,
| underserved niche like the article describes.
| going_to_800 wrote:
| I fit very well in the article description. It's not only
| about finding the right niche and riding the wave, is also
| about execution, otherwise competitors will eat you.
|
| There's luck involved of course, but after 10 failed tries
| you'll get an eye for it. Just an example: there are sub-
| markets that don't have specialized products, they all use
| products built for everyone instead that specific niche,
| like instead of a CRM for everyone niche it down as CRM for
| mechanics (i'm sure there are many of them, but you get the
| idea).
| jasongrishkoff wrote:
| As someone who pulled this off, it was less about discovery
| and more about being part of it already. The problems are
| much easier to understand and address when they're actually
| problems you're facing yourself.
| sudhirj wrote:
| It's very often a niche the founder themselves are part of. If
| the founder writes content and builds a headline A/B tester,
| it's often possible to make a tool, so some adwords and
| marketing and get a couple thousand sales at less than a $100 a
| month each.
| motoboi wrote:
| When you have the whole world as your market, even super niche
| products can make a lot of money.
| ausbah wrote:
| is this stuff really that new? I feel like I've been reading
| about solo founders who are able to bootstrap some company into
| the hundreds of thousands to low millions per year, for several
| years now on this site
|
| what seem new is all the products around it, like "micro private
| equity"
| MrAwesome wrote:
| Does anyone have a list of good resources / tools / communities
| for solo creators?
|
| I recently decided to take a solo project and run with it. The
| technical promise is real, and I'm excited about my vision for
| it. Unfortunately in this context, I've spent all 10+ years of my
| career in scientific computing and big tech - so despite having a
| few friends in the startup world, most of this is really new to
| me, and I don't actually know anyone who has gone the solopreneur
| / micro-startup route.
|
| Any and all tips, tricks, pointers, articles, and advice are
| welcome - I'm really excited to take this risk, but I'm feeling
| increasingly clueless about how to handle many of the
| organizational / non-technical aspects of this process.
| ac2u wrote:
| https://www.indiehackers.com/
| MrAwesome wrote:
| Perfect, thank you. Looks like an invitation code is needed
| to sign up, if any generous soul would like to send one to
| glenn.hope[at]protonmail.com I would be forever grateful!
| [deleted]
| cushychicken wrote:
| I had to tell someone so I'll say it here: the unicorn centaur in
| the title image disturbs me. XD
| leroman wrote:
| In todays market where developers are commoditized "resources"
| it's only logical for the "ninjas" or "superstars" who repeatedly
| see their role being perceived as "working bees" who don't want
| to fall into this management / worker dichotomy or choose serving
| a "management" queen.. to rebel and redefine the work as they see
| fit, a good enough business where work is done and is more
| aligned with the interests of the working class, so no VCs and no
| conforming to top to bottom hierarchies.. just work
| unixhero wrote:
| You have precisely described me.
|
| One man army, taking projects in megacorps. I answer to no one.
| andruby wrote:
| I applaud your devotion!
|
| At what point do you start to answer "to your customers"
| though?
|
| This sometimes holds me back from rebelling. Exchanging 1
| boss for a 100 customers that all have expectations.
| ipaddr wrote:
| You pick your customers and who you want to support. Pick
| wisely..
| [deleted]
| unixhero wrote:
| You exchange the relationship from boss to customer and
| business partner. You divide your customer facing work unto
| three categories: DELIVERY, MANAGEMENT, STEERING
|
| The relationship must be strong and you must have a working
| relationship, can never be caustic. Make sure that you are
| making the customer shine, always. Be a trusted advisor
| when you can. Say yes a lot, but setting expectations and
| saying no is also okay and important.
|
| Risk tolerance and thick skin is key. The financial reward
| is sky high.
| bob33212 wrote:
| Reaching 1B valuation would require hiring a lot of people, but
| building a startup that normally cost 15M to build in less than
| a year is very doable.
| djoldman wrote:
| You might be surprised. Instagram was bought for 1B and had
| 13 employees at that time.
|
| "Instagram launched 10 years ago. By the time it was bought
| by Facebook in 2012, it only had 13 employees -- including
| founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger."
| azinman2 wrote:
| That's a very, very rare story.
| wombatpm wrote:
| Hence the unicorn designation. If it was common every 10
| year old girl would have one
| azinman2 wrote:
| There are many startups that have reached unicorn (1B)
| valuation by this point. Very very few of those have less
| than 20 employees.
| carom wrote:
| Is that a necessary condition though or due to the
| environment? A security company I worked for got acquired
| and in a relatively short time they went from 100 to 300
| to 600 quickly in preparation for the acquisition. I am
| not sure those people were required for the valuation or
| if they were part of the standard game plan of a sale.
| motoxpro wrote:
| Probably seems more rare because the only stories you
| hear are "X raises 100 million" instead of "X is a
| profitable company serving a tiny niche making 100
| million in revenue"
| mandeepj wrote:
| Not really that rare. Have you heard about Whatsapp,
| AppDynamics, LinkedIn acquisitions?
| c-smile wrote:
| Yeah, exactly.
|
| I left Software Architect / UI position at big corp when
| management had ordered to use then-hot Angular on large web
| app. Without investigation, acceptance testing, etc. Just
| unconditional directive.
|
| I had Sciter[1] prototype at that moment - used as self-
| teaching tool to understand how browsers work.
|
| Since then I am almost solo (one or two contractors sometimes)
| on the project. ~10 years of non-disturbed (literally) flight.
|
| [1] https://sciter.com
| throw0101a wrote:
| IIRC, the dating site Plenty of Fish was a one-man operation for
| quite a while:
|
| > _In 2004, Plenty of Fish became a full-time money making
| business for Markus.[10] He ran the site independently until
| 2008, when he began hiring other employees at his new Vancouver
| headquarters._
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POF_(dating_website)
|
| It didn't quite hit unicorn status ($1B), as he sold it for
| "only" $500M.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Interesting after they were bought they kind of fell off the
| map. That's typical
| ornornor wrote:
| They also removed a couple of the posts that showed,
| supported by hard numbers from their analytics, that several
| things that match.com et al. will sell their users hard on
| don't work at all and can even negatively affect your odds of
| being successful of the site.
|
| These posts were deleted shortly after the acquisition but
| they're probably still in archive.org etc.
| paulgb wrote:
| Heh, the same thing happened to Ok Cupid. (Caches of) one
| of the posts occasionally resurface on HN, as here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055501
| ornornor wrote:
| I might be mixing them up, it could very well have been
| ok Cupid that I was thinking of.
| cutler wrote:
| Markus was shrewd enough to see how the business was changing
| in terms of the cost of providing a free service and jumped
| ship accordingly. At least that's how I read it.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Yea, they were bought by that dating conglomerate, I'm
| guessing the users have been rolled into one pot, instead of
| keeping them separate
| mtc010170 wrote:
| One thing I've been wondering about, as someone who's considering
| making the switch.. is the role of hiring contractors for things
| you yourself aren't a specialist in (ex: for me, design). When I
| hear "one-person" and read posts like this, they sometimes give
| the impression that indie hackers do everything themselves..
| which I imagine is really not the case. Does anyone have insight
| into that?
| JoiDegn wrote:
| Yes that's right. Almost none of these people have built
| everything themselves. Design, copy writing, marketing,
| development, accounting are just some of the things that can be
| outsourced easily.
|
| Source: myself building https://subledger.app
| mellavora wrote:
| From the landing page, subledger seems pretty useful. Good
| success!
| Jack000 wrote:
| I started out designing everything from scratch, but realized
| it's 10 times faster to just use a commercial vue/html theme.
| You don't need _custom_ design, especially if your product is
| not design-related.
|
| It's absolutely possible to do everything yourself. Most skills
| relevant to indies have a low "skill ceiling" - ie. it's easy
| to learn just enough to be dangerous.
| peterthehacker wrote:
| > In this universe, of bootstrapping to several hundred thousand
| per month in revenue, a founder can walk away with $5m, $10m,
| $20m (depending on the multiple) in around half the time it'd
| take to build a "unicorn".
|
| The odds of this level of success for a solo bootstrapped founder
| is much smaller when you don't raise. If you look at the stats on
| startup success (exits), funding has a strong positive
| correlation.
|
| There are good and bad reasons to raise capital and many startups
| do raise for bad reasons, but that doesn't mean that funding is
| inherently bad or should be eliminated as an option.
| cj wrote:
| The common rational used as a counterpoint (including during my
| time at YC) was "if taking on $xx million in exchange for 20%
| of the company increases the value of your equity by more than
| 20%, it's a win-win.
|
| The one (major) caveat is that taking on significant funding
| also means you need to repay all of the amount raised when you
| sell your company (legally referred to as a 1x liquidation
| preference).
|
| My main worry for modern day SaaS founders raising giant seed
| rounds (often $5-10mm) is that after taking that money, you've
| now raised the minimum price you would need to sell the company
| for you or your employees to financially gain from a sales.
|
| After raising $10mm, if you go and sell for $12mm a year later,
| the first $10mm goes straight back to your investors, and the
| left over $2mm goes to whoever owns the shares of the company.
|
| When a startup that raised a $10mm seed goes on to raise a
| $25mm Series A, the company can no longer sell for less than
| $35mm (1x liquidation preference to investors).
|
| In other words, we're seeing a shift of mindset to one of "go
| big or go home, there's no middle ground".
|
| The one exception is sometimes VCs allow founders to take money
| off the table during large rounds (but of course that often
| doesn't trickle down to employees with stock options, etc).
|
| And then there are founders who accept 2x or 3x liquidation
| preference terms, which double or triple to problem described
| above.
|
| This is just one of many reasons I favor bootstrapping and
| reinvesting profits for long-term organic growth rather than
| short-term VC-fueled hypergrowth.
| graderjs wrote:
| Peter the Thiel? How very out of character to be pushing fund
| raising
| imgabe wrote:
| What are the odds, exactly?
|
| I don't see where they say that VC funding should be
| eliminated, just that this is another option that more people
| are pursuing.
| peterthehacker wrote:
| This has been analyzed by many, but the stats you see
| reported often are that 9/10 startups fail while 7/10
| venture-backed startups fail [0]. Perhaps the reason why a
| startup has no investor interest is because the market is too
| small, so cutting the data by TAM (if possible) might be
| interesting. We don't have data for these micro-TAM startups
| showing whether they succeed more or less than any other
| startup. But the data we do have does show an advantage to
| raising money from VC vs. not. But to be clear, my point is
| that funding should be a more complicated and nuanced
| discussion. And if there's a $5M+ potential return, like the
| author proposes, then there should be investor interest. The
| question is whether it's a good idea for the company to
| raise.
|
| [0] https://review42.com/resources/what-percentage-of-
| startups-f...
| lugged wrote:
| Survivorship bias.
|
| One person unicorns don't generally exit in the same way, this
| whole article was about the problems trying to raise for small
| one person companies.
| peterthehacker wrote:
| How is that survivorship bias?
|
| Bootstrapped, small, one person companies are still startups,
| where the odds of success are less than 10%, while venture-
| backed startups is 20%-30%. [0][1] What non-survivors are
| excluded from these cohorts?
|
| [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390443720204578
| 004... [1] https://www.embroker.com/blog/startup-statistics/
| fighterpilot wrote:
| And selection bias. The most successful startups attract the
| most VC interest.
|
| It's like Harvard grads. Yes, they're a very high calibre and
| more successful on average, but a lot (not all) of that is
| selection instead of creation.
| 41209 wrote:
| That's not a fair comparison.
|
| If I'm able to raise funding, it means that some very smart
| people think they'll be able to get their money back.
|
| Compare this to just me creating a website vowing to re invent
| bowing. No one's looked at my business plan. Do I even have a
| business plan ?
| lostcolony wrote:
| -Thank- you. I scrolled through all the replies until I saw
| this one, because it seemed like such an obvious reason for
| why there would be a correlation. The first is "someone had
| an idea", and the latter is "someone had an idea that
| outsiders vetted and decided to put money towards". Of course
| the latter would be more likely to succeed. That doesn't mean
| the latter would not have succeeded had they foregone
| investing, nor that the former would have succeeded had they
| only been able to raise funds.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Ehh. If you look at the VC world, it is hard for the VCs to
| bet right. Which means it is essentially just a gamble.
| lostcolony wrote:
| So you're saying you disagree with the parent that
| started this thread, that there isn't even a correlation.
| I'm not saying I agree, just that even if there is such a
| correlation it does not imply causation, for a -very-
| obvious reason.
| [deleted]
| throw63738 wrote:
| "Leave" is wrong idea in this context. If it generates money,
| hire some support staff and just leave it running. Do not sell,
| where would u invest anyway? $5m profit over a few years is
| very common for a small businesses.
| kayhi wrote:
| 5m in profit in a few years seems very rare from my
| experience talking with small business owners.
| madamelic wrote:
| The nice thing about solo bootstrapped is that it is extremely
| quick & easy to cut losses.
|
| Most 'indie hacker' founders have 5 - 10+ failed businesses
| that didn't grow fast enough or just weren't quite right.
|
| The indie hacker scene is pretty different from your typical VC
| startup where a business is 3 - 5 years minimum, most indie
| hackers are running on time frames of 1 - 3 months to gain
| traction.
| [deleted]
| axegon_ wrote:
| From a personal point of view, I completely disagree here. The
| one-person thing is just not doable, no matter how hard you
| believe/try. I've attempted this countless times and my
| motivation and dedication never cut it, no matter how hard I
| push. It's an inhumane amount of work for a single person to
| handle. And there is one specific moment that I've been able to
| pin-point every single time. I end up making a ton of progress:
| bootstrapping a development environment, databases, frameworks,
| containers, yada, yada, yada, I end up building a tons of things
| and just as I feel extremely happy and motivated, I take a step
| back and suddenly I see how many small details I need to fix up,
| as well as how much stuff there is still to be done and how much
| more would pop up to fix, polish and clear up and even a small
| project ends up feeling like infinity and depression and
| frustration kicks in. In my experience having at least one other
| person is at least a good frustration and prevention mechanism.
| That said, finding someone who's on board is equally hard.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Never worry about the big picture. It's too easy to get
| overwhelmed. Sure, have an idea where you want to go, but don't
| worry about all the steps it will take to get there. Worry
| about the next thing. And then the next thing. And little by
| little you will have suddenly made a lot of progress.
| axegon_ wrote:
| Easier said than done it seems. I reckon I've abandoned at
| least 7-8 projects I took pretty far in the last decade,
| everything ended the same way-collecting dust in a repo or on
| an old drive. At this point even if something interesting
| comes to my mind, I shrug it off and ignore it or just share
| it online somewhere or tell someone. Maybe someone else has a
| stronger will than I do, idk. Still secretly hoping that
| eventually I'll meet someone as motivated as I can get so we
| can push each other but seems incredibly unlikely.
| motoxpro wrote:
| 10 years / 7 or 8 projects is about 1.3 years on average.
| It takes a long time to build a company and a product as
| one person. Sounds like you have been giving up a bit
| prematurely. Or if you would like results in that time,
| make an MVP instead of trying to build a feature complete
| product.
| giorgioz wrote:
| I've been a solopreneur boostrapping waiterio.com for 6 years and
| then 2 more years with 1-3 fulltime team members with a 20k MRR
| after 8 years. I've chosen the bootstrap SaaS path after working
| 1 year in Silicon Valley. I thought all my life my dream was to
| build incredible stuff in Silicon Valley, then I got there and I
| didn't like it enough. When I was there I felt lonely and tired
| and sad. Despite having rare skills as Android and iOS developer
| 10 YEARS AGO my manager assigned me to build landing pages. This
| was after not passing hiring interviews for Facebook/Google but
| still getting in one of the big ones. I felt unappreciated and
| pushed to work a lot on something that wasn't even my specialty.
| The Silicon Valley is/was a sausage fest and it was very hard
| dating. When I pitched at events I felt I wasn't being considered
| at all. I was and I am too afraid that the fact I am Italian
| and/or a pragmatic and nerdy developer with no salesy wowing
| pitch skills would let others with little technical skills and a
| big mouth take all the venture funds.
|
| I left the Silicon Valley and started to work on waiterio.com
| while travelling the world. I lived in 10+ countries for 6 months
| each, I saw the world, met a lot of interesting people and found
| love.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Where are the forums for people with this mindset? It used to
| be you could talk small-scale entrepreneurship on webdev forums
| of old, but now there s too much talk of raising
| money/marketing to death/bulshit your way up/game the system
| richardw wrote:
| https://microconf.com/ and surrounds
| SilurianWenlock wrote:
| What sort of tech stack do you need for these types of
| businesses?
| cutler wrote:
| I was wondering too, particularly whether most MVPs and early
| stage startups are web apps (React, Vue etc.) delaying native
| mobile versions.
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| How do you approach your potential customers? I applaud your
| effort, I was in your shoes. But for your idea (SaaS for
| restaurants), your competitors probably hire an army of sales
| because restaurant owners are busy with day-to-day and
| relatively not high-tech.
| giorgioz wrote:
| Yes indeed. My (huge amount of) competitors indeed have an
| army of sales.
|
| If you are David and the others are Goliath just don't play
| the same game they are playing because you are bound to lose.
| Find out what you are good at and play a completely different
| game from them.
|
| We don't do sales. 8 years ago Waiterio was just a mobile app
| and got the customers from the app stores. These days we do a
| lot of content marketing and i18n.
|
| Are you a founder from a non English speaking country? I'll
| be extracting my internal tools for content marketing and
| i18n. Write me here if you would like to give it a try.
| cornel_io wrote:
| You don't want to necessarily play the same game as your
| competitors, but you should probably consider at least
| building up an understanding of what it is they're doing,
| why, and whether there are lighter versions of it that you
| can achieve. The 80/20 rule can go a long way, and a B2B
| company that "doesn't do sales" is probably leaving a lot
| of easy money on the table, depending what exactly that
| means (do you just not do high-touch individual pitching?
| Or no advertising at all? [Sounds like you do some of that
| at least, which is a kind of sales] Do you try to use
| existing customers to get referrals to new ones? If a
| potential customer does want to talk to someone do you
| support that? Etc).
|
| The best CEOs I've known are basically sales people, and
| they all tell me that it's a skill you really can learn,
| even with a language barrier - I know several Indian tech
| folks who sell like _crazy_ in the US even as I can barely
| understand their accents, so it 's not an insurmountable
| barrier, though I do understand that's a bit of a special
| case since the Indian culture is very keen on teaching
| negotiation and sales as a life skill and a lot of the
| dealings end up being with other Indian entrepreneurs.
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| Would love to! I'm a dev, if it's open source, maybe I can
| help improve it. Btw I don't see anyway to reach you in
| your HN profile.
| Abishek_Muthian wrote:
| Congratulations for doing what you love!
|
| I decided to close my startup after I woke up from a surgery
| which had 50% chance of survival because until couple of hours
| before the surgery I was typing the product strategy to my
| shareholders in case I die. Then I spent the next whole year
| winding up my startup in midst of recovery and the whole
| process still gives me PTSD.
|
| So I decided to go solo, to build what I want and possibly what
| others need. I've been doing it for past 2 years and I'm happy.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Are you earning income from what you are building now?
| magpi3 wrote:
| Very inspiring. Thank you for sharing.
| m00dy wrote:
| For those thinking the Silicon Valley is still a sausage fest,
| I suggest you guys to try Northern Europe. Good life, nice pay
| and amazing women :)
| ardit33 wrote:
| They are low key racist though (compared to the US). They are
| kinda racist to other Europeans. Eg Polish people and
| Southern Europeans would be looked down.
| Veen wrote:
| That's a bizarre generalisation.
| [deleted]
| ardit33 wrote:
| 1. I lived in Sweden, and kinda experienced this. I was
| treated much better when I told people I live in the
| US/NYC. Also my colleagues there had hard time making
| friends.
|
| 2. Norway is staunchly anti-immigrant for a reason. It
| has resources and they like to keep it that way. They
| wont even give visas to foreign grand-parents unless one
| of the grandparents has died. This happened to my dad's
| friend. His daughter married to a Norwegian, he couldn't
| stay more than few weeks at a time with his grandchildren
| (treated like a tourist). Finally when he died from
| cancer, wis wife (the grandmother), finally could. This
| is especially cruel from a country that has trilions of
| oil money. (The US sytem, while flawed, is very family
| friendly).
|
| 3. Danemark had enough, and it is turning to the right
| and started doing all kinds of ant-immigration laws.
|
| Denmark's immigrants forced out by government policies:
| https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/06/denmarks-immigrants-
| for...
|
| Now, the OP, said came to north europe as they are plenty
| of women. I am warning the OP as he will face some kind
| of low key discrimination as those countries
| traditionally have been mono-enthnic nation states, and
| as a foreigner you will always be treated like an
| 'other'.
|
| Just giving it the reality on the ground. I know the US
| gets a lot of flack about racist this, or that, but the
| reality the US is the least racist country among western
| countries. Europe is on another level. They discriminate
| routinely against other europeans.
|
| The main complain in the UK during brexit was about
| Romanians and Polish plumbers taking the jobs away....
| m00dy wrote:
| well, I am from Turkey and I have been living in Denmark
| for 5 years.
|
| I really understand what you are saying. I think that
| Racism is everywhere and it is not specific to Northern
| Europe. During my 7 years in Europe, I have developed
| some sort of immunity for low key discrimination and I
| have been lucky enough to build my social circle. So, I
| don't care right now much.
|
| P.S: I'm white, good-looking and have European look. I
| think these are also important.
| rexreed wrote:
| Where specifically in Northern Europe do you suggest? What is
| the visa situation and cost of living? I'm assuming any
| mobility will be difficult in COVID era.
| dgellow wrote:
| Mobility is easy within the EU. Assuming you're vaccinated
| of course.
| m00dy wrote:
| If I were you and If I were in my 20s, I would definitely
| go to Berlin.
| istorical wrote:
| which part of northern europe? my experience was that it was
| cool but not particularly different in that respect
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Great story, thanks for sharing it. I have a friend who has
| been an entrepreneur his whole life, many different kinds of
| businesses. He wanted to partner with me eight years ago to
| write something similar to your Waiterio product, but I have
| always been hesitant to give up just working for pay. Your
| story, and this article is inspiring, but probably not enough
| for me. It is difficult in life to give up successful paths for
| the unknown.
| granshaw wrote:
| I often say that high dev salaries are both a blessing and a
| curse for entrepreneur-minded devs. The opportunity cost and
| bar for success can be insanely high
| asimpletune wrote:
| Where did you meet your love?
| 55555 wrote:
| Asking the right questions!
| brtkdotse wrote:
| How on earth do you afford 1-3 team members on 20k MRR?
| fencepost wrote:
| A big part is probably not being in Silicon Valley or any
| other high cost of living location. T&C has governing law in
| England & Wales so remove company paid healthcare insurance
| as a big factor.
| jason0597 wrote:
| You pay them $70k instead of $150k
| valenterry wrote:
| If I have a SaaS (e.g. website that offers some service) then is
| there a good service that takes care of the technical part of
| user registration, payment and user support / CRM?
|
| Even if there are services like stripe and Auth0, as a solo
| developer it takes considerable time to connect all these
| together to get the basic functionality to actually sell things
| and integrate it into my product.
| heliodor wrote:
| Search for SaaS skeleton or boilerplate. Examples:
|
| https://www.saaspegasus.com/
|
| https://usegravity.app/
|
| https://buildasaasappwithflask.com/
|
| https://bullettrain.co/
|
| https://www.saasforge.dev/
|
| https://nodewood.com/
|
| https://mernkit.com/
| kolaente wrote:
| Stripe is incredibly good. And then there's stuff like Laravel
| Spark which handles all the common stuff like accounts and
| invoicing.
| valenterry wrote:
| Sounds like I have to install/maintain stuff here myself. I
| wish there was a solution that doesn't require me to have any
| additional infrastructure...
| cspags wrote:
| https://www.outseta.com/ is the best tool I've seen that offers
| everything you listed.
| bluedevil2k wrote:
| > as a solo developer it takes considerable time to connect all
| these together
|
| Well hopefully it you're a developer it doesn't take that long.
| I just switched a SaaS to Stripe from PayPal last week and it
| took less than 30 minutes. These SaaS support tools/websites
| are increasingly easy to use, making time to market for even a
| solo dev pretty easy.
| gennarro wrote:
| >> This piece was editorially supported by HSG, the content firm
| that helps startups, investors and entrepreneurs become media
| companies.
|
| What does this mean? It's sponsored content? Or just like a
| freelance writer?
| rexreed wrote:
| The article was "ghost written". Meaning that if you're a
| founder who has no time or ability to write but want to put out
| content, HSG will do all / much / some of the writing for you
| under your name and also promote the content. HSG lists Paddle
| as a client.
| hiddencache wrote:
| I suspect this includes outsourcing a whole series of functions
| from support functions such as finance, accounting, tax and
| legal, to even what would be considered core functions such as
| UX, coding etc.
|
| Taken to an extreme, the startup could remain a handful of people
| while benefiting from a much larger team which is not included in
| the headcount.
| matchagaucho wrote:
| That's really the key. A successful one-person SaaS company is
| effectively leveraging gig economy and contracting out many
| business functions.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| You should be outsourcing as many of those as possible anyway,
| even if you aren't going for the bootstrap play. There's no
| strategic reason to have a finance, HR or legal team unless you
| have 100s of employees. That's not to say you ignore those
| things, but there are so many quality SaaS services that do
| those at a tiny fraction of the cost of an FTE it only makes
| sense to use them.
| ncfausti wrote:
| Sounds a lot like _virtual integration_.
|
| "...you basically stitch together a business with partners that
| are treated as if they're inside the company."
|
| https://hbr.org/1998/03/the-power-of-virtual-integration-
| an-....
| madamelic wrote:
| In some instances, yes. In others, not really.
|
| If you cut out the bloat, planning meetings, etc., you can
| stand up an MVP pretty quickly while doing the coding yourself.
|
| I think most of the tricks are CSS frameworks, re-using parts
| of old projects, no-code MVP, outsourcing non-tech things.
|
| Many of the successful indie founders seem to be non-technical
| business people who give 0 cares about coding something the
| right way, so they just smash stuff together without a care to
| get it out the door.
| nickjj wrote:
| One thing this article doesn't point out is how beneficial it is
| to have a decently large highly engaged audience beforehand.
|
| ConvertKit is an example of this.
|
| The founder started by selling books and then made a course on
| how to sell books, got a pretty big audience around that and then
| started to build ConvertKit. Eventually he figured out who he
| wanted to market ConvertKit to and his prior audience of people
| wanting to sell things online was a great match. Naturally a lot
| of people who bought his books and courses are a great fit for
| his email service because the whole premise of his course on
| selling books is around building an email list. The books ended
| up being a lead generator for his SAAS app.
|
| That's not to take anything away from Nathan's work. At the end
| of the day he made a very successful and well deserved business
| but the specific circumstances around it are a bit different than
| what this blog post makes it out to be. It was a 10 year journey
| with multiple good ideas at the right time to get to that point.
| All of it is documented on Nathan's site. I remember reading some
| of his posts many years ago.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| It's silly not to include this in the article. The majority of
| these "one man shows" are the result of years of work building
| an online audience, and then launching a business around that
| audience.
|
| Roam is another example. Without Conor having the Twitter
| audience he had and the hype around Roam, specifically on
| Twitter, they don't hit $2m+ in rev their first month of
| turning on pricing.
| rexreed wrote:
| That's because this article was written by a company that
| ghost writes articles for tech companies for content
| marketing purposes. Paddle.com is the beneficiary of this
| content, and HSG is the marketing company that wrote this
| article. So, yeah, of course it's thinly veiled product
| marketing and misses quite a bit of detail while gently
| pushing a SaaS solution for revenue growth that happens to be
| tailored to the small B2B or B2C SaaS company. I guess the
| content writers do a good job because this sort of
| advertorial is quite subtle and looks genuine. Indeed the
| website that this is hosted on is just a means to gather
| email subscriptions for product promotion as well as content
| marketing SEO juju.
| is0tope wrote:
| This is extremely true. I've read many blog posts about how
| someone started a side project and bootstrapped it to 10k mrr
| etc.
|
| Invariably when you read closer it goes something like this:
| "So I had this widely successful blog about X and decided to
| make a product. I posted about it on my blog and got 1000 sign-
| ups overnight etc".
| Alacart wrote:
| I think this gets overblown in the sense that followers often
| do no equal customers, especially when it's a subscription.
| obviously yes, having an audience is helpful, but it can also
| give you false confidence too. They'll tell you your product
| is amazing, sign up for an early access waitlist, and then
| often very few of them actually buy because what brought them
| there was a desire to emotionally support you, not a need for
| your product. It does help you get the word out though.
| is0tope wrote:
| Yes of course I'm not implying it's a panacea. However from
| my experience getting product market fit is one of the
| hardest parts of the whole process, and having a ready made
| audience relevant to your topic is a very nice head start.
| Alacart wrote:
| Absolutely. my reply was aimed more at the unseen other
| readers looking to use your comment to confirm their bias
| that regular people can't do this without a huge audience
| and dismiss it altogether.
| BrianOnHN wrote:
| Same can probably be said for ClickFunnels.
| dgellow wrote:
| That sounds like the main lessons from the course 30x500:
| https://30x500.com.
|
| 1. Identify an audience
|
| 2. Find them where they are (Reddit, Facebook group, etc) and
| learn their jargon and actual, real pains
|
| 3. Create content to help that audience and build an email list
| of people who trust you
|
| 4. Create a product to solve an identified pain
|
| 5. Sell it to your audience
|
| I simplify of course, and did not take the course yet, but from
| what I gathered that's the gist.
| zuhayeer wrote:
| Bootstrapped Levels.fyi up until now to $2m run rate. We're 2
| founders, but I absolutely believe this phenomenon of solo
| creators is the future. The pros of solo are evident: everything
| lives in one head / one stakeholder, singularly focused on core
| value by necessity (separation of concerns, do one thing really
| well, no sprawl), no meetings
|
| Building an audience with strong engagement is replacing the
| "seed" round so to speak. Don't need anything else, just an
| ability to ship and iterate fast.
| riku_iki wrote:
| > Building an audience with strong engagement is replacing the
| "seed" round so to speak.
|
| For funded startups this is established area: buy online ads
| and receive views for your product. How solo can do it
| efficiently without significant monetary investment into
| digital marketing?
| motoxpro wrote:
| podcasts, speaking engagements, blogs, twitter, substack, HN,
| Product Hunt, Instagram, small communities, early customers,
| newsletters.
|
| The reason digital advertising is so popular with VC backed
| startups is because they need capacity. If you are starting a
| bootstrapped startups getting a flywheeling going starting
| with 50 people is fine.
| riku_iki wrote:
| Thank you for advice. I guess I unsuccessfully tried this
| route, but maybe need to push harder and smarter.
| mindvirus wrote:
| This is great. One question I've had for a while - do founders
| typically get one time bonuses or sell their own shares during
| later funding rounds? I feel like with a lot of these businesses
| that are successful, there's probably opportunities along the way
| to sell and make a few million. Especially with unicorn founders
| I'm often in awe that they stick with it - I'm sure they had
| opportunities to pocket $100 million and walk away.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| Yes, depending on the VC and how the business is going. Here is
| an example:
|
| https://www.theinformation.com/articles/one-year-in-bird-fou...
|
| This might be an extreme one, but the Bird founder appears to
| have cashed out $44m.
|
| It makes sense for VCs to let founders cash out a bit -- just
| so you can be comfortable and focus on hyper-growth of the
| business rather than making short term decisions. I've heard
| the amounts are usually more like <3M (enough for a house and
| car or college for kids) and not like the example above. The
| more the founder cashes out, theoretically the less
| incentivized they are to grow the company.
| rmah wrote:
| Typically, no. It is not unheard of though.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| "TGV Software" stood for "Two Guys and a Vax", before they
| eventually hired about 128 more people, bought a few more
| computers, and were acquired by Cisco in 1996. It was originally
| an SRI spin-off.
|
| I ran into one of the founders at a party in Santa Cruz in the
| mid-90's, and laughed with him about the great acronym, and asked
| if he and his buddy had ever gotten around to buying another Vax.
| He shushed me and told me never to tell anyone what TGV
| originally stood for! (Oops.) They must have been in negotiations
| with Cisco at the time.
|
| https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/tgv-software
|
| >TGV Software, Inc. employs more than 130 people and is
| headquartered in Santa Cruz, California. The company develops,
| markets and supports TCP/IP internetworking software products
| which enable connectivity between disparate computer systems over
| local area, enterprise-wide and global computing networks. TGV's
| principal product line is marketed under the name of MultiNet.
| MultiNet for Windows integrates a robust suite of TCP/IP
| applications including a 32-bit VxD kernel, NFS client, FTP
| client and server, VT100-320 and TN3270 emulations, network
| printing, Pronto Mail V2.0 electronic mail, Enhanced Mosaic V2.1
| web browser and network diagnostics.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SRI_International_spin...
|
| >TGV: Founded in 1988, this company created communications
| software and simulation software for VAX computers. TGV stood for
| "Two Guys and a Vax". The company was sold to Cisco Systems in
| 1996.
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