[HN Gopher] My solopreneur story
___________________________________________________________________
My solopreneur story
Author : alexzeitler
Score : 657 points
Date : 2023-09-23 12:32 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.tonydinh.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.tonydinh.com)
| gejose wrote:
| Great read! I don't know why there's so much negativity in the
| comments, but great job Tony!
| alex_lav wrote:
| Until using Twitter drops out of these types of post, I'll
| continue to suggest retitling them to "How I became a tech
| influencer that writes software at 45k/mo". Also would love to
| see usage rates on these products instead of subscriptions alone,
| as very clearly Twitch has demonstrated people will give money to
| influencers they like regardless of (even in absence of) their
| product.
| janmo wrote:
| A lot of people here complaining that Soloproneurs only make
| "useless" "pet rocks".
|
| There is a big bias here, only the pet rock solopreneurs are very
| public about what they are doing and their success at it, because
| that is their marketing, YOU (their audience on HN and Twitter)
| are the pet rocks buyers.
|
| Solopreneurs with stuff other than pet rocks often don't want to
| share their success and how much they are making especially not
| to a tech savvy and entrepreneurial audience, as this would just
| cause more competition.
| proxyon wrote:
| bullseye. when I read this I specifically thought of a few guys
| I know that made proprietary license SDKs that tons of
| corporations are paying for. there's a dude well known in the
| mobile space for example that sells the background geolocation
| plugins that everyone uses. it's a very tough problem to solve
| and he works on it full time and probably make a boatload of
| money owning his own business.
| sgu999 wrote:
| > ~90% profit
|
| Even though I understand the mechanics of the free market, in how
| many other fields do we consider this kind of profit margins to
| be _honest_? What about a farmer selling at a 90% profit? A
| pharmacist? A banker?
|
| Good for him though, "why not if he can", after all. I'm just not
| sure how I feel about it...
| sothatsit wrote:
| This is why investors love software: the marginal cost of
| product is tiny. However, real money must be spent on R&D and
| marketing to keep those profit margins going, especially if you
| don't have a technology moat (e.g., AI wrappers).
| donnythecroc wrote:
| Good job Tony Dinh. I think the lesson here is to keep going, a
| bunch of failures and then a success.
| danbruc wrote:
| 90% profit is a market failure, you should not be able to
| overcharge your customers almost 10x in a working market.
| free_energy_min wrote:
| It's not the same as profit margin in other business it doesn't
| take into account labor costs. How much is his time worth?
| danbruc wrote:
| Pick some random full-time developer salary, say $100k per
| year, and cut this in half as he says he works four hours per
| day.
| DandyDev wrote:
| I agree that it is a market failure, but it is for sure a
| marketing success. I cannot help but feel that there must be
| dozen competitors to his simple products that gather more
| "honest" profit margins (aka are cheaper or more feature rich)
| but have a hard time with marketing.
|
| This is obviously something Tony put a lot of time and effort
| in, and it paid off. Good on him!
| ag56 wrote:
| > Probably 12 hours a day, or even 16 hours/day if you also count
| Twitter as "work".
|
| It's the marketing effort that puts me off. I know I'm a 10x
| developer with a great product sense, but spending hours every
| day on Twitter and blogging sounds awful. I very definitely count
| those 4 twitter hours as 'work'.
| sentimentscan wrote:
| I feel the same. I really hate writing all those articles,
| posts, writing to people to get mostly rejected/ignored. But
| then again I grind it out
| xyst wrote:
| "Conjoined triangles of success"
|
| It's taught in business schools!!1
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Marketing either costs money, or time. I've blogged before, and
| I've also ran ads before (on Facebook, Google, paying
| influencers, etc) which is basically outsourcing your
| marketing. If you don't want to do it yourself, you can always
| pay for the problem to be solved. However, most indie hackers
| don't have the money to pay for ads so they must inevitably
| spend time marketing instead.
| tspike wrote:
| Sounds like you need a business partner. Me too.
| intelVISA wrote:
| If only there was some way to connect 10x SWEs with 10x MBAs
| :/
|
| An 'accelerator' of some description, perhaps.
| dmoura wrote:
| Thank you for sharing your learnings and for your transparency!
| Congrats!
| aogaili wrote:
| So many envious people, including myself, but at least I admit
| it. Go back to your corporate cusion or VC lap, and resolve that
| jira please.
| gumballindie wrote:
| And be sure to return to your field (office as they call it
| these days), peasant.
| ink_13 wrote:
| It's possible to find this kind of thing distasteful without
| being motivated by envy.
| aogaili wrote:
| It is, I agree, at the end of the day he built his products
| on top of corporate workers and exploited good opportunities
| and niches, and he brags about it, to market it, which I
| personally find distasteful, but that what it takes for solo
| devs.
|
| But it's not the vibe I get from most of the comments, it
| seems a lot of comments are knee-jerk reaction promted by
| envy.
| DandyDev wrote:
| How is this guy "exploiting" people? He sells products
| mostly for a one-time fee - something HN often reminds us
| is way better than "subscription for everything". And these
| products obviously serve people well.
|
| And since when is being successful and in detail explaining
| how you went about it "bragging"?
| aogaili wrote:
| I didn't say exploiting people. I said exploiting niche
| opportunities and piggybacking on the shoulders of
| corporate workers, ain't nothing wrong in that. In fact,
| I praise his hustling and envious of it.
| the_only_law wrote:
| "You're just jealous" has for a while now been HN's go to any
| unwelcome criticism, whether the criticism is valid or not. I
| suppose that's what goes for "thoughtful and substantive"
| comments nowadays. In that spirit l, I suggest these people
| are just mentally underdeveloped, to the point where the best
| weapon they have are childish quips.
| endisneigh wrote:
| mixed feelings - this is a good story, but it's sort of
| impressive in the same way it's impressive Six Flags gets away
| with selling Corn Dogs for $10.
|
| but all in all I wish more people did this. it would create a
| more competitive environment the ultimately result in driving the
| price down for many things and lowering hopefully making BigCo
| weaker.
| xyst wrote:
| When I was an avid Twitter user this person was pretty active in
| selling his product. Particularly in the "indie hacker" hashtag.
|
| My take from this is: know how to market and sell your product.
| If not, get someone that can
| umvi wrote:
| The hard part here is the spending hours on Twitter each day to
| "become more influential" and "engage with your audience"
| mihaic wrote:
| While I admire the can-do attitude and independent mindset,
| stories like this strike me primarily as how unscalable doing
| something like this is.
|
| I mean, it only works because not more then 1-2% of developers
| even try to do something like this, since it's really hard to
| ensure you have enough edge in understanding user needs, building
| and being able to find a distribution chanel, and there simply
| isn't enough revenue to support many more developers to sell
| their niche products.
|
| I hate this conclusion, but most developers have to rely on
| salaries, since only a few companies have captured revenue
| streams big enough to justify a full time job.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Why isn't there enough revenue to support other devs? Lots of
| people have money to spend, they just don't want to spend it on
| bad products. Induced demand via increased competition is a
| real phenomenon [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
| mihaic wrote:
| Induced demand leads often also to a race-to-the-bottom in
| pricing.
|
| Almost everyone is just using a few basic apps, going against
| the consumer train is very hard, and only companies are
| spending money on software.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| There is always a competitive advantage to be had;
| products, especially software products, are not
| commodities.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Good point, although I am less worried about the lack of scale
| and more about the lack of temporal persistence.
|
| It seems like he needs to constantly push new products out
| there to maintain a steady income.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I always enjoy reading success stories of developers of small
| apps.
|
| At the same time, I can't shake the feeling that we're seeing
| only a cherry picked part of the picture. There is no mention of
| advertising spend or customer acquisition costs. The trend among
| indie hackers is to talk about MRR without mentioning a single
| expense, then to interleave it all with "follow me on Twitter" so
| you're inspired to join their audience. This is a bit cynical,
| but I've been following accounts like this for a decade and it's
| depressing to watch how many of them pivot into trying to sell me
| courses and/or private community access based on their success.
|
| Audience building (which he readily talks about in the article)
| becomes a conflict of interest for real information because it
| incentivizes big numbers while hiding costs. Maybe his apps are
| growing entirely organically and it's pure profit. Or maybe he's
| spent huge amounts of money on ads or marketing to get more
| installs to grow his user base as fast as possible. He mentions
| spending 16 hour days between coding the app and promoting it.
|
| The thing is, we don't know how he got the users, and he won't
| tell us because admitting anything other than MRR would only
| detract from his story. And as any small business operator knows,
| getting the customers is the hardest part.
|
| I wish him the best and enjoy following these success stories,
| but having seen enough of these I always take the isolated MRR
| numbers with a grain of salt. It's not the full picture. This
| isn't unique to this developer. It's _the_ trend among social
| media "indie hackers": They know people are hungry for success
| stories and want to learn the secrets of how to build a
| successful indie company, so they build narratives to make
| themselves look like the person who will share those secrets. But
| then the more you read and the more you follow, the more you
| start seeing how they're leaving out all of the actual secrets
| and keys to success, such as how they're marketing their apps and
| getting downloads.
| nomilk wrote:
| > without mentioning a single expense
|
| The article does appear to give a general indication of
| expenses:
|
| > At the moment, my total revenue across all products is about
| $45K/month at ~90% profit.
| keiferski wrote:
| > The thing is, we don't know
|
| In the first paragraph:
|
| _At the moment, my total revenue across all products is about
| $45K /month at ~90% profit._
| Aurornis wrote:
| Right! Did you notice the phrase "at the moment"? A snapshot
| in time that makes the narrative sound optimal.
|
| No mention of how it reached that point. No mention of what
| advertising routes were tried in the past.
|
| Another trick I've seen is for solopreneurs to create a
| "HoldCo" that holds their individual businesses, then to find
| creative ways to spend marketing dollars out of the parent
| company so they can keep it off the books of their individual
| businesses. You have to look for this when someone has a
| large personal brand presence that markets the app. For
| example, how much is he spending to grow his Twitter and
| newsletter following, which isn't counted as an expense out
| of the individual businesses but is a huge (perhaps the
| largest?) driver of leads for them.
|
| From evaluating potential small business acquisitions I
| quickly learned that operators are _very_ good at juicing
| their profitability numbers as they prepare for a potential
| sale, for example. You'd often see great stories of customer
| growth and high profit numbers, only to discover that the
| profitability was a recent change after they turned off the
| growth tools. You might also discover that their customer
| acquisition costs were hidden away in one of the owner's
| other ventures. For example, a roofing company that looks
| great until you realize their entire customer base comes from
| "referrals" from the owner's other company which installs
| solar panels on people's roofs.
|
| Again, it's possible that this is pure, organic, word-of-
| mouth growth all the way to $45K MRR, but I've seen enough of
| these stories to know that word of mouth and a moderate
| Twitter following generally isn't enough to do it.
|
| All I'm saying is to keep an eye open for what you're _not_
| being told in these stories. When someone is part indie
| hacker and part social media influencer, everything they
| write is designed to consider you a potential customer,
| potential follower, or potential acquirer of their business
| (as with his previous sale). That doesn't mean that their
| information is unhelpful, it just means that you're getting a
| partial sales pitch with everything you read. Keep that in
| mind.
| debo_ wrote:
| He has several other articles about his journey. Perhaps
| look in his newsletter back issues?
| keiferski wrote:
| Yeah I'm pretty sure you didn't read the article and are
| just being cynical.
|
| > No mention of how it reached that point. No mention of
| what advertising routes were tried in the past.
|
| From the post:
|
| _I knew that posting the app to websites and forums on the
| internet and hoping for a traffic spike wouldn't work in
| the long term. I can't get lucky forever._
|
| _So, I started to look for a long-term distribution
| channel. I tried Google paid ads, wrote SEO articles,
| looked for sponsorships on newsletter /YouTube channels,
| and tons of other things. There were some small results,
| but in the end, I didn't see a way that could give me
| traffic for the long-term without continuous effort.
| (Except for SEO, but SEO is extremely slow to see the
| results). This is when I think about Twitter and the
| #buildinpublic community._
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Don't think he's spent seriously on ads
| ncruces wrote:
| Or, he just got lucky, but that doesn't make for a good story.
|
| I'm content knowing one of my apps (only one) is a success out
| of unrepeatable sheer luck.
| dublinben wrote:
| Reading between the lines, building his Twitter and newsletter
| audience was key to growing these 'businesses'. The real
| product he's selling is hope to all the wantrepreneurs who
| yearn to escape their own corporate grind and find success
| selling their own useless nick-nacks. This is no different than
| real-estate investing, or drop-shipping, or any other get rich
| quick scheme from time immemorial.
| [deleted]
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Not really. He got my money in exchange for a tool I use 3
| times a day, every day.
| phgn wrote:
| What do you use the tool for?
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Making screenshots that I mark up with arrows, boxes and
| labels and then email.
|
| Xsnapper is far nicer-looking and far quicker (via
| numeric keyboard shortcuts for markup options) than macOS
| built-in utils for this.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Which one?
| jackbridger wrote:
| Very interesting and inspiring Story
| lucgagan wrote:
| Been following your story on Twitter for a long time. Very
| inspiring. I really like the DevUtils app that you built. You
| never mention what MRR it is generating today, though. Would love
| to know if you managed to grow it to anything of meaningful MRR.
| didip wrote:
| I am surprised people reduced this article as just another pet
| rock.
|
| Dude's journey has some interesting nuggets. He knows how to time
| box himself and build the smallest MVP that will actually make
| money.
|
| And his journey is not an overnight success either, it took him
| years to build everything including his social presence. Compare
| that to a W-2 job where you just have to show up 9am-5pm.
|
| HN is showing its overly critical self again, just like when
| Dropbox first appeared on HN.
| shrimpx wrote:
| I think the guy's aesthetic just turns people off here. He
| seems intensely invested in how to make virality happen in any
| way possible, and building simplistic stuff that's not
| advancing the state of tech. People here want to see technical
| contributions and organic success. It's kind of ironic since
| this is a forum made by a VC company, but I doubt the Tony guy
| could get into YC with his ideas, despite his 70k followers and
| 40k mrr.
| imiric wrote:
| What was eye opening to me about his story is that it doesn't
| take a "disruptive" product to achieve _moderate_ amounts of
| success. And I do stress _moderate_, since the traditional VC
| formula popularized by YC is that companies are meant to grow
| infinitely YoY, making all shareholders rich far beyond their
| needs, and if there's no growth, then investors aren't happy.
| That's a skewed hypercapitalist perspective that continues to
| concentrate wealth among the wealthy, and, among many other
| issues, corrupts the product development into pleasing the
| investors rather than the customers.
|
| Instead, a single person today can create a moderate amount
| of income that allows them to live free from financial
| concerns, by building small and useful products that are not
| revolutionary in any way, but help many people regardless.
| This is a far more sustainable and fairer way of achieving
| "success" than the VC formula, so this Tony guy probably
| doesn't care about YC.
| nico_h wrote:
| I mean 45k MRR with 90% profit is far from moderate success
| when compared to US minimum wage (or even of a more
| civilized country like Switzerland where it's $4k),
| especially when living in moderate or low cost of living
| locations like Vietnam or Bali (he also mentions Lisbon but
| i doubt the CoL is comparable to vietnam)
|
| Especially when working only "4" hours a day.
|
| I think the only concern with something like that is the
| sustainable lifetime of the product, seems to me you have
| to re-invent the business every few years if you want to
| keep your solopreneur story going ( the product grows
| beyond the solo part or gets overtaken by the competition).
| imiric wrote:
| I meant "moderate" as relative to the kind of wealth that
| VC-funded companies can achieve, which I would label as
| "excessive". Obviously, 45k MRR exceeds even high wage
| standards in wealthy countries, but then again, even
| those wages hardly allow people to achieve financial
| independence. They're enough for them to be profitable to
| the government, and to maintain a decent way of life, but
| they still have to be mindful about their expenses,
| investments and financial status.
|
| 45k MRR means that you and your loved ones are safe from
| money being an issue in any situation, which is a
| liberating way to live. It doesn't allow you to own
| mansions, yachts and private jets, but I would argue that
| such wealth is disproportionate for any individual to
| manage.
|
| If they can maintain this by working 4 hours a day, more
| power to them. That's an enviable position to be in by
| any definition, especially if they got there by
| legitimate means.
|
| I agree that long-term sustainability might be a problem,
| but they seem to have the drive to keep supporting the
| products for as long as possible, and the ingenuity and
| skills to invent new ones, and hopefully the wisdom of
| investment, so they'll be fine. It's doubtful this would
| work for many others, but as they point out, this is
| their own journey.
| noident wrote:
| Why would Tony want to get into YC? He's already making
| enough money that he "hit the brakes" while answering to no
| one. Sounds like a better deal to me than being some tech
| gazillionaire's sharecropper.
| shrimpx wrote:
| Was just talking myself through why this forum would be
| unfriendly to this guy Tony. A forum that is run by
| YCombinator, a company that presumably values
| entrepreneurship.
|
| And my take is that both this forum and YC are fairly
| aligned on "high impact" ideas and don't value people like
| Tony, monetizing basic ideas using social media influence.
| icedchai wrote:
| He doesn't need investors. Why would he bother?
| pc86 wrote:
| Very few of YC's companies have done _anything_ to "advance
| the state of tech," especially the successful ones. According
| to their website the top three by revenue are Airbnb,
| Instacart, and Doordash.
| mt_ wrote:
| He's a good marketeer, I'll give you that. Just this week I've
| seen one of his tweets being promoted on X and now he's top of
| hacker news on my feed. Not particularly interested in his
| tools but congratulations on his way to achieve engagement.
| nomilk wrote:
| > HN is showing its overly critical self again, just like when
| Dropbox first appeared on HN
|
| Was HN overly critical of Dropbox? If so, how so? (genuinely
| curious)
|
| I did some digging and found some interesting sources but
| didn't come across anything overly critical of Dropbox in its
| early years (yet):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dhouston
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1253750400&dateRange=custom&...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR7tJ8wAI3M&t=27s
| satvikpendem wrote:
| When someone mentions HN and Dropbox, they are usually
| mentioning the infamous comment by BrandonM which is the top
| comment in your first link.
| nomilk wrote:
| Hmm.. that seemed like perfectly reasonable criticism to
| me, the kind that informed the founder of the gulf between
| users' current understanding and the level they'd need to
| see the value in the product (i.e. very useful to a
| founder).
|
| But I guess looking back now it's easy to view it with
| levity; it could have felt extremely harsh at the time
| (although Drew does manage a few smiley emojis throughout
| his answer so he seemed to have taken it well).
| ferfumarma wrote:
| It's not infamous because the skepticism of dropbox was
| wrong (though it obviously was...)
|
| It's infamous because Drew made a point of coming back as
| a billionaire to call out and shame brandonm; something
| that seemed unnecessarily petty when you're holding a
| billion dollars.
|
| https://zedshaw.com/blog/2018-03-25-the-billionaires-vs-
| bran...
| NavinF wrote:
| That's definitely not why it's infamous lol. That
| article's comments have much more reasonable takes:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16675883
| satvikpendem wrote:
| No, it is infamous precisely because people, especially
| developers, on HN discount the value of good user
| experience. No one but the most technical will set up
| their own FTP server to rsync files back and forth, but
| they will drag and drop files into a folder that
| "magically" syncs. To say it more flippantly, this is why
| Drew is a billionaire and BrandonM is not.
| musicale wrote:
| > To say it more flippantly, this is why Drew is a
| billionaire and BrandonM is not
|
| Seems a bit mean-spirited, and I'm not sure I like the
| implied value assumptions. I expect there are other
| important reasons as well including connections, timing,
| luck, etc.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I was just mentioning it in the same spirit as the parent
| comment. It's not about "billionaires bullying" at all
| but the fundamental disconnect engineers often have to
| user experience.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| IMHO this is the difference between real innovation and
| productization. The invention of the transistor is a real
| innovation, the transistor radio is a mere product.
| That's not to say products don't have value, but they're
| just... not as impressive to me.
|
| Nothing that Dropbox does (or did? is it still around?)
| is technically innovative. I guess it's nice for that
| rich guy that he identified a user-friendly box that
| people would pay for.
| musicale wrote:
| Honest criticism is undervalued. I think the zedshaw take
| isn't exactly wrong either.
|
| Seems to be a slightly different category from CmdrTaco's
| infamous take on the iPod ('No wireless. Less space than
| a nomad. Lame') but that wasn't entirely wrong either.
|
| I'm not quite as critical of HN, but I concur that
| allowing deletion whenever would be a positive change.
| [deleted]
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| HN: "It's okay to make something nobody wants = damn right! Do it
| for the craft and the process and the learning and the joy."
|
| Also HN: "A guy makes 45K/mo by building tiny time-saving apps,
| starting with ones he himself wants = what a sad world of
| frivolous side-hustles!"
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I wish this absolutely ridiculous, unthinking trope of treating
| communities of thousands of people as one mind that's only
| allowed to have one opinion would finally stop.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| in consensus based communities that only show you a reality
| based on what comments people upvote, it is not ridiculous at
| all
|
| when a different community would have completely different
| sentiment
|
| it is reflective of the audience
| fullstackchris wrote:
| but reading the comments, they mostly fall in to one of these
| two buckets...
| kolbe wrote:
| I see a large diversity of opinion about this guy's business.
| Who is this "HN" you're talking about?
| pbj1968 wrote:
| And here's the third bucket - can't see the forest for the
| semantic trees.
| kolbe wrote:
| Is there a 4th bucket of people who are so eager to
| pigeonhole ideologies instead of reading that it makes them
| functionally illiterate? Or are we done at three buckets?
| keiferski wrote:
| I think there is a lot of money to be made in building "human
| accessible" frontends to AI tools, so I'm not surprised that his
| ChatGPT wrapper product does well.
|
| Setting up Midjourney, for example, is such a convoluted mess,
| where you have to create an account on another service (Discord)
| before creating a Midjourney account, then understand the
| different chat channels and figure out where the best place to
| use the app is (private DM with Midjourney bot.) And that's all
| before even generating an image! Even their website looks like
| someone's art project, not a cutting-edge image generation
| service: https://www.midjourney.com/
| naillo wrote:
| Well dalle3 pretty much has that niche covered
| keiferski wrote:
| Meh, I still am not convinced that the blank chat box is a
| good UI. You still need to know what to say and how to say
| it. Too much implicit knowledge is required.
| ferennag wrote:
| Leonardo.ai is much better in this regard. I hated midjourney,
| and if they don't change this ridiculous way of interacting
| with the app they will fail.
| Supply5411 wrote:
| I tried to read this with an open mind to learn something that
| may help me on a similar journey. However, I found it challenging
| to get any new nuggets of advice or wisdom. Maybe the
| "#buildinpublic" movement and interacting with that community?
| Otherwise it just seems like he found his groove, but it's not
| really transferable.
| jarekceborski wrote:
| Well deserved! And you are great inspiration for fellow
| solopreneurs and indie hackers! Keep shipping!
| tuyenhx wrote:
| Congratz Tony! He has been very good at creating products for
| years. Since he was a student. The way he studied, the way he
| worked, just so different from the rest of us.
|
| It feels so good that your story in the front page of HN. 45k is
| not a big number for HN crowd, but it is a fortune here in my
| country.
|
| Keep going my friend!
|
| P/s: I am his classmate at the university.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| I'd think that 45K _per month_ is a big number for most people
| on HN.
| [deleted]
| uconnectlol wrote:
| but i don't care because it involves doing web dev and using
| twitter. i already easily enter any math domain so i can work for
| some stupid company and get $300K/year in a week of job
| searching. what you are doing is no different than 90s microsoft
| devs making products to sell on microsoft's platform. none of
| these solutions are "freedom", since you still have to work
| terribly long amounts of time like 9-5, and sit on top of
| foundations that randomly move on peoples whims, your twitter
| suddenly requesting 45K/month being a prime example. the only
| freedom is skill. making a screenshot app is something anyone can
| do. you can also invest your time fully into marketing and that's
| what people do and why the world sucks.
| gumballindie wrote:
| It is refreshing to see stories of capitalist success among a sea
| of corporate communism stories pumped by a media apparatus owned
| by corporate politburos.
|
| This type of genuine entrepreneurship should gain more
| popularity.
| NhanH wrote:
| He was Communist Vietnam born and raised.
|
| Funny enough, this type of entrepreneurship is more common in
| Vietnam than the US (I have lived in both, now in Vietnam).
| kubb wrote:
| Corporate communism? I wonder what's that, let me check, oh
| it's some US conservative talking point.
|
| Wait, isn't a politburo the executive committee of a communist
| party? How can that be corporate and own the media?
|
| Wait how is selling apps capitalist success? What capital is
| winning here? I guess the corporate capital of the company
| owning the App Store. Or is it the capital that the app making
| guy is building up?
|
| I guess when you use your own language, the things you say
| sound very alien, and can't be used to communicate. You could
| be saying anything so you're saying nothing at all.
| gumballindie wrote:
| > I wonder what's that, let me check, oh it's some US
| conservative talking point.
|
| I am confused. I thought us conservatives are fixated on
| corporate. Either way I am far from conservative in the sense
| you imply. If i do cross boundaries on some concepts thats
| because i am not fixated on ideology.
|
| The politburo is the corporate board.
|
| The corporate own the media through money.
|
| Selling apps is capitalism because money moves. Free movement
| of capital is a core value of capitalism.
|
| Clogging it in the hands of a few means money doesnt move
| freely. The politburo control it and with it it controls the
| narrative, the media and our lives. We are not free, much
| like people are not free in communism.
|
| I guess it is confusing because i am reversing roles. In my
| view pure, proper, capitalism is where money is largely
| managed by small and medium sized entities, as to allow it to
| flow freely and to set the mover of capital free in the
| process.
|
| Freedom is indie.
| [deleted]
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| These are all functions of late-stage capitalism. Welcome
| to unchecked monopolies and corporate lobbying.
|
| > I guess it is confusing because i am reversing roles. In
| my view pure, proper, capitalism is where money is largely
| managed by small and medium sized entities, as to allow it
| to flow freely and to set the mover of capital free in the
| process.
|
| That's awesome, it's just never been done long-term and
| never will be.
| ljfjklklj wrote:
| [flagged]
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| Snarky tone aside, you can actually strip powers from
| both the government and corporations. You're not suddenly
| making a super government because you don't let Disney
| dump money into strengthening copyright laws.
|
| But it's clear you're not really thinking about it beyond
| memes so I'm gonna end it here.
| kubb wrote:
| Especially since the natural tendencies of such systems
| are that the few end up having almost all. You could
| distribute everything evenly and in a 100 years, without
| redistribution, we'd be back in the same place.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726
| 812...
| kubb wrote:
| It's clear that you're confused by the way you express your
| views and the framework you use to understand the world.
|
| You claim that you're not fixated on ideology, but in the
| same breath you talk about core values of capitalism.
|
| The corporate board (actually the board of directors)
| jointly supervise a company. It's not the decision making
| body (that's the CEO), and therefore is not analogous to a
| politburo. Fun fact: the Communist Party of China has both
| a Politburo and a Central Committee.
|
| The media (or more precisely, the most of the media in the
| US, because many countries have broadcasters not financed
| through private capital) aren't owned by "the corporate".
| Media (TV, newspapers) are usually corporations themselves,
| and are owned by shareholders. By capitalists. If you had
| enough money, you could buy them.
|
| Money moves? Sure it moves when a corporation runs the
| payroll every month, or when I go buy a popsicle. Or when
| someone pays someone else to procure him a kidney on the
| black market. Money in every form and in every economic
| system, not just in capitalism, will be exchanged, this is
| because it's the very purpose of money and it's reason to
| exist.
|
| You have some theories as to why most wealth is
| concentrated (top 1% owned 46% of global wealth in 2020).
| There seems to be a conspiracy narrative (the politburos
| are conspiring to keep the money in the hands of the rich),
| and a remedy (small entrepreneurs will rise and reclaim the
| money).
|
| You might be aware that money is locked up in the 1%,
| because 1) they don't need to spend it, or very little of
| it, like $5 for an app. 2) the capital that they have lets
| them extract more money from the 99% (in the form of rent
| and stock dividends), so the direction of money flow is
| from the poor to the rich. Your conclusion is that we need
| more capitalism, but the right kind, not the one we have
| now, because the one we have right now is actually
| communism.
| swayvil wrote:
| I sold my kidney and bought a Tesla. Everybody in the trailer-
| park is green with envy.
| agentofoblivion wrote:
| The fact you're getting downvotes for this shows the current
| state of HN, and the broader culture. I.e., the effectiveness
| of that propaganda. We're in real big trouble.
| swayvil wrote:
| Putting the wolves in charge of the ranch is a philosophy
| with profound inherent flaws, you must agree.
| [deleted]
| dubcanada wrote:
| I'm sorry but what? I think they are getting downvoted
| because they somehow turned a story of a guys venture into
| the business world into politics.
| public_defender wrote:
| Maybe I'm an optimist, but I'd like to think the downvotes
| are because the user showed in the space of a haiku that they
| understand neither capitalism nor communism.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Au contraire. Corporate communism is very much alive and
| kicking. Capital is clogged. The only way to make it move
| is to allow small to medium sized true capital makers and
| movers to thrive. Corporations are the new communist
| apparatus. Roles have been reversed.
| hooverd wrote:
| TIL communism is when organizations do things.
| kljkjkjlkju wrote:
| If capitalism (incidentally, a term coined by Marx) is
| whatever one feels like it is, and no-one ever would call
| you out for that in an internet discussion, then it's
| pretty consistent to apply the same approach to
| communism.
| hooverd wrote:
| Functional programming that doesn't deal with money?
| Communism. In my experience people will say X is not true
| capitalism because true capitalism won't have X's
| downsides.
| public_defender wrote:
| This whole analysis reads like the economic version of
| flat earth theory to me, but I thank you both in advance
| because I am about to go down a research rabbit hole on
| "corporate communism."
| gumballindie wrote:
| Yeah so the state always bails corporations out, makes
| laws disproportionally in their favour, controls the
| media to whitewash their actions, and most important
| clogs capital and access to resources. Not to mention the
| constant suppression of businesses by acquisitions under
| all sorts of threats and regulatory overburdening. Thats
| communism. In communist countries communism did exactly
| that - a handful controlled the resources, media, and
| people's lives while keeping everyone poor and obedient
| by suppressing all form of independent enterprise. When
| capital moves freely and in the process enriches the
| people that help move it thats capital-ism. And thats
| what indies and small to medium business owners are, pure
| capitalists and free folk. We should see more of that.
| hooverd wrote:
| You need permanent revolution to seize the productive
| forces from the communist-capitalist firms by the state
| and redistribute them to capitalist-communist firms and
| so on and so forth.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| You're describing money flowing freely between rich
| people.
|
| Republicans vote for this everyday. It's called taxing
| the rich. It's not that complicated.
| xwdv wrote:
| Back in the day of low hanging fruits, stories like this were
| very common on HN. I think it's harder for software
| developers to attain this kind of success today, and as a
| result they have developed an allergy to capitalism.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Well of course it's hard since they made all their software
| available for free to corporate communes. Instead they
| should charge anyone earning > idk 1 million in revenue a
| fee. I know these freeloaders (amazons, microsofts, and
| apples) expect our hard earned money and code for free but
| i think it would be fair to make them start paying.
|
| Then you'd get more indie software developer success
| stories.
| gumballindie wrote:
| It's the Stockholm syndrome. Some people have become attached
| to their captors.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| You mean that fake syndrome that's not real?
| ghotli wrote:
| I don't mean this as anything but a constructive comment and I
| won't reply further. Feedback, for your perusal.
|
| Some of your comments on this thread tipped your hand (to me at
| least) that you must be a new account here. I was right. You
| seem like you may not have read the comment guidelines.
|
| I'd like to see the positives in some of this but my friend it
| comes across really tone deaf and dripping with bias. I don't
| really disagree with some of your points, but it's wrapped up
| in language that might be best suited elsewhere. There's room
| for improvement when it comes to your rhetoric and if the
| downvotes didn't make that clear I'm hoping this feedback helps
| ongoing.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| It's mostly a story of one worker producing and selling his
| work. That's commerce not capitalism
| damascus wrote:
| A private person who controls the production of his work and
| sells it in an open market economy is definitely capitalism.
| zztop44 wrote:
| Where is capital involved? Capitalism is not the only form
| of open market economy.
| ljfjklklj wrote:
| > Where is capital involved? Capitalism is not the only
| form of open market economy
|
| Right. Like you don't own anything but still somehow sell
| it on the open market.
|
| Apparently, "you can't have your cake and eat it, too" is
| a capitalist prejudice as comrades in the USSR would have
| ensured us.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| There's more thought on markets than capitalism and ML
| communism
| JanSt wrote:
| The software he writes is the capital obviously
| damascus wrote:
| From Investopedia: Capitalism is focused on the creation
| of wealth and ownership of capital and factors of
| production, whereas a free market system is focused on
| the exchange of wealth or goods and services.
|
| It's not the free market part that defines it as
| capitalism but rather the fact he owns the method of
| production. He owns the code he writes and he owns the
| business processes around those applications. He
| privately owns the capital assets (applications and
| business processes) which make the money.
| allenu wrote:
| As a fellow indie hacker (I quit my job 18 months ago to build
| and sell my own apps), I am super jealous. I don't have the
| success of this guy (only getting close to $1k/mo these days),
| but I can understand the success.
|
| This guy knows how to market and ship product. I've seen him pop
| up a few times on indiehackers.com and social media. His "brand"
| is super simple to understand, which helps gain followers. He
| knows marketing.
|
| A lot of people who try to go from being a dev to entrepreneur
| focus entirely too much on the engineering side (I'm guilty of
| that) and think that what matters most is the product and how
| well it's made. We focus way too much on tools, processes, and
| forget that at the end of the day, we're trying to exchange
| useful products for money. Getting your product(s) out the door
| and telling people about it (and iterating) are way more
| important than what stack you use.
|
| I'm a little disappointed by all the negativity here, but I
| suspect most of us are just jealous.
| foooorsyth wrote:
| His speed is what most impressed me. Had his ChatGPT tool out
| in 5 days. Seriously impressive. Being early in the hype cycle
| is important.
| eddmakesio wrote:
| > We focus way too much on tools, processes, and forget that at
| the end of the day, we're trying to exchange useful products
| for mone
|
| Yep, just look at @levelsio and his $250k MRR stack of apps
| built with PHP and jQuery
|
| > I'm a little disappointed by all the negativity here, but I
| suspect most of us are just jealous.
|
| Yep x2, for a website built around startups a huge number seem
| to be against a solo founder bootstrapping apps successfully
| thelastparadise wrote:
| > Yep x2, for a website built around startups a huge number
| seem to be against a solo founder bootstrapping apps
| successfully
|
| x3
|
| Solo bootstrapper as well, ~20K ARR on one SaaS app about to
| launch another.
|
| It's clear to me there's money to be made, and yes engineers
| tend to overweight engineering effort and underweight
| distribution.
|
| Make something that makes someone's life better, saves or
| makes them money, and ask a fair amount for it.
|
| That's what I've done and have modest recurring revenue after
| only 6-8 months or so.
| eddmakesio wrote:
| Congrats!!
| dinvlad wrote:
| x4, but I'd put an asterisk that tech choice matters in as
| much as how fast it allows you to go - something like PHP
| or Rails or Phoenix app with batteries included and
| deployed by hand on a single Linode instance, beats a fancy
| new TypeScript GraphQL Kubernetes stack on time-to-market
| any time of the day.
| pc86 wrote:
| Honestly all the "fancy new" stuff only gives you
| benefits at galactic scale compared to what most solo
| folks will build. You already start well behind the curve
| being a solo dev, so you lose out on a lot of benefits of
| orchestration, rapid microservice deployments, etc. That
| stuff is built for teams, not one person hacking away in
| their home office on nights and weekends. You get all the
| bad parts, because they can't be avoided, and none of the
| good, because you don't have the throughput to take
| advantage.
|
| My current job has 80 or 90 devs and we have both on-prem
| k8s, on-prem monolith, and plenty of "cloud-native" AWS
| stuff. Everything TS, GraphQL, messaging queues, exactly
| what you'd expect from an organization that size.
|
| My side projects are all .NET MVC apps. Full-page
| reloads, manual deployments out of Visual Studio, etc.
| The only excuse for me to go the TS etc. route would be
| if that was the only thing I knew how to do, and honestly
| with as much as I've heard from folks like Tony and
| Pieter, if I was green now and only knew TS, I'd probably
| be learning PHP and Laravel.
| dinvlad wrote:
| I'm not even sure solo is at a disadvantage here - on the
| contrary, regular companies are bogged down by a massive
| tech pit, because of which they can't move fast, and only
| keep adding to that according to Conway's law.
|
| Imho 90% of 90-developer companies out there could be
| replaced by 1-2 devs working same hours but more
| efficiently with a more efficient stack. I'm not even
| joking!
| bruce511 wrote:
| All our lives we're told that skills matter. Society will
| reward those who are most skilled.
|
| Inevitably groups form around a skill, programmers hang around
| programmers and so on. Since programmers "create" all the value
| we believe we should get paid the most etc.
|
| Alas schools emphasise "hard" skills (programming, math,
| doctors, lawyers etc) and those are all good jobs that make
| decent money. They ignore "soft" skills like selling,
| marketing, and so on.
|
| In truth sales and marketing are orders of magnitude more
| valuable, and their pay reflects that. There are a lot of
| pharma reps, realtors, insurance salesman that earn mega bucks.
|
| This is not something the average hacker wants to hear. I
| expect to get down-voted for saying it. But if you're reading
| this, and you're thinking of starting out on your own, then I
| recommend you consider;
|
| Who will you sell to? How will you reach them? What can they
| afford?
|
| Only then start thinking about what to make.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >In truth sales and marketing are orders of magnitude more
| valuable
|
| As someone who's been on both sides of the fence, this isn't
| true either.
|
| Both engineering and sales are important, and there are
| probably as many entrepreneurs who have failed by spending
| all their time marketing and selling a shit product as there
| are those who get bogged down in technical minutiae.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Inevitably groups form around a skill, programmers hang
| around programmers and so on. Since programmers "create" all
| the value we believe we should get paid the most etc.
|
| Programmers do get paid a lot, relatively speaking.
|
| The disconnect is that programming and creating a business
| are different skills.
|
| There are occasional examples of someone programming a thing
| so useful that it sells itself, but they are extremely rare.
| Most of these success stories come with major marketing
| attached, although it's often hidden. In this case the person
| was marketing through Twitter, including promoted Tweets.
| It's not mentioned in the article, but the _business_ is more
| about cultivating a social media presence and getting a
| fractional percentage of them to convert into sales.
|
| There's nothing wrong with this, of course! However, the
| marketing and personal brand angle are often overlooked by
| indie hackers who think they're going to make a great
| business that people will just discover randomly and pay them
| for.
|
| One of the best examples would be the indie hacker who first
| got a lot of attention for his job board business. There have
| been hundreds of indie hacker job boards popping up ever
| since, but none of them get the same traction as the person
| who built it as a Twitter sensation. The Twitter presence and
| ensuing brand recognition was a key part of the business, but
| it gets overlooked by people who are just wowed by the MRR
| numbers.
| throwing_away wrote:
| > All our lives we're told that skills matter. Society will
| reward those who are most skilled.
|
| Remember, kids: you don't get what you deserve -- you get
| what you negotiate.
| jart wrote:
| > at the end of the day, we're trying to exchange useful
| products for money
|
| If you're just trying to make money, then you shouldn't call
| yourself a hacker.
| hbien wrote:
| >> at the end of the day, we're trying to exchange useful
| products for money
|
| > If you're just trying to make money, then you shouldn't
| call yourself a hacker.
|
| I hate gatekeeping like this.
|
| For anyone who needs to hear it: you don't need to be a
| starving artist. You are not a sell-out for wanting to
| exchange useful products for money. You can call yourself a
| hacker.
| smokel wrote:
| Or perhaps the advice was well-intended, because the term
| "hacker" has a negative connotation for most people?
| hbien wrote:
| Ty for the benefit of the doubt and seeing the best in
| others :)
| [deleted]
| tomcam wrote:
| > If you're just trying to make money, then you shouldn't
| call yourself a hacker.
|
| jart is one of my heroes but strong disagree here. Not sure
| why we can call ourselves progressive or trans or feminist
| whether or not we are trying to scrape by. But hacker? Heaven
| forfend.
| DantesKite wrote:
| Since when did financial success invalidate technical
| expertise?
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > This guy knows how to market and ship product. I've seen him
| pop up a few times on indiehackers.com and social media. His
| "brand" is super simple to understand, which helps gain
| followers. He knows marketing.
|
| I think it boils down to one thing. He built a tool
| specifically to market on Twitter, it worked well, it got
| traction because of how well it worked. His main trick was to
| show up every day and show what he was working on. Which works
| well for indie hackers on Twitter.
|
| Alot of his marketing efforts is look at how well I'm doing,
| he's seen that this has worked and has repeated it repeatedly.
| Can't blame the guy. The only big story from him that wasn't a
| success story was him writing about how the twitter API pricing
| really cost him big time.
| laserDinosaur wrote:
| >I think it boils down to one thing. He built a tool
| specifically to market on Twitter, it worked well, it got
| traction because of how well it worked.
|
| I remember about 6 years ago seeing an small indie studio
| talking about how, when they were starting their next
| project, they posted 10 second gameplay gifs of games that
| didn't exist yet every week on twitter. They'd track the
| reactions they got from the gif, then try one or two more of
| the same game to see if it's consistent. They ended up with
| the most traffic towards some kind of airship management
| game, and it ended up doing extremely well for them once
| released. But the youtube comments where he was explaining
| his process post-release were LIVID. They were furious that
| it was such a cold, calculated commercialized process - but
| hey that's business.
| jorgesborges wrote:
| You can't blame the guy?! What blame is there to find in
| being successful? What "trick" is there in adhering to a
| successful marketing strategy?
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Many would blame people for constantly bragging. Bragging
| is generally looked down upon. He isn't really sharing any
| tips or tricks. He's literally just saying "Look at how
| well I'm doing" in any other scenario there wouldn't be so
| much acceptance to it.
| tbbfjotllf wrote:
| If you don't know how to sell, There's no point in
| worrying/focusing too much on the engineering side. While the
| engineering side is Important, People have to buy the product
| first for you to be able to earn anything.
| matsemann wrote:
| [flagged]
| konschubert wrote:
| Agreed. I make an e-paper calendar with google sync and
| everytime I talk about it, people love it.
|
| But it's so, so hard to find a scalable way to market it.
| Landing pages, photos, ads. All that stuff is very important
| and genuinely super hard.
| report-to-trees wrote:
| I think the initial reaction of many (myself included) is
| pretty negative just based on the niche these products fall
| into. Something about a Twitter Influencer selling various
| products to other Twitter Influencers to manage their own
| business hyping is a bit off putting.
|
| After some reflection I don't think this is better or worse
| than any other niche you might market towards.
| allenu wrote:
| That's fair. My initial reaction on just seeing the headline
| was "Oh, I wonder what indie dev-focused tool this guy made."
| It's definitely a cliche now to see someone going into the
| solo SaaS business and then pivoting to being an influencer
| or someone selling "tools" to help other solopreneurs.
| finite_depth wrote:
| [dead]
| meiraleal wrote:
| > A lot of people who try to go from being a dev to
| entrepreneur focus entirely too much on the engineering side
| (I'm guilty of that) and think that what matters most is the
| product and how well it's made.
|
| This is important, at least for me. Some people can be
| confident without backing or just fake confidence, some people
| can't. It is a natural process to take a long time building the
| right abstractions and just then get into marketing mode, when
| you have a solid platform to back your confidence.
| aragonite wrote:
| There are two kinds of jealousy, the motivating kind and the
| demotivating kind. For example, most folks here are probably
| somewhat jealous of how rich Linus Torvald is, but this kind of
| jealousy motivates one to perfect one's craft and pursue
| ambitious projects. The story posted here tends to generate the
| kind of jealousy that demotivates. I think that's where the
| negativity comes from.
| EddTheSDET wrote:
| Hackernews seems overly critical and anti-"hacker" nowadays (new
| acc but been around for years). Anyone have a guess why that's
| the case? Influx of new users?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| elboru wrote:
| I've also been around for years, but I don't see it as a recent
| phenomenon. I've noticed that usually most top comments (for
| most topics) contain contra-arguments, or critical comments of
| any sort against the article. Sometimes it's useful to learn
| about other perspectives, but often it feels forced or just
| plain negative/ego inspired. I could go back years and check
| old posts and notice that same trend. One famous example is the
| Dropbox post.
| dang wrote:
| > most top comments (for most topics) contain contra-
| arguments, or critical comments of any sort against the
| article
|
| That's true until the top comments start objecting to the
| objections. The current thread is a clear example. I call it
| the contrarian dynamic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all
| &page=0&prefix=true&que.... It's a surprisingly reliable
| phenomenon.
| braza wrote:
| I think this is the beauty of HN: having people that does not
| share the hive mind from Social Media, edgy comments,
| contrarians, insiders, builders and people that reflects over
| the topics posted here.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| New users are more likely to be positive, actually. HN has
| always been more negative, it even has the infamous Dropbox
| comment by BrandonM.
| lylejantzi3rd wrote:
| I'm also guessing the bounce rate on HN is pretty high. New
| users come in, see a post like this where the top 5 posts are
| all long and very negative, and they bounce. Who wants to
| stick around for that? Other people who like to post negative
| comments. It's a self-reinforcing cycle.
| sph wrote:
| The vast majority of people in here are posers, i.e. not
| hackers in the old-school computer wiz sense, nor hackers in
| the Paul Graham sense.
|
| HN has gone mainstream a decade ago. Now we've got the same
| audience of Ars Technica and r/technology.
| greatpostman wrote:
| General bitter people stuck in the 9 to 5 grind
| hubraumhugo wrote:
| Business advice is often just someone handing you their winning
| lottery ticket. It worked perfectly for them but will probably be
| totally useless and not repeatable for you.
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| I am really fed up with this kind of indie hacker story.
|
| MMR updates are superficial. Weak signal. I'm confident most are
| absent of critical info and some are entirely made up. I don't
| disbelieve anyone in particular, but when a mechanism of virality
| proliferates, it often gets deployed without the backing
| substance.
|
| "How I XYZ" around money is similarly misleading. Most
| entrepreneurs I know cannot recreate their own success - when
| they set out on a new venture, they need to look with fresh eyes,
| invent some new techniques, and discard a lot of methods that
| previously worked. If entrepreneurs aren't even able to reuse
| their own "how I xyz," then how will a stranger with even less
| nuance be able to learn or apply much from the blog post? Again,
| some of these stories have great lessons, but as a category I
| believe they are more noise than signal.
|
| Finally, the sheer obsession with money saddens me. The great
| entrepreneurs of our world are hardly motivated by money - to
| them, money is a tool that they factor in as they work to realize
| a vision, not an end goal. How ethically/morally impoverished is
| this technical class to be so obsessed with money? There's a term
| for this - greed. I know that a lot of jobs suck, a lot of stuff
| in life is expensive, we need money to do a lot of basic things,
| etcetera. But money is not the only solution, and more money is
| not an even better solution. I don't think this incessant
| messaging around money is virtuous - I think it is both a product
| of greed and a means of harnessing the greed in others. (And
| where are the entrepreneurs bragging about impact?)
|
| (For the record, I am not jealous - I make my money doing
| literally whatever I want, on projects that I find much more
| exciting, with ample time left over for nature walks, rock
| climbing, reading, and more. Unlike these authors, the money I
| make is not the most interesting part of my story.)
| ncallaway wrote:
| > For the record, I am not jealous - I make my money doing
| literally whatever I want, on projects that I find much more
| exciting, with ample time left over for nature walks, rock
| climbing, reading, and more. Unlike these authors, the money I
| make is not the most interesting part of my story
|
| Frankly, I think you're being incredibly rude to assume that
| because someone shared their story on a topic, then it must be
| their entire identity. It's just so presumptuous to assume that
| the author or authors of these pieces have nothing else in
| their lives of value, because they decided to share this piece
| of their life.
|
| There's a lot in your comment I agree with, but this note
| struck me as just... extremely uncharitable, presumptuous, and
| rude.
| zedadex wrote:
| Yeah, their comment read as incredibly privileged, and that
| paragraph pretty much said what they didn't have to
| williamtrask wrote:
| To be fair. The title of the post only focuses on money and
| completely ignores whether the work has any real value to
| themself or society. Kindof implies pretty strongly "their
| identity".
| ncallaway wrote:
| > Kindof implies pretty strongly "their identity".
|
| Respectfully, it doesn't, I don't think you're being fair,
| and I think saying it does is rude and presumptuous.
|
| It pretty strongly implies "what they chose to write a blog
| post about".
|
| If, in the blog post they described focusing on nothing
| else but money, I'd agree with you. But they don't.
|
| > I still want to get more revenue, but I realized that
| this is a moving goalpost, and it will never stop. $10K,
| then $20K, then $50K. I knew I would never satisfied.
|
| > It's much better to work and play at the same time.
|
| > So I traveled. I went for a trip around Vietnam.
|
| > My average working hours during this period was about 4
| hours/day. I still tweet a lot
|
| Clearly there's more to this person than doing nothing but
| focusing on money. Just because they chose to write this
| blog post, doesn't mean it's their entire identity.
| savanaly wrote:
| No it doesn't? They just chose to write a tight, focused
| post. Rather than an autobiography. If they had written a
| larger sweeping piece focusing on all their hobbies and
| aspirations and well as their successful business people
| would still be salty in the comments.
| williamtrask wrote:
| Devils advocate, if the post was about building an open
| source non-profit with that level of financial success I
| don't think there would be so much salt.
| blantonl wrote:
| I think the point is that it seems like these days every time
| someone get's lucky with a couple SAAS / Apps they've
| released they've got to author a blog post how how they
| climbed the mountain. At some point the playbook seems more
| like self-promotion than it does anything else.
|
| And that's fine, no one should be ashamed of their success.
| But it is also OK to point out what's going on and that's
| what the OP is doing.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I think it's a mystical part of the software career path
| and useful to write about
|
| He said he took risks because he was unencumbered, he
| waited till the ideal time to strike and did and it has
| more success than his employment offered financially and
| fulfillment wise
|
| Who cares that his blogging is intrinsically tied to his
| growth hacking
|
| This same standard is not levied on every Stanford dropout
| that sold shares of a pre-revenue idea to their VC
| neighbors for $20 million dollars
|
| What are you all even bickering about
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I find these stories somewhat inspirational but generally
| lacking anything actionable. What is far more interesting is
| the stories of people who detail the longer road. How they
| started, problems and setbacks they encountered, why business X
| failed or was shutdown, how they used the lessons learned to
| build the next business, how they recognized opportunities and
| which ones they were able to take advantage of and which ones
| they had to pass up, and so on...
|
| There's someone on twitter (I think it's The Gas Station Guy)
| who talked about having to fire sale a business that was worth
| close to $1M for $60,000 to a competitor because he was out of
| cash and desperate. How you get to that stage and how you
| recovered from it is far more interesting to me than these "0
| to $XXX in 18 months" stories.
| cj wrote:
| Sure, but this is a forum run by a bunch of startup founders
| and a startup VC.
|
| MRR is not a weak signal.
|
| If anything, I'd love to see more stories like this and less
| stories from popular media like NPR, Gizmodo, and NY Times (all
| 3 on the front page right now).
| eb0la wrote:
| Maybe I am a very sceptical person... but every time I see a
| similar story I can't help thinking about survivorship bias.
| shw1n wrote:
| This is a strangely bitter take on someone sharing their
| business journey.
|
| Sure, someone can make up their MRR, just like anyone sharing
| any personal story of theirs can make anything up.
|
| But in a world full of wantrepreneurs and pseudo-intellectuals,
| revenue/profits is the best "objective" measure of a business'
| progress
|
| Wanting money also does not necessarily correlate to greed, it
| can also correlate to desiring freedom in a world with bills
| and expenses
| brigadier132 wrote:
| This reeks of moral superiority, you probably consider yourself
| to be a non-judgmental person too. Even if they were purely
| money driven, why is it bad for this person to have sought out
| money by creating a tool used by many that improves people's
| lives? It's not like this guy is a financier or middleman just
| pushing numbers around and taking a percent on every
| transaction.
|
| I'd think that someone with the ability to live and walk around
| in nature would not be so critical of others.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| Sorry but you can't fall downhill into 45k a month. You also
| can't write down a cake recipe for 45k a month like you seem to
| be expecting.
|
| As someone who, over the last two years, has created a more
| modest 5 figure MRR business, I can assure you, you don't know
| what you're talking about.
|
| It takes a lot of skill and understanding of the market and
| market forces to be this successful. Being able to do the same
| thing again and get the same results is exactly what these
| people are not trying to do.
|
| There seems to be some disconnect between what you think would
| make a successful business and what people who are making
| successful businesses do.
|
| If I was to start again today and do the same thing, I would
| fail. If I wrote down what I did and someone else tried it,
| they would fail. The market has moved on since then and so
| every day when I get out of bed, I need to get my work done,
| manage my team and plan for tomorrow.
|
| And after all this, my little MRR is an important metric
| because it shows success and because it's something that I've
| worked the hardest in my life for.
|
| Best of luck for your nature walks, people get to chose what
| they do in life.
| williamtrask wrote:
| Care to comment on the idea that $ is over celebrated as a
| metric of success? That seemed like a bigger point.
| aunty_helen wrote:
| $ or in this case MRR, is the easiest comparable thing. The
| question "How big is your agency/business?" Is often very
| nuanced and tedious to explain.
|
| It would probably take me 30+ seconds of boring
| conversation to get to the point. Humans optimize and now
| you have $xx / month. It's easy to understand exactly where
| I am in my journey, how much "stuff" goes on in the day to
| day and the types of problems I have.
|
| I like talking to people that are doing six figures a
| month, it gives me insight into the problems that I hope to
| one day have. Like a child looking up to their bigger
| brother. But also, they're often very direct and insightful
| with the problems that I'm dealing with.
|
| Not like they have the cake recipe I'm trying to make, but
| they can adapt their advice to my experience and tell me
| what temperature I should set my oven.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| What else would you even measure? How much other people
| love what you made? The fact that lots of people pay you
| for it measures that. How much what you made helps other
| people? The fact that lots of people pay you for it
| measures that. How much you're able to contribute to good
| causes? How much money you make influences that. Money is a
| tool, it's created and traded with others as a means of
| exchange. If you make something valuable, you are given
| money for it, which you can use to make claims on the
| output of other people's work. There's no grand evil
| conspiracy here.
| [deleted]
| didibus wrote:
| Their hiatus on the whole greed thing appart, I think they
| meant the same as what you said?
|
| That there's no lessons to learn, because doing the same
| thing again wouldn't work. And if even the person who
| succeeded first hand would fail to reproduce their own
| success a second time, then those who are just reading about
| it have even less of a chance to be successful with that
| advice.
|
| I think that's interesting to explore. I do wonder if it's
| true or not. There does exist some serial entrepreneurs that
| did manage to bootstrap many successful business after all.
|
| Also I think the OP is more annoyed at the constant
| publication about "how I achieved financial success", because
| it kinds of gives out this illusion to others that they can
| as well, or that this is the ultimate achievement in life.
| somsak2 wrote:
| >"how I achieved financial success", because it kinds of
| gives out this illusion to others that they can as well
|
| Why do you think this is unachievable for others?
| aunty_helen wrote:
| I appreciate your comment and understand your point of
| view.
|
| What people that want a guide to money (aka reading self
| help "how to make a million dollars in 100 days" books)
| don't understand is that the lessons aren't a formula. My
| feeling for the commenter I originally replied to is
| therein lies a source of misunderstanding and frustration.
|
| Being an entrepreneur is a skill. There are some very good
| serial entrepreneurs but they've all had 10x as many
| failures as their handful of successes.
|
| Reading someone else's story isn't to be taken as a lesson
| of what to do to get to any MRR. It's a series of data
| points to be mused over.
|
| Enough data points, along with time in the game
| (persistence, market viability, base level competence and
| work ethic) and you will start to have larger and larger
| successes.
| kanbara wrote:
| funnily, the poster now works 4hrs/day and has a team, so
| they've become a capitalist in an extremely low cola
| country and can do whatever they want.
|
| not saying they dont want to hack still, but as they said,
| there's no end to the limit, and ramen profitability wasnt
| enough
| lifechoseme123 wrote:
| I agree.
|
| Survivorship bias makes me say "I want to see the stories of
| all the solopreneurs who failed."
|
| HN-- Please share more failure stories. I want to balance the
| optimistic fun hype with pragmatic realism.
|
| I say this as a nascent "solopreneur" (I don't like that word)
| who is getting his agency & first product off the ground at the
| moment.
| trashface wrote:
| Failure reporting in. We can't actually post all the
| failures, or even the interesting ones, because the site
| would be overwhelmed and crash.
| nico_h wrote:
| Where is the greed???
|
| This article articulates pretty well everything i've read in
| all the wantreprenarial / bootstrap articles i've read, which
| is summed up as "build a following, ride rising trends, iterate
| fast".(and dump things that slow you down / have peaked) This
| article is in line with the build a following, and shows which
| rising trend he's riding.
|
| The part about the money irking you seems to come from a place
| of incredible privilege. He earned his independence and is
| selling a non-essential product on the free market, before B2B
| powerhouses move in. He shares what he's done and experienced
| with the community and also hired employees.
|
| He escaped the 9-5 and says he's only working part time, which
| allows him to do the non work things you mentioned though he
| prefers surfing travelling and gaming to your rock climbing and
| nature walk.
|
| The article is not even behind a paywall or part of a bootstrap
| course, so again where is the greed?
|
| More power to him.
| [deleted]
| patrec wrote:
| So what _is_ the most interesting part of your story?
| ohrlly wrote:
| That's awfully judgemental, calling people who care about money
| "greedy," no?
|
| I think your ingrained views around money and greed are
| preventing you from presenting a fair perspective. The author
| has something like 4 successful products, so the problem around
| reproducibility is... irrelevant.
|
| And the idea of great entrepreneurs not being motivated by
| money... I mean, ok, maybe give some evidence. I think you'll
| find many people have 2 reasons for doing something, the nice
| "non-greedy" one they tell everyone and some seem to take a
| face value, and the underlying one.
| RyeCombinator wrote:
| These stories are reminding me of the "Doctors hate this one
| trick!" Ads in the 90s. Or the influencers who start selling
| content, dropshipping tricks or ebooks on how they have
| succeeded.
|
| There's a lot of merit for entrepreneurs sharing their journey,
| like a lot of the other comments here I just wished it was less
| about being "successful" or making money.
| charles_f wrote:
| > Finally, the sheer obsession with money saddens me. The great
| entrepreneurs of our world are hardly motivated by money - to
| them, money is a tool that they factor in as they work to
| realize a vision, not an end goal.
|
| Is often a post rationalization.
|
| Not everyone has to be, or has to seek to be a great
| entrepreneur. A lot of people, myself included, want to just go
| by and have a happy life. A new business doesn't have to
| ambition being a game changer, and I actually quite like the
| approach of building several small marginally successful
| products. True, this is not a recipe, and there's always a luck
| factor, but at least the author is sharing his story, whatever
| their own design behind this was.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| I am not an indie hacker and I find this story great. The
| author is genuine and shares interesting insights. The tone is
| humble. He recognizes himself that MRR is a risky metric and
| that you need to keep building new products all the time.
|
| Finally, the "sheer obsession with money" is not at all what
| comes across in the post. A lot of it is about lifestyle
| topics, making news friends, etc.
|
| Honestly, I find your comment completely out of touch with the
| article.
| encoderer wrote:
| It's money-focused because that is what people want to read.
|
| I've been running a small successful software business for 10
| years and we've posted here, Twitter, everywhere over the
| years, and nothing I write about attracts as much interest as
| when I open the kimono and share real numbers.
|
| Partly it generates feedback like yours which is cat nip for
| social feed algorithms, but I think mainly people just really
| like personal details about others lives and businesses.
|
| My advice would be to just not read these if they bother you.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| > The great entrepreneurs of our world are hardly motivated by
| money
|
| The "great" entrepreneurs of our world have always been
| obsessed with money because it is literally the fuel and
| lifeblood of their endeavors. Only people with a lot of money
| can afford to pretend not to care about it while working
| strenuously their entire life to obtain it.
|
| >But money is not the only solution
|
| Money is literally the only solution its the only way to buy
| food medicine and live indoors.
|
| > There's a term for this - greed
|
| Greed is a natural response to a world so constructed that if
| you stop swimming you drown. It's as natural for people to be
| greedy as for a coyote to be hungry.
| goodmunky wrote:
| At its best, money is a terrific measure of satisfaction you've
| provided to other people. This man builds products people like
| and shares the story of his success for free to build an
| audience. These are all good things. You respond with bitter
| vitriol, that is not a good thing. If this is how you approach
| life you will not deserve his success or money.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _This man builds products people like and shares the story
| of his success for free to build an audience._
|
| Maybe people are getting tired of 90% of social media content
| being about "building an audience". Everyone is trying to
| sell us something, all the time.
| nico_h wrote:
| Sounds to me like sour grapes from someone that's doing high
| paying consulting but can't escape it.
| zedadex wrote:
| > Finally, the sheer obsession with money saddens me
|
| You'd think they need it to live or something
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I liked this story because I've had a taste of what $45k/mo is
| like
|
| and it resonated with me how difficult this is to do as an
| employee, I've played around with running the numbers on
| overemployment and it is still not the same amount
|
| I've done many more projects than this person and just couldn't
| be compelled to build an audience on twitter religiously, or
| stick to one persona! many of my ideas have incompatible crowds
|
| its great for me to see examples of launching multiple projects
|
| another thing that stood out is what he considers a failed
| project has probably changed
|
| he wrote off two later in the story as a footnote, but they are
| probably viable ideas, just don't make _enough_ , for him,
| anymore
|
| it is fulfilling for me to have lifestyle flexibility and
| capital, I've had it and it is objectively better. I can relate
| to how this author filled in his time doing other fulfilling
| things
| meiraleal wrote:
| > (For the record, I am not jealous - I make my money doing
| literally whatever I want, on projects that I find much more
| exciting, with ample time left over for nature walks, rock
| climbing, reading, and more. Unlike these authors, the money I
| make is not the most interesting part of my story.)
|
| If this was written in the beginning, the whole thing would
| make much more sense as you are clearly jealous.
| totallywrong wrote:
| > For the record, I am not jealous
|
| You sure don't sound like it..
| aatd86 wrote:
| You should read his post. It's a good one and he acknowledges
| what you're complaining about toward the end of it.
|
| :)
| monero-xmr wrote:
| The benefit to "how I XYZ" for me is not that I can copy them.
| It's ideally to see a path, obstacles that come, decisions that
| were made, and try and understand why they made certain
| decisions and took certain actions.
|
| If something becomes so straightforwards that it can be
| replicated straightforwards, the value of it becomes a product
| of skills + time. So if I want to open a business mowing lawns,
| this is a very commodotized and high-competition industry, so I
| will earn a profit that is pretty much correlated to the
| unpleasantness of the job and the time it takes. Very little
| opportunity to earn a premium, and the only tactic is hacking
| around how quickly I can complete each job.
|
| If I want to create a brand new product from scratch (one that
| is not glorified consulting), then it will by its definition be
| totally unique and the journey unlike all others, including my
| previous journeys. The best I can do is take all information I
| can and try and make the best decisions and take the best
| actions.
| hncowardnum3 wrote:
| Arthur, despite agreeing with your thoughts, I think it's easy
| to not care about money when you have money that grows without
| your time investment.
|
| The rest of us have to place a dire importance on it, lest we
| end up destitute, unemployable, homeless, and so on.
|
| Though if you would like to write something up about "I made
| enough, and now I enrich my soul with leisure and nature
| walks," that would go further to disillusion some of the need
| to keep getting more and more money. But publicly decrying
| greed (and fear in greed's skin) will not achieve anything of
| lasting value.
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| It's not about "not caring about money." It's about not
| letting money be so blindingly front and center that reality
| is obscured.
|
| I'm with you - we all need to be materially conscious to stay
| alive. We can't just throw our finances to the wind. As an
| entrepreneur, money is a particularly critical part of the
| equation.
|
| Similarly, we can't afford to be so enamored by strangers
| making money on the internet that we fail to see 1) the
| pitfalls, errors, and missed opportunities in their efforts
| 2) their actual method (MRR charts are not a method) 3) the
| gifts and opportunities of our unique situations.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _The rest of us have to place a dire importance on it, lest
| we end up destitute, unemployable, homeless, and so on._
|
| This article is literally about a person quitting his job to
| do this, so it seems he's not part of "the rest of us".
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Finally, the sheer obsession with money saddens me. The great
| entrepreneurs of our world are hardly motivated by money - to
| them, money is a tool that they factor in as they work to
| realize a vision, not an end goal
|
| This sounds great until the bills arrive or you realize you
| need to save extra for retirement or home buying because your
| business's income is unpredictable.
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| Paying bills is not greed.
| blantonl wrote:
| I concur with this assessment. I don't want to discount the
| hard work of the author of the post, but this post could have
| also literally been "My slot machine win: $3 to $1.2M with one
| pull of the handle"
|
| I'm under no illusions that my success has a lot to do with
| _being in the right place at the right time, a lot of luck,_
| and a lot of hard work.
| johnfn wrote:
| Are we reading the same article? "One pull of the handle"...
| the guy wrote about iterating through like 10-15 (more?)
| different ideas over the course of 2 years, with most of them
| failing for one reason or another. Apparently, the meme that
| success is entirely luck is so pervasive that when exact
| evidence to the contrary is provided people still miss it.
| slig wrote:
| Seriously. There are at least four different comments on
| this thread about how the author was lucky, is showing his
| lottery ticket, pulled the right lever and is writing about
| making money without doing anything.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > I make my money doing literally whatever I want, on projects
| that I find much more exciting, with ample time left over for
| nature walks, rock climbing, reading, and more. Unlike these
| authors, the money I make is not the most interesting part of
| my story.
|
| Good for you, little man. How did you manage to find a moment
| to write this spiteful comment with such an interesting life?
| brunojppb wrote:
| > I make my money doing literally whatever I want...
|
| Classic take from somebody that most probably could spend their
| entire time just fiddling with ideas, with zero worries about
| money. Everything else was taken care of. Not everyone has this
| luxury pal.
|
| The author is plain, simple sharing his story. Can you
| replicate his success? Who knows. But I respect him for sharing
| this candid blog post documenting his steps.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Sharing is the marketing and the dream is also what they're
| selling.
| airstrike wrote:
| Reminds me of this interview I once saw on YouTube with a
| French heiress who said (and I paraphrase) "after reflecting
| a lot, I've concluded that although most things in life cost
| something, time is free" which is entirely delusional because
| time is only free to someone who has more money than they'll
| ever need
| slig wrote:
| I'd love to read more about how the GP can live this
| lifestyle, maybe they can share and we all can learn and
| replicate their journey on how to make money doing literally
| whatever we want whist doing a lot of interesting hobbies.
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| Here are some of the principles I like to apply ->
| https://minimal.app/design
|
| Generally my formula is about cultivating a healthy value
| set, becoming increasingly clear minded, and trying to do
| things that are worthwhile. I know that's vague, but those
| are the abstract principles that work in different
| circumstances. I've led many different lives within my life
| - rock climbing full time, building software - and those
| are the guiding themes that have most consistently offered
| the greatest results.
|
| (Write to me directly if you'd like me to flush out in more
| concrete detail, including how money and service factor in,
| how to avoid traps, what I currently struggle with, etc.)
| slig wrote:
| Thank you!
| chasd00 wrote:
| They likely sit deep in the bowels of a very large company
| in a position shielded from the market. No expectations of
| delivery and no accountability for failure. You don't get
| hired into a role like that, it's the end result of a
| multi-decade tenure where you slowly evolve into a potted
| plant in the corner.
|
| I know a handful of these at my current employer.
| unmole wrote:
| I can't tell if this is satire.
| charles_f wrote:
| Yeah I waa asking myself the same question, this is such a
| stereotypical hn answer, but it lacks just enough emphasis to
| make it satirical
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Yeah, it's such a bitter, and wrong, take, it seems like a
| caricature.
|
| I simply don't understand the "why is it all about money"
| take, at all. The author isn't saying he wants to but a Rolls
| and lots of gold chains. He simply want to make enough to be
| able to be independent (which he succeeded), and to indulge
| in relatively minor enjoyments, like travel.
|
| "Why is it all about money?" Because some of us like both
| independence _and_ not starving.
| foooorsyth wrote:
| Is this HackerNews or some former communist Twitter enclave?
| Why is this mopey, undercutting, crabs-in-bucket post near the
| top of this comments section on HN?
|
| This is a website about software entrepreneurship and you don't
| like articles about going solo and making it? Maybe find a
| different website.
| imiric wrote:
| > There's a term for this - greed.
|
| Greed? You want to lecture about greed, when 95% of tech
| companies are _driven_ by profits, by driving the share price
| up by any means necessary, including exploiting their users and
| employees, being the reason for new consumer protection laws to
| come into place and then skirting around them, tax avoidance,
| and a million other shady tricks, all with the goal of becoming
| a "unicorn", to go public or be acquired, and to get to do it
| all over again.
|
| This very forum is built by, around and for serial
| entrepreneurs in this rat race, so it's a bit... rich to
| lecture about greed on here, of all places.
|
| And yet you criticize when a solo developer, without any
| venture capital as a safety net, manages to have the success
| entrepreneurs dream of, measured by the same measuring stick.
| It all reads like sour grapes to me.
|
| Good on OP for having the courage, persistence and skill to
| pull this off. Why shouldn't they talk about the steps they
| took, and the results they're seeing? We can call it
| survivorship bias, growth hacking, luck, etc. all we want, but
| it's encouraging to know that these stories _do_ happen.
|
| Achieving financial independence by building something people
| want to pay for, instead of relying on the usual advertising
| and VC get-rich-quick schemes, should be applauded.
| dooraven wrote:
| Also this is just lol
|
| > The great entrepreneurs of our world are hardly motivated
| by money
|
| Yeah come on like Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates, Hoffman etc
| aren't motivated by money lol.
|
| For a forum created by an accelerator, it is weirdly anti-
| success.
| williamtrask wrote:
| Fwiw I don't think those are "the great entrepreneurs".
| They're rich and famous, yes, but "THE great
| entrepreneurs"?. I'd prefer Tesla, Jobs, and even JCR
| Licklider over them.
| dooraven wrote:
| are you confusing inventors and entrepreneurs? Cause no
| way you'd consider Tesla a great entrepreneur, he died
| penniless and JCR Licklider same thing - great inventor
| and innovator yeah. Great Entrepreneur no.
|
| Of the 3 you listed only Jobs qualifies.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| FWIW, none of those people are whom I'd consider great
| entrepreneurs.
| dooraven wrote:
| please name some then
| eertami wrote:
| Are these people entrepreneurs? What risks did they take. I
| wager almost none, they were fine whatever happened.
| somsak2 wrote:
| How would you define an entrepreneurs? I think risk-
| taking correlates with entrepreneurship, but I don't
| think I'd use it in a definition.
| blantonl wrote:
| I think the issue is there's this undercurrent of self-
| promotion with these types of posts. Just like the people
| 20 years ago who would post their $20K adsense checks on
| their blog posts saying "you too can be successful like me
| (FLEX)"
| zpeti wrote:
| Did you ever think these people want some feedback and
| admiration and recognition for what they've done? Being a
| solopreneur is really really lonely.
|
| And no one cares what you are doing. Posts like this are
| about getting recognition. Making $42k a month doesn't
| actually get you any recognition by itself. Maybe buying
| champagne in a club from it does, but a lot of people
| don't like that kind of attention.
|
| People on HN are just so resentful and want to see the
| bad in posts like this it's really sad.
| amelius wrote:
| > For a forum created by an accelerator, it is weirdly
| anti-success.
|
| It's not anti-success. HN applauds anyone making millions
| by doing real hard work that benefits everybody. What's
| frowned upon are these look-I-did-nothing-but-still-made-
| it-big stories.
| imiric wrote:
| > What's frowned upon are these look-I-did-nothing-but-
| still-made-it-big stories.
|
| Seven years of acquiring skills in different domains, and
| two years of applying those skills, learning more along
| the way, grinding, failing, trying again, and building
| several successful products people are willing to pay for
| is "doing nothing"? What a ridiculous take.
|
| People get rich nowadays by manipulating virtual numbers
| on screens, based on speculation and pure luck, which is
| much closer to "doing nothing", and we enthusiastically
| celebrate their success, yet someone uses their skills to
| build and sell products to people that enjoy using them,
| and we label them as lucky, lazy and show-offs. #smh
| satvikpendem wrote:
| They made something people want, the motto of this
| forum's accelerator, but when it's not something _you 'd_
| want, then it's not "real hard work," apparently.
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| Ah ok, some success is ok, some is not.
| amelius wrote:
| Just like some statements are ok, some are not.
| aramattamara wrote:
| > 95% of tech companies are _driven_ by profits
|
| They are obliged to, by definition. Unlike non-profit or
| public-benefit companies, commercial companies must maximize
| profits for shareholders, otherwise they might be prosecuted
| by law.
| thelastparadise wrote:
| Most non-VC founders I've ever met start with the humbe goal
| of earning a living and feeding their family (and, of course,
| building a product that the market needs).
|
| Definitely see more greed on the VC side and in more mature
| companies, especially when PE or acquisitions come into play.
| demondemidi wrote:
| What is your position? You're bashing the reply for not
| complaining about all greed, is that it? Like somehow the OP
| didn't go far enough? I'm struggling to understand your
| response, maybe it is to defend greed?
| cj wrote:
| The juxtaposition of a entrepreneur recounting his
| experience building/selling products, with the original
| commenter criticizing entrepreneurs for being greedy,
| alongside of stories/comments every week here complaining
| about how we aren't paid enough in tech and how it's
| immoral to ask tech workers to drive to an office is quite
| ironic.
|
| He has a point.. HN is full of greed (or lack of
| appreciation for the privilege most of us have) and
| criticizing a solo bootstrapped entrepreneur for greed
| feels completely misplaced.
|
| To a certain extent, yes, let's defend and embrace greed
| when the outcome is a solo entrepreneur doing cool things
| and sharing the experience publicly.
| demondemidi wrote:
| > To a certain extent, yes, let's defend and embrace
| greed
|
| No, let's not do this. That's literally the root of
| inequity that is rotting western culture. Put down the
| Ayn Rand and starting thinking about more than your
| /r/wsb fantasies of become a wolf of wallstreet or an
| elon musk. Cultures, cities, and nations' people are
| dying because of this callous attitude.
| imiric wrote:
| I'm criticizing the hipocrisy of denouncing greed while
| being part of the tech industry, especially on this forum,
| and the accusation that the author is guilty of it, based
| on nothing but a post about a successful entrepreneurship
| journey taken on "hard mode" (being a solo founder with no
| VC backing or advertising scam business models).
|
| This is a success story we should all celebrate in this
| community, and it pains me to see this type of response at
| the top of the comment section.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I dont think all "success stories" should be celebrated.
| I think that's what the commenter was trying to
| highlight.
|
| There is such a thing as toxic productivity advice, the
| internet is full of it. It's easy to spot for me now,
| because I've noticed a few common threads. 1- The writing
| typically focuses on how much money the person makes 2-
| how little they have to work now or how little they had
| to work to get it and 3- How little time it took.
|
| In my career, business, etc. I've learned the exact
| opposite. I would give the exact opposite advice for
| people looking to be successful in their lives and
| careers: 1- Don't focus on how much money you make, but
| how much value you add to the world and those around you.
| As you keep investing in your community, it will pay you
| back dividends right when you need it most. 2- Work hard,
| even when mo one is watching. Work hard for yourself, no
| one else. 3- Don't rush things, sometimes taking an extra
| month to build your business infrastructure properly
| could save you millions in the future.
|
| In one sentence: It's not helpful for me personally for
| this guy to boast about how much he makes, how little he
| works, and how quickly he did it. What would be helpful
| is for him to remove all the concrete numbers
| ($45k/month, etc.) and boasting which only serves to put
| up my defenses and force me to start off in a position of
| comparison. Then he could just have simple prose about
| things he thinks are helpful that he learned along the
| way, simple information like a technical paper, not ad
| copy.
|
| This, and other content like it, serves them, not me.
| I've found that limiting or even completely restricting
| my consumption of this kind of content for the latter, is
| better for me.
| imiric wrote:
| > I dont think all "success stories" should be
| celebrated.
|
| I agree, and I never said so.
|
| I get the perspective of being jaded by vapid success
| stories of "here's how I got rich, buy my book/merch/MLM
| and you can get rich too", but this is far from being the
| case here.
|
| If you read the article, the author clearly states they
| were lucky several times, and towards the end:
|
| > There is no formula to guarantee success.
|
| This is not someone boasting of their success, or saying
| there's a quick and foolproof way to reach it, but
| sharing their journey with others and hoping it inspires
| people, in the same way they were inspired by similar
| stories.
|
| > how little they have to work now or how little they had
| to work to get it
|
| This was a 2 year journey, where at some point they were
| working 12 and 16 hours a day, and they said it took a
| toll on their personal and social life, so this is hardly
| working little, and having no sacrifices. If they now get
| to enjoy working 4 hours a day, and taking many days off,
| then that's a notable reward they get to enjoy from their
| previous hard work.
|
| We should all be thankful that we live in an age where
| such a work/life balance is even possible. Our ancestors
| had to do back-breaking labour for 18 hours a day, or
| work a dead-end office job for their entire lives
| enriching someone else just so they could earn the right
| to a meager existence when they retire. Yet we live in a
| time when computers enable us to not think about our
| finances, and to do work we actually enjoy doing, rather
| than because we have to in order to subsist.
|
| _This_ is the future technology promised us, where
| everyone gets to work less and enjoy life more, yet most
| of us are still stuck in industries with the same grind
| mentality from 100 years ago. Let's not criticize being
| able to work less.
|
| > How little time it took.
|
| They invested 7 years into their career, and did hard
| work for 2 years, with several failures along the way, so
| this is not an insignificant amount of time. It's
| certainly impressive what they've accomplished in 2
| years, but this is not an overnight success story. How
| long would they have to have done "hard" work for their
| story to hold water?
|
| > In one sentence: It's not helpful for me personally for
| this guy to boast about how much he makes, how little he
| works, and how quickly he did it.
|
| I mean, that's your preference, sure. But companies are
| measured by their finances, and it's difficult to talk
| about growth towards financial independence without
| mentioning numbers. If they were discussing their fitness
| journey, they would need to mention their weight and
| exercise statistics, so I don't see how this is any
| different.
|
| > This, and other content like it, serves them, not me.
|
| Again, it's your opinion, and that's fine, but myself and
| many others find it very interesting to hear about
| someone else's road to "success". We don't need to be so
| cynical about their intentions just because it fits some
| preconceived notions about this type of content.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| >I mean, that's your preference, sure. But companies are
| measured by their finances, and it's difficult to talk
| about growth towards financial independence without
| mentioning numbers. If they were discussing their fitness
| journey, they would need to mention their weight and
| exercise statistics, so I don't see how this is any
| different
|
| This is exactly what I'm trying to highlight. While this
| kind of behavior seems normal or common in this community
| its not really in the greater world.
|
| My plumber has done real well for himself, has dozens of
| people working for him, successful. He does not have
| articles on his website about how much he makes in a
| month, and how many hours he works when. He does have
| articles about the big name job he just landed, local
| building code committees he's on, and the little league
| baseball team he sponsors. Oh, and some plumbing tips and
| tricks.
|
| My proctologist is similar. His website talks mostly
| about proctology. I bet he makes a lot, but he doesn't
| really talk publicly about it. That would be tacky.
|
| In this community for some reason it's popular to say
| "look at how much money I make, look at all the bridges
| I've burned along the way, look at how I was way out of
| balance one way then the other, etc.". I get it, this was
| their journey. I'm not trying to say anything about them
| or there journey.
|
| I think for every successful person like this there is
| another who did it a more "in balance" way. Those voices
| don't seem to come through so clearly, that's all I'm
| saying. I think it would benefit those in that second
| bucket to hear more stories about people like them being
| successful.
| imiric wrote:
| Financial independence is a big deal, though. Especially
| for people living in poorer areas of the world, where the
| majority of the population is struggling to get by. This
| type of content, where someone shares their legitimate
| road to FI instead of using some get-rich-quick scheme is
| a big deal. It's very insightful, and inspires many to
| want to do the same, which is a good thing.
|
| I'm sure that if your plumber or proctologist shared
| their journeys this openly that others would find it
| helpful as well. Mentioning incomes can be tacky, and I
| too scowl whenever someone boasts about theirs, but this
| article didn't strike me as such at all. Which is why I
| think the negative tone here is unwarranted.
| huimang wrote:
| This is a lot of words to merely say that you're jealous. There
| a lot of assumptions here that have nothing to do with the
| author or the post.
| slig wrote:
| > I make my money doing literally whatever I want, on projects
| that I find much more exciting, with ample time left over for
| nature walks, rock climbing, reading, and more. Unlike these
| authors, the money I make is not the most interesting part of
| my story.
|
| Nice humblebragging. So you just read one blog post from the
| author and concluded that the most interesting part of their
| story is money? I bet they enjoy a lot of things and this is
| only a small piece of their life, as their blog post is
| specifically about being an entrepreneur, not about their
| hobbies.
| moneywoes wrote:
| i agree this whole build in public is a growth hack
| meiraleal wrote:
| so build in private. Isn't it the default?
| arthur_sav wrote:
| I don't understand the complaint here. He's sharing his journey
| - he's not selling you a course on how to be an indie hacker.
| If you want to take any lessons from this, that's up to you.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| This sharing is also promotion for what they are selling:
| shovels and dreams
| eddmakesio wrote:
| Actually he's selling a web UI over ChatGPT
| pdyc wrote:
| I would argue that if someone is not motivated by money why
| should he be in "for profit venture" at all? why not create
| non-profit? or may be become a govt official or senator where
| you can influence policy decision that has the potential to
| create whole industry catering to your selected cause?
|
| This is incredible story for me. I am not sure i can achieve
| same thing as he achieved. It is inspiring. Moreover his main
| business failed after twitters api policy changed so it is even
| more incredible that he was able to recover from that setback
| and managend to create a new business which is now surpassing
| his older biz. And he did it without taking any outside
| funding. In my eyes he is equal or greater than your so called
| great entreprenuers!
| spencerchubb wrote:
| Are we even reading the same story? It seems like you're trying
| to do a takedown of the story, but the author addresses all of
| those points (the author largely agrees with you)
| swagempire wrote:
| Why is HN so opposed to people making money?
|
| He's literally made probably under $500k in revenue. And he's
| Vietnamese -- so that's really a fortune there.
|
| I don't see anything except a reason to be happy for him.
| xyst wrote:
| I think it's crab mentality.
| Remnant44 wrote:
| On the contrary: while to you the other things you spend your
| time with might be more interesting, for the rest of us the
| means through which you have acquired all of this free time...
| is by far more interesting and useful.
|
| Care to share?
| nico wrote:
| Very interesting read. Highlights how important having an
| audience is
|
| The key was building his Twitter following and mailing list
| jcytong wrote:
| It's wonderful the world is big enough to celebrate whether you
| run a $45k/mo company solo, or find joy in nature walks, rock
| climbing, reading or raised VC to go big.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I paid for & use one of Tony's products (Xnapper for
| screenshots). It's good, but I reported a cropping bug, along
| with a replication bullet list and .gif screencast of me
| replicating the bug.
|
| I got a response from a support person telling me to increase
| border padding beyond any reasonable aesthetic level. Aesthetics
| is the purpose of buying the product, otherwise non-aesthetic
| screenshots are built into macOS.
|
| The support person asked if this error happens regularly... well
| replicate it for yourself using my screencast and that's your
| answer.
|
| There was no bug fix. No point version update in the works. The
| last software update was 9 months ago on 15 Jan, 2023.
|
| I feel like Tony's able to be a profitable solopreneur because he
| outsources all support to people who don't really care about the
| quality of the output.
| sokoloff wrote:
| You got an unsatisfactory reply to a support ticket.
|
| What's the realistic alternative with other software vendors of
| $20-50 products? IMO, the most common is not "a satisfactory
| reply" but rather "no [edit to add: human-generated] reply".
| thfuran wrote:
| I was able to get prompt and effective support from VoIP.ms,
| a company I pay something like $1.50/month. I once contacted
| Aruba support regarding hardware I bought secondhand and they
| replaced it for me. That many software companies choose to
| (and for some reason are permitted to) operate at scale
| beyond which they can meaningfully support their products
| doesn't mean that it's fundamentally impossible to receive
| support without paying a lot.
| fullstackchris wrote:
| see, i just don't get this. one of my SaaS products is
| essentially 100% hands off (aside from occasional package
| upgrading, random refunds or upgrade issues every few weeks)
| but i still absolutely LOVE adding new features or fixing bug
| requests that customers bring into my view. it gives me the
| classic feeling of really helping someone, even if it is just
| a single individual out there.
|
| then the bug reports start to get further and further
| apart... now i have had one in months :)
| johntiger1 wrote:
| Yep, well it's clear how indexed on money Tony is in this
| post. Not passing judgment either way, but for some people
| software is just a means of making money. And that's okay.
| antisthenes wrote:
| The solution to receiving an unsatisfactory reply on a
| support ticket is not "lower your expectations", regardless
| of how that business may be structured.
|
| If we lower our expectations of software, we'll get exactly
| that, shitty software.
| cellis wrote:
| If you don't like it you can always stop paying, or better
| yet build your own. That's how things get better.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| I stopped paying for Youtube Premium. Did that make
| Youtube better?
|
| Maybe I'll find time to build that when I'm not building
| API integrations with Youtube.
| cellis wrote:
| If everyone thinks like this then no, it won't get
| better. But I stand by my statement, no matter how many
| downvotes I get. If you don't like a product, stop paying
| for it, and either find alternatives or build your own.
| Its quite rare that you're going to influence their
| roadmap by getting a ticket filed.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| Don't you think it'd be a lot quicker if multiple people
| were filing a ticket for the same issue then to build the
| entire product yourself?
| cellis wrote:
| I could write many Series A angel checks if I only had a
| penny for all the tickets on product issues I've had that
| were never resolved.
|
| It's for this reason if I find an NPM library that
| doesn't meet my needs and I have the time, I'll write a
| new one that solves only my use case.
| ipaddr wrote:
| If enough people stopped it might influence Youtube to
| change. Youtube is in the drivers seat. Some products
| change rapidly based on feedback and others never change.
| Youtube has the right to not make changes and not get
| your business back. If they make too many of these
| decisions and run out of money the will close. This is
| indirect.
|
| You save by not paying for youtube. You paying someone
| else for similar services has a better return because
| your money endorses someone elses vision. When you buy a
| product you give a thumbs up. When you don't you don't
| give a thumbs down..
| johntiger1 wrote:
| Alternatively, you can speak their language so to speak,
| and request a refund/issue a chargeback. Sometimes that's
| the only way they'll understand
| 38 wrote:
| > IMO, the most common is not "a satisfactory reply" but
| rather "no reply".
|
| what point are you trying to make here? that he should shut
| up and be a good consumer? how dare he expect support from a
| product he paid for, from a guy making 500k a year, am I
| right?
| riddley wrote:
| Responses like yours are always so strange to me. Perhaps I
| misunderstood your response but it feels very much like a
| defense of the status quo. As if the PC was expecting too
| much to get support for software they paid for and that their
| raising of the issue in the comment was unwarranted.
|
| How do things ever get better if everyone just accepts
| everything that ever happens without complaint?
| 1shooner wrote:
| >How do things ever get better if everyone just accepts
| everything that ever happens without complaint?
|
| I don't think this post is about making things better, it's
| about making money quickly.
| sokoloff wrote:
| It's not that it was unwarranted on the consumer's part,
| but rather that the common outcome of support (of no human
| reply) would have been not noteworthy, quickly forgotten,
| and probably not resulted in the upthread comment at all.
|
| Instead, the case of having human-staffed support for a
| low-priced product that happens to have given an unhelpful
| reply to GP (but likely gave helpful replies to >50% of
| support cases [because most support questions are user-
| error]) drives home a negative [rather than null] feeling
| in the upthread consumer and results in the negative
| response above. (For avoidance of doubt, GP/consumer did
| nothing at all wrong then nor now. I'm talking about the
| incentives a company has to offer support at all for a low
| priced software product.)
| suzzer99 wrote:
| So many software devs seem to have this attitude that the
| customer (internal or external) should just shut up and be
| happy with whatever they've been given.
|
| I've often felt that many devs could benefit from a stint
| waiting tables -- where the customer is always right and
| your income is dependent on being helpful and responsive.
| bdlowery wrote:
| Clean shot is exactly like xnapper but better in every single
| aspect
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| I sell a $10 app on the App Store and it sells quite well. My
| co-founder and I personally block time every evening to reply
| to support emails and interact with our users on discord. We
| could easily hire someone to handle support, but we derive a
| lot of pleasure and satisfaction from being able to deal with
| our users ourselves. Our users seem to like it too. And we
| couldn't care less about building in public. We build for
| ourselves and our users.
| [deleted]
| Lewton wrote:
| > the most common is not "a satisfactory reply" but rather
| "no reply".
|
| No it isn't?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Isn't more of a bug report than a support ticket ? I'd hate
| silence to be the standard response to bug reports.
| bnt wrote:
| I see this with course creators as well. I reported dozens of
| errors in a particular corse and the creator was literally
| annoyed at me.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| If you can't do, teach. If you can't teach, write an online
| course. If you can't write an online course, teach phys ed.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| > I feel like Tony's able to be a profitable solopreneur
| because he outsources all support to people who don't really
| care about the quality of the output.
|
| Replace Tony with the name of almost any company these days and
| the statement would still be true, unfortunately. This isn't a
| solopreneur issue at all.
| ec109685 wrote:
| Slack still responds to every issue raised in detail.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Seems like a cyclical systemic failure where confidence in
| the system makes people buying even though there's no real
| desire for high quality and it just coasts until it fails.
| DantesKite wrote:
| So much envy.
| wx30 wrote:
| Thanks for the article. What tools do you use to quickly build
| websites? Stripe? Something else?
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Looks like a marketing bullshit article.
| NickC25 wrote:
| Good on you Tony. $45k monthly revenue is nothing to shake a
| stick at, and it seems you're quite happy with the lifestyle it's
| afforded you. An inspiration.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Amazingly done for one time payments as well. People like them.
|
| Forever licenses are maybe more tolerable as well for self host
| and client side local applications. Could be good money
| combined with b2b pricing on top of it
| zygo wrote:
| Pettiness and entitlement in the comments are another level!
| Kudos to Tony for having the guts to take the leap and reaching
| this milestone
| yusufmalikul wrote:
| Tony = 7 years of dev before going indie also Tony = 2-4 years of
| saving
|
| losers = no dev exp, learn no code in a week then quit 9-5 also
| losers = spend all their one month saving
| [deleted]
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Doesn't look easy
| frabjoused wrote:
| Don't know why this is trending on HN. It's not a coincidence
| that in a majority of these stories, they also have a large blog,
| social media following or in some other way are selling their
| success. This is just another person being successful by talking
| about how they are successful.
| [deleted]
| admildo wrote:
| Congratulations on such a huge milestone. What an inspiration, I
| know you're going to achieve even greater milestones. Keep on
| building
| uoaei wrote:
| One lesson I've learned from this post is if you create products
| for people who are on their computers all the time and who are
| not very price-sensitive to double-digit recurring costs, it's
| easy to make a lot of money.
| axegon_ wrote:
| > unit test suite with >95% test coverage
|
| I'm sorry, but that claim is wild. This is nearly impossible
| unless your application consists of 5 classes and you are moving
| a few bits in memory. For a large application, anything over 75%
| sounds a bit fishy to say the least. And beyond that, it's
| practically unsustainable: the odds of making even a small
| refactor(which sooner or later you will need to), without wasting
| a week fixing your tests is a fairy tale.
| braza wrote:
| Reading those comments I think this is a tale of two cities.
|
| City one here several corporate developers can see how a raw and
| crystalline feedback from the user is: attention and money. no
| fluff, no Hippo, no assumptions of what a customer is. Well done
| an we salute you.
|
| Another city has people that is tired with that renaissance of
| this dollar-menu version of the hustle culture, that as a
| stubborn Phoenix always reappears and now fuelled with social
| attention.
|
| And here I am not talking about people doing important things to
| the world, but my message is for the several clout chasers from
| Twitter that their "product" is selling courses to build
| products, how to hustle and show stats in social media, and
| generate twitter impressions as "qualified leads".
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| [dead]
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| I don't know if I'm in an algorithmic rabbit hole, but my Twitter
| shows hundreds of people like this talking about how much they
| are making, how many signups they are getting for their products,
| how many Twitter followers they have.
|
| It seems like some strange playbook where you build a very simple
| product and shout about (possibly exaggerate) your success to
| attract eyeballs. Then you sell the real thing which is a course
| or info product to the people who want to replicate your success.
|
| No bitterness here and I haven't even read this particular post
| properly to cast aspersions at him. I've just felt something
| didn't add up with this corner of the internet for some time.
|
| Here are a few more random ones from the top of my "For You"
| feed. Again nothing against the specific posters, just to
| illustrate what I am seeing:
|
| https://twitter.com/MrNick_Buzz https://twitter.com/marc_louvion
| https://twitter.com/Timb03
| michaelsalim wrote:
| I had the same thought. So I did a bit of digging into it,
| turns out they are just rehashing the same tweet again and
| again. Just with different wording. When a new popular tweet
| pops up, everyone copies each other. It's an echo chamber down
| there.
|
| As an experiment, you can try to choose a random popular tweet
| from your timeline. Look into their profile. And I bet there's
| a high chance you can find the same or very similar tweet a few
| months or year prior
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I don't know if I'm in an algorithmic rabbit hole, but my
| Twitter shows hundreds of people like this talking about how
| much they are making, how many signups they are getting for
| their products, how many Twitter followers they have.
|
| I've followed a lot of them. Maybe 100 at one point?
|
| I love watching people build little businesses, iterate, and
| find success. It was really cool to see them all working on
| their various things, celebrating the little wins, and sharing
| things they learned along the way.
|
| But to be honest, I've gradually unfollowed most of them. Many
| of them got a little too into the self-promotion angle and
| their content became repetitive "follow me for more content
| like this" bits. It felt like half of them were repeating same
| variations of the popular topic of the week every week, because
| they were! When threads were the thing to do I'd see the same
| topic rehashed to death in thread form for about 2 weeks by
| different people until they all moved on to the next topic.
|
| Another chunk of them slowly pivoted from their own business to
| selling courses, educational materials, or "pay $499 to access
| my private community of builders" deals. I hit the unfollow
| button as soon as they pivot to this stuff.
|
| There are a few that I still follow, but if I'm being honest I
| don't know that I've learned a whole lot. The most successful
| ones always have their business success wrapped up largely in
| their giant social media followings, which turns into a game of
| how well they can market to their audience without being off
| putting. The most famous example is the levels.io guy, who is
| by all means an honest and great guy but nevertheless appears
| to be making businesses that spread by word-of-Twitter because
| he has such an audience. Nothing wrong with that, really, but
| after watching it for a few years you realize that it's not
| repeatable unless you can play the Twitter game successfully at
| massive scale, which is what a lot of these influencers and up
| trying with mixed success.
| antigirl wrote:
| Agree with this, it's mostly talking about numbers and the
| success instead of the product itself [which you'd expect to be
| the forefront of all their posts as its the main reason they
| are tweeting?]
| diimdeep wrote:
| And author of this article is happy about #1 on front page of
| HN https://twitter.com/tdinh_me/status/1705597632876626166
|
| And there is one with critique of HN comments, like
| https://twitter.com/LBacaj/status/1705601091981754482
|
| > @LBacaj This top comment on HN, to this post on getting to
| $45K/MO, captures everything wrong with the developer mindset
| today. > "everything has to be crazy hard technically or it's
| not valuable." > You've all been duped into delusions of
| grandeur, only so they can take advantage of you.
|
| > @circleseer HN has become the old man yelling at the cloud
| meme
|
| > @madmaxbr5 A pizza shop is just a thin rapper around the
| agricultural supply chain and restaurant equipment industry.
| The recipes are centuries old. Zero actual innovation.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Its exactly the same spiel as all these Amazon seller "gurus"
| on Youtube telling you how to sell properly and how much they
| are making, but they only make money with their courses, etc...
|
| If you hang out long enough on indiehackers you realize most of
| the people there dont want to create businesses, they just want
| to amass more followers and readers in order to peddle their
| "dev tools" or whatever
| demondemidi wrote:
| An arrow indicator for a twitter profile pic, a screen cap tool,
| and a wrapper around ChatGPT.
|
| I kinda want to shoot myself. Largely useless products that made
| someone rich that rely on two other ecosystems. That's the way I
| guess? I'm so not an entrepreneur.
|
| Edit: apologies for using a suicide metaphor. I was being
| sarcastic. I'm in my 50s, really like my job, and am on a path to
| a good retirement. It just amazes me that there are so many
| opportunities for "pet rocks" in this era. Go get some if you
| know how! It I think it is safer to do things the old fashioned
| way and not rely on extreme luck and social media. But again, I'm
| old.
| [deleted]
| garganzol wrote:
| An entrepreneur sees a niche and acts. If his products satisfy
| the demand then good for him. He just makes some customers
| happy and receives money in return.
| getrealyall wrote:
| This is the endgame of rent-seeking and an abundance of
| (concentrated) capital, in a country that is largely
| comfortable letting everyone fend for themselves. Who needs to
| build cars when you can tickle Sam Altman's Markov chain
| generator for $45,000 a month? I mean, I don't blame anyone,
| and I need money as much as the next husk of a man, but I
| really wish hustle culture would stop permeating every last
| open space of our lives. I'm depressed about it, too, and I
| don't see it getting better any time soon.
|
| Edit: clerical error.
|
| Edit 2: added despair.
| jjallen wrote:
| If you are saying that this person is from the US, he isn't.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| He's not from the US.
|
| Typical hackernews: "Something bad happened in the world and
| this is why the US is bad"
| getrealyall wrote:
| There's that vaunted, cerebral HN discourse I've come to
| know and love.
| ignoramous wrote:
| I mean, you got too real like Casey in _Manchester by the
| Sea_ ;)
| dahart wrote:
| Which country are you referring to? You will find a lot of
| hope if you study a little history and see how this has
| always been the case. I would guess that in terms of rent
| seeking and of hustle and useless products things are
| improving and much better than they used to be. It's too easy
| to forget the vast array of useless and even harmful crap
| people have been selling for centuries if you didn't live
| through it and/or don't know about it. How many civilizations
| in history had despotic kings that controlled all housing and
| income, and nobody was allowed to earn their own money? The
| existence of someone making a decent living on products you
| don't appreciate isn't evidence of rent seeking, it's
| evidence that we have more freedom than ever before, and that
| people have a wide range of tastes and the ability to spend a
| few bucks on little things they enjoy or save them small
| amounts of time, no?
| demondemidi wrote:
| Well put. I think this take summarizes the lens of
| incredulity from which many in my generation view this new
| economy.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| What a weird take, as if someone building cars is prevented
| by them also selling supposed pet rocks online. Lots of
| people, Musk included, made enough money from throwaway
| startups to then work on the bigger problems, as they're
| actually financially secure to do so at that point, the
| Maslow's hiararchy of needs in action. If you don't like
| someone's product, don't buy it, but if other people find
| them useful, good for them and good for the creator.
| Whiteshadow12 wrote:
| I get it, with the right positioning, you can convince people
| to buy bottled water for $30 or more, Tony built or found
| really good positions, you can do the same.
| mrits wrote:
| If you were first to market with a patent you'd be able to
| charge a lot more than that.
| Whiteshadow12 wrote:
| A patent on bottled water, I would not want to live in that
| world but you are correct. I get what you mean.
| OmarShehata wrote:
| There are two ways of approach entrepreneurship, and the
| conflict between each is why there's some dissonance here:
|
| 1) Do it to escape the grind, as one commenter here mentioned.
| In this way, it doesn't matter what product you make, or how
| you make it. The goal is self sufficiency, to find a niche that
| you can fill, etc.
|
| 2) Do it because you're trying to effect some specific change
| in the world. Something doesn't exist yet, so you will go out
| and make it happen.
|
| "2" is much harder, and more rare. And, if you believe 2 is the
| way, then it makes sense to NOT start a company & instead join
| an existing effort, if there are already people working on
| pressing problems & you have the skills to help them out.
|
| For "1", it almost always makes sense to start a company if you
| can. Because that life & amenities is itself the goal.
| brookst wrote:
| I've lived 3 a few times: building something small that I
| find amusing/useful, then more or less accidentally finding a
| user base and business.
|
| It's not necessarily a good thing; it can turn a fun hobby
| into an onerous obligation. But it is another path.
| intelVISA wrote:
| I'm #2 for the history books but #1 pays the bills. :(
| cornholio wrote:
| It's an illusion that 2 can happen without 1. Unless you have
| financial and entrepreneurial freedom, you will never change
| anything anywhere.
|
| Whatever social structure you imagine you might navigate, be
| it business, politics, public opinion, a charitable
| organization, the world of art, literature or academia; you
| will always find a pre-existing, entrenched power structure
| of people calling the shots, controlling key decisions and
| very unwilling to cut you in, because they either have their
| own vision to put in practice, or... they simply like the
| power, status and nice amenities that come with them.
|
| The business of changing the world is the business of power.
| You either have capital, name recognition, the largest lab, a
| huge social network of other powerful people in your debt, a
| massive amount of luck and/or first mover advantage etc.
| Otherwise, the powerful people of the world, often
| particularly apprehensive to world changing plans, will just
| crush you and move on.
| k__ wrote:
| To be fair, you don't need to "escape the grind" 100% to
| make 2 happen.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Largely correct but the margins can have unreasonably large
| effects, like Linux, the GNU project and so on.
| cornholio wrote:
| "a massive amount of luck and/or first mover advantage"
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Again, I want to emphasise that sometimes a project or
| set of ideas not only thrives, but completely
| _dominates_.
| cornholio wrote:
| Sure, but how does that help you chose an effective
| strategy? For example, winning lottery players absolutely
| dominate when it comes to risk vs reward. But that
| doesn't mean playing the lottery is the way to achieving
| your financial goals.
|
| Without an understanding of the underlying odds of
| success, isolated success stories are just random noise.
| And you have to ask: are they really success stories? Did
| Linus set out to create a world known free kernel, or was
| it just serendipty, he was just a random bloke who filled
| a role that needed to be filled at that particular
| historic time, so in fact had no control over the story
| and did not, in fact, change the world, he just gave a
| name of the rough thing that was to appear at that rough
| time.
| OmarShehata wrote:
| One the flipside here, you can argue that, every time you get
| another "1", this is great for the economy. You now have
| someone who's making their own money, leaving a salaried job
| spot open for another person.
|
| A lot of these indie hacking ventures probably wouldn't exist
| at all if the person making them decided not to. If that is,
| or for the subset of indie hacking companies for which it is
| true, it means this is growing the economy.
| donnythecroc wrote:
| This is a great point. He's literally created a job.
| dgfitz wrote:
| To take this point further, two jobs were kind of
| created. The vacancy left and the new job.
| xur17 wrote:
| And he hired a few full time employees, so more than 2
| jobs were created.
| ttymck wrote:
| That doesn't seem accurate. When hypothetical "Person B"
| leaves their job to fill the vacancy, were 3 jobs now
| created?
| amelius wrote:
| I'm not sure if I get the logic here. If he instead wrote
| a bunch of FOSS tools, then that would have been a worse
| outcome for society?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| In economic terms where money isn't circulating, yes.
| Now, many open source projects are used by other
| companies that are commercial, so that does grow the
| economy however.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I mean, you want to shoot yourself because someone is making
| 45k$ doing something useless? If you think about facebook
| making billions actively damaging humanity?
| veeti wrote:
| How is a screen capture tool largely useless? Have you not ever
| taken screenshots yourself or at least read documentation that
| relies on screenshots? What a ridiculous take.
|
| It's not exactly a new concept either. Look at the office
| Snagit from 1990 built:
| https://www.msufoundation.org/techsmith-hq and keep on going
| about "this era".
| glnarayanan wrote:
| You're right - you're so not an entrepreneur & you're clueless
| about customer-led development or new age problem solving.
|
| For context, I'm a TypingMind user (the ChatGPT wrapper) & it's
| so much better than ChatGPT that some of us bought the license
| & started paying for API, even to use the free GPT 3.5.
|
| Since then, it has evolved to support custom models & today, I
| could train a custom model on a bunch of research papers or
| product documentation & chat with them, something that takes a
| lot of effort to develop for non devs.
|
| Developers are not the primary market - non devs are & we are
| very happy with the product.
|
| BlackMagic again, is a revolutionary product - afaik, nothing
| like it existed when it came out & a ton of us happily jumped
| on it, realizing how much it helped with Twitter growth.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Keep in mind this money is very cyclical. It's not a $45k a
| month salary until retirement. If he doesn't find some other
| idea that hits pay dirt he can make $0 a month. I hope Tony is
| investing the money wisely.
| chx wrote:
| For almost everyone, the wise strategy is to invest in
| unmanaged index funds.
|
| Please read Daniel Kahneman on the illusion of skill in
| investing:
|
| > Most of the buyers and sellers know that they have the same
| information; they exchange the stocks primarily because they
| have different opinions. The buyers think the price is too
| low and likely to rise, while the sellers think the price is
| high and likely to drop. The puzzle is why buyers and sellers
| alike think that the current price is wrong. What makes them
| believe they know more about what the price should be than
| the market does? For most of them, that belief is an
| illusion.
| coldtrait wrote:
| [dead]
| amelius wrote:
| Just accept that there exist people who get fulfillment out of
| looking for the low hanging fruit all the time. And spending
| lots of time on marketing.
| arcbyte wrote:
| You missed everything in the article.
|
| The key to his success was to Get Started.
|
| It wasn't an arrow indicator that brought him success. That was
| a trivial toy. But having gotten started, he was now able to
| identify the next step amd the next step that lead to Black
| Magic being a twitter analytics tool. He would never have
| planned to build the end product from sitting on his couch back
| in the beginning. It was only after taking the first step, then
| a few more, and gaining the perspective of a new vantage point
| that he was able to make such good progress.
|
| Get off the couch and get started is the first key. The second
| is to keep going and not to stop. That's it, that's the whole
| secret to getting rich.
|
| Now read his story with those two points in mind
| hyperfuturism wrote:
| Beautifully put. Only something I learned recently, to stop
| psych:ing yourself out and just Get Started.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The key to his success was to Get Started.
|
| Not really. The key was to find a niche that worked. He "Got
| Started" with tools he wanted to build and it didn't work
| out. It wasn't until he pivoted to identifying trends,
| building an audience, and building tools for them which he
| could market to his audience that he found success.
| hyperfuturism wrote:
| I would argue that that's what arcbyte is arguing.
|
| He's saying to just get started, and you will figure it
| out. So when you're arguing that "trends", "audience", etc.
| is what lead to his success, yes, that's what it means to:
|
| 1. Get started (just start, and improve) 2. Become better
| and learn (whether that's finding trends, building audience
| whatever)
|
| Many paths to success, so the lesson isn't specific in many
| cases imo. Hence, why arcbyte's comment is really good imo.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| He never would have been able to pivot if he didn't "Get
| Started" building tools in the first place.
| firtoz wrote:
| From reading the article, you probably skimmed it too fast, 1st
| is actually a "growth tools for Twitter", the arrow was only
| pointing to the first feature, and it grew to be more than
| that.
| yayitswei wrote:
| I get the frustration of seeing someone else succeed through
| seemingly frivolous means. That said, you state that you're not
| willing to take the risk that he did, not to mention the hard
| work and stress that comes with it.
|
| By the numbers, he's created $45k/mo of usefulness.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Largely useless products that made someone rich that rely on
| two other ecosystems. That's the way I guess? I'm so not an
| entrepreneur._
|
| Consider the fact that OP is perhaps an outlier [0]. They
| probably are _super_ comfortable and _super_ good at _selling_
| or _marketing_ their product themselves and building way many
| number of experiments (bets) than most would / could. Consumer
| software (and usually product-led b2b2c software) is all about
| marketing, while b2b is mostly sales. You just can't know those
| are do-able by every eng on their own.
|
| > _An arrow indicator for a twitter profile pic, a screen cap
| tool, and a wrapper around ChatGPT._
|
| But really, software has been lucrative, and Internet made it
| doubly so. Unlike most goods / services in the world, for
| software the distribution costs are non-existent, and
| manufacturing costs are subsidized heavily as number of users
| increase. Building a sustainable software business (as opposed
| to repeatedly building tools and services for the _flavour of
| the day_ , which is AI right now) however is not easy. New
| comers (or call them copy cats) challenge incumbents like no
| tomorrow since the only investment required in light of new
| technological advancements is... time (assuming you've got the
| skill already).
|
| [0] Btw, Pieter Levels makes way more as solopreneur: ~$200k
| per month / https://levels.io/my-first-million/
| ahoka wrote:
| Yes, you would only create products you really believe in and
| find useful to society. But you then would need to compete with
| the Tonys of the world, who try selling ice to eskimos or
| simply ads, malware and online casinos.
| kubb wrote:
| Go for it, 1% of the time it works all the time. If you fail,
| you just weren't good enough.
| harryquach wrote:
| Self selection bias. It worked for me therefore anyone can do
| it!
|
| In reality people have ideas and build things all the time.
| The vast majority never make money.
|
| I read posts like this I rarely see any mention of luck
| surrounding the outcome.
| gumballindie wrote:
| You are only angry because you too want to escape and are
| externalising the frustration of not finding a similar path. At
| least thats what i learned about myself when i had a similar
| reaction seeing such success stories. Then it struck me - this
| is it. This is the way for indie success. Build stuff that
| makes sense to a niche market. To me the product is irrelevant.
| But the fact that the author escaped is absolute bliss.
|
| Also arent most products just useless things relying on other
| ecosystems?
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| I don't think the OP doesn't realize that, it just doesn't
| make it any less frustrating.
| gumballindie wrote:
| But why let it frustrate people when one can start taking
| notes? Literarily when i started looking into these types
| of successful independent makers in all industries i
| discovered there are _loads_ of them and each make a little
| thing here and there. It's fascinating, and i cant stop
| reading about them. And the more i read the more i realise
| that hey... it's actually doable! But one need to stop
| overcomplicating things.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| Because there are no notes to take on this. It's
| survivorship bias of a product that exists in 1000 other
| forms. It's not visibly doing anything better that other
| screen cap tools or chatGPT wrappers aren't doing.
|
| The main note is that you may not know what people want,
| and I've been around long enough to know people that
| advertise themselves as knowing what people want are
| usually full of shit.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _It 's survivorship bias..._
|
| tbf to TFA, it is exactly about how one could be one of
| those survivors if one did those totally not simple
| things. It is a crash course survival guide for a _build-
| in-public_ solopreneur, if you will.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| While it's true that niches work, the actual money maker is
| to create your own niche by forking an existing one. While
| 45k / month is impressive, the ones who are making 6 figures
| and above per month, are doing it in niches which aren't
| "built in public".
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Yep, I know people in the "boring" industries, making
| software or running the marketing for plumbers,
| electricians, med spas, etc. They're at 6 or more figures a
| month doing that, and they're in industries most software
| engineers won't dare look.
| gumballindie wrote:
| This is the kind of stuff i want to know more about. I
| wish it was promoted more on HN. Those people are what I
| like to call hackers and painters. Nothing hacky about
| getting VC money or winning the lottery. Building a small
| thing that works in the 6 figures is.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Custom mobile apps for different companies in the
| industry is sooo under utilized that you can easily reach
| 10 million a year with 70-80% margins by just doing that.
| dahart wrote:
| I have two arguments to counter this that contradict each other
| :)
|
| One one hand, our entire economy is built on useless products.
| Chances are high that our good comfortable jobs involve making
| and marketing stuff people don't really need at a larger scale
| than Tony's solo projects. Large and so-called legitimate
| companies make billions and billions on things we don't need.
| Coca-cola? Flavored sugar water that's not good for you, you
| don't need, and can make at home in seconds for a fraction of
| the price pulled in 44 billion last year for Coke. PepsiCo
| revenue was $86B. Starbucks: $32B, InBev: $58B. Does the global
| beverage industry top $1T? (Google says yes, many times over.)
| What about games and movies, fashion, apps, car accessories,
| music and sports equipment that's unnecessarily high end and/or
| never gets used... the list is endless.
|
| On the other hand, it's not accurate or fair to call Tony's
| products useless, because people paid for them. It's reductive
| and low effort to frame them as simple, since he added a lot of
| features that don't fit your summary. But if they save someone
| time, or someone likes the way they feel or look, and they pay
| for it, then it was useful for them. Don't make the mistake of
| conflating the value you get, or your idea of what you pay for,
| for annyone else's idea of usefulness.
| demondemidi wrote:
| > it's not accurate or fair to call Tony's products useless
|
| I'll cede that point. Having an arrow on your Twitter profile
| is of some use to someone, and just because I've never had a
| problem with iPhone screen capture "press two buttons"
| doesn't mean some people need to click through an app, a nd
| the teletype style of GPT3 doesn't bother me but I guess some
| people need faster response.
|
| I know snark is against the rules. Technically they aren't
| "useless" but they are single-task gadgets like you'd find
| for your kitchen drawer on QVC at night. The people that make
| the "banana slicer" probably made a ton of money and by your
| definition a "banana slicer" isn't useless because someone
| bought it.
| dahart wrote:
| > Obviously having an arrow on your Twitter profile is of
| some use to someone
|
| One of the reasons your upper comment isn't fair is because
| the story was about how he pivoted the product away from
| just showing the arrow & circle progress bar, and moved
| toward something more complex that does analytics
| reporting, and that's when he actually started making money
| on it.
|
| > I guess by your definition a "banana slicer" isn't
| useless because someone bought it.
|
| That was half of my definition. The other half, I think,
| probably agreed with yours, and points out that banana
| slicers are useless and we have an economy that is built on
| banana slicers. So, anyway, what is your definition of
| useful?
| demondemidi wrote:
| > So, anyway, what is your definition of useful?
|
| That's a good question. The naive definition would be
| something that someone uses to fulfill a purpose. I don't
| think a Bratz Doll on a Keychain in the store is useful,
| but my 5 year old niece will get a solid week of
| entertainment out of it. Sure that is useful, but do we
| want to compare it to a SawStop or iPhone? All of them
| are useful, but to different degrees, different people,
| and across varying lifespans.
|
| You can argue that anything is useful if it is "used",
| but let's not pretend there isn't a spectrum here.
| croes wrote:
| Survivorship bias.
|
| These stories are the few lucky ones, the rest didn't have
| nearly the same success.
|
| Remember flappy bird?
| gumballindie wrote:
| This is such a false statement.
|
| Amazon and apple are making trillions on the backs of small
| indie folks. Google too. The apple app store is monetised by
| nearly a million people, google makes money largely from
| small businesses, amazon's filled with small independent
| sellers.
|
| Any time someone's success reaches the bubble of corporate
| workers the workers that cant fathom there's success out
| there and freedom claim "survivorship bias". Couldnt be
| further from the truth.
| croes wrote:
| How many single entrepreneurs reach that income level?
|
| 10%, 1%, less than 1%?
|
| There are very few with really great ideas and only some of
| them have success and there are some with success with
| average ideas but the large mass aren't that lucky. The
| lucky ones post their stories but they aren't reproducible.
|
| They can't be. Otherwise the lucky ones wouldn't have
| succeeded in the first place.
|
| If attention gets evenly split it approaches zero for the
| single individual.
|
| BTW why mentioning Google and Apple? Yes the make millions
| of indie developers, but the developers don't nake nearly
| as much. They just hope to be the next lucky winner with
| app gone viral to generate enough revenue.
|
| That's why the app stores are full of copycats.
| appleiigs wrote:
| People voluntarily pay him $45K/mo. for his products... Makes
| you claim of "largely useless products" obviously false.
| carlossouza wrote:
| Exactly. This story is excellent... truly inspiring!
|
| It reminds me of PG's mantra: make something people want.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| People voluntarily pay to smoke products that give them
| cancer which is probably more "actively harmful" than
| "largely useless". Which is to say that the value proposition
| is largely subjective so the OP is entirely within their
| right to wonder why on earth people pay for those things!
|
| I think the better takeaway should be that other people have
| very different problems to you, don't always act rationally
| about things and waving something shiny at them is a good way
| to get them to spend.
| ljfjklklj wrote:
| > "largely useless"
|
| > don't always act rationally about things
|
| And by that you surely mean that they act in the way you do
| not approve of.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > An arrow indicator for a twitter profile pic, a screen cap
| tool, and a wrapper around ChatGPT
|
| I've followed the "indie hacker" scene for about a decade, and
| this sounds about right.
|
| Notice how he started out with developer tools that scratched
| his own itch, but didn't have much success. Could have been
| great tools, but developers are difficult to please and
| notoriously opposed to spending money on helpful tools.
|
| So he pivoted to social media and trend following. Instead of
| making tools for people who are good at technology and make
| things themselves, he now makes tools for people who don't know
| how to accomplish simple tasks like putting an arrow on a
| profile picture. They just want that arrow on their picture and
| they'll spend (or, often, expense) a couple dollars to make it
| happen.
|
| He took it a step further and built an audience around indie
| hacking. Now he's selling shovels in a gold rush. Arrows on
| profile pictures were a hot trend for a minute among
| influencers. Building nice screenshots of things is key for
| making courses and marketing materials. ChatGPT is the hot
| topic among people who think it will build a business for them,
| so $40 is a drop in the bucket.
| mrieck wrote:
| Oh man, this comment hits too close to home.
|
| Spent 2+ years building my developer tool extension SnipCSS
| as a side project and I still only make $1K MRR.
|
| You want to write 100k lines of code and make $1k / month?
| Sell a developer tool. You want $45k / mon, and travel the
| world? Sell shovels to influencers that exploit some trend.
| kirse wrote:
| You must be new here / have never heard the legend of patio11:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11
|
| It ain't stupid if it works. If you find an ethical way to get
| people handing you a dollar, keep going. That's business.
| getrealyall wrote:
| I doubt the people engaging in this behavior have stopped to
| consider the commons and the tragedies thereof that this kind
| of aggregate behavior might induce. Just because it works,
| doesn't mean it's not stupid.
| kirse wrote:
| Care to explain to me the tragedy part of a guy building a
| desktop app that organizes common dev utils into a single
| UI?
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| I think what a lot of would-be entrepreneurs don't get is the
| sheer scale of the global market. There are many, many billions
| of dollars trading hands every single day. You only have to dip
| the very tip of your pinky finger into that economic stream and
| you can make more money than you imagined. If you ever think of
| a product and then talk yourself out of it with "no one will
| buy this", just remember that there are 8.1 billion people out
| there. If you create a product for $10/month, you only have to
| convince 0.0001% of them of the value of your product to make
| $1M per year.
|
| Also, I completely disagree that OP's product is useless or due
| to luck. He intentionally created something people want, and
| it's actually a pretty cool product IMO.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| I wouldn't mind escaping the grind if I can crack the next
| fruit cutting or a bird flapping or a site or an app that does
| something like, I don't know, add random words to people's
| names (?) and people can use it and I can just show ads and
| retire or so. Fuck yeah! Yeah I am evil.
| intelVISA wrote:
| Whilst it is absurd, it should be encouraging that you can
| escape from the grind so easily nowadays!
| [deleted]
| donnythecroc wrote:
| Why is it absurd? Chat GPT UI is pretty bad, he created a
| better one, people pay him for it. That seems like a pretty
| sensible exchange.
| moooo99 wrote:
| > it should be encouraging that you can escape from the grind
| so easily nowadays!
|
| And this exactly the false fallacy. This is a perfect example
| of survivorship bias. For everywhere successful
| solopreneur/indie maker/whatever, there are a hundred failed
| attempts that didn't fail for a lack of trying hard.
|
| A common denominator between many successful solopreneurs is
| a strong social media presence, so this image isn't
| surprising.
|
| That being said, giving it a try yourself is fairly
| accessible as opposed to starting a startup with external
| funding. So if you can afford to, give it a try. But do not
| expect it to be easy
| DecayingOrganic wrote:
| I've noticed that negative comments often float to the top.
| That's a bit of a bummer. No one's entrepreneurial success should
| make you question your life choices or become a reason for your
| frustration.
|
| Congratulations Tony! I remember the time you quit your job and
| set a goal of reaching $10K/mo with a few products on twitter, it
| seemed crazy. But you pulled it off! Hats off to you.
| xyst wrote:
| Crab mentality
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| It's ok for folks to express skepticism in response to someone
| selling shovels and dreams. Despite any insinuation in their
| marketing, luck isn't repeatable. All that said congrats to
| them on seizing the opportunity.
|
| (I too sell trinkets ;) yet am too ashamed to sell dreams)
|
| It would be nice to see a survey of all those who quit and it
| didn't work out compared to those who did, and their
| strategies. My guess is the losers tried most of the same
| things yet just didn't get lucky, or ran out of money before
| luck could come along.
| guzik wrote:
| Xnapper is really cool. Anything similar but for videos?
| tamimio wrote:
| In reality the title should be: this is how I got lucky in my
| journey, I jumped into the AI hype just like thousands of other
| developers, but pure luck made it for me, and now I make X amount
| of money. I'm not the first to jump into it, I'm not the
| brightest since there are way smarter people than me who tried
| similar ideas, I didn't build anything groundbreaking, and I
| didn't invent anything new. I just got lucky. Now all you have to
| do is to sustain that, make an article about it, write a book on
| how you are successful and sell it because everyone
| subconsciously likes to read stuff that gives them hope, and
| maybe even later make a TED talk talking about how X attribute is
| all you need for success. But in reality, it is just luck! A lot
| of people did what OP did, and a lot will try to mimic it too,
| only to find out years later that they didn't make it, ending up
| in a worse financial situation plus all the mental health issues
| they had/have to deal with. I am not trying to be pessimistic,
| but I always wish that in all these inspirational stories, they
| would make it clear that it is all luck. Sure, try your luck too,
| but keep your hopes just like how you do when you gamble.
| sakopov wrote:
| He built several projects that made recurring revenue. I can't
| build shit that makes $1 for me before I get bored out of my
| mind or "life happens" and it's abandoned. People underestimate
| how difficult it is to see anything through to completion and
| make any miniscule revenue. Not to mention scaling it out to
| some huge MRR. And he did that several times. This isn't just
| luck.
| topicseed wrote:
| True, and I resonate so much with that. So many amazing ideas
| that were abandoned at 60% completion, after passion fades, a
| few days or weeks later.
|
| It's tough to scope, build, deliver. Let alone then market,
| sell, and keep on improving. All of this with no promise of
| revenue, big or small.
|
| Now, I hate these Twitter humblebrags but one can't knock his
| hustle.
| DandyDev wrote:
| How do you even get to this take?
|
| The guy clearly explained how he has built MULTIPLE successful
| products. So there is obviously more going on than sheer luck.
|
| And jumping on the AI hype is exactly what being a good
| entrepreneur is all about: recognizing an opportunity/gap and
| capitalizing on it. And the reason he was more successful than
| those thousands other developers is because he understands that
| there is more to business than building a cool product. For
| example marketing, something that he is clearly very good at.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| The first is the hardest. After that you can leverage your
| brand
| shrimpx wrote:
| Stretching your take to the extreme, it's like saying Kim
| Kardashian makes money from perfume because she's a genius
| fragrance designer and really understands the nuances and
| opportunities in the fragrance market, not because she had
| built an 'influential celebrity' persona with 400 million
| followers.
| DandyDev wrote:
| Are you really comparing a socialite from a wealthy family
| who didn't have to work to a regular Vietnamese guy who
| built his own business from scratch?
| shrimpx wrote:
| I did qualify it as stretched to the extreme. But it's
| the same basic framework: Build yourself into an
| influencer with a high follower count, then sell them
| basic products.
| admildo wrote:
| Congratulations on such a big win. That's a huge milestone. Keep
| on building you're such an inspiration. Don't listen to the
| haters. It's easy to talk down when you're not in the arena. Keep
| on building, keep on hacking, keeps on winning.
| [deleted]
| redbell wrote:
| "People are rewarded in public for what they practice for _years
| in private._ " -- Tony Robbins
|
| Whenever I heard about a success story, especially, when the
| _hero_ is an indie hacker, the above quote hits my brain.
|
| I would assume that nobody here would disagree that _zero to $45K
| /mo in 2 years_ is a jaw-dropping number but once you read the
| full story with all _behind-the-scenes_ challenges, blood, sweet
| and tears you quickly realize that this is a lot of work
| multiplied by some coefficient of _uncertainty_.
|
| I've discovered and been following _Tony_ for about a year now on
| Twitter and on IndieHackers and must say I was inspired by him.
|
| If ONLY he posted this on HN himself and was here for an _AMA_
|
| Best of luck..
| Lemmi wrote:
| I read it and I don't know it's a story I would not want to have.
|
| It feels like the good friend who always has some side hussle
| instead of just doing something useful.
| DandyDev wrote:
| Making enough money to support the lifestyle you want is
| useful, no?
| Lemmi wrote:
| I still wouldn't do sex work.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| I bought his devutils for $9 and love it!
| prakhar897 wrote:
| I was also interested in this. So, I scraped and crunched a lot
| of IndieHackers data. Things like which fields are most pursued,
| how many ventures succeed etc. You can read the complete report
| here:
| https://prakgupta.com/blog/real_world_stats_for_bootstrappin...
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Cool to see someone use and abuse Twitter to make money.
|
| Seems that every successful indie hacker story has a component of
| being somewhat known on twitter.
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