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Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?

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Re: Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?

#21

Post by rakshitpandit »

dzonga wrote: post #17

go to the Harvard MBA for Bootstrappers i.e https://longform.asmartbear.com one of the recommended posts: https://longform.asmartbear.com/problem/ which goes to the heart of what you're experiencing. play in large markets, very large in absolute numbers i.e B2B but small enough not to attract major VC companies - again play in large markets - don't listen to indie-hacker influencers that are making stuff for other in…

I myself am facing marketing as the biggest challenge. I used to believe "a product so good that it sells itself" has to be the biggest lie. We're in this era where building and shipping are super fast, and reaching TAM has become the hardest problem.

Re: Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?

#22

Post by fduran »

There is def some luck involved, as in you don't know beforehand what's going to be successful.

"You find a problem in a niche, say accounting for plumbers, and build for that, then you just go and market to these people". It's way better to work on something you are familiar with and you like.

Re: Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?

#23

Post by fynis »

fnoef wrote: post #3
bigfatkitten wrote: post #2

If you’re an expert in a particular niche and people just bring you work, then being a solo operator works fine. You choose which engagements to take on based on your own capacity, and you’re not burning cycles on business development etc.

The problem with such advice is that it requires me to go back in time and fix my life. I am not an expert, I started this career when I was barely an adult, and did it for fun because I liked it and the money was good. I wasn't thinking about "building a professional circle" or staying in touch with past colleagues. So advice like "use your network to find freelance / contracting" is not helpful to me. So there are…

Best time to start was back then, but second best time to start is now. Give it a whopping try before you toss in towels.

Re: Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?

#24

Post by adzicg »

It's not impossible, it's just difficult :) Luck plays part like in anything, but consistency and persistence also makes it possible for luck to happen.

I'd recommend scratching your itch first and then finding people in a similar situation. You know enough about your own problem to be able to design a solution around it, and you likely know some other people around that as well. Slice that segment into something worth attacking first. Bill Aulet defined the first group of people worth solving for as a "beachhead market". This is his test for that first segment:

- the customers within the market should all buy similar products

- the customers within the market should have a similar sales cycle and expect products to provide value in similar ways

- the customers within the market talk to each other, and there is a high probability of word-of-mouth referrals, where customers can serve as a “compelling and high-value references for one another in making purchases”.

The third one is for me the key to open doors as a solo founder. You probably don't have the marketing budget to compete with large companies, so word of mouth and happy customers will be your first best marketing strategy. SEO is black magic, and from my experience takes a long time to actually start working - happy customers doing word of mouth and writing/recommending you also helps significantly with that.

Once this segment opens the doors, things will likely change for something else, then you follow the trail.

Re: Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?

#25

Post by massi24 »

It's hard but not impossible, imo you should stop it instead of building. Nowadays people like us (swe) are stuck in the building process, but we should take the majority of the time thinking to solve real problems and to find them we should just take our time off the coding.

Re: Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?

#27

Post by borzi »

Personal story time: for me it was falling for the indie hacker stuff near covid and realizing the same stuff.

The best solo business is to pretend you are successful i.e. "I'm sitting on the beach sipping my drink while Claude is coding my app that's raking in 20k MRR, just use my {SEO|Social Media|Referral} tool and that will be you!". Hope to get enough people suckered in to become a "voice in the bootstrapper community" i.e. your posts filled with generic tropes get shared around X. But ultimately the product is the (fake) lifestyle. Most of the products in that eco system are not used by anyone in the productive economy, it's a pyramid ponzi of users believing they are getting valuable advice.

That said, I do still build stuff "Solo", because I enjoy the process of making and I can take the time time to meet my own quality standards (classic trope in that community even before AI was "you just gotta build you MVP in 3 days, ship quickly!" and it ends up causing you to churn out soulless software that obviously nobody will use unless they are your bootstrapping internet buddy).

Lot of people I know from those days are still trying to make it and wasted a lot of time/money! Not all bad for me personally though - I learned a lot about entrepeneurship, spotting fakes, etc. and was much more naive and younger then.

Re: Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?

#29

Post by pbs29 »

rakshitpandit wrote: post #21
dzonga wrote: post #17

go to the Harvard MBA for Bootstrappers i.e https://longform.asmartbear.com one of the recommended posts: https://longform.asmartbear.com/problem/ which goes to the heart of what you're experiencing. play in large markets, very large in absolute numbers i.e B2B but small enough not to attract major VC companies - again play in large markets - don't listen to indie-hacker influencers that are making stuff for other in…

I myself am facing marketing as the biggest challenge. I used to believe "a product so good that it sells itself" has to be the biggest lie. We're in this era where building and shipping are super fast, and reaching TAM has become the hardest problem.

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