Well most software I buy are games and I usually don't like games produced by solo indy devs
Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?
81–90 of 164 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?
#82I'm the sole developer of www.castingcall.club and www.closingcredits.com. About 1M people use these two products a year and I've ran them for about 7 years. While I have no plans of stopping working on them in the near term, I have listed that in the event of my death, an entrusted tech savvy person will take over these two companies. That said, all my users have no guarantee that I'll continue to work on these prod…
Casting Call sounds like a cool service and the clients really interesting. Just a word of rec. On mobile (Android/FF) the post titles are vertically stacked, which is tough to read for people. If you keep the text horizontally aligned and rotate 90 degrees (or dont and make horizontal) it'd make it easier to read. Edit: Just checked out Closing Credits too. Super cool work
Thanks for the heads-up!
Some of the site is just ancient and I'm doing a big rebuild right now. I've added a note to fix that. Cheers!
Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?
#83For your typical solo founder in their 30s, their odds of dying at any point over the next 10 years is something like 0.2%. And short of them dying, their business isn't going anywhere because keeping a SaaS startup online doesn't cost anything -- if you have the skills to do it yourself. Whereas the odds of a venture backed startup shutting down at any point over the next ten years is something like 30%. So from a r…
Is the 100x valid? The odds of a founder dying vs. the chances of a company shutting down seem not apples-to-apples I would guess there are many cases of solo founders shutting down their business other than founder death...
> I would guess there are many cases of solo founders shutting down their business other than founder death...
Sure, but it really only makes sense to consider cases where:
A) The business has paying customers
B) It's very important to the customers that this product remain available
C) The founder is unwilling to give or license the source code to those customers
In practice, all three of these factors being present is uncommon. Usually if the product is actually important to a customer, they just pay to acquire the assets. And there is usually no reason for a solo founder not to take that deal if the alternative is just shutting down the business.
For a venture backed business, maybe the lawyers decide there is too much legal risk or whatever. But for an indie hacker, that doesn't happen.
We hear stories all the time of folks getting burned when venture backed startups shut down without giving people any time to switch to another product, or sometimes even to expert their data. When is the last time you heard about this happening from the paying customers of a solo founder? Literally never.
Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?
#84I built LightTag and eventually
sold it. In my experience , at lower price points (Once you go up in price point it becomes a bigger issue, I had many deals die when they realized I was a 1 man show.
That shouldn’t stop you. If you close a 50k recurring deal once a year, that still adds up to a great income.
Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?
#85Yes, but it depends on the software.
From a builder's POV, I also thought about this whenever I had ideas. Thoughts like - if I build this alone, will my customers be stuck or drastically affected if something happens to me? What will be the impact to my customers if I'm unreachable for a day or more (sick, traveling, etc).
For me, if it's a utility tool or software where my data is on my system, then I'm more likely going to be okay if it was built by a solo developer (this is how I green-lit my current project - https://nocommandline.com).
But if it's something where my data is on the cloud and/or the software is a key part of my workflow, then I would do some further analysis if I know it's a solo developer e.g. can I easily backup/extract my data, are there alternatives that I can easily move to, do I need to be able to reach support within a very short window (e.g. 6 hours). To be clear, this automatically doesn't mean I won't buy the software but the analysis will help me reach the decision. I have previously launched an idea that fell into this category but I provided the ability for users to export their data in JSON format from day 1 and I knew there were alternatives that users could move to with very little down-time
Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?
#86If it’s a one time sale then it doesn’t matter the size of the company selling. If it’s a SaaS but for a commodity service then it similarly doesn’t matter who is selling it, since there are other partners to work with if the one man shop goes out of business.
It’s only in the case of enterprise software or niche products that I wouldn’t trust a one man shop.
Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?
#87No post body was provided.
Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?
#88For me, it depends on the type of problem I'm trying to solve. Specifically, I ask is it hard work or a difficult problem? (see also [1], [2], and HN commentary at [3] from a short time ago).
Hard work is something that a big corp can solve by throwing bodies at the problem. A proprietary data format or protocol but with an available, thorough specification (eg. a giant PDF from an international standard, an industrial protocol, and associated XML schema with a bunch of separate devices to talk to by just reading through thousands of pages of PDFs...). Another example of hard work is handling a high volume of support requests, just communicating to individual users might involve more hours in a single day than are available to a single user, and it might require supporting 3 shifts or 7 days a week, which a solo dev just can't do. These are tasks that a solo dev is likely to burn out on and which I would not entrust them with.
On the other hand, a difficult problem is something that can be solved by a single contributor, but which often cannot be solved by throwing bodies at it. The output may be something as tiny as a few hundred lines of code that realize a single critical insight. That insight might synthesize a lot of complicated and inaccessible concepts available only to someone who is an expert in multiple fields and who has experience gained over many consecutive years of work in a single field. A company that can put 20 people with 1 year experience and 4 year degrees on the problem may not ever come to that synthesis. For example, I've had the opportunity to work on some complicated coordinate systems and GD&T mathematics for multi-axis CNC equipment; just communicating the requirements to even highly competent engineers unfamiliar with the problem is difficult, much less actually implementing the mathematics and software required to accomplish the task.
Big organizations often make progress by, as the author of the linked post describes, following "Effective strategies [that] often consist of converting difficult problems into something that can be solved through hard work." But sometimes this analogy just doesn't exist. And often, the conversion process introduces leaky abstractions and waste. Really good big organizations realize this, and will farm out these tasks to solo contractors/entrepeneurs, work with research institutions, or (less popular lately) build internal 'think tanks' and R&D departments that can make progress on difficult problems, which the rest of the company can scale out with hard work.
Conversely, solo entrepeneurs need to understand when and how to transition from working on difficult problems to scaling out and delegating hard work. I'm currently waiting on a support request with a guy who is really, really smart, and really productive, but as his company scaled out from building one really innovative machine that solved a difficult problem, to building and supporting 20 of them at locations throughout the state, to now when they have lots of sales engineers, a manufacturing department, some traveling technicians, and some 600 units at locations all over the world... he never managed to transition out of his keystone roll at the top of the software department. He's got an ever-growing backlog of engineering change orders that all fall back on him, and while highly successful and valued, he's really unhappy because he's just completely swamped.
My advice is to carefully select what your product is and does. Is it something for which people would want to call in an expert? You'll be fine. Is it something for which they'd want frequent changes, extended hours of support, many years of operation, and that can be done by anyone with a modicum of competency? I'd rather find a bigger, more reliable company.
[1] https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/difficult-problems-and-hard...
[2] https://benjamincongdon.me/blog/2022/06/22/Mental-Model-Diff...
Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is about the same rate that airlines lose luggage. (Unrelated comparison but analogies can help)
That's a fairly deceptive analogy though. Many people check baggage a lot more (or less) than once per year.
That’s exactly the opposite of why it’s an unrelated analogy (which was stated). People live days of their lives far more often than they check baggage. Death is not a once per year risk. The risk of losing luggage per day or per hour of traveling is much higher than the risk of dying per hour/day of living.
Re: Ask HN: Do you trust solo entrepreneurs?
#90In my time as a Product Manager for both tiny startups and giant corporations, (and indeed one little startup that became a giant) I’ve killed maybe 15 products and launched 6. During those days I was always amazed how few customers bothered to enquire where the particular product was in the product’s lifecycle.