After losing my savings as an indie hacker, I can't do it anymore. I quit.

Technical people both enjoy, and know how to build digital products. But they don't understand that a product is not a business.

A product solves a problem.

A business has a steady stream of customers actively searching to fix that problem (a market) and a set of reliable channels for converting these leads into customers (distribution).

If you're not in a reliable market and have no reliable distribution within that market...you have a product, not a business.

A good way to figure out if you'll enjoy being an entrepreneur is to start building an audience first (namely an email list built through social and blog content). It's all of the vital marketing/sales work and talking to customers you'll need, without burning all your savings on 6 months of product development that might be wasted.

If you don't enjoy building the audience of customers, selling to them, and talking to them, you won't enjoy being an entrepreneur.

The way I read the reply is that almost all small businesses fail, almost all startups fail. There is absolutely nothing unique to "indy hacking" in the original post that doesn't apply in general to the small business/independent contractor world, and if you spend any time talking to one of these people, they will have plenty of similar stories. Thus the "well, what did you expect" tone of some of the replies that you seem to take offense to.

The best course of action for low risk tolerance people who don't want to do everything themselves is to find a big company to work for with stable employment that is focused on their core passion, rather than forcing them to deal with customer support, billing, tax issues, HR issues, VISA issues, facilities maintenance, infrastructure, sales, working capital management, and all the other stuff you have to handle on your own if you are running a 1 man shop (or even a small business).

All of the above should be absolutely obvious -- why do you think these big companies have tens of thousands of employees and have dozens of non-developer full time staff for every developer? If you want to do everything yourself, you will need to take on the responsibilities of all these other people.

None of this will ever change, either.

Btw, this was the topic of a nice essay by Joel Spolsky called "The Developer Abstraction Layer". The original author of the post basically lived out the parable in Joel's story. You might want to take a look:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/04/11/the-development-ab...

Interestingly enough, the theme of Joel's story is that developers take this abstraction layer for granted, and thus end up being shocked when it turns out really hard for the indy developer, who is missing this layer, to do everything for themselves.

There is around here (on Hacker News). If you don't run a company, the entrepreneurs around here don't believe you deserve anything more than a "competitive" salary and a job.

I don’t really know your motivation for trying this path, but if that motivation remains or returns, you might want to start with a friend, so you can divide up the efforts. Or perhaps you just decided that this path is not for you — nothing wrong with that!

Good luck either way!

As far as friends go:

I Started my first business with two friends: one was really good at cold calls and asking for things (I.e. orders) — I struggled with that similarly to you. The other was super comfortable asking friends to come work with us. I had other things I contributed — and we all programmed.

For the three of us it turned out to be fun. I am sure none of us could have done it alone.