building startup = testing a new idea / market / product from 0
digital nomad = selling a common service - probably cheaper since you can work remotely from cheaper countries
I am done. I give up
31–40 of 1001 posts
Re: I am done. I give up
#32You’re right that your not alone in this. More than 50% of products built by indie hackers don’t make any money at all: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/indie-hackers-revenue
Re: I am done. I give up
#33You’re conflating your “entrepreneurship dream” with a very very small subset of entrepreneurs (indie hacker digital nomads). Entrepreneurs start corner shops. Sell physical products, digital products, provide services, etc. the number who build a SaaS alone and travel while doing it is very small.
Also - in regards to the indie hacker space there are important things to watch out for:
- Constant bragging about revenue but no talk of margin/profit.
- Lots of talk that the product would still be a success without the persons huge Twitter following.
- Lots of bragging about success that, when you actually look into it, is $1000MRR. That’s great but these people give off the impression that they are much more successful than that.
Finally, you have to love entrepreneurship because it fits your personality. The risk taking necessary isn’t for everyone (rightly so) and for some people a stable career is much more fulfilling. You sound like you want to be an entrepreneur because of the lifestyle you see from these digital nomads but maybe the reality of it (risk, instability, failure) isn’t actually what you want.
Re: I am done. I give up
#34It's not defeat, it is the expected outcome. Out of 20 or so of my projects two have been break-out successes and the rest (commercially) complete failures, and I'm very lucky to have two out of those 20, with very small variations in timing it would have been a big fat zero. So don't beat yourself up about it, some people win the lottery and the majority don't. There is absolutely no recipe that will work every time…
What rate is the cutoff at which people give up entrepreneurship altogether? I wonder how big has the opportunity cost of monopolies been in the past decade
Re: I am done. I give up
#35It's a Darwinian world out there. Success is not up to you to produce. Telling people that it's all up to them and their free will is the most destructive lie you can tell, because it's not and the end result is that people start harming themselves with guilt because it's "their fault".
It's not "your fault" and it's not because of your "free will". Guilt is an extremely destructive and evil emotion. Excise it from your heart.
Re: I am done. I give up
#36> constant stream of digital nomad influencers on Twitter who sell extremely distorted, rosy, and often times false dreams to indie entrepreneurs like myself
I don’t know where the grindset culture comes from (on Instagram I often used to see sappy quotes slapped over an image of an overrated business type) but it must be very lucrative. Influencers are not there to show you reality, just like no one is ever driving their new car down empty streets in Manhattan. I don’t know what success is like, but it’s not that.
Re: I am done. I give up
#37Why do "indiehackers" want attention from and create products for other "indiehackers"? As a group they seem the people with the least amount of money to spend on products, and are some of the most cheapskate people on the planet. Here's some advice: if you want to make money selling a software product, sell to people who are able and willing to spend money on it.
> Why do "indiehackers" want attention from and create products for other "indiehackers"?
Two things come to my mind:
1) "indie hackers" are way easier to get a relation started with than companies or even start-ups. And forget about big enterprise if you don't have an angel investor or some other experienced and well-connected guidance.
2) With smaller users, you're more likely to get better testing and feedback. In companies of all sizes, it's rare to have a "we have an issue with vendor X's software" pipeline that goes straight from the affected user to the vendor, in most cases every report or feedback question will take six to seven steps in between.
Re: I am done. I give up
#38Please don’t take any offence at this, it’s not meant to offend at all. I just feel like perhaps part of your outlook here may help to explain where you’re currently at.
Firstly, you’ve learned that social media influencing is in essence a MLM scam. Good! A lot of people never realise this and get themselves into incredibly dire situations as a result, so kudos for realising this.
> I tried everything - building an audience, making sure my product actually solved a problem, getting paying customers, and writing high-quality content and contributing to the community. But no matter what I did, I couldn't seem to get anywhere. My efforts were fruitless and I'm tired of trying. I barely had 20 followers, my substack and product blogs didn't get any signups, and while I did get a few upvotes (8) on Product Hunt once, I never had a paid customer. It was as if the world was against me and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make any progress.
You’ve missed out on one critical ingredient in the above. Luck. A lot of things need to fall together just so in order for a product to gain traction. Broken down these are all fairly logical non-chance related factors, but no-one is realistically able to anticipate the millions of externalities that will play into that ahead of time, so from the perspective of someone trying to get a business off the ground, it is luck. All those factors you talked about in terms of substack and product hunt should be viewed as the cost of getting slightly better odds on your lottery ticket. YCombinator doesn’t expect a single random applicant to become AirBnb, and they have more experience in this than anyone.
You’ve learned that social media is bad for you and that nothing on it is real. This is also good. You can take some time, and if you choose to have another attempt at this later, you’ll have that wisdom to carry with you.
> Don't let your dreams consume you like they did for me
Dreams are fleeting, but they’re still precious. It feels strange to say that as in my 20’s I had a very all-or-nothing view of success, but life happens regardless and what you want to get out of it will change over time. I’m grateful for my lot, and if I should achieve those dreams later then I’ll be grateful for that too, but if it doesn’t happen I really don’t regret the pitfalls along the way. You can’t take any of it with you anyway.
> PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PROTECT YOUR MENTAL HEALTH AT ALL COST! Don't make the same mistakes I did and realize that entrepreneurship may not be the path for you. It's okay to admit defeat and move on to something else.
This is the correct answer. Speaking as someone with wild stories that are a little too close to the bone for sharing on the topic of mental health, it really does need to come first. Speaking personally - the costs aren’t obvious, they sneak up on you, and you’re usually the last to see it. Take the win here - learning this lesson while you’re young is very much “the easy way”.
I wish you well and happy to chat if you ever want to reach out.
Re: I am done. I give up
#39A big fact of the entrepreneur world is that it is hugely based on luck. Luck of finding the right idea, the right market, the right timing, the right connections, the right customers, the right employees, the right financing. The basic fact is that most startups and most entrepreneurial dreams fail or get consumed by another for their talent/clients. And as an entrepreneur you fight against all odds. Most will fail…
> A big fact of the entrepreneur world is that it is hugely based on luck.
And for anything with bigger ambitions than a lifestyle business, don’t forget connections. Most founders are still men from Ivies or Stanford. Just look at the “PayPal mafia” to see how inbred tech investing can be.
Not that most entrepreneurs need or should expect VC funding, but this is HN, run by a VC. You can totally run a business and be successful without it.
Re: I am done. I give up
#40Having done several options -- entrepreneurship, job, internal entrepreneurship, and consulting, my advice:
- Entrepreneurship isn't a lifestyle. Stay in a job unless you have a good idea and are ready to execute.
- Try your idea internally. Starting a new product in a company is easier than outside. It doesn't have a $1B upside, but it has enough upside, in all respects (not just financial -- learning, credibility, etc.).
- If that doesn't pan out, go external only once you're pretty confident of success.
My experience is that entrepreneurship isn't so much hard or take luck, as it takes a lot of groundwork:
- You want a diverse set of skills. Management. Finance. Sales. Technical. Legal. Market research. Etc. It's not a place for specialists, and it takes time to develop those skills. You also ought to enjoy (or at least not hate) most of them.
- You want good market timing, which comes with experience.
- You want a good idea with traction. That's where nights / weekends fit in. Nights / weekends don't give enough time for a successful startup, but they give enough to do early prototyping.
Doing a (failed) startup as a student is a good learning experience. I wish I had done it. I don't wish I had done it three times, or as an adult.
Oh, and selling false dreams is part of being a successful entrepreneur. You'll get zero customers if people think you're on the verge of going broke. Every business I've seen takes a "fake it until you make it approach." If you rely on blogs for what entrepreneurship ought to look like, you're in for a nasty surprise. A better option to learn how to do a startup is a job at a startup; you'll see the process from the inside.