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My solopreneur story

news.tonydinh.com

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Re: My solopreneur story

#221

Post by dahart »

demondemidi wrote: post #215
dahart wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

> 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 rul…

> 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?

Re: My solopreneur story

#222

Post by brigadier132 »

arthurofbabylon wrote: post #131

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…

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.

Re: My solopreneur story

#223

Post by aogaili »

ink_13 wrote: post #191
aogaili wrote: post #21

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.

It's possible to find this kind of thing distasteful without being motivated by envy.

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.

Re: My solopreneur story

#224

Post by aunty_helen »

arthurofbabylon wrote: post #131

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…

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.

Re: My solopreneur story

#225

Post by xyst »

DecayingOrganic wrote: post #104

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.

Crab mentality

Re: My solopreneur story

#226

Post by eertami »

dooraven wrote: post #214
imiric wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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",…

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.

Are these people entrepreneurs? What risks did they take. I wager almost none, they were fine whatever happened.

Re: My solopreneur story

#227

Post by bdlowery »

sokoloff wrote: post #18
unsupp0rted wrote: post #4

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…

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".

Clean shot is exactly like xnapper but better in every single aspect

Re: My solopreneur story

#228

Post by xyst »

ag56 wrote: post #71

> 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’.

“Conjoined triangles of success”

It’s taught in business schools!!1

Re: My solopreneur story

#229

Post by encoderer »

arthurofbabylon wrote: post #131

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…

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.

Re: My solopreneur story

#230

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

satvikpendem wrote: post #183
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

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.

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.
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