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Lessons from building nine startups in 2023

marclou.beehiiv.com

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Re: Lessons from building nine startups in 2023

#41

Post by askafriend »

wharvle wrote: post #17
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's so hard to find real problems if you spend 90% of your time finding problems. > Having a job is a great fix. My experience differs: it is very easy to find real problems, and it is possible to implement a decent solution for at least some of them. But: many of the problems that various industries have are in my opinion self-inflicted because of their structures. What is hard is convincing potential customers t…

Example: the entire software industry (to include, and perhaps especially, companies that develop software but aren’t exactly software companies) seems to have a problem with splitting tools across a bunch of vendors, many of which have heavily overlapping functionality. It adds friction to everything and makes it harder to see what’s going on, burning god knows how much productivity. But you can’t fix it by making a…

> seems to have a problem with splitting tools across a bunch of vendors

Why is this a problem?

Re: Lessons from building nine startups in 2023

#42

Post by ametrau »

iamleppert wrote: post #16
TheLastSultan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if you can focus on making informative content for YT at the same quality as your commercials it will be a smashing success. The key is focus. You have an eccentric charm that devs like myself enjoy. Your Twitter following will help you get from 0 to 1 there, but you should still be prepared for a steep curve before it generates revenue. I do have a radical idea that I am keen to share with you in particular.…

How do you find developers for $6/hr and what do you mean you rent them out?

Yeah. Which country I would very much like to know. 100% exploitation.

Re: Lessons from building nine startups in 2023

#43

Post by wharvle »

askafriend wrote: post #41
wharvle wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Example: the entire software industry (to include, and perhaps especially, companies that develop software but aren’t exactly software companies) seems to have a problem with splitting tools across a bunch of vendors, many of which have heavily overlapping functionality. It adds friction to everything and makes it harder to see what’s going on, burning god knows how much productivity. But you can’t fix it by making a…

> seems to have a problem with splitting tools across a bunch of vendors Why is this a problem?

Adds a little overhead and friction to processes. Causes miscommunication and lost and scattered info, and worse visibility and awareness of what’s going on than could be achieved. The result is fairly significant rarely-accounted-for costs. I’ve seen it every place I’ve worked.

Of course “well just use all the tools the right way and always look where you’re supposed to and put things in the right place” but it never works out so nicely in practice.

[edit] example: paying for a half dozen services that provide, between them, two code repo hosting solutions, four CI solutions, six wiki solutions (LOL), two cloud hosting solutions, two CDNs, three issue trackers, and on and on… and mixing and matching those such that it requires daily manual upkeep to synchronize info between them (you’re not using all the features of each one, to be clear—or, if you’re really in hell, maybe you are), onboarding is messier than it could be, account management is a pain, you’re over-paying at least a bit on everything, “where did/does that go?” is a constant question, everyone needs several pinned tabs opened when they could have, like, two, et c et c. Usually the reasons for doing this aren’t even strong, it’s just how things have ended up.

Re: Lessons from building nine startups in 2023

#44

Post by aleph_minus_one »

mvdtnz wrote: post #33
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's so hard to find real problems if you spend 90% of your time finding problems. > Having a job is a great fix. My experience differs: it is very easy to find real problems, and it is possible to implement a decent solution for at least some of them. But: many of the problems that various industries have are in my opinion self-inflicted because of their structures. What is hard is convincing potential customers t…

> many of the problems that various industries have are in my opinion self-inflicted because of their structures. I would bet my entire salary you only believe this because you don't understand the constraints. When I was in my 20's and thought I knew everything I had the same attitude. I have since gained seniorship and worked in regulated industries and it's much clearer to me now. People in the industries you're t…

> I would bet my entire salary you only believe this because you don't understand the constraints.

I would counter bet that:

i) I do know quite some of the constraints (though surely not all).

ii) Quite of these these constraints are self-imposed prisons that the respective company/industry created for itself because of historical or "political" reasons.

What you call "constraints" is something that I would rather call "the industry's preferred flavor". Well, I do have a different taste than the respective industry. :-)

Believe me: In the past, when I was frustrated of my job, I made use of an opportunity to present some ideas that I had to some former friend who has been working in business consulting for many years: he really told me that some my ideas could be as impactful for the respective industries as I imagine it, but they would be insanely hard to sell (and a huge part of his job is selling things to customers) because they so different.

To give an even different perspective: at my current emplyer's Christmas party, my boss' boss said that I am the kind of person who cannot be classified on an optimist-pessimist scale, since I don't behave like an optimist or pessimist, but rather like an statistical outlier in a data set. :-)

Re: Lessons from building nine startups in 2023

#45

Post by wetmore »

chpmrc wrote: post #38

I've been following you (among other indie hackers) for a couple of years. I respect and admire the heck out of what you're doing. But I have a huge problem with the fact that you keep referring to the income brought in by ShipFa.st (again, heck of a product!) as "51K/m" (as of today this is what your X's bio shows), when pricing is obviously not recurring. What would be a lot more indicative of the financial success…

It's definitely grifty. The shipfa.st copy makes it sound like you need it to build products so you too can make lots of money like he does. Except if you look at his website, the thing that makes all that money is.... shipfa.st.

It reminds me of people who sell classes using tales of their success, except all of their success comes from selling the classes in the first place.

Re: Lessons from building nine startups in 2023

#46

Post by smcin »

Which service were you referring to with "I killed a startup by swapping one-time payments for recurring ones"? Was it something that the average user would expect was priced with one-time payment, or subscription? What was the ratio of the one-time payment to subscription price? How did those pricings compare to competitors?

As a user of indie apps, I think in general people expect the basic version for a reasonable one-time payment, you never know if the developer's going to go become inactive, stop actively maintaining it or get hampered by OS/API changes. The developer can always later on release major upgrades at higher prices (one-time or subscription). I think users are deeply wary of monetization schemes and rug-pulls - a few bad incidents got the whole proposition a bad rep.

I'm also much more likely to recommend to people I know an app that's sold by modest one-time payment (or freemium) than subscription.

Re: Lessons from building nine startups in 2023

#48

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

This is definitely cool. I think hackers who hate mixing people and climbing the ladder should look at 2.5 million dollars as the magic number. That gives you around 10,000 dollars a month which should be a secure base for almost any place in the world. After that you never have to work for money ever again.

Re: Lessons from building nine startups in 2023

#49

Post by chrisdbanks »

purple-leafy wrote: post #36

I’m in the same boat as the OP, I’ve launched 3 projects in 2023. I spent 10 months on the first project. It was a very clever project, complicated to explain, hard to build, and ultimately did crap. It scratched my own itch - or so I thought, I don’t even use it myself at all. No emotions, pure logic marketing. 1000+ users only. $0 made. My second project I built in 1 day, and launched in 1 week. It was basic, but p…

Sounds like you're building products in lieu of doing user research and product discovery. You can often prove or disprove something is a good idea with some market research and some mock-ups. Even just building the landing page as a fake door can work. Spend more time on product discovery and less time building and you'll save time overall.

Re: Lessons from building nine startups in 2023

#50

Post by j4yav »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #47
j4yav wrote: post #28

Why go through all the trouble of creating nine startups when you could have made one startup with nine products and saved yourself an ungodly amount of paperwork?

There is no paperwork.

How are you making startups with no documentation, legal or otherwise?
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