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Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?

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Re: Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?

#61

Post by borzi »

fnoef wrote: post #35
borzi wrote: post #27

Personal story time: for me it was falling for the indie hacker stuff near covid and realizing the same stuff. The best solo business is to pretend you are successful i.e. "I'm sitting on the beach sipping my drink while Claude is coding my app that's raking in 20k MRR, just use my {SEO|Social Media|Referral} tool and that will be you!". Hope to get enough people suckered in to become a "voice in the bootstrapper com…

How are dealing with the fact that building is not important, more so with AI, and how do you get traction?

Building is not any less important now, AI just highlights this fact. The software I work on is the difference between people getting paid or not, which those people consider very important - I use AI to do that by letting it improve the quality of the software, with less bugs, more performance etc.

The 10000th social media spammming SaaS being built in public is no less important now than it was before AI - we can just see how irrelevant it is now that it can also be built faster, by virtually anybody.

Re: Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?

#62

Post by rl3 »

anovikov wrote: post #20
rl3 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... it is a mixed (live women and AI) porn webcam app. > ... various scam niches ... > ... and much more ethical line of business than outsourcing. Wild.

Yes, people who never did outsourcing don't know how dirty it is.

I wasn't judging nor disputing that, just think it's a sad commentary on the current state of the world when outsourcing is considered as dirty as scam and cam girl operations.

Re: Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?

#63

Post by icedchai »

anovikov wrote: post #20
rl3 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... it is a mixed (live women and AI) porn webcam app. > ... various scam niches ... > ... and much more ethical line of business than outsourcing. Wild.

Yes, people who never did outsourcing don't know how dirty it is.

I work with a company that outsources to a foreign IT firm. They are slow, expensive, and the quality of work is poor. They often hire subcontractors that are kids just out of school, now doing everything with AI. I've seen their prompts and often they are little more than "fix the tests." They charge $200+ hour or more for this in some cases. Insane.

Re: Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?

#65

Post by iamthemonster »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #58
dx-800 wrote: post #51

Coincidentally it's been almost exactly 7 years since I started my solo SaaS business, which is now how I make my living. My product started off 25 years ago as a simple intranet web app I wrote in Classic ASP running on a PC in the office of my father's mobile home dealership. I had taken a break from corporate software development to run the dealership for him. I did that for seven years, then got back into softwar…

Don’t dismiss the fact that you didn’t start trying to find a problem to start a business without knowing the vertical. You knew the industry not just from talking to customers - you were the first best customer of your own product. You had an “unfair advantage”. I just can’t fathom how anyone thinks about starting a software business especially these days without first thinking about what their unfair advantage is w…

I will forever remember my experience with the development of a new tool in my job as an engineer in hazardous gas processing. We had a consultant who was developing this tool that worked in a double-act with one of our engineers, and they sat there watching us use the tool. Whenever there was something we found confusing or didn't work how we wanted it to, she just said "oh I'll change that right now, give me a sec... ok press refresh it should be working now".

This tool was mainly just a form with some free-text fields, some drop-down and email notifications of each workflow step. But the fact that it was developed by constantly iterating with the users, meant that it has been adopted universally and been incredibly efficient at managing this particular workflow.

It's the only example I can remember in my 20-year career where that happened. It is more typical that there's a vast disconnect between the people with the industry experience and the people with the skills to apply fundamental IT skills to product development.

In my particular example, the IT skills required were probably completely trivial for a professional, and all the value came from tight cooperation with users.

Re: Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?

#66

Post by jjk166 »

> On one hand, people say that you need to build to solve a problem. You find a problem in a niche, say accounting for plumbers, and build for that, then you just go and market to these people. On the other hand, I see people who advocate for "I just built something that I needed, and it got traction". There are multiple examples for both camps, but the problem is that they contradict each other.

Where is the contradiction? You do need to solve a real problem, and it's very convenient if that problem is one you yourself have.

Re: Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?

#67

Post by anovikov »

icedchai wrote: post #63
anovikov wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people who never did outsourcing don't know how dirty it is.

I work with a company that outsources to a foreign IT firm. They are slow, expensive, and the quality of work is poor. They often hire subcontractors that are kids just out of school, now doing everything with AI. I've seen their prompts and often they are little more than "fix the tests." They charge $200+ hour or more for this in some cases. Insane.

And here's the trick: they use insiders to negotiate these deals, give massive kickbacks, and sometimes literally take over and destroy their victim (and i literally heard this term for a 'client' in outsourcer chats - 'victim')

Re: Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?

#68

Post by anovikov »

rl3 wrote: post #62
anovikov wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people who never did outsourcing don't know how dirty it is.

I wasn't judging nor disputing that, just think it's a sad commentary on the current state of the world when outsourcing is considered as dirty as scam and cam girl operations.

There's a major difference: scam and cam girls work and make money, outsourcing these days... not so much. Even top outsourcers who have armies of lawyers and can afford to play harder than others, are in a sorry state: EPAM stock is 5x down from peak while rest of the stock market is 2x up from same point.

Re: Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?

#69

Post by kypro »

Building a tech business is very hard these days if you're doing it as a technical founder.

Almost everything with clear use has been built. You can make slight improvements to existing products here and there but you'll struggle to be ranked well in search because you'll find there's typically at least 10-20 direct competitors which have been doing what you're doing for way longer. Additionally today Google is more or less an ad search platform rather than a website search tool, which means even if you could just do some SEO and get on the front page, you'll always place below the ads anyway.

In my experience these days you need to be reasonably good and sales and marketing to start a successful business online. Generally that will mean you need a good ad strategy and you need to be able to convert those who click your ads, which will mean you need to aggressively pursue leads.

Another thing that can work if you're b2b is having a good network to sale into to. If you have a few contacts in corporations you can sign a couple contracts then you're good.

This isn't 2008 anymore. You can't just launch some random thing online, do a little SEO and be ranked at the top of Google with only 1-2 viable competitors. You need a good sales and marketing strategy.

Re: Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?

#70

Post by Gooblebrai »

> both camps, but the problem is that they contradict each other

They don't strictly contradict each other because they are not mutually exclusive. Both methods are valid

> This leads me to believe that most people either get lucky and then apply a framework in retrospect to justify their luck

Definitely a thing. Survivorship bias.

> tried to build, calibrate, engage in SEO, talk to customers, but I can't seem to find traction

Are you speaking with people? Face to face, in person. That's more important than the online marketing methods at first. Manual onboarding.

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