Yes, first you have to accept that it doesn't take 7 months but rather years. It is really really really hard to build a business with real revenue (did I stress on the word really?). It is even harder to build it solo. Most of the solo success story you hear either had expertise in their fields OR built something to truly solve their own problem first and then expanded to others and it usually takes 18-24 months or…
I enjoyed reading it. But the big problem is always going to be how to fund everything from the start without any return while living on a low salary :*(
I don't think it's impossible, but absolutely incredibly difficult. I tried everything. Shopify stores, blogs (even owned a #1 tech blog), local job boards, global job boards, dating sites (which were shut down due to payment providers refusing to service these types of sites), various SaaS sites, etc. Nothing made any real money. I don't know if it's just me - perhaps I'm just not meant to succeed here - but I'm sti…
> I think the biggest downer was when I built the coolest SaaS for martial arts academies. I thought it was guaranteed success, as I am involved in these communities, know a ton of owners. I reached out to all of them. Offered a free setup/trial. None of them cared, or even attempted to use it.
Did you speak with them about the idea before building the platform?
It is “simple” Find out what people want Make it Sell it to them Unfortunately, engineer brain loves to skip step 1 Ive recently become friends with a younger person who makes a lot of money off vibe coded mini saas. He is fanatical about step 1. If he can’t find n people begging him to make it he will go validate the next idea. He’s ruthless with this aspect and will drop an idea instantly if people dont care. It re…
I just don’t understand how does it work. Like where do you find such people? How do you make them beg you? Isn’t building in a saturated market kind of proves that there is demand?
> kind of proves that there is demand?
It proves that there's demand but you might not get a piece of the cake. That's being able to sell/speak to the people in your market is so important
I don't think it's impossible, but absolutely incredibly difficult. I tried everything. Shopify stores, blogs (even owned a #1 tech blog), local job boards, global job boards, dating sites (which were shut down due to payment providers refusing to service these types of sites), various SaaS sites, etc. Nothing made any real money. I don't know if it's just me - perhaps I'm just not meant to succeed here - but I'm sti…
> I think the biggest downer was when I built the coolest SaaS for martial arts academies. I thought it was guaranteed success, as I am involved in these communities, know a ton of owners. I reached out to all of them. Offered a free setup/trial. None of them cared, or even attempted to use it. Did you speak with them about the idea before building the platform?
Some of them, yes. It seemed like they'd use it. I don't know. Maybe bad execution, or something. Although, maybe I should try again. Perhaps they were busy. I also didn't market beyond reaching out to people (which involved the people I know + cold email outreach).
Since I was 17 I built projects and sold some kind of digital product, from desktop apps to services and finally a 8 figure exit of a web app.
In my first 20 years of trials i made enough to support myself, i had multiple projects + consulting work that got me some money. I tried everything, but I got better and better on spotting what works.
I didn't chase unicorns, I chase things that I needed personally in my projects and also had an established market. I found out that building simpler, improved and niched versions of bigger products gives me a higher chance of making higher revenue faster. This was before the indie hacker movement started.
Eventually one of my many projects grew faster than previous trials and I knew something is there. 7 years later I had a 8 figure exit with a team of 20 people, 100% owned and fully bootstrapped.
Was luck involved? Maybe, but after 20 years of grinding was it more luck or persistence and continuous learning? How many opportunities for finding "luck" would someone that tried methodically for 20 years to launch a successful business will get?
I don't think it's impossible, but absolutely incredibly difficult. I tried everything. Shopify stores, blogs (even owned a #1 tech blog), local job boards, global job boards, dating sites (which were shut down due to payment providers refusing to service these types of sites), various SaaS sites, etc. Nothing made any real money. I don't know if it's just me - perhaps I'm just not meant to succeed here - but I'm sti…
don't give up, i spent 20 years like you, tried different things until I found something that worked really well.
Hello, I'm a freelance startup programmer in Korea, and my name is Jeong Dong-woo.I share many of the same concerns as you.I've been on an unconventional career path for about 7 years. My specialty is building factory equipment control programs using WPF on the frontend with Ladder Diagram logic as the backend. In this field, ladder logic interpretation is still weak for AI, and because of the security restrictions at Korean factories AI tools are difficult to use on site, so I've been able to keep making a living here.My typical work involves building PLC-based control programs with WPF and integrating them with MES systems, and this is my core specialization. The downside is that because of the labor-intensive nature of this work, scaling up is genuinely difficult. In practice, it feels very much like being a subcontractor to the actual equipment vendors.I started out on a freelance community platform, and for the first 3 years I had almost no work, so I took on manual labor in parallel. Currently I'm delivering code to Hyundai Motors as a second-tier subcontractor, but I still have many of the same worries you describe.Even calling it a business, I only earn around 4 to 5 million Korean won per month, and I honestly don't know how to grow it beyond this. Reading your posts, I feel reassured to see that many people are wrestling with similar concerns.To try to expand, I've also built and delivered SaaS products. My typical engagement is a solution of around 60,000 lines of code. (Over 7 years, I've completed roughly 40 corporate outsourcing projects.)Every product I launched directly to the market has failed. The only things that worked for me were building SaaS for companies that already had revenue, and making industrial control programs.Reading the advice posted here, I keep coming back to the same realistic conclusion: in the current AI era, because of the AI SLOP problem, no matter how good a program you build, it simply doesn't reach users. That's the core issue. I've been increasingly convinced that flooding the market with many AI-generated programs is actually a more effective strategy than carefully crafting one good one. When I look at the programs that are generating real revenue recently, they seem to follow this pattern.I no longer believe that a good program necessarily succeeds.In the end, the key is exposure, and this is where I keep hitting a wall. No matter how much I invest in SEO, my Korean website struggles to gain visibility. Right now I'm using an AI API to translate my Korean articles into English and posting them as a form of promotion, though I'm not yet sure whether this approach will work.Paths to success differ from person to person and from country to country, which makes specific advice difficult to give. But in my view, what matters most is how much initial capital you can put into Google ads.Expensive ad inventory is generally personalized. Users who don't provide much information to Google get served low-tier ads instead. So my current thinking is the opposite of the conventional approach: place a large volume of low-tier ads, and build programs that appeal to users in the "internet-underserved" demographic, meaning people who don't hand over their information to the major platforms.That said, I don't want to go down an illegal path, which is why I'm not building dating apps (in Korea, dating apps often end up tied to drug dealing or prostitution, so I'd rather stay away from that space).Unlike many of the other comments here, I don't believe that a good program necessarily succeeds. The real question, in my view, is how to gain direct access to consumers.
I feel like it's not luck vs strategy.May be it's just time+ exposure.The more you build and put things out there,the higher you chances something clicks.
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…
it's not like this. You need a very good product that solves a real pain much better than competitors and word of mouth will work wonders with a little marketing push.