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…
My solopreneur story
141–150 of 669 posts
Re: My solopreneur story
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are all functions of late-stage capitalism. Welcome to unchecked monopolies and corporate lobbying. > I guess it is confusing because i am reversing roles. In my view pure, proper, capitalism is where money is largely managed by small and medium sized entities, as to allow it to flow freely and to set the mover of capital free in the process. That's awesome, it's just never been done long-term and never will be…
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But it's clear you're not really thinking about it beyond memes so I'm gonna end it here.
Re: My solopreneur story
#143I am surprised people reduced this article as just another pet rock. Dude's journey has some interesting nuggets. He knows how to time box himself and build the smallest MVP that will actually make money. And his journey is not an overnight success either, it took him years to build everything including his social presence. Compare that to a W-2 job where you just have to show up 9am-5pm. HN is showing its overly cri…
Was HN overly critical of Dropbox? If so, how so? (genuinely curious)
I did some digging and found some interesting sources but didn't come across anything overly critical of Dropbox in its early years (yet):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dhouston
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1253750400&dateRange=custom&...
Re: My solopreneur story
#144I 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".
Re: My solopreneur story
#145I always enjoy reading success stories of developers of small apps. At the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re seeing only a cherry picked part of the picture. There is no mention of advertising spend or customer acquisition costs. The trend among indie hackers is to talk about MRR without mentioning a single expense, then to interleave it all with “follow me on Twitter” so you’re inspired to join their a…
The article does appear to give a general indication of expenses:
> At the moment, my total revenue across all products is about $45K/month at ~90% profit.
Re: My solopreneur story
#146> 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’.
Re: My solopreneur story
#147I 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…
Re: My solopreneur story
#148I 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".
Re: My solopreneur story
#149I 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…
Survivorship bias makes me say "I want to see the stories of all the solopreneurs who failed."
HN-- Please share more failure stories. I want to balance the optimistic fun hype with pragmatic realism.
I say this as a nascent "solopreneur" (I don't like that word) who is getting his agency & first product off the ground at the moment.