Live data from Hacker News

My solopreneur story

news.tonydinh.com

141–150 of 669 posts

Re: My solopreneur story

#141

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…

i agree this whole build in public is a growth hack

Re: My solopreneur story

#142

Earlier 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…

[flagged]

Snarky tone aside, you can actually strip powers from both the government and corporations. You're not suddenly making a super government because you don't let Disney dump money into strengthening copyright laws.

But it's clear you're not really thinking about it beyond memes so I'm gonna end it here.

Re: My solopreneur story

#143
post #122

I 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…

> HN is showing its overly critical self again, just like when Dropbox first appeared on HN

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&...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR7tJ8wAI3M&t=27s

Re: My solopreneur story

#144

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".

Isn't more of a bug report than a support ticket ? I'd hate silence to be the standard response to bug reports.

Re: My solopreneur story

#145

I 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…

> without mentioning a single expense

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
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’.

I feel the same. I really hate writing all those articles, posts, writing to people to get mostly rejected/ignored. But then again I grind it out

Re: My solopreneur story

#147

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…

I see this with course creators as well. I reported dozens of errors in a particular corse and the creator was literally annoyed at me.

Re: My solopreneur story

#148

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".

I was able to get prompt and effective support from VoIP.ms, a company I pay something like $1.50/month. I once contacted Aruba support regarding hardware I bought secondhand and they replaced it for me. That many software companies choose to (and for some reason are permitted to) operate at scale beyond which they can meaningfully support their products doesn't mean that it's fundamentally impossible to receive support without paying a lot.

Re: My solopreneur story

#149

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…

I agree.

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.

Re: My solopreneur story

#150
Been following your story on Twitter for a long time. Very inspiring. I really like the DevUtils app that you built. You never mention what MRR it is generating today, though. Would love to know if you managed to grow it to anything of meaningful MRR.
Post reply on HN