Business advice is often just someone handing you their winning lottery ticket. It worked perfectly for them but will probably be totally useless and not repeatable for you.
My solopreneur story
161–170 of 669 posts
Re: My solopreneur story
#162I 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…
The benefit to “how I XYZ” for me is not that I can copy them. It’s ideally to see a path, obstacles that come, decisions that were made, and try and understand why they made certain decisions and took certain actions.
If something becomes so straightforwards that it can be replicated straightforwards, the value of it becomes a product of skills + time. So if I want to open a business mowing lawns, this is a very commodotized and high-competition industry, so I will earn a profit that is pretty much correlated to the unpleasantness of the job and the time it takes. Very little opportunity to earn a premium, and the only tactic is hacking around how quickly I can complete each job.
If I want to create a brand new product from scratch (one that is not glorified consulting), then it will by its definition be totally unique and the journey unlike all others, including my previous journeys. The best I can do is take all information I can and try and make the best decisions and take the best actions.
Re: My solopreneur story
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
This whole analysis reads like the economic version of flat earth theory to me, but I thank you both in advance because I am about to go down a research rabbit hole on "corporate communism."
Yeah so the state always bails corporations out, makes laws disproportionally in their favour, controls the media to whitewash their actions, and most important clogs capital and access to resources. Not to mention the constant suppression of businesses by acquisitions under all sorts of threats and regulatory overburdening. Thats communism. In communist countries communism did exactly that - a handful controlled the…
You need permanent revolution to seize the productive forces from the communist-capitalist firms by the state and redistribute them to capitalist-communist firms and so on and so forth.
Re: My solopreneur story
#164I 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…
Arthur, despite agreeing with your thoughts, I think it's easy to not care about money when you have money that grows without your time investment.
The rest of us have to place a dire importance on it, lest we end up destitute, unemployable, homeless, and so on.
Though if you would like to write something up about "I made enough, and now I enrich my soul with leisure and nature walks," that would go further to disillusion some of the need to keep getting more and more money. But publicly decrying greed (and fear in greed's skin) will not achieve anything of lasting value.
Re: My solopreneur story
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wonder what’s that, let me check, oh it’s some US conservative talking point. I am confused. I thought us conservatives are fixated on corporate. Either way I am far from conservative in the sense you imply. If i do cross boundaries on some concepts thats because i am not fixated on ideology. The politburo is the corporate board. The corporate own the media through money. Selling apps is capitalism because money…
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…
Especially since the natural tendencies of such systems are that the few end up having almost all. You could distribute everything evenly and in a 100 years, without redistribution, we'd be back in the same place.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726812...
Re: My solopreneur story
#166While I admire the can-do attitude and independent mindset, stories like this strike me primarily as how unscalable doing something like this is. I mean, it only works because not more then 1-2% of developers even try to do something like this, since it's really hard to ensure you have enough edge in understanding user needs, building and being able to find a distribution chanel, and there simply isn't enough revenue…
Why isn't there enough revenue to support other devs? Lots of people have money to spend, they just don't want to spend it on bad products. Induced demand via increased competition is a real phenomenon [0].
Re: My solopreneur story
#167I 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…
> Finally, the sheer obsession with money saddens me. The great entrepreneurs of our world are hardly motivated by money – to them, money is a tool that they factor in as they work to realize a vision, not an end goal
This sounds great until the bills arrive or you realize you need to save extra for retirement or home buying because your business’s income is unpredictable.
Re: My solopreneur story
#168I 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 concur with this assessment. I don't want to discount the hard work of the author of the post, but this post could have also literally been "My slot machine win: $3 to $1.2M with one pull of the handle"
I'm under no illusions that my success has a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time, a lot of luck, and a lot of hard work.
Re: My solopreneur story
#169An arrow indicator for a twitter profile pic, a screen cap tool, and a wrapper around ChatGPT. I kinda want to shoot myself. Largely useless products that made someone rich that rely on two other ecosystems. That’s the way I guess? I’m so not an entrepreneur. Edit: apologies for using a suicide metaphor. I was being sarcastic. I’m in my 50s, really like my job, and am on a path to a good retirement. It just amazes me…
This is the endgame of rent-seeking and an abundance of (concentrated) capital, in a country that is largely comfortable letting everyone fend for themselves. Who needs to build cars when you can tickle Sam Altman's Markov chain generator for $45,000 a month? I mean, I don't blame anyone, and I need money as much as the next husk of a man, but I really wish hustle culture would stop permeating every last open space o…
Which country are you referring to? You will find a lot of hope if you study a little history and see how this has always been the case. I would guess that in terms of rent seeking and of hustle and useless products things are improving and much better than they used to be. It’s too easy to forget the vast array of useless and even harmful crap people have been selling for centuries if you didn’t live through it and/or don’t know about it. How many civilizations in history had despotic kings that controlled all housing and income, and nobody was allowed to earn their own money? The existence of someone making a decent living on products you don’t appreciate isn’t evidence of rent seeking, it’s evidence that we have more freedom than ever before, and that people have a wide range of tastes and the ability to spend a few bucks on little things they enjoy or save them small amounts of time, no?
Re: My solopreneur story
#170So much envy.