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My solopreneur story

news.tonydinh.com

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Re: My solopreneur story

#171

Post by dev_tty01 »

Aurornis wrote: post #101
arcbyte wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed everything in the article. The key to his success was to Get Started. It wasn't an arrow indicator that brought him success. That was a trivial toy. But having gotten started, he was now able to identify the next step amd the next step that lead to Black Magic being a twitter analytics tool. He would never have planned to build the end product from sitting on his couch back in the beginning. It was only af…

> The key to his success was to Get Started. Not really. The key was to find a niche that worked. He “Got Started” with tools he wanted to build and it didn’t work out. It wasn’t until he pivoted to identifying trends, building an audience, and building tools for them which he could market to his audience that he found success.

He never would have been able to pivot if he didn't "Get Started" building tools in the first place.

Re: My solopreneur story

#172

Post by satvikpendem »

getrealyall wrote: post #110
demondemidi wrote: post #10

An 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…

What a weird take, as if someone building cars is prevented by them also selling supposed pet rocks online. Lots of people, Musk included, made enough money from throwaway startups to then work on the bigger problems, as they're actually financially secure to do so at that point, the Maslow's hiararchy of needs in action. If you don't like someone's product, don't buy it, but if other people find them useful, good for them and good for the creator.

Re: My solopreneur story

#173

Post by agumonkey »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #69
unsupp0rted wrote: post #4

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 feel like Tony's able to be a profitable solopreneur because he outsources all support to people who don't really care about the quality of the output. Replace Tony with the name of almost any company these days and the statement would still be true, unfortunately. This isn't a solopreneur issue at all.

Seems like a cyclical systemic failure where confidence in the system makes people buying even though there's no real desire for high quality and it just coasts until it fails.

Re: My solopreneur story

#174

Post by itsoktocry »

goodmunky wrote: post #159
arthurofbabylon wrote: post #131

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…

At its best, money is a terrific measure of satisfaction you’ve provided to other people. This man builds products people like and shares the story of his success for free to build an audience. These are all good things. You respond with bitter vitriol, that is not a good thing. If this is how you approach life you will not deserve his success or money.

>This man builds products people like and shares the story of his success for free to build an audience.

Maybe people are getting tired of 90% of social media content being about "building an audience". Everyone is trying to sell us something, all the time.

Re: My solopreneur story

#175

Post by unsupp0rted »

dublinben wrote: post #99
Aurornis wrote: post #31

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…

Reading between the lines, building his Twitter and newsletter audience was key to growing these ‘businesses’. The real product he’s selling is hope to all the wantrepreneurs who yearn to escape their own corporate grind and find success selling their own useless nick-nacks. This is no different than real-estate investing, or drop-shipping, or any other get rich quick scheme from time immemorial.

Not really. He got my money in exchange for a tool I use 3 times a day, every day.

Re: My solopreneur story

#176

Post by ghotli »

gumballindie wrote: post #2

[flagged]

I don't mean this as anything but a constructive comment and I won't reply further. Feedback, for your perusal.

Some of your comments on this thread tipped your hand (to me at least) that you must be a new account here. I was right. You seem like you may not have read the comment guidelines.

I'd like to see the positives in some of this but my friend it comes across really tone deaf and dripping with bias. I don't really disagree with some of your points, but it's wrapped up in language that might be best suited elsewhere. There's room for improvement when it comes to your rhetoric and if the downvotes didn't make that clear I'm hoping this feedback helps ongoing.

Re: My solopreneur story

#177

Post by satvikpendem »

amelius wrote: post #68
donnythecroc wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great point. He's literally created a job.

I'm not sure if I get the logic here. If he instead wrote a bunch of FOSS tools, then that would have been a worse outcome for society?

In economic terms where money isn't circulating, yes. Now, many open source projects are used by other companies that are commercial, so that does grow the economy however.

Re: My solopreneur story

#178

Post by itsoktocry »

hncowardnum3 wrote: post #164
arthurofbabylon wrote: post #131

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…

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 disill…

>The rest of us have to place a dire importance on it, lest we end up destitute, unemployable, homeless, and so on.

This article is literally about a person quitting his job to do this, so it seems he's not part of "the rest of us".

Re: My solopreneur story

#179

Post by imiric »

arthurofbabylon wrote: post #131

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…

> There's a term for this – greed.

Greed? You want to lecture about greed, when 95% of tech companies are _driven_ by profits, by driving the share price up by any means necessary, including exploiting their users and employees, being the reason for new consumer protection laws to come into place and then skirting around them, tax avoidance, and a million other shady tricks, all with the goal of becoming a "unicorn", to go public or be acquired, and to get to do it all over again.

This very forum is built by, around and for serial entrepreneurs in this rat race, so it's a bit... rich to lecture about greed on here, of all places.

And yet you criticize when a solo developer, without any venture capital as a safety net, manages to have the success entrepreneurs dream of, measured by the same measuring stick. It all reads like sour grapes to me.

Good on OP for having the courage, persistence and skill to pull this off. Why shouldn't they talk about the steps they took, and the results they're seeing? We can call it survivorship bias, growth hacking, luck, etc. all we want, but it's encouraging to know that these stories _do_ happen.

Achieving financial independence by building something people want to pay for, instead of relying on the usual advertising and VC get-rich-quick schemes, should be applauded.

Re: My solopreneur story

#180

Post by slig »

arthurofbabylon wrote: post #131

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 make my money doing literally whatever I want, on projects that I find much more exciting, with ample time left over for nature walks, rock climbing, reading, and more. Unlike these authors, the money I make is not the most interesting part of my story.

Nice humblebragging. So you just read one blog post from the author and concluded that the most interesting part of their story is money? I bet they enjoy a lot of things and this is only a small piece of their life, as their blog post is specifically about being an entrepreneur, not about their hobbies.

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