Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My solopreneur story

news.tonydinh.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 669 posts

Re: My solopreneur story

#181

Post by spencerchubb »

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…

Are we even reading the same story? It seems like you're trying to do a takedown of the story, but the author addresses all of those points (the author largely agrees with you)

Re: My solopreneur story

#182

Post by swagempire »

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…

Why is HN so opposed to people making money?

He's literally made probably under $500k in revenue. And he's Vietnamese -- so that's really a fortune there.

I don't see anything except a reason to be happy for him.

Re: My solopreneur story

#183

Post by satvikpendem »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #75
gumballindie wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are only angry because you too want to escape and are externalising the frustration of not finding a similar path. At least thats what i learned about myself when i had a similar reaction seeing such success stories. Then it struck me - this is it. This is the way for indie success. Build stuff that makes sense to a niche market. To me the product is irrelevant. But the fact that the author escaped is absolute bl…

While it's true that niches work, the actual money maker is to create your own niche by forking an existing one. While 45k / month is impressive, the ones who are making 6 figures and above per month, are doing it in niches which aren't "built in public".

Yep, I know people in the "boring" industries, making software or running the marketing for plumbers, electricians, med spas, etc. They're at 6 or more figures a month doing that, and they're in industries most software engineers won't dare look.

Re: My solopreneur story

#184

Post by cj »

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…

Sure, but this is a forum run by a bunch of startup founders and a startup VC.

MRR is not a weak signal.

If anything, I’d love to see more stories like this and less stories from popular media like NPR, Gizmodo, and NY Times (all 3 on the front page right now).

Re: My solopreneur story

#185

Post by MSFT_Edging »

bnt wrote: post #147
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 see this with course creators as well. I reported dozens of errors in a particular corse and the creator was literally annoyed at me.

If you can't do, teach. If you can't teach, write an online course. If you can't write an online course, teach phys ed.

Re: My solopreneur story

#186

Post by shw1n »

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…

This is a strangely bitter take on someone sharing their business journey.

Sure, someone can make up their MRR, just like anyone sharing any personal story of theirs can make anything up.

But in a world full of wantrepreneurs and pseudo-intellectuals, revenue/profits is the best “objective” measure of a business’ progress

Wanting money also does not necessarily correlate to greed, it can also correlate to desiring freedom in a world with bills and expenses

Re: My solopreneur story

#188

Post by nomilk »

satvikpendem wrote: post #152
nomilk wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/?da…

When someone mentions HN and Dropbox, they are usually mentioning the infamous comment by BrandonM which is the top comment in your first link.

Hmm.. that seemed like perfectly reasonable criticism to me, the kind that informed the founder of the gulf between users' current understanding and the level they'd need to see the value in the product (i.e. very useful to a founder).

But I guess looking back now it's easy to view it with levity; it could have felt extremely harsh at the time (although Drew does manage a few smiley emojis throughout his answer so he seemed to have taken it well).

Re: My solopreneur story

#189

Post by glnarayanan »

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…

You're right - you're so not an entrepreneur & you're clueless about customer-led development or new age problem solving.

For context, I'm a TypingMind user (the ChatGPT wrapper) & it's so much better than ChatGPT that some of us bought the license & started paying for API, even to use the free GPT 3.5.

Since then, it has evolved to support custom models & today, I could train a custom model on a bunch of research papers or product documentation & chat with them, something that takes a lot of effort to develop for non devs.

Developers are not the primary market - non devs are & we are very happy with the product.

BlackMagic again, is a revolutionary product - afaik, nothing like it existed when it came out & a ton of us happily jumped on it, realizing how much it helped with Twitter growth.

Re: My solopreneur story

#190

Post by nico_h »

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…

Where is the greed???

This article articulates pretty well everything i’ve read in all the wantreprenarial / bootstrap articles i’ve read, which is summed up as “build a following, ride rising trends, iterate fast”.(and dump things that slow you down / have peaked) This article is in line with the build a following, and shows which rising trend he’s riding.

The part about the money irking you seems to come from a place of incredible privilege. He earned his independence and is selling a non-essential product on the free market, before B2B powerhouses move in. He shares what he’s done and experienced with the community and also hired employees.

He escaped the 9-5 and says he’s only working part time, which allows him to do the non work things you mentioned though he prefers surfing travelling and gaming to your rock climbing and nature walk.

The article is not even behind a paywall or part of a bootstrap course, so again where is the greed?

More power to him.

Post reply on HN