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My solopreneur story

news.tonydinh.com

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Re: My solopreneur story

#211

Post by slig »

brunojppb wrote: post #203
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… Classic take from somebody that most probably could spend their entire time just fiddling with ideas, with zero worries about money. Everything else was taken care of. Not everyone has this luxury pal. The author is plain, simple sharing his story. Can you replicate his success? Who knows. But I respect him for sharing this candid blog post documenting his steps.

I'd love to read more about how the GP can live this lifestyle, maybe they can share and we all can learn and replicate their journey on how to make money doing literally whatever we want whist doing a lot of interesting hobbies.

Re: My solopreneur story

#213

Post by ncallaway »

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…

> For the record, I am not jealous – 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

Frankly, I think you’re being incredibly rude to assume that because someone shared their story on a topic, then it must be their entire identity. It’s just so presumptuous to assume that the author or authors of these pieces have nothing else in their lives of value, because they decided to share this piece of their life.

There’s a lot in your comment I agree with, but this note struck me as just… extremely uncharitable, presumptuous, and rude.

Re: My solopreneur story

#214

Post by dooraven »

imiric wrote: post #179
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",…

Also this is just lol

> The great entrepreneurs of our world are hardly motivated by money

Yeah come on like Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates, Hoffman etc aren't motivated by money lol.

For a forum created by an accelerator, it is weirdly anti-success.

Re: My solopreneur story

#215

Post by demondemidi »

dahart wrote: post #200
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…

I have two arguments to counter this that contradict each other :) One one hand, our entire economy is built on useless products. Chances are high that our good comfortable jobs involve making and marketing stuff people don’t really need at a larger scale than Tony’s solo projects. Large and so-called legitimate companies make billions and billions on things we don’t need. Coca-cola? Flavored sugar water that’s not g…

> it’s not accurate or fair to call Tony’s products useless

I'll cede that point. Having an arrow on your Twitter profile is of some use to someone, and just because I've never had a problem with iPhone screen capture "press two buttons" doesn't mean some people need to click through an app, a nd the teletype style of GPT3 doesn't bother me but I guess some people need faster response.

I know snark is against the rules. Technically they aren't "useless" but they are single-task gadgets like you'd find for your kitchen drawer on QVC at night. The people that make the "banana slicer" probably made a ton of money and by your definition a "banana slicer" isn't useless because someone bought it.

Re: My solopreneur story

#216

Post by sgu999 »

> ~90% profit

Even though I understand the mechanics of the free market, in how many other fields do we consider this kind of profit margins to be honest? What about a farmer selling at a 90% profit? A pharmacist? A banker?

Good for him though, "why not if he can", after all. I'm just not sure how I feel about it...

Re: My solopreneur story

#218

Post by cj »

demondemidi wrote: post #210
imiric wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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",…

What is your position? You're bashing the reply for not complaining about all greed, is that it? Like somehow the OP didn't go far enough? I'm struggling to understand your response, maybe it is to defend greed?

The juxtaposition of a entrepreneur recounting his experience building/selling products, with the original commenter criticizing entrepreneurs for being greedy, alongside of stories/comments every week here complaining about how we aren’t paid enough in tech and how it’s immoral to ask tech workers to drive to an office is quite ironic.

He has a point.. HN is full of greed (or lack of appreciation for the privilege most of us have) and criticizing a solo bootstrapped entrepreneur for greed feels completely misplaced.

To a certain extent, yes, let’s defend and embrace greed when the outcome is a solo entrepreneur doing cool things and sharing the experience publicly.

Re: My solopreneur story

#219

Post by proxyon »

janmo wrote: post #108

A lot of people here complaining that Soloproneurs only make "useless" "pet rocks". There is a big bias here, only the pet rock solopreneurs are very public about what they are doing and their success at it, because that is their marketing, YOU (their audience on HN and Twitter) are the pet rocks buyers. Solopreneurs with stuff other than pet rocks often don't want to share their success and how much they are making…

bullseye. when I read this I specifically thought of a few guys I know that made proprietary license SDKs that tons of corporations are paying for. there's a dude well known in the mobile space for example that sells the background geolocation plugins that everyone uses. it's a very tough problem to solve and he works on it full time and probably make a boatload of money owning his own business.

Re: My solopreneur story

#220

Post by xyst »

When I was an avid Twitter user this person was pretty active in selling his product. Particularly in the “indie hacker” hashtag.

My take from this is: know how to market and sell your product. If not, get someone that can

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