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My solopreneur story

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Re: My solopreneur story

#231

Post by shrimpx »

didip wrote: 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…

I think the guy’s aesthetic just turns people off here. He seems intensely invested in how to make virality happen in any way possible, and building simplistic stuff that’s not advancing the state of tech. People here want to see technical contributions and organic success. It’s kind of ironic since this is a forum made by a VC company, but I doubt the Tony guy could get into YC with his ideas, despite his 70k followers and 40k mrr.

Re: My solopreneur story

#232

Post by airstrike »

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.

Reminds me of this interview I once saw on YouTube with a French heiress who said (and I paraphrase) "after reflecting a lot, I've concluded that although most things in life cost something, time is free" which is entirely delusional because time is only free to someone who has more money than they'll ever need

Re: My solopreneur story

#233

Post by trashface »

lifechoseme123 wrote: post #149
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 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.

Failure reporting in. We can't actually post all the failures, or even the interesting ones, because the site would be overwhelmed and crash.

Re: My solopreneur story

#234

Post by blantonl »

dooraven wrote: post #214
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",…

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.

I think the issue is there's this undercurrent of self-promotion with these types of posts. Just like the people 20 years ago who would post their $20K adsense checks on their blog posts saying "you too can be successful like me (FLEX)"

Re: My solopreneur story

#235

Post by williamtrask »

aunty_helen wrote: post #224
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…

Sorry but you can’t fall downhill into 45k a month. You also can’t write down a cake recipe for 45k a month like you seem to be expecting. As someone who, over the last two years, has created a more modest 5 figure MRR business, I can assure you, you don’t know what you’re talking about. It takes a lot of skill and understanding of the market and market forces to be this successful. Being able to do the same thing ag…

Care to comment on the idea that $ is over celebrated as a metric of success? That seemed like a bigger point.

Re: My solopreneur story

#236

Post by xyst »

swagempire wrote: post #182
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.

I think it’s crab mentality.

Re: My solopreneur story

#237

Post by harryquach »

kubb wrote: post #47
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…

Go for it, 1% of the time it works all the time. If you fail, you just weren’t good enough.

Self selection bias. It worked for me therefore anyone can do it!

In reality people have ideas and build things all the time. The vast majority never make money.

I read posts like this I rarely see any mention of luck surrounding the outcome.

Re: My solopreneur story

#238

Post by cornholio »

actionfromafar wrote: post #86
cornholio wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an illusion that 2 can happen without 1. Unless you have financial and entrepreneurial freedom, you will never change anything anywhere. Whatever social structure you imagine you might navigate, be it business, politics, public opinion, a charitable organization, the world of art, literature or academia; you will always find a pre-existing, entrenched power structure of people calling the shots, controlling key…

Largely correct but the margins can have unreasonably large effects, like Linux, the GNU project and so on.

"a massive amount of luck and/or first mover advantage"

Re: My solopreneur story

#239

Post by chasd00 »

slig wrote: post #211
brunojppb wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They likely sit deep in the bowels of a very large company in a position shielded from the market. No expectations of delivery and no accountability for failure. You don’t get hired into a role like that, it’s the end result of a multi-decade tenure where you slowly evolve into a potted plant in the corner.

I know a handful of these at my current employer.

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