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My solopreneur story

news.tonydinh.com

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Re: My solopreneur story

#251

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

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 find these stories somewhat inspirational but generally lacking anything actionable. What is far more interesting is the stories of people who detail the longer road. How they started, problems and setbacks they encountered, why business X failed or was shutdown, how they used the lessons learned to build the next business, how they recognized opportunities and which ones they were able to take advantage of and which ones they had to pass up, and so on...

There's someone on twitter (I think it's The Gas Station Guy) who talked about having to fire sale a business that was worth close to $1M for $60,000 to a competitor because he was out of cash and desperate. How you get to that stage and how you recovered from it is far more interesting to me than these "0 to $XXX in 18 months" stories.

Re: My solopreneur story

#252

Post by williamtrask »

savanaly wrote: post #247
williamtrask wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair. The title of the post only focuses on money and completely ignores whether the work has any real value to themself or society. Kindof implies pretty strongly “their identity”.

No it doesn't? They just chose to write a tight, focused post. Rather than an autobiography. If they had written a larger sweeping piece focusing on all their hobbies and aspirations and well as their successful business people would still be salty in the comments.

Devils advocate, if the post was about building an open source non-profit with that level of financial success I don’t think there would be so much salt.

Re: My solopreneur story

#253

Post by demondemidi »

dahart wrote: post #221
demondemidi wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 rul…

> Obviously having an arrow on your Twitter profile is of some use to someone One of the reasons your upper comment isn’t fair is because the story was about how he pivoted the product away from just showing the arrow & circle progress bar, and moved toward something more complex that does analytics reporting, and that’s when he actually started making money on it. > I guess by your definition a “banana slicer” isn’t…

> So, anyway, what is your definition of useful?

That's a good question. The naive definition would be something that someone uses to fulfill a purpose. I don't think a Bratz Doll on a Keychain in the store is useful, but my 5 year old niece will get a solid week of entertainment out of it. Sure that is useful, but do we want to compare it to a SawStop or iPhone? All of them are useful, but to different degrees, different people, and across varying lifespans.

You can argue that anything is useful if it is "used", but let's not pretend there isn't a spectrum here.

Re: My solopreneur story

#254

Post by ec109685 »

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.

Slack still responds to every issue raised in detail.

Re: My solopreneur story

#255

Post by charles_f »

unmole wrote: post #208
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 can't tell if this is satire.

Yeah I waa asking myself the same question, this is such a stereotypical hn answer, but it lacks just enough emphasis to make it satirical

Re: My solopreneur story

#256

Post by aunty_helen »

williamtrask wrote: post #235
aunty_helen wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

$ or in this case MRR, is the easiest comparable thing. The question “How big is your agency/business?” Is often very nuanced and tedious to explain.

It would probably take me 30+ seconds of boring conversation to get to the point. Humans optimize and now you have $xx / month. It’s easy to understand exactly where I am in my journey, how much “stuff” goes on in the day to day and the types of problems I have.

I like talking to people that are doing six figures a month, it gives me insight into the problems that I hope to one day have. Like a child looking up to their bigger brother. But also, they’re often very direct and insightful with the problems that I’m dealing with.

Not like they have the cake recipe I’m trying to make, but they can adapt their advice to my experience and tell me what temperature I should set my oven.

Re: My solopreneur story

#258

Post by DandyDev »

danbruc wrote: post #217

90% profit is a market failure, you should not be able to overcharge your customers almost 10x in a working market.

I agree that it is a market failure, but it is for sure a marketing success. I cannot help but feel that there must be dozen competitors to his simple products that gather more "honest" profit margins (aka are cheaper or more feature rich) but have a hard time with marketing.

This is obviously something Tony put a lot of time and effort in, and it paid off. Good on him!

Re: My solopreneur story

#259

Post by thegrim33 »

williamtrask wrote: post #235
aunty_helen wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What else would you even measure? How much other people love what you made? The fact that lots of people pay you for it measures that. How much what you made helps other people? The fact that lots of people pay you for it measures that. How much you're able to contribute to good causes? How much money you make influences that. Money is a tool, it's created and traded with others as a means of exchange. If you make something valuable, you are given money for it, which you can use to make claims on the output of other people's work. There's no grand evil conspiracy here.

Re: My solopreneur story

#260

Post by cellis »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #81
cellis wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t like it you can always stop paying, or better yet build your own. That’s how things get better.

I stopped paying for Youtube Premium. Did that make Youtube better? Maybe I'll find time to build that when I'm not building API integrations with Youtube.

If everyone thinks like this then no, it won't get better. But I stand by my statement, no matter how many downvotes I get. If you don't like a product, stop paying for it, and either find alternatives or build your own. Its quite rare that you're going to influence their roadmap by getting a ticket filed.
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