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My solopreneur story

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Re: My solopreneur story

#261

Post by ohrlly »

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…

That's awfully judgemental, calling people who care about money "greedy," no?

I think your ingrained views around money and greed are preventing you from presenting a fair perspective. The author has something like 4 successful products, so the problem around reproducibility is... irrelevant.

And the idea of great entrepreneurs not being motivated by money... I mean, ok, maybe give some evidence. I think you'll find many people have 2 reasons for doing something, the nice "non-greedy" one they tell everyone and some seem to take a face value, and the underlying one.

Re: My solopreneur story

#262

Post by charles_f »

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…

> Finally, the sheer obsession with money saddens me. The great entrepreneurs of our world are hardly motivated by money – to them, money is a tool that they factor in as they work to realize a vision, not an end goal.

Is often a post rationalization.

Not everyone has to be, or has to seek to be a great entrepreneur. A lot of people, myself included, want to just go by and have a happy life. A new business doesn't have to ambition being a game changer, and I actually quite like the approach of building several small marginally successful products. True, this is not a recipe, and there's always a luck factor, but at least the author is sharing his story, whatever their own design behind this was.

Re: My solopreneur story

#263

Post by DandyDev »

aogaili wrote: post #223
ink_13 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible to find this kind of thing distasteful without being motivated by envy.

It is, I agree, at the end of the day he built his products on top of corporate workers and exploited good opportunities and niches, and he brags about it, to market it, which I personally find distasteful, but that what it takes for solo devs. But it's not the vibe I get from most of the comments, it seems a lot of comments are knee-jerk reaction promted by envy.

How is this guy "exploiting" people? He sells products mostly for a one-time fee - something HN often reminds us is way better than "subscription for everything". And these products obviously serve people well.

And since when is being successful and in detail explaining how you went about it "bragging"?

Re: My solopreneur story

#264

Post by allenu »

As a fellow indie hacker (I quit my job 18 months ago to build and sell my own apps), I am super jealous. I don't have the success of this guy (only getting close to $1k/mo these days), but I can understand the success.

This guy knows how to market and ship product. I've seen him pop up a few times on indiehackers.com and social media. His "brand" is super simple to understand, which helps gain followers. He knows marketing.

A lot of people who try to go from being a dev to entrepreneur focus entirely too much on the engineering side (I'm guilty of that) and think that what matters most is the product and how well it's made. We focus way too much on tools, processes, and forget that at the end of the day, we're trying to exchange useful products for money. Getting your product(s) out the door and telling people about it (and iterating) are way more important than what stack you use.

I'm a little disappointed by all the negativity here, but I suspect most of us are just jealous.

Re: My solopreneur story

#265

Post by johnfn »

blantonl wrote: post #168
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 concur with this assessment. I don't want to discount the hard work of the author of the post, but this post could have also literally been "My slot machine win: $3 to $1.2M with one pull of the handle" I'm under no illusions that my success has a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time, a lot of luck, and a lot of hard work.

Are we reading the same article? "One pull of the handle"... the guy wrote about iterating through like 10-15 (more?) different ideas over the course of 2 years, with most of them failing for one reason or another. Apparently, the meme that success is entirely luck is so pervasive that when exact evidence to the contrary is provided people still miss it.

Re: My solopreneur story

#266

Post by mihaic »

satvikpendem wrote: post #166
mihaic wrote: post #30

While I admire the can-do attitude and independent mindset, stories like this strike me primarily as how unscalable doing something like this is. I mean, it only works because not more then 1-2% of developers even try to do something like this, since it's really hard to ensure you have enough edge in understanding user needs, building and being able to find a distribution chanel, and there simply isn't enough revenue…

Why isn't there enough revenue to support other devs? Lots of people have money to spend, they just don't want to spend it on bad products. Induced demand via increased competition is a real phenomenon [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

Induced demand leads often also to a race-to-the-bottom in pricing.

Almost everyone is just using a few basic apps, going against the consumer train is very hard, and only companies are spending money on software.

Re: My solopreneur story

#267

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

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, it's such a bitter, and wrong, take, it seems like a caricature.

I simply don't understand the "why is it all about money" take, at all. The author isn't saying he wants to but a Rolls and lots of gold chains. He simply want to make enough to be able to be independent (which he succeeded), and to indulge in relatively minor enjoyments, like travel.

"Why is it all about money?" Because some of us like both independence and not starving.

Re: My solopreneur story

#268

Post by DandyDev »

tamimio wrote: post #140

In reality the title should be: this is how I got lucky in my journey, I jumped into the AI hype just like thousands of other developers, but pure luck made it for me, and now I make X amount of money. I’m not the first to jump into it, I’m not the brightest since there are way smarter people than me who tried similar ideas, I didn’t build anything groundbreaking, and I didn’t invent anything new. I just got lucky. N…

How do you even get to this take?

The guy clearly explained how he has built MULTIPLE successful products. So there is obviously more going on than sheer luck.

And jumping on the AI hype is exactly what being a good entrepreneur is all about: recognizing an opportunity/gap and capitalizing on it. And the reason he was more successful than those thousands other developers is because he understands that there is more to business than building a cool product. For example marketing, something that he is clearly very good at.

Re: My solopreneur story

#270

Post by frabjoused »

Don't know why this is trending on HN. It's not a coincidence that in a majority of these stories, they also have a large blog, social media following or in some other way are selling their success. This is just another person being successful by talking about how they are successful.
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