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My solopreneur story

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Re: My solopreneur story

#301

Post by sothatsit »

sgu999 wrote: post #216

> ~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...

This is why investors love software: the marginal cost of product is tiny. However, real money must be spent on R&D and marketing to keep those profit margins going, especially if you don't have a technology moat (e.g., AI wrappers).

Re: My solopreneur story

#302

Post by imiric »

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?

I'm criticizing the hipocrisy of denouncing greed while being part of the tech industry, especially on this forum, and the accusation that the author is guilty of it, based on nothing but a post about a successful entrepreneurship journey taken on "hard mode" (being a solo founder with no VC backing or advertising scam business models).

This is a success story we should all celebrate in this community, and it pains me to see this type of response at the top of the comment section.

Re: My solopreneur story

#303

Post by michaelsalim »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #103

I don't know if I'm in an algorithmic rabbit hole, but my Twitter shows hundreds of people like this talking about how much they are making, how many signups they are getting for their products, how many Twitter followers they have. It seems like some strange playbook where you build a very simple product and shout about (possibly exaggerate) your success to attract eyeballs. Then you sell the real thing which is a c…

I had the same thought. So I did a bit of digging into it, turns out they are just rehashing the same tweet again and again. Just with different wording. When a new popular tweet pops up, everyone copies each other. It's an echo chamber down there.

As an experiment, you can try to choose a random popular tweet from your timeline. Look into their profile. And I bet there's a high chance you can find the same or very similar tweet a few months or year prior

Re: My solopreneur story

#304

Post by eddmakesio »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #281
arthur_sav wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the complaint here. He's sharing his journey - he's not selling you a course on how to be an indie hacker. If you want to take any lessons from this, that's up to you.

This sharing is also promotion for what they are selling: shovels and dreams

Actually he's selling a web UI over ChatGPT

Re: My solopreneur story

#305

Post by [deleted] »

dublinben wrote: post #99
Aurornis wrote: post #31

I always enjoy reading success stories of developers of small apps. At the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re seeing only a cherry picked part of the picture. There is no mention of advertising spend or customer acquisition costs. The trend among indie hackers is to talk about MRR without mentioning a single expense, then to interleave it all with “follow me on Twitter” so you’re inspired to join their a…

Reading between the lines, building his Twitter and newsletter audience was key to growing these ‘businesses’. The real product he’s selling is hope to all the wantrepreneurs who yearn to escape their own corporate grind and find success selling their own useless nick-nacks. This is no different than real-estate investing, or drop-shipping, or any other get rich quick scheme from time immemorial.

[deleted]

Re: My solopreneur story

#306

Post by [deleted] »

frabjoused wrote: post #270

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.

[deleted]

Re: My solopreneur story

#308

Post by mrieck »

Aurornis wrote: post #97
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…

> An arrow indicator for a twitter profile pic, a screen cap tool, and a wrapper around ChatGPT I’ve followed the “indie hacker” scene for about a decade, and this sounds about right. Notice how he started out with developer tools that scratched his own itch, but didn’t have much success. Could have been great tools, but developers are difficult to please and notoriously opposed to spending money on helpful tools. So…

Oh man, this comment hits too close to home.

Spent 2+ years building my developer tool extension SnipCSS as a side project and I still only make $1K MRR.

You want to write 100k lines of code and make $1k / month? Sell a developer tool. You want $45k / mon, and travel the world? Sell shovels to influencers that exploit some trend.

Re: My solopreneur story

#309

Post by konschubert »

allenu wrote: post #264

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 ma…

Agreed. I make an e-paper calendar with google sync and everytime I talk about it, people love it.

But it's so, so hard to find a scalable way to market it. Landing pages, photos, ads. All that stuff is very important and genuinely super hard.

Re: My solopreneur story

#310

Post by satvikpendem »

amelius wrote: post #243
dooraven wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> For a forum created by an accelerator, it is weirdly anti-success. It's not anti-success. HN applauds anyone making millions by doing real hard work that benefits everybody. What's frowned upon are these look-I-did-nothing-but-still-made-it-big stories.

They made something people want, the motto of this forum's accelerator, but when it's not something you'd want, then it's not "real hard work," apparently.
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