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My solopreneur story

news.tonydinh.com

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Re: My solopreneur story

#311

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.

Ah ok, some success is ok, some is not.

Re: My solopreneur story

#312

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 t…

Stretching your take to the extreme, it's like saying Kim Kardashian makes money from perfume because she's a genius fragrance designer and really understands the nuances and opportunities in the fragrance market, not because she had built an 'influential celebrity' persona with 400 million followers.

Re: My solopreneur story

#313

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…

Keep in mind this money is very cyclical. It’s not a $45k a month salary until retirement. If he doesn’t find some other idea that hits pay dirt he can make $0 a month. I hope Tony is investing the money wisely.

For almost everyone, the wise strategy is to invest in unmanaged index funds.

Please read Daniel Kahneman on the illusion of skill in investing:

> Most of the buyers and sellers know that they have the same information; they exchange the stocks primarily because they have different opinions. The buyers think the price is too low and likely to rise, while the sellers think the price is high and likely to drop. The puzzle is why buyers and sellers alike think that the current price is wrong. What makes them believe they know more about what the price should be than the market does? For most of them, that belief is an illusion.

Re: My solopreneur story

#314
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

I dont think all "success stories" should be celebrated. I think that's what the commenter was trying to highlight.

There is such a thing as toxic productivity advice, the internet is full of it. It's easy to spot for me now, because I've noticed a few common threads. 1- The writing typically focuses on how much money the person makes 2- how little they have to work now or how little they had to work to get it and 3- How little time it took.

In my career, business, etc. I've learned the exact opposite. I would give the exact opposite advice for people looking to be successful in their lives and careers: 1- Don't focus on how much money you make, but how much value you add to the world and those around you. As you keep investing in your community, it will pay you back dividends right when you need it most. 2- Work hard, even when mo one is watching. Work hard for yourself, no one else. 3- Don't rush things, sometimes taking an extra month to build your business infrastructure properly could save you millions in the future.

In one sentence: It's not helpful for me personally for this guy to boast about how much he makes, how little he works, and how quickly he did it. What would be helpful is for him to remove all the concrete numbers ($45k/month, etc.) and boasting which only serves to put up my defenses and force me to start off in a position of comparison. Then he could just have simple prose about things he thinks are helpful that he learned along the way, simple information like a technical paper, not ad copy.

This, and other content like it, serves them, not me. I've found that limiting or even completely restricting my consumption of this kind of content for the latter, is better for me.

Re: My solopreneur story

#315
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm.. that seemed like perfectly reasonable criticism to me, the kind that informed the founder of the gulf between users' current understanding and the level they'd need to see the value in the product (i.e. very useful to a founder). But I guess looking back now it's easy to view it with levity; it could have felt extremely harsh at the time (although Drew does manage a few smiley emojis throughout his answer so he…

It's not infamous because the skepticism of dropbox was wrong (though it obviously was...) It's infamous because Drew made a point of coming back as a billionaire to call out and shame brandonm; something that seemed unnecessarily petty when you're holding a billion dollars. https://zedshaw.com/blog/2018-03-25-the-billionaires-vs-bran...

No, it is infamous precisely because people, especially developers, on HN discount the value of good user experience. No one but the most technical will set up their own FTP server to rsync files back and forth, but they will drag and drop files into a folder that "magically" syncs. To say it more flippantly, this is why Drew is a billionaire and BrandonM is not.

Re: My solopreneur story

#316

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 would argue that if someone is not motivated by money why should he be in "for profit venture" at all? why not create non-profit? or may be become a govt official or senator where you can influence policy decision that has the potential to create whole industry catering to your selected cause?

This is incredible story for me. I am not sure i can achieve same thing as he achieved. It is inspiring. Moreover his main business failed after twitters api policy changed so it is even more incredible that he was able to recover from that setback and managend to create a new business which is now surpassing his older biz. And he did it without taking any outside funding. In my eyes he is equal or greater than your so called great entreprenuers!

Re: My solopreneur story

#317

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.

> What's frowned upon are these look-I-did-nothing-but-still-made-it-big stories.

Seven years of acquiring skills in different domains, and two years of applying those skills, learning more along the way, grinding, failing, trying again, and building several successful products people are willing to pay for is "doing nothing"? What a ridiculous take.

People get rich nowadays by manipulating virtual numbers on screens, based on speculation and pure luck, which is much closer to "doing nothing", and we enthusiastically celebrate their success, yet someone uses their skills to build and sell products to people that enjoy using them, and we label them as lucky, lazy and show-offs. #smh

Re: My solopreneur story

#318
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.

FWIW, none of those people are whom I’d consider great entrepreneurs.

Re: My solopreneur story

#319
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…

> 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.

I think it boils down to one thing. He built a tool specifically to market on Twitter, it worked well, it got traction because of how well it worked. His main trick was to show up every day and show what he was working on. Which works well for indie hackers on Twitter.

Alot of his marketing efforts is look at how well I'm doing, he's seen that this has worked and has repeated it repeatedly. Can't blame the guy. The only big story from him that wasn't a success story was him writing about how the twitter API pricing really cost him big time.

Re: My solopreneur story

#320
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…

> 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 mone Yep, just look at @levelsio and his $250k MRR stack of apps built with PHP and jQuery > I'm a little disappointed by all the negativity here, but I suspect most of us are just jealous. Yep x2, for a website built around startups a huge number seem to be against a solo founder bootstrap…

> Yep x2, for a website built around startups a huge number seem to be against a solo founder bootstrapping apps successfully

x3

Solo bootstrapper as well, ~20K ARR on one SaaS app about to launch another.

It's clear to me there's money to be made, and yes engineers tend to overweight engineering effort and underweight distribution.

Make something that makes someone's life better, saves or makes them money, and ask a fair amount for it.

That's what I've done and have modest recurring revenue after only 6-8 months or so.

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