Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My solopreneur story

news.tonydinh.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 669 posts

Re: My solopreneur story

#341

Post by jart »

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…

> at the end of the day, we're trying to exchange useful products for money

If you're just trying to make money, then you shouldn't call yourself a hacker.

Re: My solopreneur story

#342

Post by dang »

elboru wrote: post #157
EddTheSDET wrote: post #130

Hackernews seems overly critical and anti-“hacker” nowadays (new acc but been around for years). Anyone have a guess why that’s the case? Influx of new users?

I’ve also been around for years, but I don’t see it as a recent phenomenon. I’ve noticed that usually most top comments (for most topics) contain contra-arguments, or critical comments of any sort against the article. Sometimes it’s useful to learn about other perspectives, but often it feels forced or just plain negative/ego inspired. I could go back years and check old posts and notice that same trend. One famous e…

> most top comments (for most topics) contain contra-arguments, or critical comments of any sort against the article

That's true until the top comments start objecting to the objections. The current thread is a clear example. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... It's a surprisingly reliable phenomenon.

Re: My solopreneur story

#343

Post by veeti »

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…

How is a screen capture tool largely useless? Have you not ever taken screenshots yourself or at least read documentation that relies on screenshots? What a ridiculous take.

It's not exactly a new concept either. Look at the office Snagit from 1990 built: https://www.msufoundation.org/techsmith-hq and keep on going about "this era".

Re: My solopreneur story

#344

Post by patrec »

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…

So what is the most interesting part of your story?

Re: My solopreneur story

#345

Post by jorgesborges »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #319
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…

> 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 wa…

You can’t blame the guy?! What blame is there to find in being successful? What “trick” is there in adhering to a successful marketing strategy?

Re: My solopreneur story

#346

Post by michaelmrose »

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…

> The great entrepreneurs of our world are hardly motivated by money

The "great" entrepreneurs of our world have always been obsessed with money because it is literally the fuel and lifeblood of their endeavors. Only people with a lot of money can afford to pretend not to care about it while working strenuously their entire life to obtain it.

>But money is not the only solution

Money is literally the only solution its the only way to buy food medicine and live indoors.

> There's a term for this – greed

Greed is a natural response to a world so constructed that if you stop swimming you drown. It's as natural for people to be greedy as for a coyote to be hungry.

Re: My solopreneur story

#347

Post by ForHackernews »

satvikpendem wrote: post #315
ferfumarma wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IMHO this is the difference between real innovation and productization. The invention of the transistor is a real innovation, the transistor radio is a mere product. That's not to say products don't have value, but they're just... not as impressive to me.

Nothing that Dropbox does (or did? is it still around?) is technically innovative. I guess it's nice for that rich guy that he identified a user-friendly box that people would pay for.

Re: My solopreneur story

#348

Post by zpeti »

blantonl wrote: post #234
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.

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)"

Did you ever think these people want some feedback and admiration and recognition for what they’ve done? Being a solopreneur is really really lonely.

And no one cares what you are doing. Posts like this are about getting recognition. Making $42k a month doesn’t actually get you any recognition by itself. Maybe buying champagne in a club from it does, but a lot of people don’t like that kind of attention.

People on HN are just so resentful and want to see the bad in posts like this it’s really sad.

Re: My solopreneur story

#349

Post by aunty_helen »

didibus wrote: post #277
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…

Their hiatus on the whole greed thing appart, I think they meant the same as what you said? That there's no lessons to learn, because doing the same thing again wouldn't work. And if even the person who succeeded first hand would fail to reproduce their own success a second time, then those who are just reading about it have even less of a chance to be successful with that advice. I think that's interesting to explor…

I appreciate your comment and understand your point of view.

What people that want a guide to money (aka reading self help "how to make a million dollars in 100 days" books) don't understand is that the lessons aren't a formula. My feeling for the commenter I originally replied to is therein lies a source of misunderstanding and frustration.

Being an entrepreneur is a skill. There are some very good serial entrepreneurs but they've all had 10x as many failures as their handful of successes.

Reading someone else's story isn't to be taken as a lesson of what to do to get to any MRR. It's a series of data points to be mused over.

Enough data points, along with time in the game (persistence, market viability, base level competence and work ethic) and you will start to have larger and larger successes.

Re: My solopreneur story

#350

Post by imiric »

iancmceachern wrote: post #314
imiric wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

> I dont think all "success stories" should be celebrated.

I agree, and I never said so.

I get the perspective of being jaded by vapid success stories of "here's how I got rich, buy my book/merch/MLM and you can get rich too", but this is far from being the case here.

If you read the article, the author clearly states they were lucky several times, and towards the end:

> There is no formula to guarantee success.

This is not someone boasting of their success, or saying there's a quick and foolproof way to reach it, but sharing their journey with others and hoping it inspires people, in the same way they were inspired by similar stories.

> how little they have to work now or how little they had to work to get it

This was a 2 year journey, where at some point they were working 12 and 16 hours a day, and they said it took a toll on their personal and social life, so this is hardly working little, and having no sacrifices. If they now get to enjoy working 4 hours a day, and taking many days off, then that's a notable reward they get to enjoy from their previous hard work.

We should all be thankful that we live in an age where such a work/life balance is even possible. Our ancestors had to do back-breaking labour for 18 hours a day, or work a dead-end office job for their entire lives enriching someone else just so they could earn the right to a meager existence when they retire. Yet we live in a time when computers enable us to not think about our finances, and to do work we actually enjoy doing, rather than because we have to in order to subsist.

_This_ is the future technology promised us, where everyone gets to work less and enjoy life more, yet most of us are still stuck in industries with the same grind mentality from 100 years ago. Let's not criticize being able to work less.

> How little time it took.

They invested 7 years into their career, and did hard work for 2 years, with several failures along the way, so this is not an insignificant amount of time. It's certainly impressive what they've accomplished in 2 years, but this is not an overnight success story. How long would they have to have done "hard" work for their story to hold water?

> 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.

I mean, that's your preference, sure. But companies are measured by their finances, and it's difficult to talk about growth towards financial independence without mentioning numbers. If they were discussing their fitness journey, they would need to mention their weight and exercise statistics, so I don't see how this is any different.

> This, and other content like it, serves them, not me.

Again, it's your opinion, and that's fine, but myself and many others find it very interesting to hear about someone else's road to "success". We don't need to be so cynical about their intentions just because it fits some preconceived notions about this type of content.

Post reply on HN