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My solopreneur story
351–360 of 669 posts
Re: My solopreneur story
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Are you really comparing a socialite from a wealthy family who didn't have to work to a regular Vietnamese guy who built his own business from scratch?
Re: My solopreneur story
#353I 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…
Is this HackerNews or some former communist Twitter enclave? Why is this mopey, undercutting, crabs-in-bucket post near the top of this comments section on HN?
This is a website about software entrepreneurship and you don’t like articles about going solo and making it? Maybe find a different website.
Re: My solopreneur story
#354As 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.
>> 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.
I hate gatekeeping like this.
For anyone who needs to hear it: you don't need to be a starving artist. You are not a sell-out for wanting to exchange useful products for money. You can call yourself a hacker.
Re: My solopreneur story
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"?
I didn't say exploiting people. I said exploiting niche opportunities and piggybacking on the shoulders of corporate workers, ain't nothing wrong in that. In fact, I praise his hustling and envious of it.
Re: My solopreneur story
#356As 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…
His speed is what most impressed me. Had his ChatGPT tool out in 5 days. Seriously impressive. Being early in the hype cycle is important.
Re: My solopreneur story
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Many would blame people for constantly bragging. Bragging is generally looked down upon. He isn't really sharing any tips or tricks. He's literally just saying "Look at how well I'm doing" in any other scenario there wouldn't be so much acceptance to it.
Re: My solopreneur story
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
>> 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. I hate gatekeeping like this. For anyone who needs to hear it: you don't need to be a starving artist. You are not a sell-out for wanting to exchange useful products for money. You can call yourself a hacker.
Or perhaps the advice was well-intended, because the term "hacker" has a negative connotation for most people?
Re: My solopreneur story
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>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 is exactly what I'm trying to highlight. While this kind of behavior seems normal or common in this community its not really in the greater world.
My plumber has done real well for himself, has dozens of people working for him, successful. He does not have articles on his website about how much he makes in a month, and how many hours he works when. He does have articles about the big name job he just landed, local building code committees he's on, and the little league baseball team he sponsors. Oh, and some plumbing tips and tricks.
My proctologist is similar. His website talks mostly about proctology. I bet he makes a lot, but he doesn't really talk publicly about it. That would be tacky.
In this community for some reason it's popular to say "look at how much money I make, look at all the bridges I've burned along the way, look at how I was way out of balance one way then the other, etc.". I get it, this was their journey. I'm not trying to say anything about them or there journey.
I think for every successful person like this there is another who did it a more "in balance" way. Those voices don't seem to come through so clearly, that's all I'm saying. I think it would benefit those in that second bucket to hear more stories about people like them being successful.
Re: My solopreneur story
#360In 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…
He built several projects that made recurring revenue. I can't build shit that makes $1 for me before I get bored out of my mind or "life happens" and it's abandoned. People underestimate how difficult it is to see anything through to completion and make any miniscule revenue. Not to mention scaling it out to some huge MRR. And he did that several times. This isn't just luck.