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My solopreneur story

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Re: My solopreneur story

#371

Post by arthurofbabylon »

hncowardnum3 wrote: post #164
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…

Arthur, despite agreeing with your thoughts, I think it's easy to not care about money when you have money that grows without your time investment. The rest of us have to place a dire importance on it, lest we end up destitute, unemployable, homeless, and so on. Though if you would like to write something up about "I made enough, and now I enrich my soul with leisure and nature walks," that would go further to disill…

It's not about "not caring about money." It's about not letting money be so blindingly front and center that reality is obscured.

I'm with you – we all need to be materially conscious to stay alive. We can't just throw our finances to the wind. As an entrepreneur, money is a particularly critical part of the equation.

Similarly, we can't afford to be so enamored by strangers making money on the internet that we fail to see 1) the pitfalls, errors, and missed opportunities in their efforts 2) their actual method (MRR charts are not a method) 3) the gifts and opportunities of our unique situations.

Re: My solopreneur story

#372

Post by arthurofbabylon »

Aurornis wrote: post #167
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 This sounds great until the bills arrive or you realize you need to save extra for retirement or home buying because your business’s income is unpredictable.

Paying bills is not greed.

Re: My solopreneur story

#373

Post by braza »

Reading those comments I think this is a tale of two cities.

City one here several corporate developers can see how a raw and crystalline feedback from the user is: attention and money. no fluff, no Hippo, no assumptions of what a customer is. Well done an we salute you.

Another city has people that is tired with that renaissance of this dollar-menu version of the hustle culture, that as a stubborn Phoenix always reappears and now fuelled with social attention.

And here I am not talking about people doing important things to the world, but my message is for the several clout chasers from Twitter that their “product” is selling courses to build products, how to hustle and show stats in social media, and generate twitter impressions as “qualified leads”.

Re: My solopreneur story

#374

Post by dinvlad »

thelastparadise wrote: post #320
eddmakesio wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

x4, but I'd put an asterisk that tech choice matters in as much as how fast it allows you to go - something like PHP or Rails or Phoenix app with batteries included and deployed by hand on a single Linode instance, beats a fancy new TypeScript GraphQL Kubernetes stack on time-to-market any time of the day.

Re: My solopreneur story

#376

Post by musicale »

ferfumarma wrote: post #209
nomilk wrote: 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...

Honest criticism is undervalued. I think the zedshaw take isn't exactly wrong either.

Seems to be a slightly different category from CmdrTaco's infamous take on the iPod ('No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame') but that wasn't entirely wrong either.

I'm not quite as critical of HN, but I concur that allowing deletion whenever would be a positive change.

Re: My solopreneur story

#377

Post by kolbe »

pbj1968 wrote: post #295
kolbe wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a large diversity of opinion about this guy's business. Who is this "HN" you're talking about?

And here’s the third bucket - can’t see the forest for the semantic trees.

Is there a 4th bucket of people who are so eager to pigeonhole ideologies instead of reading that it makes them functionally illiterate? Or are we done at three buckets?

Re: My solopreneur story

#378

Post by musicale »

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.

> To say it more flippantly, this is why Drew is a billionaire and BrandonM is not

Seems a bit mean-spirited, and I'm not sure I like the implied value assumptions. I expect there are other important reasons as well including connections, timing, luck, etc.

Re: My solopreneur story

#379

Post by ignoramous »

getrealyall wrote: post #132
chinchilla2020 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not from the US. Typical hackernews: "Something bad happened in the world and this is why the US is bad"

There's that vaunted, cerebral HN discourse I've come to know and love.

I mean, you got too real like Casey in Manchester by the Sea ;)

Re: My solopreneur story

#380

Post by ignoramous »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #98
gumballindie wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why let it frustrate people when one can start taking notes? Literarily when i started looking into these types of successful independent makers in all industries i discovered there are _loads_ of them and each make a little thing here and there. It’s fascinating, and i cant stop reading about them. And the more i read the more i realise that hey… it’s actually doable! But one need to stop overcomplicating things…

Because there are no notes to take on this. It's survivorship bias of a product that exists in 1000 other forms. It's not visibly doing anything better that other screen cap tools or chatGPT wrappers aren't doing. The main note is that you may not know what people want, and I've been around long enough to know people that advertise themselves as knowing what people want are usually full of shit.

> It's survivorship bias...

tbf to TFA, it is exactly about how one could be one of those survivors if one did those totally not simple things. It is a crash course survival guide for a build-in-public solopreneur, if you will.

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