My solopreneur story

All our lives we're told that skills matter. Society will reward those who are most skilled.

Inevitably groups form around a skill, programmers hang around programmers and so on. Since programmers "create" all the value we believe we should get paid the most etc.

Alas schools emphasise "hard" skills (programming, math, doctors, lawyers etc) and those are all good jobs that make decent money. They ignore "soft" skills like selling, marketing, and so on.

In truth sales and marketing are orders of magnitude more valuable, and their pay reflects that. There are a lot of pharma reps, realtors, insurance salesman that earn mega bucks.

This is not something the average hacker wants to hear. I expect to get down-voted for saying it. But if you're reading this, and you're thinking of starting out on your own, then I recommend you consider;

Who will you sell to? How will you reach them? What can they afford?

Only then start thinking about what to make.

Honestly all the "fancy new" stuff only gives you benefits at galactic scale compared to what most solo folks will build. You already start well behind the curve being a solo dev, so you lose out on a lot of benefits of orchestration, rapid microservice deployments, etc. That stuff is built for teams, not one person hacking away in their home office on nights and weekends. You get all the bad parts, because they can't be avoided, and none of the good, because you don't have the throughput to take advantage.

My current job has 80 or 90 devs and we have both on-prem k8s, on-prem monolith, and plenty of "cloud-native" AWS stuff. Everything TS, GraphQL, messaging queues, exactly what you'd expect from an organization that size.

My side projects are all .NET MVC apps. Full-page reloads, manual deployments out of Visual Studio, etc. The only excuse for me to go the TS etc. route would be if that was the only thing I knew how to do, and honestly with as much as I've heard from folks like Tony and Pieter, if I was green now and only knew TS, I'd probably be learning PHP and Laravel.

The vast majority of people in here are posers, i.e. not hackers in the old-school computer wiz sense, nor hackers in the Paul Graham sense.

HN has gone mainstream a decade ago. Now we've got the same audience of Ars Technica and r/technology.

> 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.

I’ve followed a lot of them. Maybe 100 at one point?

I love watching people build little businesses, iterate, and find success. It was really cool to see them all working on their various things, celebrating the little wins, and sharing things they learned along the way.

But to be honest, I’ve gradually unfollowed most of them. Many of them got a little too into the self-promotion angle and their content became repetitive “follow me for more content like this” bits. It felt like half of them were repeating same variations of the popular topic of the week every week, because they were! When threads were the thing to do I’d see the same topic rehashed to death in thread form for about 2 weeks by different people until they all moved on to the next topic.

Another chunk of them slowly pivoted from their own business to selling courses, educational materials, or “pay $499 to access my private community of builders” deals. I hit the unfollow button as soon as they pivot to this stuff.

There are a few that I still follow, but if I’m being honest I don’t know that I’ve learned a whole lot. The most successful ones always have their business success wrapped up largely in their giant social media followings, which turns into a game of how well they can market to their audience without being off putting. The most famous example is the levels.io guy, who is by all means an honest and great guy but nevertheless appears to be making businesses that spread by word-of-Twitter because he has such an audience. Nothing wrong with that, really, but after watching it for a few years you realize that it’s not repeatable unless you can play the Twitter game successfully at massive scale, which is what a lot of these influencers and up trying with mixed success.

There are two kinds of jealousy, the motivating kind and the demotivating kind. For example, most folks here are probably somewhat jealous of how rich Linus Torvald is, but this kind of jealousy motivates one to perfect one's craft and pursue ambitious projects. The story posted here tends to generate the kind of jealousy that demotivates. I think that's where the negativity comes from.