My solopreneur story • Hacker News Board

Re: My solopreneur story

#411

Post by pc86 » Sat, Sep 23, 2023, 9:54 PM UTC

shrimpx wrote: post #231

didip wrote: post #122

I am surprised people reduced this article as just another pet rock. Dude's journey has some interesting nuggets. He knows how to time box himself and build the smallest MVP that will actually make money. And his journey is not an overnight success either, it took him years to build everything including his social presence. Compare that to a W-2 job where you just have to show up 9am-5pm. HN is showing its overly cri…

I think the guy’s aesthetic just turns people off here. He seems intensely invested in how to make virality happen in any way possible, and building simplistic stuff that’s not advancing the state of tech. People here want to see technical contributions and organic success. It’s kind of ironic since this is a forum made by a VC company, but I doubt the Tony guy could get into YC with his ideas, despite his 70k follow…

Very few of YC's companies have done anything to "advance the state of tech," especially the successful ones. According to their website the top three by revenue are Airbnb, Instacart, and Doordash.

Re: My solopreneur story

#412

Post by AussieWog93 » Sat, Sep 23, 2023, 10:09 PM UTC

bruce511 wrote: post #402

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…

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…

>In truth sales and marketing are orders of magnitude more valuable

As someone who's been on both sides of the fence, this isn't true either.

Both engineering and sales are important, and there are probably as many entrepreneurs who have failed by spending all their time marketing and selling a shit product as there are those who get bogged down in technical minutiae.

Re: My solopreneur story

#413

Post by Aurornis » Sat, Sep 23, 2023, 10:10 PM UTC

bruce511 wrote: post #402

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…

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…

> 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.

Programmers do get paid a lot, relatively speaking.

The disconnect is that programming and creating a business are different skills.

There are occasional examples of someone programming a thing so useful that it sells itself, but they are extremely rare. Most of these success stories come with major marketing attached, although it’s often hidden. In this case the person was marketing through Twitter, including promoted Tweets. It’s not mentioned in the article, but the business is more about cultivating a social media presence and getting a fractional percentage of them to convert into sales.

There’s nothing wrong with this, of course! However, the marketing and personal brand angle are often overlooked by indie hackers who think they’re going to make a great business that people will just discover randomly and pay them for.

One of the best examples would be the indie hacker who first got a lot of attention for his job board business. There have been hundreds of indie hacker job boards popping up ever since, but none of them get the same traction as the person who built it as a Twitter sensation. The Twitter presence and ensuing brand recognition was a key part of the business, but it gets overlooked by people who are just wowed by the MRR numbers.

Re: My solopreneur story

#414

Post by dinvlad » Sat, Sep 23, 2023, 10:12 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #404

dinvlad wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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'…

I'm not even sure solo is at a disadvantage here - on the contrary, regular companies are bogged down by a massive tech pit, because of which they can't move fast, and only keep adding to that according to Conway's law.

Imho 90% of 90-developer companies out there could be replaced by 1-2 devs working same hours but more efficiently with a more efficient stack. I'm not even joking!

Re: My solopreneur story

#415

Post by tacker2000 » Sat, Sep 23, 2023, 10:26 PM UTC

benjaminwootton wrote: post #103

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. It seems like some strange playbook where you build a very simple product and shout about (possibly exaggerate) your success to attract eyeballs. Then you sell the real thing which is a c…

Its exactly the same spiel as all these Amazon seller “gurus” on Youtube telling you how to sell properly and how much they are making, but they only make money with their courses, etc…

If you hang out long enough on indiehackers you realize most of the people there dont want to create businesses, they just want to amass more followers and readers in order to peddle their “dev tools” or whatever

Re: My solopreneur story

#416

Post by throwing_away » Sat, Sep 23, 2023, 10:27 PM UTC

bruce511 wrote: post #402

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…

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…

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

Remember, kids: you don't get what you deserve -- you get what you negotiate.

Re: My solopreneur story

#417

Post by danbruc » Sat, Sep 23, 2023, 10:27 PM UTC

free_energy_min wrote: post #396

danbruc wrote: post #217

90% profit is a market failure, you should not be able to overcharge your customers almost 10x in a working market.

It’s not the same as profit margin in other business it doesn’t take into account labor costs. How much is his time worth?

Pick some random full-time developer salary, say $100k per year, and cut this in half as he says he works four hours per day.

Re: My solopreneur story

#418

Post by NavinF » Sat, Sep 23, 2023, 10:41 PM UTC

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...

That's definitely not why it's infamous lol. That article's comments have much more reasonable takes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16675883

Re: My solopreneur story

#419

Post by Supply5411 » Sat, Sep 23, 2023, 10:45 PM UTC

I tried to read this with an open mind to learn something that may help me on a similar journey. However, I found it challenging to get any new nuggets of advice or wisdom. Maybe the "#buildinpublic" movement and interacting with that community? Otherwise it just seems like he found his groove, but it's not really transferable.

Re: My solopreneur story

#420

Post by ncallaway » Sat, Sep 23, 2023, 10:58 PM UTC

williamtrask wrote: post #242

ncallaway wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the record, I am not jealous – I make my money doing literally whatever I want, on projects that I find much more exciting, with ample time left over for nature walks, rock climbing, reading, and more. Unlike these authors, the money I make is not the most interesting part of my story Frankly, I think you’re being incredibly rude to assume that because someone shared their story on a topic, then it must be thei…

To be fair. The title of the post only focuses on money and completely ignores whether the work has any real value to themself or society. Kindof implies pretty strongly “their identity”.

> Kindof implies pretty strongly “their identity”.

Respectfully, it doesn’t, I don’t think you’re being fair, and I think saying it does is rude and presumptuous.

It pretty strongly implies “what they chose to write a blog post about”.

If, in the blog post they described focusing on nothing else but money, I’d agree with you. But they don’t.

> I still want to get more revenue, but I realized that this is a moving goalpost, and it will never stop. $10K, then $20K, then $50K. I knew I would never satisfied.

> It’s much better to work and play at the same time.

> So I traveled. I went for a trip around Vietnam.

> My average working hours during this period was about 4 hours/day. I still tweet a lot

Clearly there’s more to this person than doing nothing but focusing on money. Just because they chose to write this blog post, doesn’t mean it’s their entire identity.