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My solopreneur story

news.tonydinh.com

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Re: My solopreneur story

#441

Post by trungdq88 »

redbell wrote: post #368

“People are rewarded in public for what they practice for years in private. ” — Tony Robbins Whenever I heard about a success story, especially, when the hero is an indie hacker, the above quote hits my brain. I would assume that nobody here would disagree that zero to $45K/mo in 2 years is a jaw-dropping number but once you read the full story with all behind-the-scenes challenges, blood, sweet and tears you quickly…

Thank you the kind words! I did post the link myself but it didn't get a lot of votes like this one.

Re: My solopreneur story

#443

Post by rwhyan »

Lemmi wrote: post #13

I read it and I don't know it's a story I would not want to have. It feels like the good friend who always has some side hussle instead of just doing something useful.

$45k/month is more than a "side hustle."

And Tony's products ARE useful. Or else people wouldn't buy them.

Value is subjective.

Re: My solopreneur story

#444

Post by manicennui »

shrimpx wrote: post #336
noident wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would Tony want to get into YC? He's already making enough money that he "hit the brakes" while answering to no one. Sounds like a better deal to me than being some tech gazillionaire's sharecropper.

Was just talking myself through why this forum would be unfriendly to this guy Tony. A forum that is run by YCombinator, a company that presumably values entrepreneurship. And my take is that both this forum and YC are fairly aligned on "high impact" ideas and don't value people like Tony, monetizing basic ideas using social media influence.

Really? Most YC startups do not seem to be high impact.

Re: My solopreneur story

#445

Post by vunderba »

keiferski wrote: post #54
naillo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well dalle3 pretty much has that niche covered

Meh, I still am not convinced that the blank chat box is a good UI. You still need to know what to say and how to say it. Too much implicit knowledge is required.

You should watch the dall-e 3 trailers. The whole leap forward is that you can just write a description of the scene, the more descriptive the better. The coherence and accuracy seems to be far better than MJ or even SDXL. There's less prompt fu nonsense (aka 4k, hdr, trending on art station, etc) than ever.

Re: My solopreneur story

#446

Post by michaelteter »

gejose wrote: post #212

Great read! I don't know why there's so much negativity in the comments, but great job Tony!

Jealousy maybe. Or frustration that marketing often seems to be more important than anything else. HN probably has more good devs than good marketers, and some of us (dev) really hate doing marketing.

A story like this seems to reinforce that just being good at product development or software development isn't enough, and that it _might_ be more effective to be mediocre at development and good at marketing. (Not to suggest that TFA author is mediocre at development.)

Re: My solopreneur story

#447

Post by atleastoptimal »

Its amazing that as a senior developer he was making 1700 a month USD, which is about 20k a year. Salaries for software devs outside America are so comically low. I understand why the remote work sphere is completely flooded, simply being a junior dev in America doing simple stuff right out of college and you make 6 figs. That's a platinum ticket in 99% of countries.

Re: My solopreneur story

#448

Post by ilamont »

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…

Another red flag: "Sign up for my free newsletter/access video tutorials" which turns into an upsell for an expensive "masterclass"/private discussion group. In the Amazon passive income universe, these typically run $1500/year.

Re: My solopreneur story

#449

Post by majani »

Aurornis wrote: post #31

I always enjoy reading success stories of developers of small apps. At the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re seeing only a cherry picked part of the picture. There is no mention of advertising spend or customer acquisition costs. The trend among indie hackers is to talk about MRR without mentioning a single expense, then to interleave it all with “follow me on Twitter” so you’re inspired to join their a…

The smoking gun is the fact that this story could absolutely kill his golden goose, which is easily replicable. In the next few weeks there will be 10 new competitors for ChatGPT wrappers, all armed with paid marketing budgets to try and get a piece of this high margin business.

The only reason he would risk committing business suicide like this is because building the personal brand is more important to him than keeping this business afloat. If he really wanted to grow the business, there seems to be enough margin in it to support very aggressive paid marketing

Re: My solopreneur story

#450

Post by satvikpendem »

majani wrote: post #449
Aurornis wrote: post #31

I always enjoy reading success stories of developers of small apps. At the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re seeing only a cherry picked part of the picture. There is no mention of advertising spend or customer acquisition costs. The trend among indie hackers is to talk about MRR without mentioning a single expense, then to interleave it all with “follow me on Twitter” so you’re inspired to join their a…

The smoking gun is the fact that this story could absolutely kill his golden goose, which is easily replicable. In the next few weeks there will be 10 new competitors for ChatGPT wrappers, all armed with paid marketing budgets to try and get a piece of this high margin business. The only reason he would risk committing business suicide like this is because building the personal brand is more important to him than kee…

There already are tons of ChatGPT wrappers already, both now and when Tony started initially, but Tony still succeeded in building one of the top ones. This is because marketing matters more than product, which you've ironically not caught as the true message of this article.
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