451–460 of 669 posts
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Sounds like you need a business partner. Me too.
If only there was some way to connect 10x SWEs with 10x MBAs :/ An 'accelerator' of some description, perhaps.
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Yep, I know people in the "boring" industries, making software or running the marketing for plumbers, electricians, med spas, etc. They're at 6 or more figures a month doing that, and they're in industries most software engineers won't dare look.
This is the kind of stuff i want to know more about. I wish it was promoted more on HN. Those people are what I like to call hackers and painters. Nothing hacky about getting VC money or winning the lottery. Building a small thing that works in the 6 figures is.
I've found great insight through following actual marketers though, such as Jordan Platten on YouTube who builds a social media marketing agency from scratch via cold calls [1]. Now this is, in my opinion, what programmers should be doing, not learning the latest new Javascript framework to make their MVP just right.
On Reddit, there is similarly /r/sweatystartup [2] which also has a website with more podcasts and articles [3]. But the gist is that it's more about boring industries like lawn care, plumbing etc than shiny tech businesses. One of the best things you can do is to take a look at [2] and call 100 local businesses in a niche you pick (lawn care, etc), ask them about their problems then either start a competing service or start creating software for that niche. Nick Huber, the guy who started the subreddit and site, did both and has a ~$25 million business now.
The above is basically what I'm doing, I'm looking into making software for the boring industry of social media marketing.
[0] https://podcasts.google.com/search/Indie%20Hackers
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdO5xp5occOzfVGNbR_WZ...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/sweatystartup/comments/dmgy0f/usefu...
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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.
IMHO this is the difference between real innovation and productization. The invention of the transistor is a real innovation, the transistor radio is a mere product. That's not to say products don't have value, but they're just... not as impressive to me. Nothing that Dropbox does (or did? is it still around?) is technically innovative. I guess it's nice for that rich guy that he identified a user-friendly box that p…
> Nothing that Dropbox does (or did? is it still around?) is technically innovative. I guess it's nice for that rich guy that he identified a user-friendly box that people would pay for.
Technology is a tool for people, there is no value to technology (and it doesn't matter how "innovate" it is) if people don't use it.
> ~90% profit Even though I understand the mechanics of the free market, in how many other fields do we consider this kind of profit margins to be honest ? What about a farmer selling at a 90% profit? A pharmacist? A banker? Good for him though, "why not if he can", after all. I'm just not sure how I feel about it...
Also I'm not sure banks are a good example. Over the course of my mortgage, I will end up paying more than I borrowed in interest.
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What do you use the tool for?
Making screenshots that I mark up with arrows, boxes and labels and then email. Xsnapper is far nicer-looking and far quicker (via numeric keyboard shortcuts for markup options) than macOS built-in utils for this.
The best alternative I found is shottr ( https://shottr.cc ), and I cobbled together a thing that scratches my itch: https://github.com/philsnow/shots-filed
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I wish this absolutely ridiculous, unthinking trope of treating communities of thousands of people as one mind that’s only allowed to have one opinion would finally stop.
in consensus based communities that only show you a reality based on what comments people upvote, it is not ridiculous at all when a different community would have completely different sentiment it is reflective of the audience
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Yep, I know people in the "boring" industries, making software or running the marketing for plumbers, electricians, med spas, etc. They're at 6 or more figures a month doing that, and they're in industries most software engineers won't dare look.
This is the kind of stuff i want to know more about. I wish it was promoted more on HN. Those people are what I like to call hackers and painters. Nothing hacky about getting VC money or winning the lottery. Building a small thing that works in the 6 figures is.
In short:
> Entrepreneurship embodies this romanticized vision of Shark Tank and Tech Crunch and newness and innovation when in reality most people need to simplify the way they think. I judged a pitch competition at UGA a few months ago, and all I could think of with every pitch was the need to simplify. People want to complicate things, do something revolutionary, and chase glory and the lure of entrepreneurship, but that doesn’t mean they have a real shot at being successful.
> When you take away the sex appeal and fun, you come into a more rational and less saturated market. There’s a shortage of people doing things that aren’t fun, that’s why plumbers make more than most people with liberal arts degrees.
> With sweaty businesses, all you need to do is answer the phone and do what you say you’re going to do and you can make a lot of money. Innovation is sexy and fun, but the way people make real money is by copying others. My first business was just a Frankenstein take on the current offerings and competitors I saw around me.
> The businesses I love aren’t fun. People are told to chase their passion, but the entrepreneurs that make money are chasing customers. The market doesn’t care about your passion, you need to provide real value in something that customers want.
I paid for & use one of Tony's products (Xnapper for screenshots). It's good, but I reported a cropping bug, along with a replication bullet list and .gif screencast of me replicating the bug. I got a response from a support person telling me to increase border padding beyond any reasonable aesthetic level. Aesthetics is the purpose of buying the product, otherwise non-aesthetic screenshots are built into macOS. The…
They have a problem with their css media queries that causes necessary navigation items to completely disappear as certain screen sizes, making the software unusable. Their answer, when I reported this, was to resize the browser window. The answer, I suspect, was from a low pay support worker.
Outsourcing support isn't easy, even if you do care about quality, and have a decent budget.
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You are only angry because you too want to escape and are externalising the frustration of not finding a similar path. At least thats what i learned about myself when i had a similar reaction seeing such success stories. Then it struck me - this is it. This is the way for indie success. Build stuff that makes sense to a niche market. To me the product is irrelevant. But the fact that the author escaped is absolute bl…
While it's true that niches work, the actual money maker is to create your own niche by forking an existing one. While 45k / month is impressive, the ones who are making 6 figures and above per month, are doing it in niches which aren't "built in public".
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.