90% profit is a market failure, you should not be able to overcharge your customers almost 10x in a working market.
Why are you on this forum if you hate capitalism? It’s an advertising funnel for a VC firm, in case you don’t know.
My solopreneur story
491–500 of 669 posts
Re: My solopreneur story
#49290% profit is a market failure, you should not be able to overcharge your customers almost 10x in a working market.
Why are you on this forum if you hate capitalism? It’s an advertising funnel for a VC firm, in case you don’t know.
People have different ideas what capitalism exactly means, but free matkets are generally part of it. And properly working free markets would ensure that profits are zero and that to a first approximation everyone earns the same. Making profits and getting rich is against the spirit of capitalism.
Re: My solopreneur story
#493I’m very happy for Tony, it’s a great achievement indeed. Having said that, as an aspiring solopreneur myself, this article misses a very big part. Engineers like to talk about how they build products, but we rarely talk about how to market them. I quit my job 5 months ago, launched my first SaaS 3 months ago, and got zero users. I then started to tweet, write in LinkedIn, and focus on my newsletter. But I barely get…
It’s very hard to build a following without a system and without copying content For LinkedIn, ideally you should be posting at least 5 times a week, reposting your best performing content, re-phrasing or straight up copying viral content, and adding as many people to your contacts as possible every day (there’s a weekly limit, and there’s also a 20k total limit, so you also need to figure out what type of contacts y…
I'd rather be unemployed and live off charity kitchen soups than engage in these juvenile games.
As a society we need to find a way to stop rewarding slyness and trickery (aka marketing)
Re: My solopreneur story
#49490% profit is a market failure, you should not be able to overcharge your customers almost 10x in a working market.
90% never lasts for long. Its called the law of attractive profits. The more attractive your profits are, the more competition you attract.
Sure, that's the theory. In theory someone cleaning toilets should also earn more than software developers or CEOs. People doing badly paid unpleasant jobs should all learn to program or manage a company and then drive down the salaries until cleaning toilets pays a premium because it is unpleasant work no one wants to do.
Re: My solopreneur story
#49590% profit is a market failure, you should not be able to overcharge your customers almost 10x in a working market.
Have you ever heard of a company called Apple?
I have no idea how high Apple's profit margins are, but I am quite sure they are not small. But what is your point, that is also a market failure.
Re: My solopreneur story
#49690% profit is a market failure, you should not be able to overcharge your customers almost 10x in a working market.
Why don’t you exploit that market failure?
Not interested. I would feel bad for overcharging people and getting rich from that. And if I would charge them the actual costs, then I would mostly just destroy that guy's business and save some thousand people each a couple of bucks on some utilities that they almost certainly do not really need and are voluntarily paying for.
Re: My solopreneur story
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s very hard to build a following without a system and without copying content For LinkedIn, ideally you should be posting at least 5 times a week, reposting your best performing content, re-phrasing or straight up copying viral content, and adding as many people to your contacts as possible every day (there’s a weekly limit, and there’s also a 20k total limit, so you also need to figure out what type of contacts y…
I'd rather be unemployed and live off charity kitchen soups than engage in these juvenile games. As a society we need to find a way to stop rewarding slyness and trickery (aka marketing)
I want to think of marketing as a way of providing valuable content and explaining why your product might be just what the consumer needs (potentially helping them with their problems).
What's described above really doesn't fit into this view, but is definitely how I've seen people "play the game". ChatGPT-generated fluff, copied content, and the same tips & tricks, inspirational stories, etc. you see repurposed all the time on different platforms - especially LinkedIn.
I hope marketing can be good and value-adding but, the way it's going right now, we're due for a change.
Re: My solopreneur story
#498I’m very happy for Tony, it’s a great achievement indeed. Having said that, as an aspiring solopreneur myself, this article misses a very big part. Engineers like to talk about how they build products, but we rarely talk about how to market them. I quit my job 5 months ago, launched my first SaaS 3 months ago, and got zero users. I then started to tweet, write in LinkedIn, and focus on my newsletter. But I barely get…
A fellow solopreneur here, I've been doing it for several years now.
I browsed through your profile, website, Twitter account, and I'm still not sure what your product is and what it does. Is it consulting? Coaching? Book?
You don't have a lot of followers (me neither), so tweeting won't get you far as you're talking into a void. Instead, join existing discussions where people already are. Also, don't use too many hashtags - it looks spammy.
Not trying to put you down, just offering a different perspective you might not hear otherwise. I hope you succeed.
Re: My solopreneur story
#499> ~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...
The 90% didn‘t account for his time working on the stuff. So you can reduce from the $500k/year his salary - and now the 90% margin is far away. Indie hackers never factor in their working time.
Re: My solopreneur story
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
IndieHackers has more on this, they have a forum but their podcasts especially are the real value [0]. But most people on there are tech people, not marketers, so you'll still get a skewed version of reality. 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…
While this is true and I agree partially, I think there is a big elephant in the room. Today's hackers are simply copycats. Now this is not their fault. In the 90s and early 2000s when I grew up, the web was just getting established which means we had to learn stuff to do interesting things.
Nowadays, people start learning React and useEffect hooks as their "first programming" experience. That is simply insane to me.
What this causes, is a fundamental inability to understand what a computer is actually capable of. Which in turn means a lot of hackers are actually not innovating on technology and using tech in new ways to solve problems in the real world. "What can technology unlock" is a powerful question. One that is not asked nearly enough in my opinion and that's where the riches lie in tech.
Our contribution to the world is not marketing, and while we still need to do some of it, there is still a lot of money to be made by unlocking things for people by using technology in novel ways and for that one needs to actually step out of the herd mentality once in a while.
So instead of Jordan Platten I would recommend Andreas Kling [0] instead. Imagine if you could build a custom OS for an industry which needs to use only certain programs and use low powered devices? That is how you can make tremendous wealth both in the financial sense but also in the actual "value creation" sense.