Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My solopreneur story

news.tonydinh.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 669 posts

Re: My solopreneur story

#561

Post by danbruc »

imgabe wrote: post #553
danbruc wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If, then I would have to do it at zero profits. But I already have a job.

Oh, so you won’t work to provide something for free, but you lament that someone else also won’t work for free. I see.

I did not say this. If I build it in five days - and for simplicity assuming no future maintenance, support or service costs - than I would want to make say $5k for five days of work. Profit is revenue minus costs and costs include salaries. So I never said anyone should do anything for free.

But I have a problem with making money without doing any work. If you put in a week of work, then you should be paid for a week of work, you should not profit from indefinitely selling the result of that work again and again. Or even worse, make it into a subscription so that you do not even have to sell it again and again but can just repeatedly extract money from your customers.

Re: My solopreneur story

#562

Post by skwee357 »

gizmo wrote: post #557
skwee357 wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be offensive, but you sound like the guy who I don’t want to be. Sitting there, figuring out the perfect number of posts to share at the perfect time. I don’t want to do that. I post a lot. On all platforms. But I don’t want to play games. Maybe I’m stupid, but I believe there is more than one way to succeed. Edit: I also feel like this entire industry is based on survivorship bias. You post into the void, tha…

You’re not stupid, and your constraints are reasonable and fine. However; if you want to succeed based on the strength of your product then your product has to be amazing. You only get consistent word of mouth marketing if your product blows people away by how good it is. You don’t have to play stupid marketing games, but you do need to have a website where you explain what your product does and you need at least a l…

Thanks.

But that’s the problem. I haven’t used any of Tony’s products, but it’s hard to believe that each and one of them—is outstanding.

And this is the missing part. I see a lot of people on twitter, who build all kind of products. None of them are the next Facebook, and yet some of them are able to generate pretty nice MRR. But I rarely see people talking about how they promote their products.

It’s always one of two: (1) people use click bait and “beating the algorithm” tactics, or (2) they come up with an explanation of their success, after they already succeeded (I.e. I posted everyday, and based on survivorship bias I came to a conclusion that you need to post X time a day, interact with Y people, and your first comment should be a link to your product).

Re: My solopreneur story

#563

Post by nico »

skwee357 wrote: post #546
nico wrote: post #471

Earlier 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…

Not to be offensive, but you sound like the guy who I don’t want to be. Sitting there, figuring out the perfect number of posts to share at the perfect time. I don’t want to do that. I post a lot. On all platforms. But I don’t want to play games. Maybe I’m stupid, but I believe there is more than one way to succeed. Edit: I also feel like this entire industry is based on survivorship bias. You post into the void, tha…

Not offended. But I think you might be mis-understanding my post

The main take away you should have is that you need to be consistent, have a system and give your audience what _they_ want

Posting a lot about whatever topic you want to talk about whenever you want to talk about it will probably not work, especially if you are only talking about your product

People don’t care about you or your product, they care about themselves and their problems

Marketing is work, just like any other, it’s not a fun past time that you do on the side after you spent most of your day working on the product

And yes, people do get lucky, but the most successful people at building a personal brand are consistent in building an audience to try to increase their “luck surface”

Re: My solopreneur story

#564

Post by imgabe »

danbruc wrote: post #561
imgabe wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, so you won’t work to provide something for free, but you lament that someone else also won’t work for free. I see.

I did not say this. If I build it in five days - and for simplicity assuming no future maintenance, support or service costs - than I would want to make say $5k for five days of work. Profit is revenue minus costs and costs include salaries. So I never said anyone should do anything for free. But I have a problem with making money without doing any work. If you put in a week of work, then you should be paid for a wee…

Utterly insane. If you write a piece of software you can only sell it once? That makes no sense.

And a subscription means you are administering a server (or some menagerie of “serverless” resources) which is an ongoing service that requires maintenance and cost, so that’s what people are paying for, a premium to not have to do that administration themselves.

Like you just want people to suffer? It pains you if people make money without a sufficient amount of hardship?

Re: My solopreneur story

#565

Post by tomaskafka »

sokoloff wrote: post #18
unsupp0rted wrote: post #4

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…

You got an unsatisfactory reply to a support ticket. What's the realistic alternative with other software vendors of $20-50 products? IMO, the most common is not "a satisfactory reply" but rather "no [edit to add: human-generated] reply".

I run such a product, I try to create an expectation that I read every email (I do), but I may not able to answer it, and I much prefer spending time fixing the actual bug or updating the UI or docs (which scales) to responding (which doesn't scale).

Re: My solopreneur story

#566

Post by danbruc »

imgabe wrote: post #551
danbruc wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under idealized conditions they would all take some training and learn to program.

What’s stopping them? You can learn to program with free information from the Internet. How much more ideal does it need to be?

Do you think all the people cleaning toilets for little money prefer their job over sitting in a comfortable office and getting well paid? If not, then there have to be barriers.

Here are some. You need time, you may need additional education before you can even start to tackle programming. You might have to move. You might just not be smart enough. You might not be an autodidact and need a teacher which might cost money. You need a computer for which you might not have the money.

Re: My solopreneur story

#567

Post by skwee357 »

nico wrote: post #563
skwee357 wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be offensive, but you sound like the guy who I don’t want to be. Sitting there, figuring out the perfect number of posts to share at the perfect time. I don’t want to do that. I post a lot. On all platforms. But I don’t want to play games. Maybe I’m stupid, but I believe there is more than one way to succeed. Edit: I also feel like this entire industry is based on survivorship bias. You post into the void, tha…

Not offended. But I think you might be mis-understanding my post The main take away you should have is that you need to be consistent, have a system and give your audience what _they_ want Posting a lot about whatever topic you want to talk about whenever you want to talk about it will probably not work, especially if you are only talking about your product People don’t care about you or your product, they care about…

I agree with you.

I just feel that “giving the people what they want”, is directly translated to asking stupid questions such as “do you read fantasy or sci-fi?” Or posting new-age motivational bullshit quotes.

I don’t do that. I share my journey, and my insights from it. I share my experience. My up and down moments. And it between, promoting my products.

I know that marketing is work, and it’s a hard work. And I respect clever marketing. But like with anything else, it’s been reduced to simple and idiotic steps such as shoving your products down the throat of your users.

Here is a good example of a lame cold outreach https://x.com/skwee357/status/1705209267127558265?s=46

He sent me an email few weeks ago. I told him that my post is about OOP and not business name generator, and I’m not looking for collaboration. Few weeks later, I get the SAME email. Word by word.

I don’t want to be like this guy.

Re: My solopreneur story

#568

Post by overrun11 »

danbruc wrote: post #561
imgabe wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, so you won’t work to provide something for free, but you lament that someone else also won’t work for free. I see.

I did not say this. If I build it in five days - and for simplicity assuming no future maintenance, support or service costs - than I would want to make say $5k for five days of work. Profit is revenue minus costs and costs include salaries. So I never said anyone should do anything for free. But I have a problem with making money without doing any work. If you put in a week of work, then you should be paid for a wee…

> I would want to make say $5k for five days of work

You completely ignore expected value. The most likely outcome is that you make nothing for your five days of work. A functioning market requires outsized returns to compensate for the huge failure risk that goes unseen.

90% chance of making nothing, 10% chance of making 10x your salary is a stable state that is not exploitable.

Re: My solopreneur story

#569

Post by imgabe »

danbruc wrote: post #566
imgabe wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s stopping them? You can learn to program with free information from the Internet. How much more ideal does it need to be?

Do you think all the people cleaning toilets for little money prefer their job over sitting in a comfortable office and getting well paid? If not, then there have to be barriers. Here are some. You need time, you may need additional education before you can even start to tackle programming. You might have to move. You might just not be smart enough. You might not be an autodidact and need a teacher which might cost m…

Most people have computers. You don’t need to be in any particular place to learn to program as long as you have internet access.

But yes, you might not be smart enough. Which was the point. The supply of people smart enough to program is smaller than the supply of people smart enough to clean toilets. Programming is a more complex and difficult skill than toilet cleaning, which is why it’s more highly compensated. So is being a CEO. Like these are clearly not equivalently difficult things, so why do you think they should be compensated equivalently?

Re: My solopreneur story

#570

Post by wahnfrieden »

gumballindie wrote: post #28
xwdv wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the day of low hanging fruits, stories like this were very common on HN. I think it’s harder for software developers to attain this kind of success today, and as a result they have developed an allergy to capitalism.

Well of course it’s hard since they made all their software available for free to corporate communes. Instead they should charge anyone earning > idk 1 million in revenue a fee. I know these freeloaders (amazons, microsofts, and apples) expect our hard earned money and code for free but i think it would be fair to make them start paying. Then you’d get more indie software developer success stories.

There are recent software licenses, which are interesting to use for exclusively permitting worker owned, cooperatives or individuals

One called anti capitalist another with another more marketable name

Of course license holders are also free to resell their work under other private per customer licenses in addition to the open source one

Post reply on HN