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My solopreneur story

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Re: My solopreneur story

#571

Post by skwee357 »

skwee357 wrote: post #559
4gotunameagain wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’m with you my friend. I’d rather go back to be employed and post helpful stuff to my blog, than try to promote my products using click bait tactics on social media. It’s funny, but when you post an obvious click bait to Reddit/hn everybody is like “this is clickbait, the author is trying to sell you his coaching”, etc. But then, when you say you don’t want to participate in algorithm hunger games, everyone is like…

Here is a good example. About 2.5 months ago, I’ve shared a blog post I wrote, here on HN [1].

The blog post was authentic with a simple purpose: (1) I like to write, and (2) I believed writing is beneficial to everyone. I share all my blog posts here, none of them performed as well as this one (check my profile if you want).

Seeing the success and the traffic this post generated, I crafted a quick form to offer FREE coaching session. Free as Linux free. I gave 2.5 hours of my time for free. In exchange, I asked my mentees for testimonials. A fair transaction I guess. It’s a great way to build my brand.

I put a small, non intrusive banner on my blog, with a message of free coaching session (the same banner now promotes my book). It’s not a pop up that jumps when you scroll to the bottom, it’s not a JavaScript scripts that pops up when you close the tab. It’s a ~30px, non sticky bar at the top, the goes away with a little scroll.

Top comment on HN? My post is cringy and I’m yet another “coaching bro” that promotes his stuff. :shrug:

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36659166

Re: My solopreneur story

#572

Post by nico »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #493
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…

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)

It’s not juvenile games, it’s hard work. If it was easy games everyone would be raking it in

If anything, the juvenile thing to do is to look at reality the way it is and deny it because it doesn’t fit our personal world view

I get it, we’d love a world in which we could just do our best work and everyone could see it and recognize it

But reality is that people are thinking about themselves and are not searching for what we are building. How would they ever find out about what we do if we are not telling them?

You have a serious misunderstanding of what marketing is if you think it’s slyness and trickery

Of course I’m not going to convince you otherwise, but I think it might help you to actually do research, read a marketing book and talk to people in marketing to understand what it really is

Re: My solopreneur story

#573

Post by nico »

skwee357 wrote: post #571
skwee357 wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m with you my friend. I’d rather go back to be employed and post helpful stuff to my blog, than try to promote my products using click bait tactics on social media. It’s funny, but when you post an obvious click bait to Reddit/hn everybody is like “this is clickbait, the author is trying to sell you his coaching”, etc. But then, when you say you don’t want to participate in algorithm hunger games, everyone is like…

Here is a good example. About 2.5 months ago, I’ve shared a blog post I wrote, here on HN [1]. The blog post was authentic with a simple purpose: (1) I like to write, and (2) I believed writing is beneficial to everyone. I share all my blog posts here, none of them performed as well as this one (check my profile if you want). Seeing the success and the traffic this post generated, I crafted a quick form to offer FREE…

So what? You need to grow a thicker skin

Building an audience and selling a product is in large part about rejection. You will get tons of comments like that. Haters are going to hate, no matter what you do

Yes, it hurts, but just keep going. If the top comment represented everyone’s sentiment, your post wouldn’t have gotten 200+ upvotes (congrats by the way, not an easy feat)

Re: My solopreneur story

#574

Post by kyawzazaw »

danbruc wrote: post #516
kyawzazaw wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you able to tell with that much certainty of the users needs?

If those people had only access to overpriced water, then yes, making this market failure go away would be a worthwhile undertaking with a meaningful positive outcome. But people getting overcharged on a progressbar around their Twitter profile picture, who cares? And who could not live without that or do it manually with Paint at the cost of some additional time? My original comment was just meant as a general comme…

> But people getting overcharged on a progressbar around their Twitter profile picture, who cares?

evidently, these people, who are paying money are finding value in it and they care.

> And who could not live without that?

What does this even mean? What difference is it from people who want their landscaping or house look a certain way so they pay money to others to do that for them. at the

> or do it manually with Paint at the cost of some additional time?

time is valuable or they just dont want to do it.

I don't understand the logic of all of these. What???

Re: My solopreneur story

#575

Post by kyawzazaw »

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…

> 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

do you think the same for authors and musicians?

Re: My solopreneur story

#576

Post by danbruc »

imgabe wrote: post #564
danbruc wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not sell it only once. Nobody would ever have bought an Office license if it would be priced at development costs. But lifetime revenue should be in a reasonable relation to development costs. And everything gets more complicated with expected support cost and updates and whatnot. I can not possibly mention all imaginable complications.

Just take the general gist, if you are not working, then you should not be making money. And I do not want people to suffer, I want them to be better off. There are many people that actually do hard or badly paid work, software development is not one of them.

If you overcharge your customers to be able to hang out at the beach half of the week, then you are just taking money away from them that they could otherwise spend on say higher priced vegetables improving the wages of seasonal workers.

Maybe another way to see it is that I dislike people that are already well off not being satisfied. What if everyone wanted to only work four hours a day and earn $45k per month? Does this sound like an sustainable idea?

Re: My solopreneur story

#577

Post by kyawzazaw »

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.

YC == high impact? Have you seen the cohorts of startups YC has funded?

Re: My solopreneur story

#578

Post by kyawzazaw »

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…

There is no courses being sold here though. Isn't this part of being transparent? HN often complains about non-transparent pricing in SaaS pricing pages but now complains about an indie dev telling all about the revenues and the relevant metrics that lead to this revenue?

I am baffled.

Re: My solopreneur story

#579

Post by kyawzazaw »

aogaili wrote: post #355
DandyDev wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this guy "exploiting" people? He sells products mostly for a one-time fee - something HN often reminds us is way better than "subscription for everything". And these products obviously serve people well. And since when is being successful and in detail explaining how you went about it "bragging"?

I didn't say exploiting people. I said exploiting niche opportunities and piggybacking on the shoulders of corporate workers, ain't nothing wrong in that. In fact, I praise his hustling and envious of it.

> piggybacking on the shoulders of corporate workers

Isn't that what we all do when use API calls? Or even open a nenw tab in Firefox?

Re: My solopreneur story

#580

Post by satvikpendem »

sohnakukkar wrote: post #525
satvikpendem wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my type of business, which is more B2B, cold calling and cold emails have worked the best. Both are free but take some time to set up and tweak scripts/emails, not to mention the time it takes to cold call as well. In the future I'm going to be running a few thousand in Facebook and Google ad spend.

How do you get list of companies to target? What is your conversion rate? Do you do the cold calls yourself?

Lots of lead scraper websites online, D7 leads, KleanLeads, Apollo is a big one. My niche is local businesses however so I just go to Google maps and compile a list manually although there are some Chrome extensions that just scrape it for you for free. Then I cold call myself, yeah.
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