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My solopreneur story

news.tonydinh.com

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Re: My solopreneur story

#581

Post by kyawzazaw »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #138
DecayingOrganic wrote: post #104

I've noticed that negative comments often float to the top. That’s a bit of a bummer. No one's entrepreneurial success should make you question your life choices or become a reason for your frustration. Congratulations Tony! I remember the time you quit your job and set a goal of reaching $10K/mo with a few products on twitter, it seemed crazy. But you pulled it off! Hats off to you.

It's ok for folks to express skepticism in response to someone selling shovels and dreams. Despite any insinuation in their marketing, luck isn't repeatable. All that said congrats to them on seizing the opportunity. (I too sell trinkets ;) yet am too ashamed to sell dreams) It would be nice to see a survey of all those who quit and it didn't work out compared to those who did, and their strategies. My guess is the l…

I don't see how this is shovels and dreams. There is no courses involved here or book deals.

Re: My solopreneur story

#582

Post by gizmo »

skwee357 wrote: post #562
gizmo wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Tony does a ton of marketing. Hours every day. And twitter is the logical place to market a twitter poweruser product. When you’re an indie developer selling to other indie developers just being visible on twitter /is/ marketing.

Re: My solopreneur story

#583

Post by benjaminwootton »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #578
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.

Mine was a general comment about this solopreneur/buildinpublic community works rather than any individual.

That said, I think I’ve worked out the model since yesterday. It works by building a tool for solopreneurs and then talking about your success as a solopreneur to attract them.

Re: My solopreneur story

#584

Post by jocaal »

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…

Maybe instead of advertising as free coaching, choose words that will appeal to your target audience. In your case, instead of saying free, use libre or explicitly say free as in freedom. You have to understand that many people see "free coaching" and are immediatly put into anti scam mode.

Re: My solopreneur story

#585

Post by dusanbab »

danbruc wrote: post #217

90% profit is a market failure, you should not be able to overcharge your customers almost 10x in a working market.

Gross profit, operating profit or net profit?

If you mean the latter please show us some examples of public cos with a 90% net profit margin. I don’t think there are many.

Re: My solopreneur story

#586

Post by danbruc »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #575
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…

> 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?

The first question is, do I have to? If not, then I will have to deal with all kinds of intermediate cases, say an industrial designer or film music composers. But ad hoc I tend towards making a difference and accepting that there will be a whole lot of cases that are not obvious how to deal with them. Sports professionals would be another tricky category.

I would say it lies in the nature of being an artist that the products are unique and unpredictable. Competition applies to a much smaller extent. You write one great novel at age 20, should you be able to live on the royalties for the rest of your life? In the end the consumer decides anyway, if they buy enough books at a high enough price, then you can.

As I wrote in another comment, there is also a moral aspect to this. If people willingly pay your subscription fee, then this is what it is. But do you find it good to sell your software at an inflated price in order to make yourself a nice life? How would you feel if everyone else did the same, if the supermarket staff would all only work half a day, make $45k a month and put the bill for that onto your grocery prices? I bet you would hope that competition solves the issue, otherwise your subscription income will no longer afford you a nice life.

Re: My solopreneur story

#587

Post by n_ary »

Very inspiring story and well written, heartfelt kudos.

For all the negativity comments here, I feel like these commenters read the intro paragraph and started complaining.

Unlike most of the similar indieHacker stories, this one has most details I would want to know. 99.999999% of the stories by “IndieHackers” are mostly self-congratulatory marketing bs leading to selling a consulting/book mostly about how they “followed their passion while everyone else was naysayer and how their corporate boss was a d*k” while handwaving the whole real details.

As I read the article from top-2-bottom, here are some useful tl;dr

* he had plenty time during COVID working from home while polishing his first product

* he started posting interesting daily hobby stuff(most of us do) on twitter, which people found interesting and follower grew

* he gained some initial traction from one HN & then ProductHunt posting of his product

* he lived in Singapore and earned ~$8800(~12k in SGD) and average cost of living is nearly half(or cheaper if he lived as single person) and usually tax is progressive reaching up to 22%, so he saved a good amount of cushion money(he mentioned in the post that he saved up for 2 years of living cost if he moved back to Vietnam or if frugally living then easily 4 years)

* in his post, he mentioned that $1k/month is adequate for comfortable living in his home country(Vietnam), so at $45k/month, even accounting for all taxes and misc. he is probably a very wealthy person if he moved back to Vietnam

* majority of his marketing channel was newsletter and twitter followers(first difficult 100 were probably gained from HN & PH posting)

* his products might not be ground breaking but it was very useful for average joe on twitter(remember we HN folks are very tech sophisticated, to most average joe, finding some pretty numbers about how many people their tweet reached is like feeling lightyears ahead and magic!)

* unlike other high ego IndieHackers, Tony didn’t engage in hiding his risks, he came clean about his twitter product being unsustainable due to sudden subscription model of twitter-post-elon, and sold it off($128k) which gave him good amount of cash to grow his other projects

* COL in vietnam is pretty cheap compared to our Western lands of dream and $45k/month minus other stuff is still a lot of money, which can give a QOL x10 better than what we can afford for x10 that amount here

* from the article he is not selling any coaching/tutoring/here-is-how-I-won-some-lottery-pay-me-money-to-read book or anything.

Re: My solopreneur story

#589

Post by skwee357 »

gizmo wrote: post #582
skwee357 wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Tony does a ton of marketing. Hours every day. And twitter is the logical place to market a twitter poweruser product. When you’re an indie developer selling to other indie developers just being visible on twitter /is/ marketing.

Being visible is not marketing. I’m visible, I post daily. Do I attract followers? No.

No disrespect to Tony, I liked his post, but he had one paragraph dedicated to twitter, inside a 12 minute read about his technical projects.

And this is essence of my original comment.

Re: My solopreneur story

#590

Post by skwee357 »

jocaal wrote: post #584
skwee357 wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe instead of advertising as free coaching, choose words that will appeal to your target audience. In your case, instead of saying free, use libre or explicitly say free as in freedom. You have to understand that many people see "free coaching" and are immediatly put into anti scam mode.

See, that’s the problem. When I say I don’t play algorithm games, people tell me I’m stupid and won’t succeed. When I promote my services, people tell me I use the wrong words.

It’s an endless game. I don’t complain, I just point out the absurdity of this gladiator games that everyone enjoys.

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