Did you max out your credit cards and have an VC walk out in the middle of a smoothie lunch? Because that's apparently the secret to success based on the AirBnBs of the world...
That sounds like a giant corporation compared to my many side gigs over the years. I love the development phase because it is something I control. Once the product is developed it also hits it's grave at the same time. Because I don't have the skills to get initial users.
Go to the Atlassian Marketplace, build a Forge app, publish it in March. Atlassian brings the customers. Enterprise customers. I’m perhaps being too optimistic, but at least you won’t have to do the customer part.
Not sure if they are referring specifically to this, but as of February 2021, Atlassian will stop selling new on-premise Confluence licenses. I expect a lot of companies will have to transition their on-prem servers to the Atlassian Cloud hosting environment, opening up a lot of new customers to the Marketplace.
This is underrated advice. There are quite a few platforms,like Salesforce AppExchange, where enterprise users are willing to pay top dollar for what often seems absurdly simple functionality. Much better than trying to compete with 2 million apps on Google/Apple app store.
https://DiscoFlip.com is what I published most recently (planning to do a Show:HN next week after couple bugs are ironed out). The other ones have been taken down over time.
Honestly, I get that HN and startup culture glorifies one-hit-wonders and survivorship-biased unicorns, but articles like this just feel like pointless cynicism. It's not even that funny.
There are plenty of people out there that make a comfortable living with one-person online startups. The weird idea that only the "super-privileged" can do this is just flat-out wrong. In fact, the internet has allowed many people outside of typical Coastal/SV/yuppie bubbles to make much more than their immediate circumstances allow.
Instead of ragging on Slack, or AirBnB, or YC/pg for being proud of them -- yeah, yeah, with a lot of hyperbole and rosy hindsight -- just close your browser, open that terminal, and build something. Isn't that the whole point?
> The weird idea that only the "super-privileged" can do this is just flat-out wrong.
It's not that YOU HAVE TO BE super-privileged to be able to quit your job and take a whack at the start-up lyfe, it's just that you are much more likely than the average person to be super-privileged.
You don’t need to quit your job to start a online business. I make 30K a year from a website that takes me about 10 hours a year and took about 1000 hours to build during which I learned a lot and had a lot of fun.
To start a business you need to invest a lot of time (and money), which most people simply don’t have. I have a regular job and no children, and there are so many things I’d love to do but simply don’t have the time for. This is true for most people.
> There are plenty of people out there that make a comfortable living with one-person online startups. The weird idea that only the "super-privileged" can do this is just flat-out wrong. In fact, the internet has allowed many people outside of typical Coastal/SV/yuppie bubbles to make much more than their immediate circumstances allow.
Outside of anecdotes is there any data to really back up this claim?
I think there is a certain mindset necessary for success in this area. I believe it is a mindset where even 1,000 failures is not "nothing", it is 1,000 ways on how not to do something. More so than that it is also learnings, execution, and self expression.
The cross-section of people willing to spend "hundreds/thousands of hours building" just don't make it remotely close to that point perceiving their efforts as worthless.
I think the argument that it's anymore viable a reality than founding a Slack or an Airbnb relies on some statistics showing that profitable one-man-bands aren't just as rare.
I mean, maybe the takeaway from your comment is that being enough of a generalist that you can create a useful product and successfully market that makes you rare, but surely you don't think the amount of small teams making money off of services is even within 2 orders of magnitude of the amount of billion dollar IPOs...
Of course not, but the premise wasn't a 'small team' but a single person company. In any case, even if they were 3 or 4 orders of magnitude more likely, the odds are still terrible and therefore still not a viable alternative.
The almost innate human quality of seeking the relative (and modest) safety of what the middle class call "financial freedom", an escape from the hamster wheel of wagecuckery, is now accelerators filled with bullshit artists and financiers at odds with status-game playing success-shamers and the typical rent seekers found around any popular delusion.
People with honest sensible small business advice get treated like heretics or, worse yet, how the bullshit artists should be treated.
I've tried to share a few lessons learned, having moved from employed to self employed to business owner and most of it has not been received well, or even treated with hostility.
As Jack Napier once said, "you get what you f*ing deserve".
> Instead of ragging on Slack, or AirBnB, or YC/pg for being proud of them -- yeah, yeah, with a lot of hyperbole and rosy hindsight -- just close your browser, open that terminal, and build something. Isn't that the whole point?
There are good lessons to be learned from both the successes and failures of other startups. It's worth taking some time to evaluate what others did right and wrong.
Most startup founders aren't dumb. They know that other companies succeeded or failed due to a mix of their own decisions and uncontrollable luck. Occasionally you see founders get obsessive about cargo culting in the footsteps of some company they idolize, but it's not really helpful. Most actual founders (not the wantrepreneurs) I know are reasonable about all of this.
What you're seeing in all of these articles and websites dedicated to success or failure stories is journalism. The authors want traffic, first and foremost, so they editorialize and glorify in ways that appeal to mass audiences. Writing strictly for actual startup founders is an extremely competitive niche because there are so few founders and they're all super busy. Instead, journalists target the broader startup community as a whole. That's how you get these articles designed to spark conversation and link sharing more so than conveying the most useful information.
> $9.99 so far. Next month, if all goes well, it's looking like I'll have $19.98 in my bank account.
I know he's been sarcastic but it's actually how we started at serpapi.com. Even less. First month was $9.97, second month was $19.94. (Double the revenue!) And now, we are a real business, profitable, with a 8-9 strong team.
This is off-topic, but I really liked being able to purchase packs of credits on serpapi for my one-off projects. When you folks switched to monthly packages only, that's when I had to walk away.
I recognize that's the best way for you to get to MRR of course.
This is obviously marketing disguised as satire, but in the interest of maybe providing some info that's useful to someone in the comments section I'm going to jump in here with a middle-of-the road story. I make ~$500/mo off my side project. It's nice money that I can use to explore more side projects. I'm not going to quit my day job with it. You don't have to make $5k MRR for a side project to be profitable/useful, and you can successfully scale a small idea without pouring 40hrs/wk into it.
This is sad to me. This guy seems to have written a genuine post about growing his business to $400 MRR [1], but it leads with self deprecation, and then he follows it with this take down of... himself?
Louis, I don't know you, I've not come across Cloakist before, but you've done something solid here, and MRR is truly a long slope of soul crushing growth and you're playing the game fine. Keep it up. Five months in on Cronitor we were at $410 MRR.
Thanks a lot! Just to clarify, I’m not taking myself down (I’m really happy with where Cloakist is at) - I just felt like writing some satire to mock all similar serious articles in that genre, including my own. And congrats on the awesome work at Cronitor!
HN really doesn't have a sense of humor. Or rather, a joke can get some up voters if tailored to the wry geek sense of humor, but any post which contains humor or subtext or sarcasm will absolutely get an outraged reply from somebody who has taken it literally.
Well, now everyone can see the massive network of "bot" accounts that HN has. It's a growing trend on posts; you'll see them interacting with each other; they like to work in nodes to boost the comment count and therefore somehow increase the chances of making front page.
Even if they don't hit front page, the comment itself adds to the longer term plan of these accounts. I don't doubt for a second that someone has, or is currently manipulating a lot of the traffic and comments for certain posts.
This is easily established via networks of rotating residentials; or better yet, real humans in Ukraine [1]: something that cannot be defeated unless you start nodal map chaining.
High likelihood that these troll farm/serious commenters algos are not equipped to deal with such complexities such as human satire yet, which is a reasonable conclusion as to why there are so many "serious" posts
That's an example of a ring that was trying (rather hamfistedly) to manipulate HN, which was caught by our systems and neutralized long before the thread you're linking to ever happened. As I said at the time, if anyone can find an example of a story from those accounts making the HN front page, I'd like to hear about it at hn@ycombinator.com; examples of cases we missed are hugely helpful in plugging holes. But certainly the vast majority of their efforts went nowhere.
People try every day to plant stuff on HN's front page, and every day our anti-abuse systems catch such efforts and apply different types of counter-action depending on the case. I'm not saying no one gets away with it (obviously we can't know that) but I can say for sure that anyone getting away with it would have to be way smarter than that group.
In case anyone's interested, it happens that I've been working for the last few weeks on a new type of anti-abuse system, which is designed to more tightly enforce this site guideline: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.".
Please provide evidence of this "massive network of bot accounts". I'm sure there are some but to this outside observer there doesn't seem to be any obvious large scale bot behavior.
(I guess since you posted this three times I need to reply three times. Can you please stop? this is getting repetitive and wasting time that should be going into doing other things.)
That's not evidence of what you claimed upthread; it was an inept bunch of content marketers who were easily caught by HN's anti-abuse systems. The thread you're linking to contains over 20 comments that I posted explaining various aspects of this. And if you read Troy's original report you'll notice that the examples he shows of them succeeding come from other places than HN:
Please don't post insinuations like this unless you have specific evidence. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We have this rule because internet users are too quick to imagine they're seeing these patterns when really they're just reading them into what they're looking at, much like a Rohrschach diagram.
It's not that it never happens for real, of course. Both things happen: real manipulation and imaginary accusations of manipulation. Both are bad, and we need some sort of evidence or data or $objective-thing to look at in order to have a hope of distinguishing the one from the other. We put a ton of effort into protecting HN from manipulation and have many years of experience with this. I can't say we're not being pwned but we certainly catch many attempts to game the system here.
I'm not sure whether you're asking "does this count as breaking that rule?" or "does this count as evidence that HN is overrun by bots?"
Answer to "does this count as breaking that rule?": no, Troy emailed us long in advance and he had lots of specific data that we could look at.
Answer to "does this count as evidence that HN is overrun by bots?": no, our systems had caught most of that activity long before. I posted over 20 comments in the thread you link to, covering a lot of these points; see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24785165. And if you read Troy's original report you'll notice that the examples he shows of them succeeding come from other places than HN:
If there are botnets or rings escaping our attention and succeeding on HN, they would need to be several levels more sophisticated than that one.
One thing to realize is that HN's anti-abuse systems don't always reveal publicly that accounts or sites have been caught. It can often be more effective to preserve information asymmetry and fight the abuse in subtler ways.
Re Rohrschach: the fact that it's considered dodgy is part of why I use the analogy. Most internet speculations about bots, astroturfers, shills, spies, brigaders, foreign agents and all the rest of it, are way dodgier than that.
I was happy to make $3-$4 in MRR from a 4 minute YouTube video. It took some months to hit 10k views to enable monetization, but monetization for that amount of work was great.
Then Youtube said fuck you. Your 1-video account doesn’t have 1000 subscribers, no more monetization for you!
117 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadEDIT: Clearly a joke, I took it literally at first.
Jokes aside - funny article :p I liked it
But still very laudable!
There are plenty of people out there that make a comfortable living with one-person online startups. The weird idea that only the "super-privileged" can do this is just flat-out wrong. In fact, the internet has allowed many people outside of typical Coastal/SV/yuppie bubbles to make much more than their immediate circumstances allow.
Instead of ragging on Slack, or AirBnB, or YC/pg for being proud of them -- yeah, yeah, with a lot of hyperbole and rosy hindsight -- just close your browser, open that terminal, and build something. Isn't that the whole point?
It's not that YOU HAVE TO BE super-privileged to be able to quit your job and take a whack at the start-up lyfe, it's just that you are much more likely than the average person to be super-privileged.
That's how stereotypes work.
To start a business you need to invest a lot of time (and money), which most people simply don’t have. I have a regular job and no children, and there are so many things I’d love to do but simply don’t have the time for. This is true for most people.
Outside of anecdotes is there any data to really back up this claim?
The cross-section of people willing to spend "hundreds/thousands of hours building" just don't make it remotely close to that point perceiving their efforts as worthless.
It's not nearly as big as the list of people who are afraid to try.
The almost innate human quality of seeking the relative (and modest) safety of what the middle class call "financial freedom", an escape from the hamster wheel of wagecuckery, is now accelerators filled with bullshit artists and financiers at odds with status-game playing success-shamers and the typical rent seekers found around any popular delusion.
People with honest sensible small business advice get treated like heretics or, worse yet, how the bullshit artists should be treated.
I've tried to share a few lessons learned, having moved from employed to self employed to business owner and most of it has not been received well, or even treated with hostility.
As Jack Napier once said, "you get what you f*ing deserve".
There are good lessons to be learned from both the successes and failures of other startups. It's worth taking some time to evaluate what others did right and wrong.
Most startup founders aren't dumb. They know that other companies succeeded or failed due to a mix of their own decisions and uncontrollable luck. Occasionally you see founders get obsessive about cargo culting in the footsteps of some company they idolize, but it's not really helpful. Most actual founders (not the wantrepreneurs) I know are reasonable about all of this.
What you're seeing in all of these articles and websites dedicated to success or failure stories is journalism. The authors want traffic, first and foremost, so they editorialize and glorify in ways that appeal to mass audiences. Writing strictly for actual startup founders is an extremely competitive niche because there are so few founders and they're all super busy. Instead, journalists target the broader startup community as a whole. That's how you get these articles designed to spark conversation and link sharing more so than conveying the most useful information.
I know he's been sarcastic but it's actually how we started at serpapi.com. Even less. First month was $9.97, second month was $19.94. (Double the revenue!) And now, we are a real business, profitable, with a 8-9 strong team.
I recognize that's the best way for you to get to MRR of course.
Sent you an email (julien at serpapi.com). I am sure we can figure something.
The above TLDR is really all you need to know but if you're interested in more I wrote a longer article about how this all happened here: https://medium.com/@qrohlf/i-sell-triangles-on-the-internet-...
Louis, I don't know you, I've not come across Cloakist before, but you've done something solid here, and MRR is truly a long slope of soul crushing growth and you're playing the game fine. Keep it up. Five months in on Cronitor we were at $410 MRR.
[1] https://cloak.ist/blog/how-we-got-to-400-mrr-in-5-months/
> And if you'd like to read a true, but much more boring story about getting MRR, go here.
Even if they don't hit front page, the comment itself adds to the longer term plan of these accounts. I don't doubt for a second that someone has, or is currently manipulating a lot of the traffic and comments for certain posts.
This is easily established via networks of rotating residentials; or better yet, real humans in Ukraine [1]: something that cannot be defeated unless you start nodal map chaining.
High likelihood that these troll farm/serious commenters algos are not equipped to deal with such complexities such as human satire yet, which is a reasonable conclusion as to why there are so many "serious" posts
[1] https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/inside-a-ukrainian-t...
[2] https://snap.stanford.edu/data/ego-Twitter.html
People try every day to plant stuff on HN's front page, and every day our anti-abuse systems catch such efforts and apply different types of counter-action depending on the case. I'm not saying no one gets away with it (obviously we can't know that) but I can say for sure that anyone getting away with it would have to be way smarter than that group.
In case anyone's interested, it happens that I've been working for the last few weeks on a new type of anti-abuse system, which is designed to more tightly enforce this site guideline: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That's not evidence of what you claimed upthread; it was an inept bunch of content marketers who were easily caught by HN's anti-abuse systems. The thread you're linking to contains over 20 comments that I posted explaining various aspects of this. And if you read Troy's original report you'll notice that the examples he shows of them succeeding come from other places than HN:
https://twitter.com/troyd/status/1315441811658219520
https://twitter.com/troyd/status/1316038695535833089
It's not that it never happens for real, of course. Both things happen: real manipulation and imaginary accusations of manipulation. Both are bad, and we need some sort of evidence or data or $objective-thing to look at in order to have a hope of distinguishing the one from the other. We put a ton of effort into protecting HN from manipulation and have many years of experience with this. I can't say we're not being pwned but we certainly catch many attempts to game the system here.
There's plenty of past explanation here if anyone wants more: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Answer to "does this count as breaking that rule?": no, Troy emailed us long in advance and he had lots of specific data that we could look at.
Answer to "does this count as evidence that HN is overrun by bots?": no, our systems had caught most of that activity long before. I posted over 20 comments in the thread you link to, covering a lot of these points; see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24785165. And if you read Troy's original report you'll notice that the examples he shows of them succeeding come from other places than HN:
https://twitter.com/troyd/status/1315441811658219520
https://twitter.com/troyd/status/1316038695535833089
If there are botnets or rings escaping our attention and succeeding on HN, they would need to be several levels more sophisticated than that one.
One thing to realize is that HN's anti-abuse systems don't always reveal publicly that accounts or sites have been caught. It can often be more effective to preserve information asymmetry and fight the abuse in subtler ways.
Re Rohrschach: the fact that it's considered dodgy is part of why I use the analogy. Most internet speculations about bots, astroturfers, shills, spies, brigaders, foreign agents and all the rest of it, are way dodgier than that.
Then Youtube said fuck you. Your 1-video account doesn’t have 1000 subscribers, no more monetization for you!
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/youtube-will-put-ads-on-non-...