It is refreshing to see stories of capitalist success among a sea of corporate communism stories pumped by a media apparatus owned by corporate politburos.
This type of genuine entrepreneurship should gain more popularity.
Maybe I'm an optimist, but I'd like to think the downvotes are because the user showed in the space of a haiku that they understand neither capitalism nor communism.
Au contraire. Corporate communism is very much alive and kicking. Capital is clogged. The only way to make it move is to allow small to medium sized true capital makers and movers to thrive. Corporations are the new communist apparatus. Roles have been reversed.
If capitalism (incidentally, a term coined by Marx) is whatever one feels like it is, and no-one ever would call you out for that in an internet discussion, then it's pretty consistent to apply the same approach to communism.
Functional programming that doesn't deal with money? Communism. In my experience people will say X is not true capitalism because true capitalism won't have X's downsides.
This whole analysis reads like the economic version of flat earth theory to me, but I thank you both in advance because I am about to go down a research rabbit hole on "corporate communism."
Yeah so the state always bails corporations out, makes laws disproportionally in their favour, controls the media to whitewash their actions, and most important clogs capital and access to resources. Not to mention the constant suppression of businesses by acquisitions under all sorts of threats and regulatory overburdening. Thats communism. In communist countries communism did exactly that - a handful controlled the resources, media, and people’s lives while keeping everyone poor and obedient by suppressing all form of independent enterprise. When capital moves freely and in the process enriches the people that help move it thats capital-ism. And thats what indies and small to medium business owners are, pure capitalists and free folk. We should see more of that.
You need permanent revolution to seize the productive forces from the communist-capitalist firms by the state and redistribute them to capitalist-communist firms and so on and so forth.
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.
From Investopedia: Capitalism is focused on the creation of wealth and ownership of capital and factors of production, whereas a free market system is focused on the exchange of wealth or goods and services.
It's not the free market part that defines it as capitalism but rather the fact he owns the method of production. He owns the code he writes and he owns the business processes around those applications. He privately owns the capital assets (applications and business processes) which make the money.
Corporate communism? I wonder what’s that, let me check, oh it’s some US conservative talking point.
Wait, isn’t a politburo the executive committee of a communist party? How can that be corporate and own the media?
Wait how is selling apps capitalist success? What capital is winning here? I guess the corporate capital of the company owning the App Store. Or is it the capital that the app making guy is building up?
I guess when you use your own language, the things you say sound very alien, and can’t be used to communicate. You could be saying anything so you’re saying nothing at all.
> I wonder what’s that, let me check, oh it’s some US conservative talking point.
I am confused. I thought us conservatives are fixated on corporate. Either way I am far from conservative in the sense you imply. If i do cross boundaries on some concepts thats because i am not fixated on ideology.
The politburo is the corporate board.
The corporate own the media through money.
Selling apps is capitalism because money moves. Free movement of capital is a core value of capitalism.
Clogging it in the hands of a few means money doesnt move freely. The politburo control it and with it it controls the narrative, the media and our lives. We are not free, much like people are not free in communism.
I guess it is confusing because i am reversing roles. In my view pure, proper, capitalism is where money is largely managed by small and medium sized entities, as to allow it to flow freely and to set the mover of capital free in the process.
These are all functions of late-stage capitalism. Welcome to unchecked monopolies and corporate lobbying.
> I guess it is confusing because i am reversing roles. In my view pure, proper, capitalism is where money is largely managed by small and medium sized entities, as to allow it to flow freely and to set the mover of capital free in the process.
That's awesome, it's just never been done long-term and never will be.
Snarky tone aside, you can actually strip powers from both the government and corporations. You're not suddenly making a super government because you don't let Disney dump money into strengthening copyright laws.
But it's clear you're not really thinking about it beyond memes so I'm gonna end it here.
Especially since the natural tendencies of such systems are that the few end up having almost all. You could distribute everything evenly and in a 100 years, without redistribution, we'd be back in the same place.
It's clear that you're confused by the way you express your views and the framework you use to understand the world.
You claim that you're not fixated on ideology, but in the same breath you talk about core values of capitalism.
The corporate board (actually the board of directors) jointly supervise a company. It's not the decision making body (that's the CEO), and therefore is not analogous to a politburo. Fun fact: the Communist Party of China has both a Politburo and a Central Committee.
The media (or more precisely, the most of the media in the US, because many countries have broadcasters not financed through private capital) aren't owned by "the corporate". Media (TV, newspapers) are usually corporations themselves, and are owned by shareholders. By capitalists. If you had enough money, you could buy them.
Money moves? Sure it moves when a corporation runs the payroll every month, or when I go buy a popsicle. Or when someone pays someone else to procure him a kidney on the black market. Money in every form and in every economic system, not just in capitalism, will be exchanged, this is because it's the very purpose of money and it's reason to exist.
You have some theories as to why most wealth is concentrated (top 1% owned 46% of global wealth in 2020). There seems to be a conspiracy narrative (the politburos are conspiring to keep the money in the hands of the rich), and a remedy (small
entrepreneurs will rise and reclaim the money).
You might be aware that money is locked up in the 1%, because 1) they don't need to spend it, or very little of it, like $5 for an app. 2) the capital that they have lets them extract more money from the 99% (in the form of rent and stock dividends), so the direction of money flow is from the poor to the rich. Your conclusion is that we need more capitalism, but the right kind, not the one we have now, because the one we have right now is actually communism.
I don't mean this as anything but a constructive comment and I won't reply further. Feedback, for your perusal.
Some of your comments on this thread tipped your hand (to me at least) that you must be a new account here. I was right. You seem like you may not have read the comment guidelines.
I'd like to see the positives in some of this but my friend it comes across really tone deaf and dripping with bias. I don't really disagree with some of your points, but it's wrapped up in language that might be best suited elsewhere. There's room for improvement when it comes to your rhetoric and if the downvotes didn't make that clear I'm hoping this feedback helps ongoing.
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 support person asked if this error happens regularly... well replicate it for yourself using my screencast and that's your answer.
There was no bug fix. No point version update in the works. The last software update was 9 months ago on 15 Jan, 2023.
I feel like Tony's able to be a profitable solopreneur because he outsources all support to people who don't really care about the quality of the output.
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".
The solution to receiving an unsatisfactory reply on a support ticket is not "lower your expectations", regardless of how that business may be structured.
If we lower our expectations of software, we'll get exactly that, shitty software.
If enough people stopped it might influence Youtube to change. Youtube is in the drivers seat. Some products change rapidly based on feedback and others never change. Youtube has the right to not make changes and not get your business back. If they make too many of these decisions and run out of money the will close. This is indirect.
You save by not paying for youtube. You paying someone else for similar services has a better return because your money endorses someone elses vision. When you buy a product you give a thumbs up. When you don't you don't give a thumbs down..
If everyone thinks like this then no, it won't get better. But I stand by my statement, no matter how many downvotes I get. If you don't like a product, stop paying for it, and either find alternatives or build your own. Its quite rare that you're going to influence their roadmap by getting a ticket filed.
> IMO, the most common is not "a satisfactory reply" but rather "no reply".
what point are you trying to make here? that he should shut up and be a good consumer? how dare he expect support from a product he paid for, from a guy making 500k a year, am I right?
Responses like yours are always so strange to me. Perhaps I misunderstood your response but it feels very much like a defense of the status quo. As if the PC was expecting too much to get support for software they paid for and that their raising of the issue in the comment was unwarranted.
How do things ever get better if everyone just accepts everything that ever happens without complaint?
It's not that it was unwarranted on the consumer's part, but rather that the common outcome of support (of no human reply) would have been not noteworthy, quickly forgotten, and probably not resulted in the upthread comment at all.
Instead, the case of having human-staffed support for a low-priced product that happens to have given an unhelpful reply to GP (but likely gave helpful replies to >50% of support cases [because most support questions are user-error]) drives home a negative [rather than null] feeling in the upthread consumer and results in the negative response above. (For avoidance of doubt, GP/consumer did nothing at all wrong then nor now. I'm talking about the incentives a company has to offer support at all for a low priced software product.)
So many software devs seem to have this attitude that the customer (internal or external) should just shut up and be happy with whatever they've been given.
I've often felt that many devs could benefit from a stint waiting tables — where the customer is always right and your income is dependent on being helpful and responsive.
see, i just don't get this. one of my SaaS products is essentially 100% hands off (aside from occasional package upgrading, random refunds or upgrade issues every few weeks) but i still absolutely LOVE adding new features or fixing bug requests that customers bring into my view. it gives me the classic feeling of really helping someone, even if it is just a single individual out there.
then the bug reports start to get further and further apart... now i have had one in months :)
Yep, well it's clear how indexed on money Tony is in this post. Not passing judgment either way, but for some people software is just a means of making money. And that's okay.
I was able to get prompt and effective support from VoIP.ms, a company I pay something like $1.50/month. I once contacted Aruba support regarding hardware I bought secondhand and they replaced it for me. That many software companies choose to (and for some reason are permitted to) operate at scale beyond which they can meaningfully support their products doesn't mean that it's fundamentally impossible to receive support without paying a lot.
I sell a $10 app on the App Store and it sells quite well. My co-founder and I personally block time every evening to reply to support emails and interact with our users on discord. We could easily hire someone to handle support, but we derive a lot of pleasure and satisfaction from being able to deal with our users ourselves. Our users seem to like it too. And we couldn't care less about building in public. We build for ourselves and our users.
True that Cleanshot works well and was there before but I feel like it should be mentioned that the background feature was copied 1:1 from Xnapper from Tony.
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).
> I feel like Tony's able to be a profitable solopreneur because he outsources all support to people who don't really care about the quality of the output.
Replace Tony with the name of almost any company these days and the statement would still be true, unfortunately. This isn't a solopreneur issue at all.
Seems like a cyclical systemic failure where confidence in the system makes people buying even though there's no real desire for high quality and it just coasts until it fails.
This kind of narrative stops aspiring teachers to go in the domain of education.
Teachers play such an important rule. They have to swallow the pill that the common narrative is that cause they didn’t do whatever they are teaching hence they teach
Anyone who is less than 100% confident that they can in fact “do” should not be teaching. If your ego is that fragile you’re not going to last, whether because students don’t worship you, or because management ask you to do something differently.
Hi, it's Tony here. Sorry about the experience with support.
I remember this issue, it's about making the screenshot background transparent without getting the drop shadow getting cut off, right?
The app is not designed well for using with transparent background. So if you prefer transparent background, it's best to make the shadow smaller, or remove the shadow completely, or… increase the padding.
I considered to supporting this but in the end I removed the ticket out of the backlog because I didn't want to turn Xnapper into a photo editor, sorry!
If this isn't about the transparent background, can you send me another email to support? I’ll take a look, thanks for using Xnapper! :)
It's not related to transparent backgrounds or drop shadows.
After taking a rectangular screenshot that is longer in width but shorter in height (such as the dimensions of this HN comment input box on desktop)... then adding an annotation arrow, Xnapper suddenly cuts off the top n pixels, cutting off its own generated backdrop, and the arrow is placed not where the user selected, but n pixels below that point.
I've given up on trying to resolve it and for shorter screenshots I now use the built-in macOS option again instead of Xnapper.
Ah got it. This is a known issue, usually I workaround this by first putting the arrow elsewhere in the middle of the pic and dragging it to where I want it later (not great, I know…). I haven't been putting a lot of time on Xnapper lately, sorry about that. I'll prioritize this and push out an update soon.
Reminds me of a very similar "support" experience I had just yesterday, with a well funded and relatively popular SaaS.
They have a problem with their css media queries that causes necessary navigation items to completely disappear as certain screen sizes, making the software unusable. Their answer, when I reported this, was to resize the browser window. The answer, I suspect, was from a low pay support worker.
Outsourcing support isn't easy, even if you do care about quality, and have a decent budget.
Have you tried clearing your web browser cache and resetting your cookies? Please log out and then back in again.
That should resolve the issue in at least 1 case out of 50, but if it does not please contact us again and resubmit your issue from scratch with a different agent working a different shift.
Good on you Tony. $45k monthly revenue is nothing to shake a stick at, and it seems you're quite happy with the lifestyle it's afforded you. An inspiration.
Amazingly done for one time payments as well. People like them.
Forever licenses are maybe more tolerable as well for self host and client side local applications. Could be good money combined with b2b pricing on top of it
An arrow indicator for a twitter profile pic, a screen cap tool, and a wrapper around ChatGPT.
I kinda want to shoot myself. Largely useless products that made someone rich that rely on two other ecosystems. That’s the way I guess? I’m so not an entrepreneur.
Edit: apologies for using a suicide metaphor. I was being sarcastic. I’m in my 50s, really like my job, and am on a path to a good retirement. It just amazes me that there are so many opportunities for “pet rocks” in this era. Go get some if you know how! It I think it is safer to do things the old fashioned way and not rely on extreme luck and social media. But again, I’m old.
> it should be encouraging that you can escape from the grind so easily nowadays!
And this exactly the false fallacy. This is a perfect example of survivorship bias. For everywhere successful solopreneur/indie maker/whatever, there are a hundred failed attempts that didn't fail for a lack of trying hard.
A common denominator between many successful solopreneurs is a strong social media presence, so this image isn't surprising.
That being said, giving it a try yourself is fairly accessible as opposed to starting a startup with external funding. So if you can afford to, give it a try. But do not expect it to be easy
I get it, with the right positioning, you can convince people to buy bottled water for $30 or more, Tony built or found really good positions, you can do the same.
There are two ways of approach entrepreneurship, and the conflict between each is why there's some dissonance here:
1) Do it to escape the grind, as one commenter here mentioned. In this way, it doesn't matter what product you make, or how you make it. The goal is self sufficiency, to find a niche that you can fill, etc.
2) Do it because you're trying to effect some specific change in the world. Something doesn't exist yet, so you will go out and make it happen.
"2" is much harder, and more rare. And, if you believe 2 is the way, then it makes sense to NOT start a company & instead join an existing effort, if there are already people working on pressing problems & you have the skills to help them out.
For "1", it almost always makes sense to start a company if you can. Because that life & amenities is itself the goal.
One the flipside here, you can argue that, every time you get another "1", this is great for the economy. You now have someone who's making their own money, leaving a salaried job spot open for another person.
A lot of these indie hacking ventures probably wouldn't exist at all if the person making them decided not to. If that is, or for the subset of indie hacking companies for which it is true, it means this is growing the economy.
In economic terms where money isn't circulating, yes. Now, many open source projects are used by other companies that are commercial, so that does grow the economy however.
It's an illusion that 2 can happen without 1. Unless you have financial and entrepreneurial freedom, you will never change anything anywhere.
Whatever social structure you imagine you might navigate, be it business, politics, public opinion, a charitable organization, the world of art, literature or academia; you will always find a pre-existing, entrenched power structure of people calling the shots, controlling key decisions and very unwilling to cut you in, because they either have their own vision to put in practice, or... they simply like the power, status and nice amenities that come with them.
The business of changing the world is the business of power. You either have capital, name recognition, the largest lab, a huge social network of other powerful people in your debt, a massive amount of luck and/or first mover advantage etc. Otherwise, the powerful people of the world, often particularly apprehensive to world changing plans, will just crush you and move on.
Sure, but how does that help you chose an effective strategy? For example, winning lottery players absolutely dominate when it comes to risk vs reward. But that doesn't mean playing the lottery is the way to achieving your financial goals.
Without an understanding of the underlying odds of success, isolated success stories are just random noise. And you have to ask: are they really success stories? Did Linus set out to create a world known free kernel, or was ìt just serendipty, he was just a random bloke who filled a role that needed to be filled at that particular historic time, so in fact had no control over the story and did not, in fact, change the world, he just gave a name of the rough thing that was to appear at that rough time.
Effective strategy, you are right. It's not. For the thing that was to appear, we can't know if something else would have filled that functional void. The world might have been much more proprietary without Linux.
For this particular example, I think there were worthy contenders in the era, like Minix, GNU Hurd, BSD etc. So it was rather a sum of unpredictable contingencies (in the philosophical sense) that made Linux the thing that was to be, rather than any substantial merit of its inventors; much like Facebook won the social network race by simply being lucky to launch in a cool, selective and influential community.
But in the general case, I do not claim that the world works according to a pre-written script, on the contrary, if you act with a sufficient magnitude of power, I think you can alter it deterministically. Rather, I point out the immense inertia and active opposition by the powerful to you world-altering attempts, to the point where any low power action is more like playing the lottery. You might be lucky to get the that one in a million chance, but you likely won't.
If you organize your attack carefully, amass capital, workforce, hearts and minds, etc., you drastically improve your chances of success, up to the point when your reach Elon mode: you simply wish a product or thing was real, and an entire army of people shows up ready to implement it.
Yes, you would only create products you really believe in and find useful to society. But you then would need to compete with the Tonys of the world, who try selling ice to eskimos or simply ads, malware and online casinos.
You are only angry because you too want to escape and are externalising the frustration of not finding a similar path. At least thats what i learned about myself when i had a similar reaction seeing such success stories. Then it struck me - this is it. This is the way for indie success. Build stuff that makes sense to a niche market. To me the product is irrelevant. But the fact that the author escaped is absolute bliss.
Also arent most products just useless things relying on other ecosystems?
But why let it frustrate people when one can start taking notes? Literarily when i started looking into these types of successful independent makers in all industries i discovered there are _loads_ of them and each make a little thing here and there. It’s fascinating, and i cant stop reading about them. And the more i read the more i realise that hey… it’s actually doable! But one need to stop overcomplicating things.
Because there are no notes to take on this. It's survivorship bias of a product that exists in 1000 other forms. It's not visibly doing anything better that other screen cap tools or chatGPT wrappers aren't doing.
The main note is that you may not know what people want, and I've been around long enough to know people that advertise themselves as knowing what people want are usually full of shit.
tbf to TFA, it is exactly about how one could be one of those survivors if one did those totally not simple things. It is a crash course survival guide for a build-in-public solopreneur, if you will.
While it's true that niches work, the actual money maker is to create your own niche by forking an existing one. While 45k / month is impressive, the ones who are making 6 figures and above per month, are doing it in niches which aren't "built in public".
Yep, I know people in the "boring" industries, making software or running the marketing for plumbers, electricians, med spas, etc. They're at 6 or more figures a month doing that, and they're in industries most software engineers won't dare look.
Custom mobile apps for different companies in the industry is sooo under utilized that you can easily reach 10 million a year with 70-80% margins by just doing that.
Can you elaborate on this? You mean being good at creating basic IOS/Android apps and then selling them white label slightly modified to various companies?
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 programmers should be doing, not learning the latest new Javascript framework to make their MVP just right.
On Reddit, there is similarly /r/sweatystartup [2] which also has a website with more podcasts and articles [3]. But the gist is that it's more about boring industries like lawn care, plumbing etc than shiny tech businesses. One of the best things you can do is to take a look at [2] and call 100 local businesses in a niche you pick (lawn care, etc), ask them about their problems then either start a competing service or start creating software for that niche. Nick Huber, the guy who started the subreddit and site, did both and has a ~$25 million business now.
The above is basically what I'm doing, I'm looking into making software for the boring industry of social media marketing.
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.
There is a difference between indie hackers and the hackers of the 90s, even though the words are the same. You seem to be referring to the 90s ones, who are technological nerds, basically. Andreas Kling, building his own OS, falls into this camp. But indie hackers are first and foremost those who are trying to make money where the technology is only incidental to their success (as it should be, technology is simply a tool for humans, there is no point to making technology that has no use, except for the sense of accomplishment that a craftsperson might similarly have over making some sort of well-built but useless piece of furniture).
So, no I would not recommend Andreas, gifted as he is, to anyone who is an indie hacker. His work is almost purely an intellectual exploration of the problem space of operating systems, something which has next to no business value these days when Windows, macOS and Linux exists. The riches (if you mean material riches and not intellectual riches) in tech exist by selling and marketing the product, not by the technological decisions of building the product itself. There is a reason YC tells you to create an MVP quickly with whatever technologies you know and to iterate on it after customer feedback.
For many indie hackers, who are not the next Elon building rockets in some novel way and who just want to make $10k a month, copying and improving on an existing product is good enough.
> Entrepreneurship embodies this romanticized vision of Shark Tank and Tech Crunch and newness and innovation when in reality most people need to simplify the way they think. I judged a pitch competition at UGA a few months ago, and all I could think of with every pitch was the need to simplify. People want to complicate things, do something revolutionary, and chase glory and the lure of entrepreneurship, but that doesn’t mean they have a real shot at being successful.
> When you take away the sex appeal and fun, you come into a more rational and less saturated market. There’s a shortage of people doing things that aren’t fun, that’s why plumbers make more than most people with liberal arts degrees.
> With sweaty businesses, all you need to do is answer the phone and do what you say you’re going to do and you can make a lot of money. Innovation is sexy and fun, but the way people make real money is by copying others. My first business was just a Frankenstein take on the current offerings and competitors I saw around me.
> The businesses I love aren’t fun. People are told to chase their passion, but the entrepreneurs that make money are chasing customers. The market doesn’t care about your passion, you need to provide real value in something that customers want.
The question is how do you create a niche? And the reason i ask this on hackernews is because there must be more interesting stuff happening than spammy newsletters and cheesy “self help” books.
You create a niche by looking at layers of a niche. What appears like one niche is actually a rubble pile of loose rocks held together by some gravity. You can pick off some larger rocks and create your own niche around that.
Basically niches are a bit like Mandelbrot sets. If you study then you will see more creases and patterns at the edges.
People voluntarily pay to smoke products that give them cancer which is probably more "actively harmful" than "largely useless". Which is to say that the value proposition is largely subjective so the OP is entirely within their right to wonder why on earth people pay for those things!
I think the better takeaway should be that other people have very different problems to you, don't always act rationally about things and waving something shiny at them is a good way to get them to spend.
I doubt the people engaging in this behavior have stopped to consider the commons and the tragedies thereof that this kind of aggregate behavior might induce. Just because it works, doesn't mean it's not stupid.
An entrepreneur sees a niche and acts. If his products satisfy the demand then good for him. He just makes some customers happy and receives money in return.
Keep in mind this money is very cyclical. It’s not a $45k a month salary until retirement. If he doesn’t find some other idea that hits pay dirt he can make $0 a month. I hope Tony is investing the money wisely.
For almost everyone, the wise strategy is to invest in unmanaged index funds.
Please read Daniel Kahneman on the illusion of skill in investing:
> Most of the buyers and sellers know that they have the same information; they exchange the stocks primarily because they have different opinions. The buyers think the price is too low and likely to rise, while the sellers think the price is high and likely to drop. The puzzle is why buyers and sellers alike think that the current price is wrong. What makes them believe they know more about what the price should be than the market does? For most of them, that belief is an illusion.
It wasn't an arrow indicator that brought him success. That was a trivial toy. But having gotten started, he was now able to identify the next step amd the next step that lead to Black Magic being a twitter analytics tool. He would never have planned to build the end product from sitting on his couch back in the beginning. It was only after taking the first step, then a few more, and gaining the perspective of a new vantage point that he was able to make such good progress.
Get off the couch and get started is the first key. The second is to keep going and not to stop. That's it, that's the whole secret to getting rich.
Not really. The key was to find a niche that worked. He “Got Started” with tools he wanted to build and it didn’t work out. It wasn’t until he pivoted to identifying trends, building an audience, and building tools for them which he could market to his audience that he found success.
I would argue that that's what arcbyte is arguing.
He's saying to just get started, and you will figure it out. So when you're arguing that "trends", "audience", etc. is what lead to his success, yes, that's what it means to:
1. Get started (just start, and improve)
2. Become better and learn (whether that's finding trends, building audience whatever)
Many paths to success, so the lesson isn't specific in many cases imo. Hence, why arcbyte's comment is really good imo.
> Largely useless products that made someone rich that rely on two other ecosystems. That’s the way I guess? I’m so not an entrepreneur.
Consider the fact that OP is perhaps an outlier [0]. They probably are super comfortable and super good at selling or marketing their product themselves and building way many number of experiments (bets) than most would / could. Consumer software (and usually product-led b2b2c software) is all about marketing, while b2b is mostly sales. You just can't know those are do-able by every eng on their own.
> An arrow indicator for a twitter profile pic, a screen cap tool, and a wrapper around ChatGPT.
But really, software has been lucrative, and Internet made it doubly so. Unlike most goods / services in the world, for software the distribution costs are non-existent, and manufacturing costs are subsidized heavily as number of users increase. Building a sustainable software business (as opposed to repeatedly building tools and services for the flavour of the day, which is AI right now) however is not easy. New comers (or call them copy cats) challenge incumbents like no tomorrow since the only investment required in light of new technological advancements is... time (assuming you've got the skill already).
Amazon and apple are making trillions on the backs of small indie folks. Google too. The apple app store is monetised by nearly a million people, google makes money largely from small businesses, amazon’s filled with small independent sellers.
Any time someone’s success reaches the bubble of corporate workers the workers that cant fathom there’s success out there and freedom claim “survivorship bias”. Couldnt be further from the truth.
How many single entrepreneurs reach that income level?
10%, 1%, less than 1%?
There are very few with really great ideas and only some of them have success and there are some with success with average ideas but the large mass aren't that lucky. The lucky ones post their stories but they aren't reproducible.
They can't be. Otherwise the lucky ones wouldn't have succeeded in the first place.
If attention gets evenly split it approaches zero for the single individual.
BTW why mentioning Google and Apple?
Yes the make millions of indie developers, but the developers don't nake nearly as much.
They just hope to be the next lucky winner with app gone viral to generate enough revenue.
> An arrow indicator for a twitter profile pic, a screen cap tool, and a wrapper around ChatGPT
I’ve followed the “indie hacker” scene for about a decade, and this sounds about right.
Notice how he started out with developer tools that scratched his own itch, but didn’t have much success. Could have been great tools, but developers are difficult to please and notoriously opposed to spending money on helpful tools.
So he pivoted to social media and trend following. Instead of making tools for people who are good at technology and make things themselves, he now makes tools for people who don’t know how to accomplish simple tasks like putting an arrow on a profile picture. They just want that arrow on their picture and they’ll spend (or, often, expense) a couple dollars to make it happen.
He took it a step further and built an audience around indie hacking. Now he’s selling shovels in a gold rush. Arrows on profile pictures were a hot trend for a minute among influencers. Building nice screenshots of things is key for making courses and marketing materials. ChatGPT is the hot topic among people who think it will build a business for them, so $40 is a drop in the bucket.
Spent 2+ years building my developer tool extension SnipCSS as a side project and I still only make $1K MRR.
You want to write 100k lines of code and make $1k / month? Sell a developer tool. You want $45k / mon, and travel the world? Sell shovels to influencers that exploit some trend.
I think what a lot of would-be entrepreneurs don’t get is the sheer scale of the global market. There are many, many billions of dollars trading hands every single day. You only have to dip the very tip of your pinky finger into that economic stream and you can make more money than you imagined. If you ever think of a product and then talk yourself out of it with “no one will buy this”, just remember that there are 8.1 billion people out there. If you create a product for $10/month, you only have to convince 0.0001% of them of the value of your product to make $1M per year.
Also, I completely disagree that OP’s product is useless or due to luck. He intentionally created something people want, and it’s actually a pretty cool product IMO.
I wouldn’t mind escaping the grind if I can crack the next fruit cutting or a bird flapping or a site or an app that does something like, I don’t know, add random words to people’s names (?) and people can use it and I can just show ads and retire or so. Fuck yeah! Yeah I am evil.
This is the endgame of rent-seeking and an abundance of (concentrated) capital, in a country that is largely comfortable letting everyone fend for themselves. Who needs to build cars when you can tickle Sam Altman's Markov chain generator for $45,000 a month? I mean, I don't blame anyone, and I need money as much as the next husk of a man, but I really wish hustle culture would stop permeating every last open space of our lives. I'm depressed about it, too, and I don't see it getting better any time soon.
Which country are you referring to? You will find a lot of hope if you study a little history and see how this has always been the case. I would guess that in terms of rent seeking and of hustle and useless products things are improving and much better than they used to be. It’s too easy to forget the vast array of useless and even harmful crap people have been selling for centuries if you didn’t live through it and/or don’t know about it. How many civilizations in history had despotic kings that controlled all housing and income, and nobody was allowed to earn their own money? The existence of someone making a decent living on products you don’t appreciate isn’t evidence of rent seeking, it’s evidence that we have more freedom than ever before, and that people have a wide range of tastes and the ability to spend a few bucks on little things they enjoy or save them small amounts of time, no?
What a weird take, as if someone building cars is prevented by them also selling supposed pet rocks online. Lots of people, Musk included, made enough money from throwaway startups to then work on the bigger problems, as they're actually financially secure to do so at that point, the Maslow's hiararchy of needs in action. If you don't like someone's product, don't buy it, but if other people find them useful, good for them and good for the creator.
I mean, you want to shoot yourself because someone is making 45k$ doing something useless? If you think about facebook making billions actively damaging humanity?
From reading the article, you probably skimmed it too fast, 1st is actually a "growth tools for Twitter", the arrow was only pointing to the first feature, and it grew to be more than that.
I get the frustration of seeing someone else succeed through seemingly frivolous means. That said, you state that you're not willing to take the risk that he did, not to mention the hard work and stress that comes with it.
By the numbers, he's created $45k/mo of usefulness.
You're right - you're so not an entrepreneur & you're clueless about customer-led development or new age problem solving.
For context, I'm a TypingMind user (the ChatGPT wrapper) & it's so much better than ChatGPT that some of us bought the license & started paying for API, even to use the free GPT 3.5.
Since then, it has evolved to support custom models & today, I could train a custom model on a bunch of research papers or product documentation & chat with them, something that takes a lot of effort to develop for non devs.
Developers are not the primary market - non devs are & we are very happy with the product.
BlackMagic again, is a revolutionary product - afaik, nothing like it existed when it came out & a ton of us happily jumped on it, realizing how much it helped with Twitter growth.
I have two arguments to counter this that contradict each other :)
One one hand, our entire economy is built on useless products. Chances are high that our good comfortable jobs involve making and marketing stuff people don’t really need at a larger scale than Tony’s solo projects. Large and so-called legitimate companies make billions and billions on things we don’t need. Coca-cola? Flavored sugar water that’s not good for you, you don’t need, and can make at home in seconds for a fraction of the price pulled in 44 billion last year for Coke. PepsiCo revenue was $86B. Starbucks: $32B, InBev: $58B. Does the global beverage industry top $1T? (Google says yes, many times over.) What about games and movies, fashion, apps, car accessories, music and sports equipment that’s unnecessarily high end and/or never gets used… the list is endless.
On the other hand, it’s not accurate or fair to call Tony’s products useless, because people paid for them. It’s reductive and low effort to frame them as simple, since he added a lot of features that don’t fit your summary. But if they save someone time, or someone likes the way they feel or look, and they pay for it, then it was useful for them. Don’t make the mistake of conflating the value you get, or your idea of what you pay for, for annyone else’s idea of usefulness.
> it’s not accurate or fair to call Tony’s products useless
I'll cede that point. Having an arrow on your Twitter profile is of some use to someone, and just because I've never had a problem with iPhone screen capture "press two buttons" doesn't mean some people need to click through an app, a nd the teletype style of GPT3 doesn't bother me but I guess some people need faster response.
I know snark is against the rules. Technically they aren't "useless" but they are single-task gadgets like you'd find for your kitchen drawer on QVC at night. The people that make the "banana slicer" probably made a ton of money and by your definition a "banana slicer" isn't useless because someone bought it.
> Obviously having an arrow on your Twitter profile is of some use to someone
One of the reasons your upper comment isn’t fair is because the story was about how he pivoted the product away from just showing the arrow & circle progress bar, and moved toward something more complex that does analytics reporting, and that’s when he actually started making money on it.
> I guess by your definition a “banana slicer” isn’t useless because someone bought it.
That was half of my definition. The other half, I think, probably agreed with yours, and points out that banana slicers are useless and we have an economy that is built on banana slicers. So, anyway, what is your definition of useful?
That's a good question. The naive definition would be something that someone uses to fulfill a purpose. I don't think a Bratz Doll on a Keychain in the store is useful, but my 5 year old niece will get a solid week of entertainment out of it. Sure that is useful, but do we want to compare it to a SawStop or iPhone? All of them are useful, but to different degrees, different people, and across varying lifespans.
You can argue that anything is useful if it is "used", but let's not pretend there isn't a spectrum here.
How is a screen capture tool largely useless? Have you not ever taken screenshots yourself or at least read documentation that relies on screenshots? What a ridiculous take.
It is, I agree, at the end of the day he built his products on top of corporate workers and exploited good opportunities and niches, and he brags about it, to market it, which I personally find distasteful, but that what it takes for solo devs.
But it's not the vibe I get from most of the comments, it seems a lot of comments are knee-jerk reaction promted by envy.
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.
“You’re just jealous” has for a while now been HN’s go to any unwelcome criticism, whether the criticism is valid or not. I suppose that’s what goes for “thoughtful and substantive” comments nowadays. In that spirit l, I suggest these people are just mentally underdeveloped, to the point where the best weapon they have are childish quips.
But what if they were really jealous? What makes you think the crowd here and yourself are above that universal and highly ubiquitous human emotion? Now, did you fix that Jira?
mixed feelings - this is a good story, but it's sort of impressive in the same way it's impressive Six Flags gets away with selling Corn Dogs for $10.
but all in all I wish more people did this. it would create a more competitive environment the ultimately result in driving the price down for many things and lowering hopefully making BigCo weaker.
While I admire the can-do attitude and independent mindset, stories like this strike me primarily as how unscalable doing something like this is.
I mean, it only works because not more then 1-2% of developers even try to do something like this, since it's really hard to ensure you have enough edge in understanding user needs, building and being able to find a distribution chanel, and there simply isn't enough revenue to support many more developers to sell their niche products.
I hate this conclusion, but most developers have to rely on salaries, since only a few companies have captured revenue streams big enough to justify a full time job.
Why isn't there enough revenue to support other devs? Lots of people have money to spend, they just don't want to spend it on bad products. Induced demand via increased competition is a real phenomenon [0].
Building tools for other companies’ platforms (first one was Twitter, second one is macOS, last is OpenAI) is always a double edged sword.
It makes growth / user acquisition easier, because you’re going where the people already are. But it also means you’re at the mercy of the underlying platform waking up and invalidating your business model (as happened with Twitter).
As you suggest, the only way to survive in this mode is to be continuously building new products around a diverse group of platforms. It helps if they’re not too diverse, because you can cross-sell (i.e. the correlation of Twitter users, macOS users and chatgpt web users is pretty high). When one platform shifts, you find another.
It’s a risky method but not a bad one if your morale can stomach the down turns in any individual platform.
I always enjoy reading success stories of developers of small apps.
At the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re seeing only a cherry picked part of the picture. There is no mention of advertising spend or customer acquisition costs. The trend among indie hackers is to talk about MRR without mentioning a single expense, then to interleave it all with “follow me on Twitter” so you’re inspired to join their audience. This is a bit cynical, but I’ve been following accounts like this for a decade and it’s depressing to watch how many of them pivot into trying to sell me courses and/or private community access based on their success.
Audience building (which he readily talks about in the article) becomes a conflict of interest for real information because it incentivizes big numbers while hiding costs. Maybe his apps are growing entirely organically and it’s pure profit. Or maybe he’s spent huge amounts of money on ads or marketing to get more installs to grow his user base as fast as possible. He mentions spending 16 hour days between coding the app and promoting it.
The thing is, we don’t know how he got the users, and he won’t tell us because admitting anything other than MRR would only detract from his story. And as any small business operator knows, getting the customers is the hardest part.
I wish him the best and enjoy following these success stories, but having seen enough of these I always take the isolated MRR numbers with a grain of salt. It’s not the full picture. This isn’t unique to this developer. It’s the trend among social media “indie hackers”: They know people are hungry for success stories and want to learn the secrets of how to build a successful indie company, so they build narratives to make themselves look like the person who will share those secrets. But then the more you read and the more you follow, the more you start seeing how they’re leaving out all of the actual secrets and keys to success, such as how they’re marketing their apps and getting downloads.
Right! Did you notice the phrase “at the moment”? A snapshot in time that makes the narrative sound optimal.
No mention of how it reached that point. No mention of what advertising routes were tried in the past.
Another trick I’ve seen is for solopreneurs to create a “HoldCo” that holds their individual businesses, then to find creative ways to spend marketing dollars out of the parent company so they can keep it off the books of their individual businesses. You have to look for this when someone has a large personal brand presence that markets the app. For example, how much is he spending to grow his Twitter and newsletter following, which isn’t counted as an expense out of the individual businesses but is a huge (perhaps the largest?) driver of leads for them.
From evaluating potential small business acquisitions I quickly learned that operators are very good at juicing their profitability numbers as they prepare for a potential sale, for example. You’d often see great stories of customer growth and high profit numbers, only to discover that the profitability was a recent change after they turned off the growth tools. You might also discover that their customer acquisition costs were hidden away in one of the owner’s other ventures. For example, a roofing company that looks great until you realize their entire customer base comes from “referrals” from the owner’s other company which installs solar panels on people’s roofs.
Again, it’s possible that this is pure, organic, word-of-mouth growth all the way to $45K MRR, but I’ve seen enough of these stories to know that word of mouth and a moderate Twitter following generally isn’t enough to do it.
All I’m saying is to keep an eye open for what you’re not being told in these stories. When someone is part indie hacker and part social media influencer, everything they write is designed to consider you a potential customer, potential follower, or potential acquirer of their business (as with his previous sale). That doesn’t mean that their information is unhelpful, it just means that you’re getting a partial sales pitch with everything you read. Keep that in mind.
Yeah I'm pretty sure you didn't read the article and are just being cynical.
> No mention of how it reached that point. No mention of what advertising routes were tried in the past.
From the post:
I knew that posting the app to websites and forums on the internet and hoping for a traffic spike wouldn’t work in the long term. I can’t get lucky forever.
So, I started to look for a long-term distribution channel. I tried Google paid ads, wrote SEO articles, looked for sponsorships on newsletter/YouTube channels, and tons of other things. There were some small results, but in the end, I didn’t see a way that could give me traffic for the long-term without continuous effort. (Except for SEO, but SEO is extremely slow to see the results). This is when I think about Twitter and the #buildinpublic community.
Reading between the lines, building his Twitter and newsletter audience was key to growing these ‘businesses’. The real product he’s selling is hope to all the wantrepreneurs who yearn to escape their own corporate grind and find success selling their own useless nick-nacks. This is no different than real-estate investing, or drop-shipping, or any other get rich quick scheme from time immemorial.
I used to use monosnap for annotating screenshots, but it went subscription-only (or maybe it was always subscription-based, but a previously-free-tier core feature I needed for my workflow, the s3 integration, went into a subscription tier).
The smoking gun is the fact that this story could absolutely kill his golden goose, which is easily replicable. In the next few weeks there will be 10 new competitors for ChatGPT wrappers, all armed with paid marketing budgets to try and get a piece of this high margin business.
The only reason he would risk committing business suicide like this is because building the personal brand is more important to him than keeping this business afloat. If he really wanted to grow the business, there seems to be enough margin in it to support very aggressive paid marketing
There already are tons of ChatGPT wrappers already, both now and when Tony started initially, but Tony still succeeded in building one of the top ones. This is because marketing matters more than product, which you've ironically not caught as the true message of this article.
Is there a 4th bucket of people who are so eager to pigeonhole ideologies instead of reading that it makes them functionally illiterate? Or are we done at three buckets?
I wish this absolutely ridiculous, unthinking trope of treating communities of thousands of people as one mind that’s only allowed to have one opinion would finally stop.
Yeah, there is a reason HN has a certain reputation, and Twitter has a different one, and Reddit (or certain subreddits, rather) has an entirely different one. At some point, by comparing the aggregate trends, you definitely can put communities into different camps.
I think there is a lot of money to be made in building "human accessible" frontends to AI tools, so I'm not surprised that his ChatGPT wrapper product does well.
Setting up Midjourney, for example, is such a convoluted mess, where you have to create an account on another service (Discord) before creating a Midjourney account, then understand the different chat channels and figure out where the best place to use the app is (private DM with Midjourney bot.) And that's all before even generating an image! Even their website looks like someone's art project, not a cutting-edge image generation service: https://www.midjourney.com/
Meh, I still am not convinced that the blank chat box is a good UI. You still need to know what to say and how to say it. Too much implicit knowledge is required.
You should watch the dall-e 3 trailers. The whole leap forward is that you can just write a description of the scene, the more descriptive the better. The coherence and accuracy seems to be far better than MJ or even SDXL. There's less prompt fu nonsense (aka 4k, hdr, trending on art station, etc) than ever.
Leonardo.ai is much better in this regard. I hated midjourney, and if they don’t change this ridiculous way of interacting with the app they will fail.
> Probably 12 hours a day, or even 16 hours/day if you also count Twitter as “work”.
It’s the marketing effort that puts me off. I know I’m a 10x developer with a great product sense, but spending hours every day on Twitter and blogging sounds awful. I very definitely count those 4 twitter hours as ‘work’.
Is this something that we can facilitate through IH or elsewhere? I am on the other side - not good enough of a dev but plenty of experience on the biz side.
Let me know if you're interested in brainstorming. I've got extensive dev experience across the stack and can slog my way through marketing/sales but it wears on me quickly and I'm not great at it. I've got some time off coming up and will be looking to pick up a side project or two.
Marketing either costs money, or time. I've blogged before, and I've also ran ads before (on Facebook, Google, paying influencers, etc) which is basically outsourcing your marketing. If you don't want to do it yourself, you can always pay for the problem to be solved. However, most indie hackers don't have the money to pay for ads so they must inevitably spend time marketing instead.
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.
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.
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 course or info product to the people who want to replicate your success.
No bitterness here and I haven't even read this particular post properly to cast aspersions at him. I've just felt something didn't add up with this corner of the internet for some time.
Here are a few more random ones from the top of my "For You" feed. Again nothing against the specific posters, just to illustrate what I am seeing:
Agree with this, it's mostly talking about numbers and the success instead of the product itself [which you'd expect to be the forefront of all their posts as its the main reason they are tweeting?]
> @LBacaj This top comment on HN, to this post on getting to $45K/MO, captures everything wrong with the developer mindset today.
> ”everything has to be crazy hard technically or it’s not valuable.”
> You’ve all been duped into delusions of grandeur, only so they can take advantage of you.
> @circleseer HN has become the old man yelling at the cloud meme
> @madmaxbr5 A pizza shop is just a thin rapper around the agricultural supply chain and restaurant equipment industry. The recipes are centuries old. Zero actual innovation.
I had the same thought. So I did a bit of digging into it, turns out they are just rehashing the same tweet again and again. Just with different wording. When a new popular tweet pops up, everyone copies each other. It's an echo chamber down there.
As an experiment, you can try to choose a random popular tweet from your timeline. Look into their profile. And I bet there's a high chance you can find the same or very similar tweet a few months or year prior
> 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.
I’ve followed a lot of them. Maybe 100 at one point?
I love watching people build little businesses, iterate, and find success. It was really cool to see them all working on their various things, celebrating the little wins, and sharing things they learned along the way.
But to be honest, I’ve gradually unfollowed most of them. Many of them got a little too into the self-promotion angle and their content became repetitive “follow me for more content like this” bits. It felt like half of them were repeating same variations of the popular topic of the week every week, because they were! When threads were the thing to do I’d see the same topic rehashed to death in thread form for about 2 weeks by different people until
they all moved on to the next topic.
Another chunk of them slowly pivoted from their own business to selling courses, educational materials, or “pay $499 to access my private community of builders” deals. I hit the unfollow button as soon as they pivot to this stuff.
There are a few that I still follow, but if I’m being honest I don’t know that I’ve learned a whole lot. The most successful ones always have their business success wrapped up largely in their giant social media followings, which turns into a game of how well they can market to their audience without being off putting. The most famous example is the levels.io guy, who is by all means an honest and great guy but nevertheless appears to be making businesses that spread by word-of-Twitter because he has such an audience. Nothing wrong with that, really, but after watching it for a few years you realize that it’s not repeatable unless you can play the Twitter game successfully at massive scale, which is what a lot of these influencers and up trying with mixed success.
Its exactly the same spiel as all these Amazon seller “gurus” on Youtube telling you how to sell properly and how much they are making, but they only make money with their courses, etc…
If you hang out long enough on indiehackers you realize most of the people there dont want to create businesses, they just want to amass more followers and readers in order to peddle their “dev tools” or whatever
Another red flag: "Sign up for my free newsletter/access video tutorials" which turns into an upsell for an expensive "masterclass"/private discussion group. In the Amazon passive income universe, these typically run $1500/year.
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?
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.
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 losers tried most of the same things yet just didn't get lucky, or ran out of money before luck could come along.
A lot of people here complaining that Soloproneurs only make "useless" "pet rocks".
There is a big bias here, only the pet rock solopreneurs are very public about what they are doing and their success at it, because that is their marketing, YOU (their audience on HN and Twitter) are the pet rocks buyers.
Solopreneurs with stuff other than pet rocks often don't want to share their success and how much they are making especially not to a tech savvy and entrepreneurial audience, as this would just cause more competition.
bullseye. when I read this I specifically thought of a few guys I know that made proprietary license SDKs that tons of corporations are paying for. there's a dude well known in the mobile space for example that sells the background geolocation plugins that everyone uses. it's a very tough problem to solve and he works on it full time and probably make a boatload of money owning his own business.
I mute a lot of these accounts that try to farm me as their audience. I used to engage some, they just don't care to reply at all. And they are annoying real fast. Imaging you have 10 posts of garbage a day / influencer
I am surprised people reduced this article as just another pet rock.
Dude's journey has some interesting nuggets. He knows how to time box himself and build the smallest MVP that will actually make money.
And his journey is not an overnight success either, it took him years to build everything including his social presence. Compare that to a W-2 job where you just have to show up 9am-5pm.
HN is showing its overly critical self again, just like when Dropbox first appeared on HN.
He's a good marketeer, I'll give you that. Just this week I've seen one of his tweets being promoted on X and now he's top of hacker news on my feed.
Not particularly interested in his tools but congratulations on his way to achieve engagement.
Hmm.. that seemed like perfectly reasonable criticism to me, the kind that informed the founder of the gulf between users' current understanding and the level they'd need to see the value in the product (i.e. very useful to a founder).
But I guess looking back now it's easy to view it with levity; it could have felt extremely harsh at the time (although Drew does manage a few smiley emojis throughout his answer so he seemed to have taken it well).
It's not infamous because the skepticism of dropbox was wrong (though it obviously was...)
It's infamous because Drew made a point of coming back as a billionaire to call out and shame brandonm; something that seemed unnecessarily petty when you're holding a billion dollars.
No, it is infamous precisely because people, especially developers, on HN discount the value of good user experience. No one but the most technical will set up their own FTP server to rsync files back and forth, but they will drag and drop files into a folder that "magically" syncs. To say it more flippantly, this is why Drew is a billionaire and BrandonM is not.
IMHO this is the difference between real innovation and productization. The invention of the transistor is a real innovation, the transistor radio is a mere product. That's not to say products don't have value, but they're just... not as impressive to me.
Nothing that Dropbox does (or did? is it still around?) is technically innovative. I guess it's nice for that rich guy that he identified a user-friendly box that people would pay for.
Sure, but the company that made the transistor radio (and not necessarily even made it, but the one that made the best version of it), Sony, is now rich, while the organization that made the transistor, Bell Labs, is now essentially defunct.
> Nothing that Dropbox does (or did? is it still around?) is technically innovative. I guess it's nice for that rich guy that he identified a user-friendly box that people would pay for.
Technology is a tool for people, there is no value to technology (and it doesn't matter how "innovate" it is) if people don't use it.
> To say it more flippantly, this is why Drew is a billionaire and BrandonM is not
Seems a bit mean-spirited, and I'm not sure I like the implied value assumptions. I expect there are other important reasons as well including connections, timing, luck, etc.
I was just mentioning it in the same spirit as the parent comment. It's not about "billionaires bullying" at all but the fundamental disconnect engineers often have to user experience.
Honest criticism is undervalued. I think the zedshaw take isn't exactly wrong either.
Seems to be a slightly different category from CmdrTaco's infamous take on the iPod ('No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame') but that wasn't entirely wrong either.
I'm not quite as critical of HN, but I concur that allowing deletion whenever would be a positive change.
I think the guy’s aesthetic just turns people off here. He seems intensely invested in how to make virality happen in any way possible, and building simplistic stuff that’s not advancing the state of tech. People here want to see technical contributions and organic success. It’s kind of ironic since this is a forum made by a VC company, but I doubt the Tony guy could get into YC with his ideas, despite his 70k followers and 40k mrr.
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.
Point taken. I think they strive for high impact, at least high market impact, in the application phase. What they end up with doesn't reflect what they want, kind of by definition. The extreme majority of YC startups fail.
What was eye opening to me about his story is that it doesn't take a "disruptive" product to achieve _moderate_ amounts of success. And I do stress _moderate_, since the traditional VC formula popularized by YC is that companies are meant to grow infinitely YoY, making all shareholders rich far beyond their needs, and if there's no growth, then investors aren't happy. That's a skewed hypercapitalist perspective that continues to concentrate wealth among the wealthy, and, among many other issues, corrupts the product development into pleasing the investors rather than the customers.
Instead, a single person today can create a moderate amount of income that allows them to live free from financial concerns, by building small and useful products that are not revolutionary in any way, but help many people regardless. This is a far more sustainable and fairer way of achieving "success" than the VC formula, so this Tony guy probably doesn't care about YC.
I mean 45k MRR with 90% profit is far from moderate success when compared to US minimum wage (or even of a more civilized country like Switzerland where it’s $4k), especially when living in moderate or low cost of living locations like Vietnam or Bali (he also mentions Lisbon but i doubt the CoL is comparable to vietnam)
Especially when working only “4” hours a day.
I think the only concern with something like that is the sustainable lifetime of the product, seems to me you have to re-invent the business every few years if you want to keep your solopreneur story going ( the product grows beyond the solo part or gets overtaken by the competition).
I meant "moderate" as relative to the kind of wealth that VC-funded companies can achieve, which I would label as "excessive". Obviously, 45k MRR exceeds even high wage standards in wealthy countries, but then again, even those wages hardly allow people to achieve financial independence. They're enough for them to be profitable to the government, and to maintain a decent way of life, but they still have to be mindful about their expenses, investments and financial status.
45k MRR means that you and your loved ones are safe from money being an issue in any situation, which is a liberating way to live. It doesn't allow you to own mansions, yachts and private jets, but I would argue that such wealth is disproportionate for any individual to manage.
If they can maintain this by working 4 hours a day, more power to them. That's an enviable position to be in by any definition, especially if they got there by legitimate means.
I agree that long-term sustainability might be a problem, but they seem to have the drive to keep supporting the products for as long as possible, and the ingenuity and skills to invent new ones, and hopefully the wisdom of investment, so they'll be fine. It's doubtful this would work for many others, but as they point out, this is their own journey.
Very few of YC's companies have done anything to "advance the state of tech," especially the successful ones. According to their website the top three by revenue are Airbnb, Instacart, and Doordash.
Hackernews seems overly critical and anti-“hacker” nowadays (new acc but been around for years). Anyone have a guess why that’s the case? Influx of new users?
I’ve also been around for years, but I don’t see it as a recent phenomenon. I’ve noticed that usually most top comments (for most topics) contain contra-arguments, or critical comments of any sort against the article. Sometimes it’s useful to learn about other perspectives, but often it feels forced or just plain negative/ego inspired. I could go back years and check old posts and notice that same trend. One famous example is the Dropbox post.
I think this is the beauty of HN: having people that does not share the hive mind from Social Media, edgy comments, contrarians, insiders, builders and people that reflects over the topics posted here.
I'm also guessing the bounce rate on HN is pretty high. New users come in, see a post like this where the top 5 posts are all long and very negative, and they bounce. Who wants to stick around for that? Other people who like to post negative comments. It's a self-reinforcing cycle.
I am really fed up with this kind of indie hacker story.
MMR updates are superficial. Weak signal. I'm confident most are absent of critical info and some are entirely made up. I don't disbelieve anyone in particular, but when a mechanism of virality proliferates, it often gets deployed without the backing substance.
"How I XYZ" around money is similarly misleading. Most entrepreneurs I know cannot recreate their own success – when they set out on a new venture, they need to look with fresh eyes, invent some new techniques, and discard a lot of methods that previously worked. If entrepreneurs aren't even able to reuse their own "how I xyz," then how will a stranger with even less nuance be able to learn or apply much from the blog post? Again, some of these stories have great lessons, but as a category I believe they are more noise than signal.
Finally, the sheer obsession with money saddens me. The great entrepreneurs of our world are hardly motivated by money – to them, money is a tool that they factor in as they work to realize a vision, not an end goal. How ethically/morally impoverished is this technical class to be so obsessed with money? There's a term for this – greed. I know that a lot of jobs suck, a lot of stuff in life is expensive, we need money to do a lot of basic things, etcetera. But money is not the only solution, and more money is not an even better solution. I don't think this incessant messaging around money is virtuous – I think it is both a product of greed and a means of harnessing the greed in others. (And where are the entrepreneurs bragging about impact?)
(For the record, I am not jealous – I make my money doing literally whatever I want, on projects that I find much more exciting, with ample time left over for nature walks, rock climbing, reading, and more. Unlike these authors, the money I make is not the most interesting part of my story.)
These stories are reminding me of the "Doctors hate this one trick!" Ads in the 90s. Or the influencers who start selling content, dropshipping tricks or ebooks on how they have succeeded.
There's a lot of merit for entrepreneurs sharing their journey, like a lot of the other comments here I just wished it was less about being "successful" or making money.
At its best, money is a terrific measure of satisfaction you’ve provided to other people. This man builds products people like and shares the story of his success for free to build an audience. These are all good things. You respond with bitter vitriol, that is not a good thing. If this is how you approach life you will not deserve his success or money.
>This man builds products people like and shares the story of his success for free to build an audience.
Maybe people are getting tired of 90% of social media content being about "building an audience". Everyone is trying to sell us something, all the time.
The benefit to “how I XYZ” for me is not that I can copy them. It’s ideally to see a path, obstacles that come, decisions that were made, and try and understand why they made certain decisions and took certain actions.
If something becomes so straightforwards that it can be replicated straightforwards, the value of it becomes a product of skills + time. So if I want to open a business mowing lawns, this is a very commodotized and high-competition industry, so I will earn a profit that is pretty much correlated to the unpleasantness of the job and the time it takes. Very little opportunity to earn a premium, and the only tactic is hacking around how quickly I can complete each job.
If I want to create a brand new product from scratch (one that is not glorified consulting), then it will by its definition be totally unique and the journey unlike all others, including my previous journeys. The best I can do is take all information I can and try and make the best decisions and take the best actions.
Arthur, despite agreeing with your thoughts, I think it's easy to not care about money when you have money that grows without your time investment.
The rest of us have to place a dire importance on it, lest we end up destitute, unemployable, homeless, and so on.
Though if you would like to write something up about "I made enough, and now I enrich my soul with leisure and nature walks," that would go further to disillusion some of the need to keep getting more and more money. But publicly decrying greed (and fear in greed's skin) will not achieve anything of lasting value.
It's not about "not caring about money." It's about not letting money be so blindingly front and center that reality is obscured.
I'm with you – we all need to be materially conscious to stay alive. We can't just throw our finances to the wind. As an entrepreneur, money is a particularly critical part of the equation.
Similarly, we can't afford to be so enamored by strangers making money on the internet that we fail to see 1) the pitfalls, errors, and missed opportunities in their efforts 2) their actual method (MRR charts are not a method) 3) the gifts and opportunities of our unique situations.
> Finally, the sheer obsession with money saddens me. The great entrepreneurs of our world are hardly motivated by money – to them, money is a tool that they factor in as they work to realize a vision, not an end goal
This sounds great until the bills arrive or you realize you need to save extra for retirement or home buying because your business’s income is unpredictable.
I concur with this assessment. I don't want to discount the hard work of the author of the post, but this post could have also literally been "My slot machine win: $3 to $1.2M with one pull of the handle"
I'm under no illusions that my success has a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time, a lot of luck, and a lot of hard work.
Are we reading the same article? "One pull of the handle"... the guy wrote about iterating through like 10-15 (more?) different ideas over the course of 2 years, with most of them failing for one reason or another. Apparently, the meme that success is entirely luck is so pervasive that when exact evidence to the contrary is provided people still miss it.
Seriously. There are at least four different comments on this thread about how the author was lucky, is showing his lottery ticket, pulled the right lever and is writing about making money without doing anything.
Greed? You want to lecture about greed, when 95% of tech companies are _driven_ by profits, by driving the share price up by any means necessary, including exploiting their users and employees, being the reason for new consumer protection laws to come into place and then skirting around them, tax avoidance, and a million other shady tricks, all with the goal of becoming a "unicorn", to go public or be acquired, and to get to do it all over again.
This very forum is built by, around and for serial entrepreneurs in this rat race, so it's a bit... rich to lecture about greed on here, of all places.
And yet you criticize when a solo developer, without any venture capital as a safety net, manages to have the success entrepreneurs dream of, measured by the same measuring stick. It all reads like sour grapes to me.
Good on OP for having the courage, persistence and skill to pull this off. Why shouldn't they talk about the steps they took, and the results they're seeing? We can call it survivorship bias, growth hacking, luck, etc. all we want, but it's encouraging to know that these stories _do_ happen.
Achieving financial independence by building something people want to pay for, instead of relying on the usual advertising and VC get-rich-quick schemes, should be applauded.
What is your position? You're bashing the reply for not complaining about all greed, is that it? Like somehow the OP didn't go far enough? I'm struggling to understand your response, maybe it is to defend greed?
The juxtaposition of a entrepreneur recounting his experience building/selling products, with the original commenter criticizing entrepreneurs for being greedy, alongside of stories/comments every week here complaining about how we aren’t paid enough in tech and how it’s immoral to ask tech workers to drive to an office is quite ironic.
He has a point.. HN is full of greed (or lack of appreciation for the privilege most of us have) and criticizing a solo bootstrapped entrepreneur for greed feels completely misplaced.
To a certain extent, yes, let’s defend and embrace greed when the outcome is a solo entrepreneur doing cool things and sharing the experience publicly.
> To a certain extent, yes, let’s defend and embrace greed
No, let's not do this. That's literally the root of inequity that is rotting western culture. Put down the Ayn Rand and starting thinking about more than your /r/wsb fantasies of become a wolf of wallstreet or an elon musk. Cultures, cities, and nations' people are dying because of this callous attitude.
I'm criticizing the hipocrisy of denouncing greed while being part of the tech industry, especially on this forum, and the accusation that the author is guilty of it, based on nothing but a post about a successful entrepreneurship journey taken on "hard mode" (being a solo founder with no VC backing or advertising scam business models).
This is a success story we should all celebrate in this community, and it pains me to see this type of response at the top of the comment section.
I dont think all "success stories" should be celebrated. I think that's what the commenter was trying to highlight.
There is such a thing as toxic productivity advice, the internet is full of it. It's easy to spot for me now, because I've noticed a few common threads. 1- The writing typically focuses on how much money the person makes 2- how little they have to work now or how little they had to work to get it and 3- How little time it took.
In my career, business, etc. I've learned the exact opposite. I would give the exact opposite advice for people looking to be successful in their lives and careers:
1- Don't focus on how much money you make, but how much value you add to the world and those around you. As you keep investing in your community, it will pay you back dividends right when you need it most. 2- Work hard, even when mo one is watching. Work hard for yourself, no one else. 3- Don't rush things, sometimes taking an extra month to build your business infrastructure properly could save you millions in the future.
In one sentence: It's not helpful for me personally for this guy to boast about how much he makes, how little he works, and how quickly he did it. What would be helpful is for him to remove all the concrete numbers ($45k/month, etc.) and boasting which only serves to put up my defenses and force me to start off in a position of comparison. Then he could just have simple prose about things he thinks are helpful that he learned along the way, simple information like a technical paper, not ad copy.
This, and other content like it, serves them, not me. I've found that limiting or even completely restricting my consumption of this kind of content for the latter, is better for me.
> I dont think all "success stories" should be celebrated.
I agree, and I never said so.
I get the perspective of being jaded by vapid success stories of "here's how I got rich, buy my book/merch/MLM and you can get rich too", but this is far from being the case here.
If you read the article, the author clearly states they were lucky several times, and towards the end:
> There is no formula to guarantee success.
This is not someone boasting of their success, or saying there's a quick and foolproof way to reach it, but sharing their journey with others and hoping it inspires people, in the same way they were inspired by similar stories.
> how little they have to work now or how little they had to work to get it
This was a 2 year journey, where at some point they were working 12 and 16 hours a day, and they said it took a toll on their personal and social life, so this is hardly working little, and having no sacrifices. If they now get to enjoy working 4 hours a day, and taking many days off, then that's a notable reward they get to enjoy from their previous hard work.
We should all be thankful that we live in an age where such a work/life balance is even possible. Our ancestors had to do back-breaking labour for 18 hours a day, or work a dead-end office job for their entire lives enriching someone else just so they could earn the right to a meager existence when they retire. Yet we live in a time when computers enable us to not think about our finances, and to do work we actually enjoy doing, rather than because we have to in order to subsist.
_This_ is the future technology promised us, where everyone gets to work less and enjoy life more, yet most of us are still stuck in industries with the same grind mentality from 100 years ago. Let's not criticize being able to work less.
> How little time it took.
They invested 7 years into their career, and did hard work for 2 years, with several failures along the way, so this is not an insignificant amount of time. It's certainly impressive what they've accomplished in 2 years, but this is not an overnight success story. How long would they have to have done "hard" work for their story to hold water?
> In one sentence: It's not helpful for me personally for this guy to boast about how much he makes, how little he works, and how quickly he did it.
I mean, that's your preference, sure. But companies are measured by their finances, and it's difficult to talk about growth towards financial independence without mentioning numbers. If they were discussing their fitness journey, they would need to mention their weight and exercise statistics, so I don't see how this is any different.
> This, and other content like it, serves them, not me.
Again, it's your opinion, and that's fine, but myself and many others find it very interesting to hear about someone else's road to "success". We don't need to be so cynical about their intentions just because it fits some preconceived notions about this type of content.
>I mean, that's your preference, sure. But companies are measured by their finances, and it's difficult to talk about growth towards financial independence without mentioning numbers. If they were discussing their fitness journey, they would need to mention their weight and exercise statistics, so I don't see how this is any different
This is exactly what I'm trying to highlight. While this kind of behavior seems normal or common in this community its not really in the greater world.
My plumber has done real well for himself, has dozens of people working for him, successful. He does not have articles on his website about how much he makes in a month, and how many hours he works when. He does have articles about the big name job he just landed, local building code committees he's on, and the little league baseball team he sponsors. Oh, and some plumbing tips and tricks.
My proctologist is similar. His website talks mostly about proctology. I bet he makes a lot, but he doesn't really talk publicly about it. That would be tacky.
In this community for some reason it's popular to say "look at how much money I make, look at all the bridges I've burned along the way, look at how I was way out of balance one way then the other, etc.". I get it, this was their journey. I'm not trying to say anything about them or there journey.
I think for every successful person like this there is another who did it a more "in balance" way. Those voices don't seem to come through so clearly, that's all I'm saying. I think it would benefit those in that second bucket to hear more stories about people like them being successful.
Financial independence is a big deal, though. Especially for people living in poorer areas of the world, where the majority of the population is struggling to get by. This type of content, where someone shares their legitimate road to FI instead of using some get-rich-quick scheme is a big deal. It's very insightful, and inspires many to want to do the same, which is a good thing.
I'm sure that if your plumber or proctologist shared their journeys this openly that others would find it helpful as well. Mentioning incomes can be tacky, and I too scowl whenever someone boasts about theirs, but this article didn't strike me as such at all. Which is why I think the negative tone here is unwarranted.
I think the issue is there's this undercurrent of self-promotion with these types of posts. Just like the people 20 years ago who would post their $20K adsense checks on their blog posts saying "you too can be successful like me (FLEX)"
Did you ever think these people want some feedback and admiration and recognition for what they’ve done? Being a solopreneur is really really lonely.
And no one cares what you are doing. Posts like this are about getting recognition. Making $42k a month doesn’t actually get you any recognition by itself. Maybe buying champagne in a club from it does, but a lot of people don’t like that kind of attention.
People on HN are just so resentful and want to see the bad in posts like this it’s really sad.
> For a forum created by an accelerator, it is weirdly anti-success.
It's not anti-success. HN applauds anyone making millions by doing real hard work that benefits everybody. What's frowned upon are these look-I-did-nothing-but-still-made-it-big stories.
They made something people want, the motto of this forum's accelerator, but when it's not something you'd want, then it's not "real hard work," apparently.
> What's frowned upon are these look-I-did-nothing-but-still-made-it-big stories.
Seven years of acquiring skills in different domains, and two years of applying those skills, learning more along the way, grinding, failing, trying again, and building several successful products people are willing to pay for is "doing nothing"? What a ridiculous take.
People get rich nowadays by manipulating virtual numbers on screens, based on speculation and pure luck, which is much closer to "doing nothing", and we enthusiastically celebrate their success, yet someone uses their skills to build and sell products to people that enjoy using them, and we label them as lucky, lazy and show-offs. #smh
Fwiw I don’t think those are “the great entrepreneurs”. They’re rich and famous, yes, but “THE great entrepreneurs”?. I’d prefer Tesla, Jobs, and even JCR Licklider over them.
are you confusing inventors and entrepreneurs? Cause no way you'd consider Tesla a great entrepreneur, he died penniless and JCR Licklider same thing - great inventor and innovator yeah. Great Entrepreneur no.
Sure, my ex father in law: he built and ran a private theatre in the middle of the mountains at the Polish-German borders. We’re talking: a deep dark forest, small village, relatively impoverished area, shortly after the economic transformation post 1989.
He built the place in the ruins of a falling apart 16th century barn, had to support his initial work with clown shows, manual labor, then scaled it to the point where the place was regularly frequented by world class jazz performers.
He trained actors, provided work to people in the area. But he never scaled the business to the point where he’d have to compromise his work or relationships with people/fans.
We all play the cards we’re given and he managed to do it so much better than the brain parasites we tend to worship here.
Build a sustainable business that is a net positive contribution to the society, focus on value above growth, and stay true to your beliefs. Then keep it going for three decades. That’s entrepreneurship.
Bear in mind that although he’s a writer/playwright, I’d say that 3/4 of his work was managing the business like any other, juggling marketing, sales, admin.
(Apologies for any typos, writing this from my phone while in a rush)
PS IIRC in its peak the little village had more theatres per capita than Broadway (3 theatres!)
that's really cool, your definition of a great entrepreneur is a bit outside the common parlance but yeah I'd definitely agree that your father in law is a successful entrepreneur
Sustainable profitable businesses that make a healthy profit and give back to their communities are the lifeblood of economies
Most non-VC founders I've ever met start with the humbe goal of earning a living and feeding their family (and, of course, building a product that the market needs).
Definitely see more greed on the VC side and in more mature companies, especially when PE or acquisitions come into play.
They are obliged to, by definition. Unlike non-profit or public-benefit companies, commercial companies must maximize profits for shareholders, otherwise they might be prosecuted by law.
> I make my money doing literally whatever I want, on projects that I find much more exciting, with ample time left over for nature walks, rock climbing, reading, and more. Unlike these authors, the money I make is not the most interesting part of my story.
Nice humblebragging. So you just read one blog post from the author and concluded that the most interesting part of their story is money? I bet they enjoy a lot of things and this is only a small piece of their life, as their blog post is specifically about being an entrepreneur, not about their hobbies.
Are we even reading the same story? It seems like you're trying to do a takedown of the story, but the author addresses all of those points (the author largely agrees with you)
Sure, but this is a forum run by a bunch of startup founders and a startup VC.
MRR is not a weak signal.
If anything, I’d love to see more stories like this and less stories from popular media like NPR, Gizmodo, and NY Times (all 3 on the front page right now).
This article articulates pretty well everything i’ve read in all the wantreprenarial / bootstrap articles i’ve read, which is summed up as “build a following, ride rising trends, iterate fast”.(and dump things that slow you down / have peaked) This article is in line with the build a following, and shows which rising trend he’s riding.
The part about the money irking you seems to come from a place of incredible privilege. He earned
his independence and is selling a non-essential product on the free market, before B2B powerhouses move in. He shares what he’s done and experienced with the community and also hired employees.
He escaped the 9-5 and says he’s only working part time, which allows him to do the non work things you mentioned though he prefers surfing travelling and gaming to your rock climbing and nature walk.
The article is not even behind a paywall or part of a bootstrap course, so again where is the greed?
I liked this story because I’ve had a taste of what $45k/mo is like
and it resonated with me how difficult this is to do as an employee, I’ve played around with running the numbers on overemployment and it is still not the same amount
I’ve done many more projects than this person and just couldn't be compelled to build an audience on twitter religiously, or stick to one persona! many of my ideas have incompatible crowds
its great for me to see examples of launching multiple projects
another thing that stood out is what he considers a failed project has probably changed
he wrote off two later in the story as a footnote, but they are probably viable ideas, just don't make enough, for him, anymore
it is fulfilling for me to have lifestyle flexibility and capital, I’ve had it and it is objectively better. I can relate to how this author filled in his time doing other fulfilling things
> (For the record, I am not jealous – I make my money doing literally whatever I want, on projects that I find much more exciting, with ample time left over for nature walks, rock climbing, reading, and more. Unlike these authors, the money I make is not the most interesting part of my story.)
If this was written in the beginning, the whole thing would make much more sense as you are clearly jealous.
> I make my money doing literally whatever I want…
Classic take from somebody that most probably could spend their entire time just fiddling with ideas, with zero worries about money. Everything else was taken care of. Not everyone has this luxury pal.
The author is plain, simple sharing his story. Can you replicate his success? Who knows. But I respect him for sharing this candid blog post documenting his steps.
I'd love to read more about how the GP can live this lifestyle, maybe they can share and we all can learn and replicate their journey on how to make money doing literally whatever we want whist doing a lot of interesting hobbies.
They likely sit deep in the bowels of a very large company in a position shielded from the market. No expectations of delivery and no accountability for failure. You don’t get hired into a role like that, it’s the end result of a multi-decade tenure where you slowly evolve into a potted plant in the corner.
Generally my formula is about cultivating a healthy value set, becoming increasingly clear minded, and trying to do things that are worthwhile. I know that's vague, but those are the abstract principles that work in different circumstances. I've led many different lives within my life – rock climbing full time, building software – and those are the guiding themes that have most consistently offered the greatest results.
(Write to me directly if you'd like me to flush out in more concrete detail, including how money and service factor in, how to avoid traps, what I currently struggle with, etc.)
Reminds me of this interview I once saw on YouTube with a French heiress who said (and I paraphrase) "after reflecting a lot, I've concluded that although most things in life cost something, time is free" which is entirely delusional because time is only free to someone who has more money than they'll ever need
Yeah, it's such a bitter, and wrong, take, it seems like a caricature.
I simply don't understand the "why is it all about money" take, at all. The author isn't saying he wants to but a Rolls and lots of gold chains. He simply want to make enough to be able to be independent (which he succeeded), and to indulge in relatively minor enjoyments, like travel.
"Why is it all about money?" Because some of us like both independence and not starving.
> For the record, I am not jealous – I make my money doing literally whatever I want, on projects that I find much more exciting, with ample time left over for nature walks, rock climbing, reading, and more. Unlike these authors, the money I make is not the most interesting part of my story
Frankly, I think you’re being incredibly rude to assume that because someone shared their story on a topic, then it must be their entire identity. It’s just so presumptuous to assume that the author or authors of these pieces have nothing else in their lives of value, because they decided to share this piece of their life.
There’s a lot in your comment I agree with, but this note struck me as just… extremely uncharitable, presumptuous, and rude.
To be fair. The title of the post only focuses on money and completely ignores whether the work has any real value to themself or society. Kindof implies pretty strongly “their identity”.
No it doesn't? They just chose to write a tight, focused post. Rather than an autobiography. If they had written a larger sweeping piece focusing on all their hobbies and aspirations and well as their successful business people would still be salty in the comments.
Devils advocate, if the post was about building an open source non-profit with that level of financial success I don’t think there would be so much salt.
Respectfully, it doesn’t, I don’t think you’re being fair, and I think saying it does is rude and presumptuous.
It pretty strongly implies “what they chose to write a blog post about”.
If, in the blog post they described focusing on nothing else but money, I’d agree with you. But they don’t.
> I still want to get more revenue, but I realized that this is a moving goalpost, and it will never stop. $10K, then $20K, then $50K. I knew I would never satisfied.
> It’s much better to work and play at the same time.
> So I traveled. I went for a trip around Vietnam.
> My average working hours during this period was about 4 hours/day. I still tweet a lot
Clearly there’s more to this person than doing nothing but focusing on money. Just because they chose to write this blog post, doesn’t mean it’s their entire identity.
I think the point is that it seems like these days every time someone get's lucky with a couple SAAS / Apps they've released they've got to author a blog post how how they climbed the mountain. At some point the playbook seems more like self-promotion than it does anything else.
And that's fine, no one should be ashamed of their success. But it is also OK to point out what's going on and that's what the OP is doing.
I think it’s a mystical part of the software career path and useful to write about
He said he took risks because he was unencumbered, he waited till the ideal time to strike and did and it has more success than his employment offered financially and fulfillment wise
Who cares that his blogging is intrinsically tied to his growth hacking
This same standard is not levied on every Stanford dropout that sold shares of a pre-revenue idea to their VC neighbors for $20 million dollars
This reeks of moral superiority, you probably consider yourself to be a non-judgmental person too. Even if they were purely money driven, why is it bad for this person to have sought out money by creating a tool used by many that improves people's lives? It's not like this guy is a financier or middleman just pushing numbers around and taking a percent on every transaction.
I'd think that someone with the ability to live and walk around in nature would not be so critical of others.
Sorry but you can’t fall downhill into 45k a month. You also can’t write down a cake recipe for 45k a month like you seem to be expecting.
As someone who, over the last two years, has created a more modest 5 figure MRR business, I can assure you, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
It takes a lot of skill and understanding of the market and market forces to be this successful. Being able to do the same thing again and get the same results is exactly what these people are not trying to do.
There seems to be some disconnect between what you think would make a successful business and what people who are making successful businesses do.
If I was to start again today and do the same thing, I would fail. If I wrote down what I did and someone else tried it, they would fail. The market has moved on since then and so every day when I get out of bed, I need to get my work done, manage my team and plan for tomorrow.
And after all this, my little MRR is an important metric because it shows success and because it’s something that I’ve worked the hardest in my life for.
Best of luck for your nature walks, people get to chose what they do in life.
$ or in this case MRR, is the easiest comparable thing. The question “How big is your agency/business?” Is often very nuanced and tedious to explain.
It would probably take me 30+ seconds of boring conversation to get to the point. Humans optimize and now you have $xx / month. It’s easy to understand exactly where I am in my journey, how much “stuff” goes on in the day to day and the types of problems I have.
I like talking to people that are doing six figures a month, it gives me insight into the problems that I hope to one day have. Like a child looking up to their bigger brother. But also, they’re often very direct and insightful with the problems that I’m dealing with.
Not like they have the cake recipe I’m trying to make, but they can adapt their advice to my experience and tell me what temperature I should set my oven.
What else would you even measure? How much other people love what you made? The fact that lots of people pay you for it measures that. How much what you made helps other people? The fact that lots of people pay you for it measures that. How much you're able to contribute to good causes? How much money you make influences that. Money is a tool, it's created and traded with others as a means of exchange. If you make something valuable, you are given money for it, which you can use to make claims on the output of other people's work. There's no grand evil conspiracy here.
Their hiatus on the whole greed thing appart, I think they meant the same as what you said?
That there's no lessons to learn, because doing the same thing again wouldn't work. And if even the person who succeeded first hand would fail to reproduce their own success a second time, then those who are just reading about it have even less of a chance to be successful with that advice.
I think that's interesting to explore. I do wonder if it's true or not. There does exist some serial entrepreneurs that did manage to bootstrap many successful business after all.
Also I think the OP is more annoyed at the constant publication about "how I achieved financial success", because it kinds of gives out this illusion to others that they can as well, or that this is the ultimate achievement in life.
I don't think it's unachievable by others, but it's probably not achievable exclusively from following a template or immitating a play book. This in turn means that articles, books, seminars that provide a template or a play book inadvertently pray on people desperately hoping to replicate financial success themselves.
Also, I believe, mathematically, since money is a finite resource, having an outsize amount of it, compared to the average, implies that not everyone can be in that situation. Which would mean most people cannot achieve it. This assumes financial success is defined as having above average money.
I appreciate your comment and understand your point of view.
What people that want a guide to money (aka reading self help "how to make a million dollars in 100 days" books) don't understand is that the lessons aren't a formula. My feeling for the commenter I originally replied to is therein lies a source of misunderstanding and frustration.
Being an entrepreneur is a skill. There are some very good serial entrepreneurs but they've all had 10x as many failures as their handful of successes.
Reading someone else's story isn't to be taken as a lesson of what to do to get to any MRR. It's a series of data points to be mused over.
Enough data points, along with time in the game (persistence, market viability, base level competence and work ethic) and you will start to have larger and larger successes.
It’s money-focused because that is what people want to read.
I’ve been running a small successful software business for 10 years and we’ve posted here, Twitter, everywhere over the years, and nothing I write about attracts as much interest as when I open the kimono and share real numbers.
Partly it generates feedback like yours which is cat nip for social feed algorithms, but I think mainly people just really like personal details about others lives and businesses.
My advice would be to just not read these if they bother you.
I find these stories somewhat inspirational but generally lacking anything actionable. What is far more interesting is the stories of people who detail the longer road. How they started, problems and setbacks they encountered, why business X failed or was shutdown, how they used the lessons learned to build the next business, how they recognized opportunities and which ones they were able to take advantage of and which ones they had to pass up, and so on...
There's someone on twitter (I think it's The Gas Station Guy) who talked about having to fire sale a business that was worth close to $1M for $60,000 to a competitor because he was out of cash and desperate. How you get to that stage and how you recovered from it is far more interesting to me than these "0 to $XXX in 18 months" stories.
That's awfully judgemental, calling people who care about money "greedy," no?
I think your ingrained views around money and greed are preventing you from presenting a fair perspective. The author has something like 4 successful products, so the problem around reproducibility is... irrelevant.
And the idea of great entrepreneurs not being motivated by money... I mean, ok, maybe give some evidence. I think you'll find many people have 2 reasons for doing something, the nice "non-greedy" one they tell everyone and some seem to take a face value, and the underlying one.
> Finally, the sheer obsession with money saddens me. The great entrepreneurs of our world are hardly motivated by money – to them, money is a tool that they factor in as they work to realize a vision, not an end goal.
Is often a post rationalization.
Not everyone has to be, or has to seek to be a great entrepreneur. A lot of people, myself included, want to just go by and have a happy life. A new business doesn't have to ambition being a game changer, and I actually quite like the approach of building several small marginally successful products. True, this is not a recipe, and there's always a luck factor, but at least the author is sharing his story, whatever their own design behind this was.
I don't understand the complaint here. He's sharing his journey - he's not selling you a course on how to be an indie hacker. If you want to take any lessons from this, that's up to you.
I would argue that if someone is not motivated by money why should he be in "for profit venture" at all? why not create non-profit? or may be become a govt official or senator where you can influence policy decision that has the potential to create whole industry catering to your selected cause?
This is incredible story for me. I am not sure i can achieve same thing as he achieved. It is inspiring. Moreover his main business failed after twitters api policy changed so it is even more incredible that he was able to recover from that setback and managend to create a new business which is now surpassing his older biz. And he did it without taking any outside funding. In my eyes he is equal or greater than your so called great entreprenuers!
I am not an indie hacker and I find this story great. The author is genuine and shares interesting insights. The tone is humble. He recognizes himself that MRR is a risky metric and that you need to keep building new products all the time.
Finally, the "sheer obsession with money" is not at all what comes across in the post. A lot of it is about lifestyle topics, making news friends, etc.
Honestly, I find your comment completely out of touch with the article.
On the contrary: while to you the other things you spend your time with might be more interesting, for the rest of us the means through which you have acquired all of this free time... is by far more interesting and useful.
> The great entrepreneurs of our world are hardly motivated by money
The "great" entrepreneurs of our world have always been obsessed with money because it is literally the fuel and lifeblood of their endeavors. Only people with a lot of money can afford to pretend not to care about it while working strenuously their entire life to obtain it.
>But money is not the only solution
Money is literally the only solution its the only way to buy food medicine and live indoors.
> There's a term for this – greed
Greed is a natural response to a world so constructed that if you stop swimming you drown. It's as natural for people to be greedy as for a coyote to be hungry.
Is this HackerNews or some former communist Twitter enclave? Why is this mopey, undercutting, crabs-in-bucket post near the top of this comments section on HN?
This is a website about software entrepreneurship and you don’t like articles about going solo and making it? Maybe find a different website.
> I make my money doing literally whatever I want, on projects that I find much more exciting, with ample time left over for nature walks, rock climbing, reading, and more. Unlike these authors, the money I make is not the most interesting part of my story.
Good for you, little man. How did you manage to find a moment to write this spiteful comment with such an interesting life?
> with ample time left over for nature walks, rock climbing, reading, and more.
> Unlike these authors, the money I make is not the most interesting part of my story
You're deluded if you think anyone (other than your mom) is interested in your walking, climbing or reading.
In reality the title should be: this is how I got lucky in my journey, I jumped into the AI hype just like thousands of other developers, but pure luck made it for me, and now I make X amount of money. I’m not the first to jump into it, I’m not the brightest since there are way smarter people than me who tried similar ideas, I didn’t build anything groundbreaking, and I didn’t invent anything new. I just got lucky.
Now all you have to do is to sustain that, make an article about it, write a book on how you are successful and sell it because everyone subconsciously likes to read stuff that gives them hope, and maybe even later make a TED talk talking about how X attribute is all you need for success. But in reality, it is just luck! A lot of people did what OP did, and a lot will try to mimic it too, only to find out years later that they didn’t make it, ending up in a worse financial situation plus all the mental health issues they had/have to deal with. I am not trying to be pessimistic, but I always wish that in all these inspirational stories, they would make it clear that it is all luck. Sure, try your luck too, but keep your hopes just like how you do when you gamble.
The guy clearly explained how he has built MULTIPLE successful products. So there is obviously more going on than sheer luck.
And jumping on the AI hype is exactly what being a good entrepreneur is all about: recognizing an opportunity/gap and capitalizing on it. And the reason he was more successful than those thousands other developers is because he understands that there is more to business than building a cool product. For example marketing, something that he is clearly very good at.
Stretching your take to the extreme, it's like saying Kim Kardashian makes money from perfume because she's a genius fragrance designer and really understands the nuances and opportunities in the fragrance market, not because she had built an 'influential celebrity' persona with 400 million followers.
Are you really comparing a socialite from a wealthy family who didn't have to work to a regular Vietnamese guy who built his own business from scratch?
I did qualify it as stretched to the extreme. But it's the same basic framework: Build yourself into an influencer with a high follower count, then sell them basic products.
He built several projects that made recurring revenue. I can't build shit that makes $1 for me before I get bored out of my mind or "life happens" and it's abandoned. People underestimate how difficult it is to see anything through to completion and make any miniscule revenue. Not to mention scaling it out to some huge MRR. And he did that several times. This isn't just luck.
Been following your story on Twitter for a long time. Very inspiring. I really like the DevUtils app that you built. You never mention what MRR it is generating today, though. Would love to know if you managed to grow it to anything of meaningful MRR.
668 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 404 ms ] threadThis type of genuine entrepreneurship should gain more popularity.
Republicans vote for this everyday. It's called taxing the rich. It's not that complicated.
Then you’d get more indie software developer success stories.
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
It's not the free market part that defines it as capitalism but rather the fact he owns the method of production. He owns the code he writes and he owns the business processes around those applications. He privately owns the capital assets (applications and business processes) which make the money.
Right. Like you don't own anything but still somehow sell it on the open market.
Apparently, "you can't have your cake and eat it, too" is a capitalist prejudice as comrades in the USSR would have ensured us.
Funny enough, this type of entrepreneurship is more common in Vietnam than the US (I have lived in both, now in Vietnam).
Wait, isn’t a politburo the executive committee of a communist party? How can that be corporate and own the media?
Wait how is selling apps capitalist success? What capital is winning here? I guess the corporate capital of the company owning the App Store. Or is it the capital that the app making guy is building up?
I guess when you use your own language, the things you say sound very alien, and can’t be used to communicate. You could be saying anything so you’re saying nothing at all.
I am confused. I thought us conservatives are fixated on corporate. Either way I am far from conservative in the sense you imply. If i do cross boundaries on some concepts thats because i am not fixated on ideology.
The politburo is the corporate board.
The corporate own the media through money.
Selling apps is capitalism because money moves. Free movement of capital is a core value of capitalism.
Clogging it in the hands of a few means money doesnt move freely. The politburo control it and with it it controls the narrative, the media and our lives. We are not free, much like people are not free in communism.
I guess it is confusing because i am reversing roles. In my view pure, proper, capitalism is where money is largely managed by small and medium sized entities, as to allow it to flow freely and to set the mover of capital free in the process.
Freedom is indie.
> I guess it is confusing because i am reversing roles. In my view pure, proper, capitalism is where money is largely managed by small and medium sized entities, as to allow it to flow freely and to set the mover of capital free in the process.
That's awesome, it's just never been done long-term and never will be.
But it's clear you're not really thinking about it beyond memes so I'm gonna end it here.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726812...
You claim that you're not fixated on ideology, but in the same breath you talk about core values of capitalism.
The corporate board (actually the board of directors) jointly supervise a company. It's not the decision making body (that's the CEO), and therefore is not analogous to a politburo. Fun fact: the Communist Party of China has both a Politburo and a Central Committee.
The media (or more precisely, the most of the media in the US, because many countries have broadcasters not financed through private capital) aren't owned by "the corporate". Media (TV, newspapers) are usually corporations themselves, and are owned by shareholders. By capitalists. If you had enough money, you could buy them.
Money moves? Sure it moves when a corporation runs the payroll every month, or when I go buy a popsicle. Or when someone pays someone else to procure him a kidney on the black market. Money in every form and in every economic system, not just in capitalism, will be exchanged, this is because it's the very purpose of money and it's reason to exist.
You have some theories as to why most wealth is concentrated (top 1% owned 46% of global wealth in 2020). There seems to be a conspiracy narrative (the politburos are conspiring to keep the money in the hands of the rich), and a remedy (small entrepreneurs will rise and reclaim the money).
You might be aware that money is locked up in the 1%, because 1) they don't need to spend it, or very little of it, like $5 for an app. 2) the capital that they have lets them extract more money from the 99% (in the form of rent and stock dividends), so the direction of money flow is from the poor to the rich. Your conclusion is that we need more capitalism, but the right kind, not the one we have now, because the one we have right now is actually communism.
Some of your comments on this thread tipped your hand (to me at least) that you must be a new account here. I was right. You seem like you may not have read the comment guidelines.
I'd like to see the positives in some of this but my friend it comes across really tone deaf and dripping with bias. I don't really disagree with some of your points, but it's wrapped up in language that might be best suited elsewhere. There's room for improvement when it comes to your rhetoric and if the downvotes didn't make that clear I'm hoping this feedback helps ongoing.
You started a doozy with this and perpetuated it downthread. Seriously not cool.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting, we'd appreciate it.
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 support person asked if this error happens regularly... well replicate it for yourself using my screencast and that's your answer.
There was no bug fix. No point version update in the works. The last software update was 9 months ago on 15 Jan, 2023.
I feel like Tony's able to be a profitable solopreneur because he outsources all support to people who don't really care about the quality of the output.
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".
If we lower our expectations of software, we'll get exactly that, shitty software.
Maybe I'll find time to build that when I'm not building API integrations with Youtube.
You save by not paying for youtube. You paying someone else for similar services has a better return because your money endorses someone elses vision. When you buy a product you give a thumbs up. When you don't you don't give a thumbs down..
It's for this reason if I find an NPM library that doesn't meet my needs and I have the time, I'll write a new one that solves only my use case.
what point are you trying to make here? that he should shut up and be a good consumer? how dare he expect support from a product he paid for, from a guy making 500k a year, am I right?
How do things ever get better if everyone just accepts everything that ever happens without complaint?
I don't think this post is about making things better, it's about making money quickly.
Instead, the case of having human-staffed support for a low-priced product that happens to have given an unhelpful reply to GP (but likely gave helpful replies to >50% of support cases [because most support questions are user-error]) drives home a negative [rather than null] feeling in the upthread consumer and results in the negative response above. (For avoidance of doubt, GP/consumer did nothing at all wrong then nor now. I'm talking about the incentives a company has to offer support at all for a low priced software product.)
I've often felt that many devs could benefit from a stint waiting tables — where the customer is always right and your income is dependent on being helpful and responsive.
No it isn't?
then the bug reports start to get further and further apart... now i have had one in months :)
Replace Tony with the name of almost any company these days and the statement would still be true, unfortunately. This isn't a solopreneur issue at all.
Teachers play such an important rule. They have to swallow the pill that the common narrative is that cause they didn’t do whatever they are teaching hence they teach
Citation needed
I remember this issue, it's about making the screenshot background transparent without getting the drop shadow getting cut off, right?
The app is not designed well for using with transparent background. So if you prefer transparent background, it's best to make the shadow smaller, or remove the shadow completely, or… increase the padding.
I considered to supporting this but in the end I removed the ticket out of the backlog because I didn't want to turn Xnapper into a photo editor, sorry!
If this isn't about the transparent background, can you send me another email to support? I’ll take a look, thanks for using Xnapper! :)
After taking a rectangular screenshot that is longer in width but shorter in height (such as the dimensions of this HN comment input box on desktop)... then adding an annotation arrow, Xnapper suddenly cuts off the top n pixels, cutting off its own generated backdrop, and the arrow is placed not where the user selected, but n pixels below that point.
I've given up on trying to resolve it and for shorter screenshots I now use the built-in macOS option again instead of Xnapper.
They have a problem with their css media queries that causes necessary navigation items to completely disappear as certain screen sizes, making the software unusable. Their answer, when I reported this, was to resize the browser window. The answer, I suspect, was from a low pay support worker.
Outsourcing support isn't easy, even if you do care about quality, and have a decent budget.
That should resolve the issue in at least 1 case out of 50, but if it does not please contact us again and resubmit your issue from scratch with a different agent working a different shift.
Forever licenses are maybe more tolerable as well for self host and client side local applications. Could be good money combined with b2b pricing on top of it
I kinda want to shoot myself. Largely useless products that made someone rich that rely on two other ecosystems. That’s the way I guess? I’m so not an entrepreneur.
Edit: apologies for using a suicide metaphor. I was being sarcastic. I’m in my 50s, really like my job, and am on a path to a good retirement. It just amazes me that there are so many opportunities for “pet rocks” in this era. Go get some if you know how! It I think it is safer to do things the old fashioned way and not rely on extreme luck and social media. But again, I’m old.
And this exactly the false fallacy. This is a perfect example of survivorship bias. For everywhere successful solopreneur/indie maker/whatever, there are a hundred failed attempts that didn't fail for a lack of trying hard.
A common denominator between many successful solopreneurs is a strong social media presence, so this image isn't surprising.
That being said, giving it a try yourself is fairly accessible as opposed to starting a startup with external funding. So if you can afford to, give it a try. But do not expect it to be easy
1) Do it to escape the grind, as one commenter here mentioned. In this way, it doesn't matter what product you make, or how you make it. The goal is self sufficiency, to find a niche that you can fill, etc.
2) Do it because you're trying to effect some specific change in the world. Something doesn't exist yet, so you will go out and make it happen.
"2" is much harder, and more rare. And, if you believe 2 is the way, then it makes sense to NOT start a company & instead join an existing effort, if there are already people working on pressing problems & you have the skills to help them out.
For "1", it almost always makes sense to start a company if you can. Because that life & amenities is itself the goal.
A lot of these indie hacking ventures probably wouldn't exist at all if the person making them decided not to. If that is, or for the subset of indie hacking companies for which it is true, it means this is growing the economy.
Whatever social structure you imagine you might navigate, be it business, politics, public opinion, a charitable organization, the world of art, literature or academia; you will always find a pre-existing, entrenched power structure of people calling the shots, controlling key decisions and very unwilling to cut you in, because they either have their own vision to put in practice, or... they simply like the power, status and nice amenities that come with them.
The business of changing the world is the business of power. You either have capital, name recognition, the largest lab, a huge social network of other powerful people in your debt, a massive amount of luck and/or first mover advantage etc. Otherwise, the powerful people of the world, often particularly apprehensive to world changing plans, will just crush you and move on.
Without an understanding of the underlying odds of success, isolated success stories are just random noise. And you have to ask: are they really success stories? Did Linus set out to create a world known free kernel, or was ìt just serendipty, he was just a random bloke who filled a role that needed to be filled at that particular historic time, so in fact had no control over the story and did not, in fact, change the world, he just gave a name of the rough thing that was to appear at that rough time.
But in the general case, I do not claim that the world works according to a pre-written script, on the contrary, if you act with a sufficient magnitude of power, I think you can alter it deterministically. Rather, I point out the immense inertia and active opposition by the powerful to you world-altering attempts, to the point where any low power action is more like playing the lottery. You might be lucky to get the that one in a million chance, but you likely won't.
If you organize your attack carefully, amass capital, workforce, hearts and minds, etc., you drastically improve your chances of success, up to the point when your reach Elon mode: you simply wish a product or thing was real, and an entire army of people shows up ready to implement it.
It’s not necessarily a good thing; it can turn a fun hobby into an onerous obligation. But it is another path.
In reality people have ideas and build things all the time. The vast majority never make money.
I read posts like this I rarely see any mention of luck surrounding the outcome.
Also arent most products just useless things relying on other ecosystems?
The main note is that you may not know what people want, and I've been around long enough to know people that advertise themselves as knowing what people want are usually full of shit.
tbf to TFA, it is exactly about how one could be one of those survivors if one did those totally not simple things. It is a crash course survival guide for a build-in-public solopreneur, if you will.
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 programmers should be doing, not learning the latest new Javascript framework to make their MVP just right.
On Reddit, there is similarly /r/sweatystartup [2] which also has a website with more podcasts and articles [3]. But the gist is that it's more about boring industries like lawn care, plumbing etc than shiny tech businesses. One of the best things you can do is to take a look at [2] and call 100 local businesses in a niche you pick (lawn care, etc), ask them about their problems then either start a competing service or start creating software for that niche. Nick Huber, the guy who started the subreddit and site, did both and has a ~$25 million business now.
The above is basically what I'm doing, I'm looking into making software for the boring industry of social media marketing.
[0] https://podcasts.google.com/search/Indie%20Hackers
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdO5xp5occOzfVGNbR_WZ...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/sweatystartup/comments/dmgy0f/usefu...
[3] https://sweatystartup.com/
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.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@awesomekling
So, no I would not recommend Andreas, gifted as he is, to anyone who is an indie hacker. His work is almost purely an intellectual exploration of the problem space of operating systems, something which has next to no business value these days when Windows, macOS and Linux exists. The riches (if you mean material riches and not intellectual riches) in tech exist by selling and marketing the product, not by the technological decisions of building the product itself. There is a reason YC tells you to create an MVP quickly with whatever technologies you know and to iterate on it after customer feedback.
For many indie hackers, who are not the next Elon building rockets in some novel way and who just want to make $10k a month, copying and improving on an existing product is good enough.
In short:
> Entrepreneurship embodies this romanticized vision of Shark Tank and Tech Crunch and newness and innovation when in reality most people need to simplify the way they think. I judged a pitch competition at UGA a few months ago, and all I could think of with every pitch was the need to simplify. People want to complicate things, do something revolutionary, and chase glory and the lure of entrepreneurship, but that doesn’t mean they have a real shot at being successful.
> When you take away the sex appeal and fun, you come into a more rational and less saturated market. There’s a shortage of people doing things that aren’t fun, that’s why plumbers make more than most people with liberal arts degrees.
> With sweaty businesses, all you need to do is answer the phone and do what you say you’re going to do and you can make a lot of money. Innovation is sexy and fun, but the way people make real money is by copying others. My first business was just a Frankenstein take on the current offerings and competitors I saw around me.
> The businesses I love aren’t fun. People are told to chase their passion, but the entrepreneurs that make money are chasing customers. The market doesn’t care about your passion, you need to provide real value in something that customers want.
Basically niches are a bit like Mandelbrot sets. If you study then you will see more creases and patterns at the edges.
I think the better takeaway should be that other people have very different problems to you, don't always act rationally about things and waving something shiny at them is a good way to get them to spend.
> don't always act rationally about things
And by that you surely mean that they act in the way you do not approve of.
It reminds me of PG's mantra: make something people want.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11
It ain't stupid if it works. If you find an ethical way to get people handing you a dollar, keep going. That's business.
Please read Daniel Kahneman on the illusion of skill in investing:
> Most of the buyers and sellers know that they have the same information; they exchange the stocks primarily because they have different opinions. The buyers think the price is too low and likely to rise, while the sellers think the price is high and likely to drop. The puzzle is why buyers and sellers alike think that the current price is wrong. What makes them believe they know more about what the price should be than the market does? For most of them, that belief is an illusion.
The key to his success was to Get Started.
It wasn't an arrow indicator that brought him success. That was a trivial toy. But having gotten started, he was now able to identify the next step amd the next step that lead to Black Magic being a twitter analytics tool. He would never have planned to build the end product from sitting on his couch back in the beginning. It was only after taking the first step, then a few more, and gaining the perspective of a new vantage point that he was able to make such good progress.
Get off the couch and get started is the first key. The second is to keep going and not to stop. That's it, that's the whole secret to getting rich.
Now read his story with those two points in mind
Not really. The key was to find a niche that worked. He “Got Started” with tools he wanted to build and it didn’t work out. It wasn’t until he pivoted to identifying trends, building an audience, and building tools for them which he could market to his audience that he found success.
He's saying to just get started, and you will figure it out. So when you're arguing that "trends", "audience", etc. is what lead to his success, yes, that's what it means to:
1. Get started (just start, and improve) 2. Become better and learn (whether that's finding trends, building audience whatever)
Many paths to success, so the lesson isn't specific in many cases imo. Hence, why arcbyte's comment is really good imo.
Consider the fact that OP is perhaps an outlier [0]. They probably are super comfortable and super good at selling or marketing their product themselves and building way many number of experiments (bets) than most would / could. Consumer software (and usually product-led b2b2c software) is all about marketing, while b2b is mostly sales. You just can't know those are do-able by every eng on their own.
> An arrow indicator for a twitter profile pic, a screen cap tool, and a wrapper around ChatGPT.
But really, software has been lucrative, and Internet made it doubly so. Unlike most goods / services in the world, for software the distribution costs are non-existent, and manufacturing costs are subsidized heavily as number of users increase. Building a sustainable software business (as opposed to repeatedly building tools and services for the flavour of the day, which is AI right now) however is not easy. New comers (or call them copy cats) challenge incumbents like no tomorrow since the only investment required in light of new technological advancements is... time (assuming you've got the skill already).
[0] Btw, Pieter Levels makes way more as solopreneur: ~$200k per month / https://levels.io/my-first-million/
These stories are the few lucky ones, the rest didn't have nearly the same success.
Remember flappy bird?
Amazon and apple are making trillions on the backs of small indie folks. Google too. The apple app store is monetised by nearly a million people, google makes money largely from small businesses, amazon’s filled with small independent sellers.
Any time someone’s success reaches the bubble of corporate workers the workers that cant fathom there’s success out there and freedom claim “survivorship bias”. Couldnt be further from the truth.
10%, 1%, less than 1%?
There are very few with really great ideas and only some of them have success and there are some with success with average ideas but the large mass aren't that lucky. The lucky ones post their stories but they aren't reproducible.
They can't be. Otherwise the lucky ones wouldn't have succeeded in the first place.
If attention gets evenly split it approaches zero for the single individual.
BTW why mentioning Google and Apple? Yes the make millions of indie developers, but the developers don't nake nearly as much. They just hope to be the next lucky winner with app gone viral to generate enough revenue.
That's why the app stores are full of copycats.
I’ve followed the “indie hacker” scene for about a decade, and this sounds about right.
Notice how he started out with developer tools that scratched his own itch, but didn’t have much success. Could have been great tools, but developers are difficult to please and notoriously opposed to spending money on helpful tools.
So he pivoted to social media and trend following. Instead of making tools for people who are good at technology and make things themselves, he now makes tools for people who don’t know how to accomplish simple tasks like putting an arrow on a profile picture. They just want that arrow on their picture and they’ll spend (or, often, expense) a couple dollars to make it happen.
He took it a step further and built an audience around indie hacking. Now he’s selling shovels in a gold rush. Arrows on profile pictures were a hot trend for a minute among influencers. Building nice screenshots of things is key for making courses and marketing materials. ChatGPT is the hot topic among people who think it will build a business for them, so $40 is a drop in the bucket.
Spent 2+ years building my developer tool extension SnipCSS as a side project and I still only make $1K MRR.
You want to write 100k lines of code and make $1k / month? Sell a developer tool. You want $45k / mon, and travel the world? Sell shovels to influencers that exploit some trend.
Also, I completely disagree that OP’s product is useless or due to luck. He intentionally created something people want, and it’s actually a pretty cool product IMO.
Edit: clerical error.
Edit 2: added despair.
Typical hackernews: "Something bad happened in the world and this is why the US is bad"
By the numbers, he's created $45k/mo of usefulness.
For context, I'm a TypingMind user (the ChatGPT wrapper) & it's so much better than ChatGPT that some of us bought the license & started paying for API, even to use the free GPT 3.5.
Since then, it has evolved to support custom models & today, I could train a custom model on a bunch of research papers or product documentation & chat with them, something that takes a lot of effort to develop for non devs.
Developers are not the primary market - non devs are & we are very happy with the product.
BlackMagic again, is a revolutionary product - afaik, nothing like it existed when it came out & a ton of us happily jumped on it, realizing how much it helped with Twitter growth.
One one hand, our entire economy is built on useless products. Chances are high that our good comfortable jobs involve making and marketing stuff people don’t really need at a larger scale than Tony’s solo projects. Large and so-called legitimate companies make billions and billions on things we don’t need. Coca-cola? Flavored sugar water that’s not good for you, you don’t need, and can make at home in seconds for a fraction of the price pulled in 44 billion last year for Coke. PepsiCo revenue was $86B. Starbucks: $32B, InBev: $58B. Does the global beverage industry top $1T? (Google says yes, many times over.) What about games and movies, fashion, apps, car accessories, music and sports equipment that’s unnecessarily high end and/or never gets used… the list is endless.
On the other hand, it’s not accurate or fair to call Tony’s products useless, because people paid for them. It’s reductive and low effort to frame them as simple, since he added a lot of features that don’t fit your summary. But if they save someone time, or someone likes the way they feel or look, and they pay for it, then it was useful for them. Don’t make the mistake of conflating the value you get, or your idea of what you pay for, for annyone else’s idea of usefulness.
I'll cede that point. Having an arrow on your Twitter profile is of some use to someone, and just because I've never had a problem with iPhone screen capture "press two buttons" doesn't mean some people need to click through an app, a nd the teletype style of GPT3 doesn't bother me but I guess some people need faster response.
I know snark is against the rules. Technically they aren't "useless" but they are single-task gadgets like you'd find for your kitchen drawer on QVC at night. The people that make the "banana slicer" probably made a ton of money and by your definition a "banana slicer" isn't useless because someone bought it.
One of the reasons your upper comment isn’t fair is because the story was about how he pivoted the product away from just showing the arrow & circle progress bar, and moved toward something more complex that does analytics reporting, and that’s when he actually started making money on it.
> I guess by your definition a “banana slicer” isn’t useless because someone bought it.
That was half of my definition. The other half, I think, probably agreed with yours, and points out that banana slicers are useless and we have an economy that is built on banana slicers. So, anyway, what is your definition of useful?
That's a good question. The naive definition would be something that someone uses to fulfill a purpose. I don't think a Bratz Doll on a Keychain in the store is useful, but my 5 year old niece will get a solid week of entertainment out of it. Sure that is useful, but do we want to compare it to a SawStop or iPhone? All of them are useful, but to different degrees, different people, and across varying lifespans.
You can argue that anything is useful if it is "used", but let's not pretend there isn't a spectrum here.
It's not exactly a new concept either. Look at the office Snagit from 1990 built: https://www.msufoundation.org/techsmith-hq and keep on going about "this era".
It feels like the good friend who always has some side hussle instead of just doing something useful.
And Tony's products ARE useful. Or else people wouldn't buy them.
Value is subjective.
But it's not the vibe I get from most of the comments, it seems a lot of comments are knee-jerk reaction promted by envy.
And since when is being successful and in detail explaining how you went about it "bragging"?
Isn't that what we all do when use API calls? Or even open a nenw tab in Firefox?
Probably the same magical fairy power that allows you to deterministically read emotions without any context.
> Now, did you fix that Jira?
I don’t know, did you finish your schoolwork kid?
but all in all I wish more people did this. it would create a more competitive environment the ultimately result in driving the price down for many things and lowering hopefully making BigCo weaker.
I mean, it only works because not more then 1-2% of developers even try to do something like this, since it's really hard to ensure you have enough edge in understanding user needs, building and being able to find a distribution chanel, and there simply isn't enough revenue to support many more developers to sell their niche products.
I hate this conclusion, but most developers have to rely on salaries, since only a few companies have captured revenue streams big enough to justify a full time job.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
Almost everyone is just using a few basic apps, going against the consumer train is very hard, and only companies are spending money on software.
It seems like he needs to constantly push new products out there to maintain a steady income.
It makes growth / user acquisition easier, because you’re going where the people already are. But it also means you’re at the mercy of the underlying platform waking up and invalidating your business model (as happened with Twitter).
As you suggest, the only way to survive in this mode is to be continuously building new products around a diverse group of platforms. It helps if they’re not too diverse, because you can cross-sell (i.e. the correlation of Twitter users, macOS users and chatgpt web users is pretty high). When one platform shifts, you find another.
It’s a risky method but not a bad one if your morale can stomach the down turns in any individual platform.
At the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re seeing only a cherry picked part of the picture. There is no mention of advertising spend or customer acquisition costs. The trend among indie hackers is to talk about MRR without mentioning a single expense, then to interleave it all with “follow me on Twitter” so you’re inspired to join their audience. This is a bit cynical, but I’ve been following accounts like this for a decade and it’s depressing to watch how many of them pivot into trying to sell me courses and/or private community access based on their success.
Audience building (which he readily talks about in the article) becomes a conflict of interest for real information because it incentivizes big numbers while hiding costs. Maybe his apps are growing entirely organically and it’s pure profit. Or maybe he’s spent huge amounts of money on ads or marketing to get more installs to grow his user base as fast as possible. He mentions spending 16 hour days between coding the app and promoting it.
The thing is, we don’t know how he got the users, and he won’t tell us because admitting anything other than MRR would only detract from his story. And as any small business operator knows, getting the customers is the hardest part.
I wish him the best and enjoy following these success stories, but having seen enough of these I always take the isolated MRR numbers with a grain of salt. It’s not the full picture. This isn’t unique to this developer. It’s the trend among social media “indie hackers”: They know people are hungry for success stories and want to learn the secrets of how to build a successful indie company, so they build narratives to make themselves look like the person who will share those secrets. But then the more you read and the more you follow, the more you start seeing how they’re leaving out all of the actual secrets and keys to success, such as how they’re marketing their apps and getting downloads.
In the first paragraph:
At the moment, my total revenue across all products is about $45K/month at ~90% profit.
No mention of how it reached that point. No mention of what advertising routes were tried in the past.
Another trick I’ve seen is for solopreneurs to create a “HoldCo” that holds their individual businesses, then to find creative ways to spend marketing dollars out of the parent company so they can keep it off the books of their individual businesses. You have to look for this when someone has a large personal brand presence that markets the app. For example, how much is he spending to grow his Twitter and newsletter following, which isn’t counted as an expense out of the individual businesses but is a huge (perhaps the largest?) driver of leads for them.
From evaluating potential small business acquisitions I quickly learned that operators are very good at juicing their profitability numbers as they prepare for a potential sale, for example. You’d often see great stories of customer growth and high profit numbers, only to discover that the profitability was a recent change after they turned off the growth tools. You might also discover that their customer acquisition costs were hidden away in one of the owner’s other ventures. For example, a roofing company that looks great until you realize their entire customer base comes from “referrals” from the owner’s other company which installs solar panels on people’s roofs.
Again, it’s possible that this is pure, organic, word-of-mouth growth all the way to $45K MRR, but I’ve seen enough of these stories to know that word of mouth and a moderate Twitter following generally isn’t enough to do it.
All I’m saying is to keep an eye open for what you’re not being told in these stories. When someone is part indie hacker and part social media influencer, everything they write is designed to consider you a potential customer, potential follower, or potential acquirer of their business (as with his previous sale). That doesn’t mean that their information is unhelpful, it just means that you’re getting a partial sales pitch with everything you read. Keep that in mind.
> No mention of how it reached that point. No mention of what advertising routes were tried in the past.
From the post:
I knew that posting the app to websites and forums on the internet and hoping for a traffic spike wouldn’t work in the long term. I can’t get lucky forever.
So, I started to look for a long-term distribution channel. I tried Google paid ads, wrote SEO articles, looked for sponsorships on newsletter/YouTube channels, and tons of other things. There were some small results, but in the end, I didn’t see a way that could give me traffic for the long-term without continuous effort. (Except for SEO, but SEO is extremely slow to see the results). This is when I think about Twitter and the #buildinpublic community.
I'm content knowing one of my apps (only one) is a success out of unrepeatable sheer luck.
Xsnapper is far nicer-looking and far quicker (via numeric keyboard shortcuts for markup options) than macOS built-in utils for this.
The best alternative I found is shottr ( https://shottr.cc ), and I cobbled together a thing that scratches my itch: https://github.com/philsnow/shots-filed
The article does appear to give a general indication of expenses:
> At the moment, my total revenue across all products is about $45K/month at ~90% profit.
The only reason he would risk committing business suicide like this is because building the personal brand is more important to him than keeping this business afloat. If he really wanted to grow the business, there seems to be enough margin in it to support very aggressive paid marketing
Also HN: "A guy makes 45K/mo by building tiny time-saving apps, starting with ones he himself wants = what a sad world of frivolous side-hustles!"
when a different community would have completely different sentiment
it is reflective of the audience
Setting up Midjourney, for example, is such a convoluted mess, where you have to create an account on another service (Discord) before creating a Midjourney account, then understand the different chat channels and figure out where the best place to use the app is (private DM with Midjourney bot.) And that's all before even generating an image! Even their website looks like someone's art project, not a cutting-edge image generation service: https://www.midjourney.com/
It’s the marketing effort that puts me off. I know I’m a 10x developer with a great product sense, but spending hours every day on Twitter and blogging sounds awful. I very definitely count those 4 twitter hours as ‘work’.
An 'accelerator' of some description, perhaps.
It’s taught in business schools!!1
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 course or info product to the people who want to replicate your success.
No bitterness here and I haven't even read this particular post properly to cast aspersions at him. I've just felt something didn't add up with this corner of the internet for some time.
Here are a few more random ones from the top of my "For You" feed. Again nothing against the specific posters, just to illustrate what I am seeing:
https://twitter.com/MrNick_Buzz https://twitter.com/marc_louvion https://twitter.com/Timb03
And there is one with critique of HN comments, like https://twitter.com/LBacaj/status/1705601091981754482
> @LBacaj This top comment on HN, to this post on getting to $45K/MO, captures everything wrong with the developer mindset today. > ”everything has to be crazy hard technically or it’s not valuable.” > You’ve all been duped into delusions of grandeur, only so they can take advantage of you.
> @circleseer HN has become the old man yelling at the cloud meme
> @madmaxbr5 A pizza shop is just a thin rapper around the agricultural supply chain and restaurant equipment industry. The recipes are centuries old. Zero actual innovation.
As an experiment, you can try to choose a random popular tweet from your timeline. Look into their profile. And I bet there's a high chance you can find the same or very similar tweet a few months or year prior
I’ve followed a lot of them. Maybe 100 at one point?
I love watching people build little businesses, iterate, and find success. It was really cool to see them all working on their various things, celebrating the little wins, and sharing things they learned along the way.
But to be honest, I’ve gradually unfollowed most of them. Many of them got a little too into the self-promotion angle and their content became repetitive “follow me for more content like this” bits. It felt like half of them were repeating same variations of the popular topic of the week every week, because they were! When threads were the thing to do I’d see the same topic rehashed to death in thread form for about 2 weeks by different people until they all moved on to the next topic.
Another chunk of them slowly pivoted from their own business to selling courses, educational materials, or “pay $499 to access my private community of builders” deals. I hit the unfollow button as soon as they pivot to this stuff.
There are a few that I still follow, but if I’m being honest I don’t know that I’ve learned a whole lot. The most successful ones always have their business success wrapped up largely in their giant social media followings, which turns into a game of how well they can market to their audience without being off putting. The most famous example is the levels.io guy, who is by all means an honest and great guy but nevertheless appears to be making businesses that spread by word-of-Twitter because he has such an audience. Nothing wrong with that, really, but after watching it for a few years you realize that it’s not repeatable unless you can play the Twitter game successfully at massive scale, which is what a lot of these influencers and up trying with mixed success.
If you hang out long enough on indiehackers you realize most of the people there dont want to create businesses, they just want to amass more followers and readers in order to peddle their “dev tools” or whatever
I am baffled.
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.
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.
(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 losers tried most of the same things yet just didn't get lucky, or ran out of money before luck could come along.
There is a big bias here, only the pet rock solopreneurs are very public about what they are doing and their success at it, because that is their marketing, YOU (their audience on HN and Twitter) are the pet rocks buyers.
Solopreneurs with stuff other than pet rocks often don't want to share their success and how much they are making especially not to a tech savvy and entrepreneurial audience, as this would just cause more competition.
Dude's journey has some interesting nuggets. He knows how to time box himself and build the smallest MVP that will actually make money.
And his journey is not an overnight success either, it took him years to build everything including his social presence. Compare that to a W-2 job where you just have to show up 9am-5pm.
HN is showing its overly critical self again, just like when Dropbox first appeared on HN.
Was HN overly critical of Dropbox? If so, how so? (genuinely curious)
I did some digging and found some interesting sources but didn't come across anything overly critical of Dropbox in its early years (yet):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dhouston
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1253750400&dateRange=custom&...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR7tJ8wAI3M&t=27s
But I guess looking back now it's easy to view it with levity; it could have felt extremely harsh at the time (although Drew does manage a few smiley emojis throughout his answer so he seemed to have taken it well).
It's infamous because Drew made a point of coming back as a billionaire to call out and shame brandonm; something that seemed unnecessarily petty when you're holding a billion dollars.
https://zedshaw.com/blog/2018-03-25-the-billionaires-vs-bran...
Nothing that Dropbox does (or did? is it still around?) is technically innovative. I guess it's nice for that rich guy that he identified a user-friendly box that people would pay for.
> Nothing that Dropbox does (or did? is it still around?) is technically innovative. I guess it's nice for that rich guy that he identified a user-friendly box that people would pay for.
Technology is a tool for people, there is no value to technology (and it doesn't matter how "innovate" it is) if people don't use it.
Seems a bit mean-spirited, and I'm not sure I like the implied value assumptions. I expect there are other important reasons as well including connections, timing, luck, etc.
Seems to be a slightly different category from CmdrTaco's infamous take on the iPod ('No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame') but that wasn't entirely wrong either.
I'm not quite as critical of HN, but I concur that allowing deletion whenever would be a positive change.
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.
Instead, a single person today can create a moderate amount of income that allows them to live free from financial concerns, by building small and useful products that are not revolutionary in any way, but help many people regardless. This is a far more sustainable and fairer way of achieving "success" than the VC formula, so this Tony guy probably doesn't care about YC.
Especially when working only “4” hours a day.
I think the only concern with something like that is the sustainable lifetime of the product, seems to me you have to re-invent the business every few years if you want to keep your solopreneur story going ( the product grows beyond the solo part or gets overtaken by the competition).
45k MRR means that you and your loved ones are safe from money being an issue in any situation, which is a liberating way to live. It doesn't allow you to own mansions, yachts and private jets, but I would argue that such wealth is disproportionate for any individual to manage.
If they can maintain this by working 4 hours a day, more power to them. That's an enviable position to be in by any definition, especially if they got there by legitimate means.
I agree that long-term sustainability might be a problem, but they seem to have the drive to keep supporting the products for as long as possible, and the ingenuity and skills to invent new ones, and hopefully the wisdom of investment, so they'll be fine. It's doubtful this would work for many others, but as they point out, this is their own journey.
That's true until the top comments start objecting to the objections. The current thread is a clear example. I call it the contrarian dynamic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... It's a surprisingly reliable phenomenon.
HN has gone mainstream a decade ago. Now we've got the same audience of Ars Technica and r/technology.
MMR updates are superficial. Weak signal. I'm confident most are absent of critical info and some are entirely made up. I don't disbelieve anyone in particular, but when a mechanism of virality proliferates, it often gets deployed without the backing substance.
"How I XYZ" around money is similarly misleading. Most entrepreneurs I know cannot recreate their own success – when they set out on a new venture, they need to look with fresh eyes, invent some new techniques, and discard a lot of methods that previously worked. If entrepreneurs aren't even able to reuse their own "how I xyz," then how will a stranger with even less nuance be able to learn or apply much from the blog post? Again, some of these stories have great lessons, but as a category I believe they are more noise than signal.
Finally, the sheer obsession with money saddens me. The great entrepreneurs of our world are hardly motivated by money – to them, money is a tool that they factor in as they work to realize a vision, not an end goal. How ethically/morally impoverished is this technical class to be so obsessed with money? There's a term for this – greed. I know that a lot of jobs suck, a lot of stuff in life is expensive, we need money to do a lot of basic things, etcetera. But money is not the only solution, and more money is not an even better solution. I don't think this incessant messaging around money is virtuous – I think it is both a product of greed and a means of harnessing the greed in others. (And where are the entrepreneurs bragging about impact?)
(For the record, I am not jealous – I make my money doing literally whatever I want, on projects that I find much more exciting, with ample time left over for nature walks, rock climbing, reading, and more. Unlike these authors, the money I make is not the most interesting part of my story.)
Survivorship bias makes me say "I want to see the stories of all the solopreneurs who failed."
HN-- Please share more failure stories. I want to balance the optimistic fun hype with pragmatic realism.
I say this as a nascent "solopreneur" (I don't like that word) who is getting his agency & first product off the ground at the moment.
There's a lot of merit for entrepreneurs sharing their journey, like a lot of the other comments here I just wished it was less about being "successful" or making money.
Maybe people are getting tired of 90% of social media content being about "building an audience". Everyone is trying to sell us something, all the time.
If something becomes so straightforwards that it can be replicated straightforwards, the value of it becomes a product of skills + time. So if I want to open a business mowing lawns, this is a very commodotized and high-competition industry, so I will earn a profit that is pretty much correlated to the unpleasantness of the job and the time it takes. Very little opportunity to earn a premium, and the only tactic is hacking around how quickly I can complete each job.
If I want to create a brand new product from scratch (one that is not glorified consulting), then it will by its definition be totally unique and the journey unlike all others, including my previous journeys. The best I can do is take all information I can and try and make the best decisions and take the best actions.
The rest of us have to place a dire importance on it, lest we end up destitute, unemployable, homeless, and so on.
Though if you would like to write something up about "I made enough, and now I enrich my soul with leisure and nature walks," that would go further to disillusion some of the need to keep getting more and more money. But publicly decrying greed (and fear in greed's skin) will not achieve anything of lasting value.
This article is literally about a person quitting his job to do this, so it seems he's not part of "the rest of us".
I'm with you – we all need to be materially conscious to stay alive. We can't just throw our finances to the wind. As an entrepreneur, money is a particularly critical part of the equation.
Similarly, we can't afford to be so enamored by strangers making money on the internet that we fail to see 1) the pitfalls, errors, and missed opportunities in their efforts 2) their actual method (MRR charts are not a method) 3) the gifts and opportunities of our unique situations.
This sounds great until the bills arrive or you realize you need to save extra for retirement or home buying because your business’s income is unpredictable.
I'm under no illusions that my success has a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time, a lot of luck, and a lot of hard work.
Greed? You want to lecture about greed, when 95% of tech companies are _driven_ by profits, by driving the share price up by any means necessary, including exploiting their users and employees, being the reason for new consumer protection laws to come into place and then skirting around them, tax avoidance, and a million other shady tricks, all with the goal of becoming a "unicorn", to go public or be acquired, and to get to do it all over again.
This very forum is built by, around and for serial entrepreneurs in this rat race, so it's a bit... rich to lecture about greed on here, of all places.
And yet you criticize when a solo developer, without any venture capital as a safety net, manages to have the success entrepreneurs dream of, measured by the same measuring stick. It all reads like sour grapes to me.
Good on OP for having the courage, persistence and skill to pull this off. Why shouldn't they talk about the steps they took, and the results they're seeing? We can call it survivorship bias, growth hacking, luck, etc. all we want, but it's encouraging to know that these stories _do_ happen.
Achieving financial independence by building something people want to pay for, instead of relying on the usual advertising and VC get-rich-quick schemes, should be applauded.
He has a point.. HN is full of greed (or lack of appreciation for the privilege most of us have) and criticizing a solo bootstrapped entrepreneur for greed feels completely misplaced.
To a certain extent, yes, let’s defend and embrace greed when the outcome is a solo entrepreneur doing cool things and sharing the experience publicly.
No, let's not do this. That's literally the root of inequity that is rotting western culture. Put down the Ayn Rand and starting thinking about more than your /r/wsb fantasies of become a wolf of wallstreet or an elon musk. Cultures, cities, and nations' people are dying because of this callous attitude.
Would that lead to a more peaceful world? Maybe, temporarily. But a lack of companies leads to lack of jobs which leads to lots of other bad things.
This is just ludicrous, and needs to be corrected. The people I know starting companies (and succeeding) are hardly driven by money.
This is a success story we should all celebrate in this community, and it pains me to see this type of response at the top of the comment section.
There is such a thing as toxic productivity advice, the internet is full of it. It's easy to spot for me now, because I've noticed a few common threads. 1- The writing typically focuses on how much money the person makes 2- how little they have to work now or how little they had to work to get it and 3- How little time it took.
In my career, business, etc. I've learned the exact opposite. I would give the exact opposite advice for people looking to be successful in their lives and careers: 1- Don't focus on how much money you make, but how much value you add to the world and those around you. As you keep investing in your community, it will pay you back dividends right when you need it most. 2- Work hard, even when mo one is watching. Work hard for yourself, no one else. 3- Don't rush things, sometimes taking an extra month to build your business infrastructure properly could save you millions in the future.
In one sentence: It's not helpful for me personally for this guy to boast about how much he makes, how little he works, and how quickly he did it. What would be helpful is for him to remove all the concrete numbers ($45k/month, etc.) and boasting which only serves to put up my defenses and force me to start off in a position of comparison. Then he could just have simple prose about things he thinks are helpful that he learned along the way, simple information like a technical paper, not ad copy.
This, and other content like it, serves them, not me. I've found that limiting or even completely restricting my consumption of this kind of content for the latter, is better for me.
I agree, and I never said so.
I get the perspective of being jaded by vapid success stories of "here's how I got rich, buy my book/merch/MLM and you can get rich too", but this is far from being the case here.
If you read the article, the author clearly states they were lucky several times, and towards the end:
> There is no formula to guarantee success.
This is not someone boasting of their success, or saying there's a quick and foolproof way to reach it, but sharing their journey with others and hoping it inspires people, in the same way they were inspired by similar stories.
> how little they have to work now or how little they had to work to get it
This was a 2 year journey, where at some point they were working 12 and 16 hours a day, and they said it took a toll on their personal and social life, so this is hardly working little, and having no sacrifices. If they now get to enjoy working 4 hours a day, and taking many days off, then that's a notable reward they get to enjoy from their previous hard work.
We should all be thankful that we live in an age where such a work/life balance is even possible. Our ancestors had to do back-breaking labour for 18 hours a day, or work a dead-end office job for their entire lives enriching someone else just so they could earn the right to a meager existence when they retire. Yet we live in a time when computers enable us to not think about our finances, and to do work we actually enjoy doing, rather than because we have to in order to subsist.
_This_ is the future technology promised us, where everyone gets to work less and enjoy life more, yet most of us are still stuck in industries with the same grind mentality from 100 years ago. Let's not criticize being able to work less.
> How little time it took.
They invested 7 years into their career, and did hard work for 2 years, with several failures along the way, so this is not an insignificant amount of time. It's certainly impressive what they've accomplished in 2 years, but this is not an overnight success story. How long would they have to have done "hard" work for their story to hold water?
> In one sentence: It's not helpful for me personally for this guy to boast about how much he makes, how little he works, and how quickly he did it.
I mean, that's your preference, sure. But companies are measured by their finances, and it's difficult to talk about growth towards financial independence without mentioning numbers. If they were discussing their fitness journey, they would need to mention their weight and exercise statistics, so I don't see how this is any different.
> This, and other content like it, serves them, not me.
Again, it's your opinion, and that's fine, but myself and many others find it very interesting to hear about someone else's road to "success". We don't need to be so cynical about their intentions just because it fits some preconceived notions about this type of content.
This is exactly what I'm trying to highlight. While this kind of behavior seems normal or common in this community its not really in the greater world.
My plumber has done real well for himself, has dozens of people working for him, successful. He does not have articles on his website about how much he makes in a month, and how many hours he works when. He does have articles about the big name job he just landed, local building code committees he's on, and the little league baseball team he sponsors. Oh, and some plumbing tips and tricks.
My proctologist is similar. His website talks mostly about proctology. I bet he makes a lot, but he doesn't really talk publicly about it. That would be tacky.
In this community for some reason it's popular to say "look at how much money I make, look at all the bridges I've burned along the way, look at how I was way out of balance one way then the other, etc.". I get it, this was their journey. I'm not trying to say anything about them or there journey.
I think for every successful person like this there is another who did it a more "in balance" way. Those voices don't seem to come through so clearly, that's all I'm saying. I think it would benefit those in that second bucket to hear more stories about people like them being successful.
I'm sure that if your plumber or proctologist shared their journeys this openly that others would find it helpful as well. Mentioning incomes can be tacky, and I too scowl whenever someone boasts about theirs, but this article didn't strike me as such at all. Which is why I think the negative tone here is unwarranted.
> The great entrepreneurs of our world are hardly motivated by money
Yeah come on like Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates, Hoffman etc aren't motivated by money lol.
For a forum created by an accelerator, it is weirdly anti-success.
And no one cares what you are doing. Posts like this are about getting recognition. Making $42k a month doesn’t actually get you any recognition by itself. Maybe buying champagne in a club from it does, but a lot of people don’t like that kind of attention.
People on HN are just so resentful and want to see the bad in posts like this it’s really sad.
It's not anti-success. HN applauds anyone making millions by doing real hard work that benefits everybody. What's frowned upon are these look-I-did-nothing-but-still-made-it-big stories.
Seven years of acquiring skills in different domains, and two years of applying those skills, learning more along the way, grinding, failing, trying again, and building several successful products people are willing to pay for is "doing nothing"? What a ridiculous take.
People get rich nowadays by manipulating virtual numbers on screens, based on speculation and pure luck, which is much closer to "doing nothing", and we enthusiastically celebrate their success, yet someone uses their skills to build and sell products to people that enjoy using them, and we label them as lucky, lazy and show-offs. #smh
This person did a lot of work, including drudge work like support, building a Twitter following, building a newsletter audience, etc.
Of the 3 you listed only Jobs qualifies.
He built the place in the ruins of a falling apart 16th century barn, had to support his initial work with clown shows, manual labor, then scaled it to the point where the place was regularly frequented by world class jazz performers.
He trained actors, provided work to people in the area. But he never scaled the business to the point where he’d have to compromise his work or relationships with people/fans.
We all play the cards we’re given and he managed to do it so much better than the brain parasites we tend to worship here.
Build a sustainable business that is a net positive contribution to the society, focus on value above growth, and stay true to your beliefs. Then keep it going for three decades. That’s entrepreneurship.
Bear in mind that although he’s a writer/playwright, I’d say that 3/4 of his work was managing the business like any other, juggling marketing, sales, admin.
(Apologies for any typos, writing this from my phone while in a rush)
PS IIRC in its peak the little village had more theatres per capita than Broadway (3 theatres!)
Sustainable profitable businesses that make a healthy profit and give back to their communities are the lifeblood of economies
Definitely see more greed on the VC side and in more mature companies, especially when PE or acquisitions come into play.
They are obliged to, by definition. Unlike non-profit or public-benefit companies, commercial companies must maximize profits for shareholders, otherwise they might be prosecuted by law.
Nice humblebragging. So you just read one blog post from the author and concluded that the most interesting part of their story is money? I bet they enjoy a lot of things and this is only a small piece of their life, as their blog post is specifically about being an entrepreneur, not about their hobbies.
He's literally made probably under $500k in revenue. And he's Vietnamese -- so that's really a fortune there.
I don't see anything except a reason to be happy for him.
MRR is not a weak signal.
If anything, I’d love to see more stories like this and less stories from popular media like NPR, Gizmodo, and NY Times (all 3 on the front page right now).
Sure, someone can make up their MRR, just like anyone sharing any personal story of theirs can make anything up.
But in a world full of wantrepreneurs and pseudo-intellectuals, revenue/profits is the best “objective” measure of a business’ progress
Wanting money also does not necessarily correlate to greed, it can also correlate to desiring freedom in a world with bills and expenses
This article articulates pretty well everything i’ve read in all the wantreprenarial / bootstrap articles i’ve read, which is summed up as “build a following, ride rising trends, iterate fast”.(and dump things that slow you down / have peaked) This article is in line with the build a following, and shows which rising trend he’s riding.
The part about the money irking you seems to come from a place of incredible privilege. He earned his independence and is selling a non-essential product on the free market, before B2B powerhouses move in. He shares what he’s done and experienced with the community and also hired employees.
He escaped the 9-5 and says he’s only working part time, which allows him to do the non work things you mentioned though he prefers surfing travelling and gaming to your rock climbing and nature walk.
The article is not even behind a paywall or part of a bootstrap course, so again where is the greed?
More power to him.
and it resonated with me how difficult this is to do as an employee, I’ve played around with running the numbers on overemployment and it is still not the same amount
I’ve done many more projects than this person and just couldn't be compelled to build an audience on twitter religiously, or stick to one persona! many of my ideas have incompatible crowds
its great for me to see examples of launching multiple projects
another thing that stood out is what he considers a failed project has probably changed
he wrote off two later in the story as a footnote, but they are probably viable ideas, just don't make enough, for him, anymore
it is fulfilling for me to have lifestyle flexibility and capital, I’ve had it and it is objectively better. I can relate to how this author filled in his time doing other fulfilling things
If this was written in the beginning, the whole thing would make much more sense as you are clearly jealous.
You sure don't sound like it..
Classic take from somebody that most probably could spend their entire time just fiddling with ideas, with zero worries about money. Everything else was taken care of. Not everyone has this luxury pal.
The author is plain, simple sharing his story. Can you replicate his success? Who knows. But I respect him for sharing this candid blog post documenting his steps.
I know a handful of these at my current employer.
Generally my formula is about cultivating a healthy value set, becoming increasingly clear minded, and trying to do things that are worthwhile. I know that's vague, but those are the abstract principles that work in different circumstances. I've led many different lives within my life – rock climbing full time, building software – and those are the guiding themes that have most consistently offered the greatest results.
(Write to me directly if you'd like me to flush out in more concrete detail, including how money and service factor in, how to avoid traps, what I currently struggle with, etc.)
I simply don't understand the "why is it all about money" take, at all. The author isn't saying he wants to but a Rolls and lots of gold chains. He simply want to make enough to be able to be independent (which he succeeded), and to indulge in relatively minor enjoyments, like travel.
"Why is it all about money?" Because some of us like both independence and not starving.
Frankly, I think you’re being incredibly rude to assume that because someone shared their story on a topic, then it must be their entire identity. It’s just so presumptuous to assume that the author or authors of these pieces have nothing else in their lives of value, because they decided to share this piece of their life.
There’s a lot in your comment I agree with, but this note struck me as just… extremely uncharitable, presumptuous, and rude.
There’s plenty to criticize in the post, but I think making things up about the author is just not a kind thing to do.
Respectfully, it doesn’t, I don’t think you’re being fair, and I think saying it does is rude and presumptuous.
It pretty strongly implies “what they chose to write a blog post about”.
If, in the blog post they described focusing on nothing else but money, I’d agree with you. But they don’t.
> I still want to get more revenue, but I realized that this is a moving goalpost, and it will never stop. $10K, then $20K, then $50K. I knew I would never satisfied.
> It’s much better to work and play at the same time.
> So I traveled. I went for a trip around Vietnam.
> My average working hours during this period was about 4 hours/day. I still tweet a lot
Clearly there’s more to this person than doing nothing but focusing on money. Just because they chose to write this blog post, doesn’t mean it’s their entire identity.
And that's fine, no one should be ashamed of their success. But it is also OK to point out what's going on and that's what the OP is doing.
He said he took risks because he was unencumbered, he waited till the ideal time to strike and did and it has more success than his employment offered financially and fulfillment wise
Who cares that his blogging is intrinsically tied to his growth hacking
This same standard is not levied on every Stanford dropout that sold shares of a pre-revenue idea to their VC neighbors for $20 million dollars
What are you all even bickering about
I'd think that someone with the ability to live and walk around in nature would not be so critical of others.
As someone who, over the last two years, has created a more modest 5 figure MRR business, I can assure you, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
It takes a lot of skill and understanding of the market and market forces to be this successful. Being able to do the same thing again and get the same results is exactly what these people are not trying to do.
There seems to be some disconnect between what you think would make a successful business and what people who are making successful businesses do.
If I was to start again today and do the same thing, I would fail. If I wrote down what I did and someone else tried it, they would fail. The market has moved on since then and so every day when I get out of bed, I need to get my work done, manage my team and plan for tomorrow.
And after all this, my little MRR is an important metric because it shows success and because it’s something that I’ve worked the hardest in my life for.
Best of luck for your nature walks, people get to chose what they do in life.
It would probably take me 30+ seconds of boring conversation to get to the point. Humans optimize and now you have $xx / month. It’s easy to understand exactly where I am in my journey, how much “stuff” goes on in the day to day and the types of problems I have.
I like talking to people that are doing six figures a month, it gives me insight into the problems that I hope to one day have. Like a child looking up to their bigger brother. But also, they’re often very direct and insightful with the problems that I’m dealing with.
Not like they have the cake recipe I’m trying to make, but they can adapt their advice to my experience and tell me what temperature I should set my oven.
That there's no lessons to learn, because doing the same thing again wouldn't work. And if even the person who succeeded first hand would fail to reproduce their own success a second time, then those who are just reading about it have even less of a chance to be successful with that advice.
I think that's interesting to explore. I do wonder if it's true or not. There does exist some serial entrepreneurs that did manage to bootstrap many successful business after all.
Also I think the OP is more annoyed at the constant publication about "how I achieved financial success", because it kinds of gives out this illusion to others that they can as well, or that this is the ultimate achievement in life.
Why do you think this is unachievable for others?
Also, I believe, mathematically, since money is a finite resource, having an outsize amount of it, compared to the average, implies that not everyone can be in that situation. Which would mean most people cannot achieve it. This assumes financial success is defined as having above average money.
not saying they dont want to hack still, but as they said, there’s no end to the limit, and ramen profitability wasnt enough
What people that want a guide to money (aka reading self help "how to make a million dollars in 100 days" books) don't understand is that the lessons aren't a formula. My feeling for the commenter I originally replied to is therein lies a source of misunderstanding and frustration.
Being an entrepreneur is a skill. There are some very good serial entrepreneurs but they've all had 10x as many failures as their handful of successes.
Reading someone else's story isn't to be taken as a lesson of what to do to get to any MRR. It's a series of data points to be mused over.
Enough data points, along with time in the game (persistence, market viability, base level competence and work ethic) and you will start to have larger and larger successes.
I’ve been running a small successful software business for 10 years and we’ve posted here, Twitter, everywhere over the years, and nothing I write about attracts as much interest as when I open the kimono and share real numbers.
Partly it generates feedback like yours which is cat nip for social feed algorithms, but I think mainly people just really like personal details about others lives and businesses.
My advice would be to just not read these if they bother you.
There's someone on twitter (I think it's The Gas Station Guy) who talked about having to fire sale a business that was worth close to $1M for $60,000 to a competitor because he was out of cash and desperate. How you get to that stage and how you recovered from it is far more interesting to me than these "0 to $XXX in 18 months" stories.
I think your ingrained views around money and greed are preventing you from presenting a fair perspective. The author has something like 4 successful products, so the problem around reproducibility is... irrelevant.
And the idea of great entrepreneurs not being motivated by money... I mean, ok, maybe give some evidence. I think you'll find many people have 2 reasons for doing something, the nice "non-greedy" one they tell everyone and some seem to take a face value, and the underlying one.
Is often a post rationalization.
Not everyone has to be, or has to seek to be a great entrepreneur. A lot of people, myself included, want to just go by and have a happy life. A new business doesn't have to ambition being a game changer, and I actually quite like the approach of building several small marginally successful products. True, this is not a recipe, and there's always a luck factor, but at least the author is sharing his story, whatever their own design behind this was.
This is incredible story for me. I am not sure i can achieve same thing as he achieved. It is inspiring. Moreover his main business failed after twitters api policy changed so it is even more incredible that he was able to recover from that setback and managend to create a new business which is now surpassing his older biz. And he did it without taking any outside funding. In my eyes he is equal or greater than your so called great entreprenuers!
Finally, the "sheer obsession with money" is not at all what comes across in the post. A lot of it is about lifestyle topics, making news friends, etc.
Honestly, I find your comment completely out of touch with the article.
You'd think they need it to live or something
:)
Care to share?
The "great" entrepreneurs of our world have always been obsessed with money because it is literally the fuel and lifeblood of their endeavors. Only people with a lot of money can afford to pretend not to care about it while working strenuously their entire life to obtain it.
>But money is not the only solution
Money is literally the only solution its the only way to buy food medicine and live indoors.
> There's a term for this – greed
Greed is a natural response to a world so constructed that if you stop swimming you drown. It's as natural for people to be greedy as for a coyote to be hungry.
This is a website about software entrepreneurship and you don’t like articles about going solo and making it? Maybe find a different website.
Good for you, little man. How did you manage to find a moment to write this spiteful comment with such an interesting life?
You're deluded if you think anyone (other than your mom) is interested in your walking, climbing or reading.
The guy clearly explained how he has built MULTIPLE successful products. So there is obviously more going on than sheer luck.
And jumping on the AI hype is exactly what being a good entrepreneur is all about: recognizing an opportunity/gap and capitalizing on it. And the reason he was more successful than those thousands other developers is because he understands that there is more to business than building a cool product. For example marketing, something that he is clearly very good at.
It's tough to scope, build, deliver. Let alone then market, sell, and keep on improving. All of this with no promise of revenue, big or small.
Now, I hate these Twitter humblebrags but one can't knock his hustle.