My solopreneur story

https://news.tonydinh.com/p/my-solopreneur-story-zero-to-45kmo

by alexzeitler • 3 years ago

852 606 3 years ago

news.tonydinh.com

gumballindie10• 3 years ago

[flagged]

swayvil• 3 years ago

I sold my kidney and bought a Tesla. Everybody in the trailer-park is green with envy.

wahnfrieden4• 3 years ago

It’s mostly a story of one worker producing and selling his work. That’s commerce not capitalism

damascus2• 3 years ago

A private person who controls the production of his work and sells it in an open market economy is definitely capitalism.

NhanH• 3 years ago

He was Communist Vietnam born and raised.

Funny enough, this type of entrepreneurship is more common in Vietnam than the US (I have lived in both, now in Vietnam).

kubb4• 3 years ago

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.

gumballindie10• 3 years ago

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.

Freedom is indie.

ghotli• 3 years ago

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.

dang2• 3 years ago

Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. This is exactly the opposite of what HN is for, regardless of what ideology you favor.

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.

unsupp0rted7• 3 years ago

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.

sokoloff2• 3 years ago

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".

antisthenes• 3 years ago

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.

38• 3 years ago

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?

riddley• 3 years ago

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?

Lewton• 3 years ago

the most common is not "a satisfactory reply" but rather "no reply".

No it isn't?

fullstackchris2• 3 years ago

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 :)

makeitdouble• 3 years ago

Isn't more of a bug report than a support ticket ? I'd hate silence to be the standard response to bug reports.

thfuran• 3 years ago

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.

woadwarrior01• 3 years ago

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.

bdlowery• 3 years ago

Clean shot is exactly like xnapper but better in every single aspect

tomaskafka• 3 years ago

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).

Ozzie_osman• 3 years ago

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.

agumonkey• 3 years ago

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.

ec109685• 3 years ago

Slack still responds to every issue raised in detail.

bnt• 3 years ago

I see this with course creators as well. I reported dozens of errors in a particular corse and the creator was literally annoyed at me.

MSFT_Edging• 3 years ago

If you can't do, teach. If you can't teach, write an online course. If you can't write an online course, teach phys ed.

trungdq883• 3 years ago

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! :)

unsupp0rted7• 3 years ago

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.

boplicity• 3 years ago

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.

unsupp0rted7• 3 years ago

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.

NickC25• 3 years ago

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.

wahnfrieden4• 3 years ago

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

demondemidi6• 3 years ago

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.

intelVISA3• 3 years ago

Whilst it is absurd, it should be encouraging that you can escape from the grind so easily nowadays!

donnythecroc3• 3 years ago

Why is it absurd? Chat GPT UI is pretty bad, he created a better one, people pay him for it. That seems like a pretty sensible exchange.

moooo99• 3 years ago

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

Whiteshadow122• 3 years ago

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.

mrits• 3 years ago

If you were first to market with a patent you'd be able to charge a lot more than that.

OmarShehata2• 3 years ago

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.

intelVISA3• 3 years ago

I'm #2 for the history books but #1 pays the bills. :(

OmarShehata2• 3 years ago

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.

cornholio4• 3 years ago

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.

brookst• 3 years ago

I’ve lived 3 a few times: building something small that I find amusing/useful, then more or less accidentally finding a user base and business.

It’s not necessarily a good thing; it can turn a fun hobby into an onerous obligation. But it is another path.

amelius4• 3 years ago

Just accept that there exist people who get fulfillment out of looking for the low hanging fruit all the time. And spending lots of time on marketing.

ahoka• 3 years ago

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.

kubb4• 3 years ago

Go for it, 1% of the time it works all the time. If you fail, you just weren’t good enough.

harryquach• 3 years ago

Self selection bias. It worked for me therefore anyone can do it!

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.

gumballindie10• 3 years ago

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?

Capricorn24815• 3 years ago

I don't think the OP doesn't realize that, it just doesn't make it any less frustrating.

ilrwbwrkhv4• 3 years ago

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".

appleiigs• 3 years ago

People voluntarily pay him $45K/mo. for his products… Makes you claim of “largely useless products” obviously false.

meheleventyone• 3 years ago

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.

carlossouza• 3 years ago

Exactly. This story is excellent... truly inspiring!

It reminds me of PG's mantra: make something people want.

kirse2• 3 years ago

You must be new here / have never heard the legend of patio11:

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.

getrealyall3• 3 years ago

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.

garganzol• 3 years ago

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.

Mistletoe• 3 years ago

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.

chx• 3 years ago

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.

arcbyte• 3 years ago

You missed everything in the article.

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

Aurornis7• 3 years ago

The key to his success was to Get Started.

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.

hyperfuturism2• 3 years ago

Beautifully put. Only something I learned recently, to stop psych:ing yourself out and just Get Started.

ignoramous3• 3 years ago

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).

[0] Btw, Pieter Levels makes way more as solopreneur: ~$200k per month / https://levels.io/my-first-million/

croes2• 3 years ago

Survivorship bias.

These stories are the few lucky ones, the rest didn't have nearly the same success.

Remember flappy bird?

gumballindie10• 3 years ago

This is such a false statement.

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.

Aurornis7• 3 years ago

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.

mrieck• 3 years ago

Oh man, this comment hits too close to home.

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.

IAmGraydon• 3 years ago

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.

crossroadsguy• 3 years ago

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.

getrealyall3• 3 years ago

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.

Edit: clerical error.

Edit 2: added despair.

jjallen• 3 years ago

If you are saying that this person is from the US, he isn’t.

chinchilla2020• 3 years ago

He's not from the US.

Typical hackernews: "Something bad happened in the world and this is why the US is bad"

demondemidi6• 3 years ago

Well put. I think this take summarizes the lens of incredulity from which many in my generation view this new economy.

dahart3• 3 years ago

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?

satvikpendem20• 3 years ago

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.

lnxg33k1• 3 years ago

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?

firtoz• 3 years ago

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.

yayitswei• 3 years ago

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.

glnarayanan• 3 years ago

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.

dahart3• 3 years ago

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.

demondemidi6• 3 years ago

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.

veeti• 3 years ago

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'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".

Lemmi2• 3 years ago

I read it and I don't know it's a story I would not want to have.

It feels like the good friend who always has some side hussle instead of just doing something useful.

DandyDev5• 3 years ago

Making enough money to support the lifestyle you want is useful, no?

Lemmi2• 3 years ago

I still wouldn't do sex work.

rwhyan• 3 years ago

$45k/month is more than a "side hustle."

And Tony's products ARE useful. Or else people wouldn't buy them.

Value is subjective.

donnythecroc3• 3 years ago

Good job Tony Dinh. I think the lesson here is to keep going, a bunch of failures and then a success.

aogaili5• 3 years ago

So many envious people, including myself, but at least I admit it. Go back to your corporate cusion or VC lap, and resolve that jira please.

gumballindie10• 3 years ago

And be sure to return to your field (office as they call it these days), peasant.

ink_13• 3 years ago

It's possible to find this kind of thing distasteful without being motivated by envy.

aogaili5• 3 years ago

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.

the_only_law2• 3 years ago

“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.

endisneigh• 3 years ago

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.

kyawzazaw11• 3 years ago

Same way how?

mihaic2• 3 years ago

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.

satvikpendem20• 3 years ago

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].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

mihaic2• 3 years ago

Induced demand leads often also to a race-to-the-bottom in pricing.

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.

whiplash4513• 3 years ago

Good point, although I am less worried about the lack of scale and more about the lack of temporal persistence.

It seems like he needs to constantly push new products out there to maintain a steady income.

gen220• 3 years ago

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.

Aurornis7• 3 years ago

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.

keiferski4• 3 years ago

The thing is, we don’t know

In the first paragraph:

At the moment, my total revenue across all products is about $45K/month at ~90% profit.

Aurornis7• 3 years ago

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.

ncruces• 3 years ago

Or, he just got lucky, but that doesn't make for a good story.

I'm content knowing one of my apps (only one) is a success out of unrepeatable sheer luck.

dublinben• 3 years ago

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.

unsupp0rted7• 3 years ago

Not really. He got my money in exchange for a tool I use 3 times a day, every day.

kyawzazaw11• 3 years ago

How is he selling hopes when he has like 4 products that have revenue?

nomilk3• 3 years ago

without mentioning a single expense

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.

wahnfrieden4• 3 years ago

Don’t think he’s spent seriously on ads

majani• 3 years ago

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

satvikpendem20• 3 years ago

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.

moneywoes5• 3 years ago

the distribution he gets from these posts outweighs that imo

Existenceblinks4• 3 years ago

And these accounts don't care about us at all, they only want to farm us. They don't even engage our replies.

unsupp0rted7• 3 years ago

HN: "It's okay to make something nobody wants = damn right! Do it for the craft and the process and the learning and the joy."

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!"

kolbe2• 3 years ago

I see a large diversity of opinion about this guy's business. Who is this "HN" you're talking about?

pbj1968• 3 years ago

And here’s the third bucket - can’t see the forest for the semantic trees.

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

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.

fullstackchris2• 3 years ago

but reading the comments, they mostly fall in to one of these two buckets...

yieldcrv3• 3 years ago

in consensus based communities that only show you a reality based on what comments people upvote, it is not ridiculous at all

when a different community would have completely different sentiment

it is reflective of the audience

keiferski4• 3 years ago

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/

naillo• 3 years ago

Well dalle3 pretty much has that niche covered

keiferski4• 3 years ago

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.

ferennag• 3 years ago

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.

wx30• 3 years ago

Thanks for the article. What tools do you use to quickly build websites? Stripe? Something else?

m3kw9• 3 years ago

Doesn’t look easy

ag56• 3 years ago

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’.

tspike2• 3 years ago

Sounds like you need a business partner. Me too.

intelVISA3• 3 years ago

If only there was some way to connect 10x SWEs with 10x MBAs :/

An 'accelerator' of some description, perhaps.

sentimentscan• 3 years ago

I feel the same. I really hate writing all those articles, posts, writing to people to get mostly rejected/ignored. But then again I grind it out

satvikpendem20• 3 years ago

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.

moneywoes5• 3 years ago

what’s been the best roi

xyst4• 3 years ago

“Conjoined triangles of success”

It’s taught in business schools!!1

benjaminwootton2• 3 years ago

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:

https://twitter.com/MrNick_Buzz https://twitter.com/marc_louvion https://twitter.com/Timb03

antigirl• 3 years ago

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?]

diimdeep• 3 years ago

And author of this article is happy about #1 on front page of HN https://twitter.com/tdinh_me/status/1705597632876626166

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.

michaelsalim• 3 years ago

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

Aurornis7• 3 years ago

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.

tacker20002• 3 years ago

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

ilamont• 3 years ago

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.

kyawzazaw11• 3 years ago

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

I am baffled.

benjaminwootton2• 3 years ago

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.

DecayingOrganic• 3 years ago

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.

paulryanrogers4• 3 years ago

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.

kyawzazaw11• 3 years ago

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

xyst4• 3 years ago

Crab mentality

janmo• 3 years ago

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.

proxyon• 3 years ago

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.

umvi• 3 years ago

The hard part here is the spending hours on Twitter each day to "become more influential" and "engage with your audience"

Existenceblinks4• 3 years ago

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

didip• 3 years ago

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.

mt_• 3 years ago

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.

Existenceblinks4• 3 years ago

I mute all of these guys who have posted 10 times+ a day. If everyone doing this, there will be lots of garbage.

nomilk3• 3 years ago

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

satvikpendem20• 3 years ago

When someone mentions HN and Dropbox, they are usually mentioning the infamous comment by BrandonM which is the top comment in your first link.

shrimpx6• 3 years ago

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.

noident• 3 years ago

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.

imiric7• 3 years ago

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.

icedchai• 3 years ago

He doesn't need investors. Why would he bother?

pc862• 3 years ago

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.

EddTheSDET• 3 years ago

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?

elboru• 3 years ago

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.

dang2• 3 years ago

most top comments (for most topics) contain contra-arguments, or critical comments of any sort against the article

That's true until the top comments start objecting to the objections. The current thread is a clear example. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... It's a surprisingly reliable phenomenon.

braza2• 3 years ago

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.

satvikpendem20• 3 years ago

New users are more likely to be positive, actually. HN has always been more negative, it even has the infamous Dropbox comment by BrandonM.

lylejantzi3rd• 3 years ago

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.

greatpostman• 3 years ago

General bitter people stuck in the 9 to 5 grind

sph• 3 years ago

The vast majority of people in here are posers, i.e. not hackers in the old-school computer wiz sense, nor hackers in the Paul Graham sense.

HN has gone mainstream a decade ago. Now we've got the same audience of Ars Technica and r/technology.

arthurofbabylon5• 3 years ago

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.)

moneywoes5• 3 years ago

i agree this whole build in public is a growth hack

meiraleal3• 3 years ago

so build in private. Isn't it the default?

lifechoseme123• 3 years ago

I agree.

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.

trashface• 3 years ago

Failure reporting in. We can't actually post all the failures, or even the interesting ones, because the site would be overwhelmed and crash.

RyeCombinator• 3 years ago

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.

goodmunky• 3 years ago

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.

itsoktocry2• 3 years ago

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.

monero-xmr• 3 years ago

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.

hncowardnum3• 3 years ago

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.

itsoktocry2• 3 years ago

The rest of us have to place a dire importance on it, lest we end up destitute, unemployable, homeless, and so on.

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".

arthurofbabylon5• 3 years ago

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.

Aurornis7• 3 years ago

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.

arthurofbabylon5• 3 years ago

Paying bills is not greed.

blantonl3• 3 years ago

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.

johnfn• 3 years ago

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.

imiric7• 3 years ago

There's a term for this – greed.

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.

demondemidi6• 3 years ago

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?

dooraven4• 3 years ago

Also this is just lol

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.

thelastparadise2• 3 years ago

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.

aramattamara• 3 years ago

95% of tech companies are _driven_ by profits

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.

slig4• 3 years ago

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.

spencerchubb• 3 years ago

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)

swagempire• 3 years ago

Why is HN so opposed to people making money?

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.

xyst4• 3 years ago

I think it’s crab mentality.

cj3• 3 years ago

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).

shw1n• 3 years ago

This is a strangely bitter take on someone sharing their business journey.

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

nico_h3• 3 years ago

Where is the greed???

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.

nico_h3• 3 years ago

Sounds to me like sour grapes from someone that’s doing high paying consulting but can’t escape it.

yieldcrv3• 3 years ago

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

meiraleal3• 3 years ago

(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.

totallywrong• 3 years ago

For the record, I am not jealous

You sure don't sound like it..

brunojppb• 3 years ago

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.

slig4• 3 years ago

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.

airstrike• 3 years ago

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

paulryanrogers4• 3 years ago

Sharing is the marketing and the dream is also what they're selling.

unmole• 3 years ago

I can't tell if this is satire.

charles_f2• 3 years ago

Yeah I waa asking myself the same question, this is such a stereotypical hn answer, but it lacks just enough emphasis to make it satirical

hn_throwaway_99• 3 years ago

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.

ncallaway3• 3 years ago

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.

williamtrask4• 3 years ago

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”.

blantonl3• 3 years ago

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.

zedadex2• 3 years ago

Yeah, their comment read as incredibly privileged, and that paragraph pretty much said what they didn't have to

brigadier132• 3 years ago

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.

aunty_helen3• 3 years ago

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.

williamtrask4• 3 years ago

Care to comment on the idea that $ is over celebrated as a metric of success? That seemed like a bigger point.

didibus2• 3 years ago

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.

encoderer• 3 years ago

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.

HeyLaughingBoy• 3 years ago

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.

ohrlly• 3 years ago

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.

charles_f2• 3 years ago

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.

huimang• 3 years ago

This is a lot of words to merely say that you’re jealous. There a lot of assumptions here that have nothing to do with the author or the post.

arthur_sav• 3 years ago

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.

paulryanrogers4• 3 years ago

This sharing is also promotion for what they are selling: shovels and dreams

eb0la• 3 years ago

Maybe I am a very sceptical person... but every time I see a similar story I can't help thinking about survivorship bias.

pdyc• 3 years ago

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!

whiplash4513• 3 years ago

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.

zedadex2• 3 years ago

Finally, the sheer obsession with money saddens me

You'd think they need it to live or something

aatd86• 3 years ago

You should read his post. It's a good one and he acknowledges what you're complaining about toward the end of it.

Remnant44• 3 years ago

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.

Care to share?

patrec• 3 years ago

So what is the most interesting part of your story?

michaelmrose• 3 years ago

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.

foooorsyth2• 3 years ago

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.

wiseowise• 3 years ago

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?

samcat116• 3 years ago

Buddy you’re writing on a venture capital website.

hahamaster2• 3 years ago

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.

tamimio• 3 years ago

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.

DandyDev5• 3 years ago

How do you even get to this take?

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.

paulryanrogers4• 3 years ago

The first is the hardest. After that you can leverage your brand

shrimpx6• 3 years ago

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.

sakopov• 3 years ago

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.

topicseed• 3 years ago

True, and I resonate so much with that. So many amazing ideas that were abandoned at 60% completion, after passion fades, a few days or weeks later.

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.

lucgagan• 3 years ago

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.

hubraumhugo• 3 years ago

Business advice is often just someone handing you their winning lottery ticket. It worked perfectly for them but will probably be totally useless and not repeatable for you.

system24• 3 years ago

That's a stretch. There is still lots to learn from their journey. I can list at least 5 things to take from Tony's success.

mym1990• 3 years ago

One thing to keep in mind is survivorship bias…not saying that Tony’s experience is not one to glean some things from, but be very careful about what those things are and how you implement them in your journey.

Existenceblinks4• 3 years ago

Tbh, this is very repetitive story .. seen 100 times before.

hahamaster2• 3 years ago

Someone handing me their winning lottery ticket is wonderful, not totally useless.

imgabe12• 3 years ago

Nobody can ever do anything. Things only happen by random chance. What a bleak and pointless worldview.

DantesKite2• 3 years ago

So much envy.

tuyenhx• 3 years ago

Congratz Tony! He has been very good at creating products for years. Since he was a student. The way he studied, the way he worked, just so different from the rest of us.

It feels so good that your story in the front page of HN. 45k is not a big number for HN crowd, but it is a fortune here in my country.

Keep going my friend!

P/s: I am his classmate at the university.

whiplash4513• 3 years ago

I'd think that 45K per month is a big number for most people on HN.

nico7• 3 years ago

Very interesting read. Highlights how important having an audience is

The key was building his Twitter following and mailing list

zygo• 3 years ago

Pettiness and entitlement in the comments are another level! Kudos to Tony for having the guts to take the leap and reaching this milestone

gejose• 3 years ago

Great read! I don't know why there's so much negativity in the comments, but great job Tony!

michaelteter• 3 years ago

Jealousy maybe. Or frustration that marketing often seems to be more important than anything else. HN probably has more good devs than good marketers, and some of us (dev) really hate doing marketing.

A story like this seems to reinforce that just being good at product development or software development isn't enough, and that it _might_ be more effective to be mediocre at development and good at marketing. (Not to suggest that TFA author is mediocre at development.)

sgu999• 3 years ago

~90% profit

Even though I understand the mechanics of the free market, in how many other fields do we consider this kind of profit margins to be honest? What about a farmer selling at a 90% profit? A pharmacist? A banker?

Good for him though, "why not if he can", after all. I'm just not sure how I feel about it...

sothatsit• 3 years ago

This is why investors love software: the marginal cost of product is tiny. However, real money must be spent on R&D and marketing to keep those profit margins going, especially if you don't have a technology moat (e.g., AI wrappers).

fy20• 3 years ago

I like to look at it the other way: if a single person can make so much on their own, how much inefficiency must there be in big companies? Even at the medium size VC backed startup (~120 people) I work for, the amount of inefficiency I see on a day to day basis is sometimes unbelievable.

Also I'm not sure banks are a good example. Over the course of my mortgage, I will end up paying more than I borrowed in interest.

gumballindie10• 3 years ago

“so much”? This is 40k thats little. And it’s good that indies are able to achieve it.

tpetry• 3 years ago

The 90% didn‘t account for his time working on the stuff. So you can reduce from the $500k/year his salary - and now the 90% margin is far away. Indie hackers never factor in their working time.

danbruc25• 3 years ago

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

DandyDev5• 3 years ago

I agree that it is a market failure, but it is for sure a marketing success. I cannot help but feel that there must be dozen competitors to his simple products that gather more "honest" profit margins (aka are cheaper or more feature rich) but have a hard time with marketing.

This is obviously something Tony put a lot of time and effort in, and it paid off. Good on him!

free_energy_min• 3 years ago

It’s not the same as profit margin in other business it doesn’t take into account labor costs. How much is his time worth?

danbruc25• 3 years ago

Pick some random full-time developer salary, say $100k per year, and cut this in half as he says he works four hours per day.

ayushchat• 3 years ago

Have you ever heard of a company called Apple?

danbruc25• 3 years ago

I have no idea how high Apple's profit margins are, but I am quite sure they are not small. But what is your point, that is also a market failure.

hackerdrew• 3 years ago

Why don’t you exploit that market failure?

danbruc25• 3 years ago

Not interested. I would feel bad for overcharging people and getting rich from that. And if I would charge them the actual costs, then I would mostly just destroy that guy's business and save some thousand people each a couple of bucks on some utilities that they almost certainly do not really need and are voluntarily paying for.

Aslan93• 3 years ago

90% never lasts for long. Its called the law of attractive profits. The more attractive your profits are, the more competition you attract.

danbruc25• 3 years ago

Sure, that's the theory. In theory someone cleaning toilets should also earn more than software developers or CEOs. People doing badly paid unpleasant jobs should all learn to program or manage a company and then drive down the salaries until cleaning toilets pays a premium because it is unpleasant work no one wants to do.

pHollda• 3 years ago

yup yup. cc Why don't people realize that 'high software profit margins' are fugazi?(https://buttondown.email/tZero19e/archive/why-dont-people-re...)

mckravchyk• 3 years ago

I'm not an expert in this but I think that generally price is determined by what the upper limit of what the users are willing to pay and the lower limit of what the vendors are willing to charge. As a new software vendor it only makes sense to look at the price of similar software in your space. And is it really bad - how many would want to be a software vendor otherwise? I'm not saying that some physical products do not come with risk, but the article is mentioning water - what are the chances that a company selling water will have a product market fit problem? What are the chances that the app you have worked on for so long without getting paid for it will not net more than a day job would 2 years after launch?

And Google, Facebook - they are something entirely different, they have a monopoly on their ad machine so they can charge whatever they want - and give something back in R&D in exchange - a company that struggles to keep its lights on can't innovate much (Zero to One is a nice take on this). For the latter, I'm not saying it is good or bad, it has benefits and drawbacks and it's the way it is and it's certainly not limited to virtual products. The Train Monopoly Co in my country has made the tickets practically 2x as expensive in just 1 year and what can I do? They could increase the price even further and I would still be riding with them because there are no other options.

barry-cotter4• 3 years ago

Why are you on this forum if you hate capitalism? It’s an advertising funnel for a VC firm, in case you don’t know.

danbruc25• 3 years ago

People have different ideas what capitalism exactly means, but free matkets are generally part of it. And properly working free markets would ensure that profits are zero and that to a first approximation everyone earns the same. Making profits and getting rich is against the spirit of capitalism.

dogibacsi2• 3 years ago

if you talk economics make sure you know what you're talking about.

profit happens when I can give you 10 units of value that costs me 1 unit of value. depending on risk factors, we split the difference. ie: if I give you the tool that does it for you, I get all 9 units because all risk is mine. if I tell you how to do it I get maybe 1 unit because most risk is yours.

what you're referring to is arbitrage. efficient markets kill arbitrage (zero risk profit)

danbruc25• 3 years ago

No. Profits should not exist in working markets in equilibrium. If they exist, competitors are supposed to show up to also collect some of the profits eventually driving them to zero. If there are no competitors driving the profits to zero, that is a market failure.

imgabe12• 3 years ago

Then why don’t you make the same thing for 85% margin?

danbruc25• 3 years ago

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

dusanbab• 3 years ago

Gross profit, operating profit or net profit?

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

danbruc25• 3 years ago

Ask that guy. I would guess it is none of the three, i.e. he did not deduct a salary for him, but I really do not know.

anonporridge• 3 years ago

If there are any, they're private and keeping an extremely low profile to increase their run time before potential competitors catch on and come to eat their lunch.

People with a lucrative gold mine don't talk about it until the mine has run dry and their winnings are secure in the bank.

Sigfigs• 3 years ago

That comma is a punctuation failure.

iamgopal• 3 years ago

Most code editor and compiler are free, why someone else not built it ?

nickkao• 3 years ago

Drop your LinkedIn I wanna see something

xyst4• 3 years ago

When I was an avid Twitter user this person was pretty active in selling his product. Particularly in the “indie hacker” hashtag.

My take from this is: know how to market and sell your product. If not, get someone that can

admildo2• 3 years ago

Congratulations on such a huge milestone. What an inspiration, I know you’re going to achieve even greater milestones. Keep on building

admildo2• 3 years ago

Congratulations on such a big win. That’s a huge milestone. Keep on building you’re such an inspiration. Don’t listen to the haters. It’s easy to talk down when you’re not in the arena. Keep on building, keep on hacking, keeps on winning.

jackbridger• 3 years ago

Very interesting and inspiring Story

allenu2• 3 years ago

As a fellow indie hacker (I quit my job 18 months ago to build and sell my own apps), I am super jealous. I don't have the success of this guy (only getting close to $1k/mo these days), but I can understand the success.

This guy knows how to market and ship product. I've seen him pop up a few times on indiehackers.com and social media. His "brand" is super simple to understand, which helps gain followers. He knows marketing.

A lot of people who try to go from being a dev to entrepreneur focus entirely too much on the engineering side (I'm guilty of that) and think that what matters most is the product and how well it's made. We focus way too much on tools, processes, and forget that at the end of the day, we're trying to exchange useful products for money. Getting your product(s) out the door and telling people about it (and iterating) are way more important than what stack you use.

I'm a little disappointed by all the negativity here, but I suspect most of us are just jealous.

eddmakesio3• 3 years ago

We focus way too much on tools, processes, and forget that at the end of the day, we're trying to exchange useful products for mone

Yep, just look at @levelsio and his $250k MRR stack of apps built with PHP and jQuery

I'm a little disappointed by all the negativity here, but I suspect most of us are just jealous.

Yep x2, for a website built around startups a huge number seem to be against a solo founder bootstrapping apps successfully

thelastparadise2• 3 years ago

Yep x2, for a website built around startups a huge number seem to be against a solo founder bootstrapping apps successfully

Solo bootstrapper as well, ~20K ARR on one SaaS app about to launch another.

It's clear to me there's money to be made, and yes engineers tend to overweight engineering effort and underweight distribution.

Make something that makes someone's life better, saves or makes them money, and ask a fair amount for it.

That's what I've done and have modest recurring revenue after only 6-8 months or so.

konschubert• 3 years ago

Agreed. I make an e-paper calendar with google sync and everytime I talk about it, people love it.

But it's so, so hard to find a scalable way to market it. Landing pages, photos, ads. All that stuff is very important and genuinely super hard.

that_guy_iain2• 3 years ago

This guy knows how to market and ship product. I've seen him pop up a few times on indiehackers.com and social media. His "brand" is super simple to understand, which helps gain followers. He knows marketing.

I think it boils down to one thing. He built a tool specifically to market on Twitter, it worked well, it got traction because of how well it worked. His main trick was to show up every day and show what he was working on. Which works well for indie hackers on Twitter.

Alot of his marketing efforts is look at how well I'm doing, he's seen that this has worked and has repeated it repeatedly. Can't blame the guy. The only big story from him that wasn't a success story was him writing about how the twitter API pricing really cost him big time.

jorgesborges• 3 years ago

You can’t blame the guy?! What blame is there to find in being successful? What “trick” is there in adhering to a successful marketing strategy?

laserDinosaur• 3 years ago

I think it boils down to one thing. He built a tool specifically to market on Twitter, it worked well, it got traction because of how well it worked.

I remember about 6 years ago seeing an small indie studio talking about how, when they were starting their next project, they posted 10 second gameplay gifs of games that didn't exist yet every week on twitter. They'd track the reactions they got from the gif, then try one or two more of the same game to see if it's consistent. They ended up with the most traffic towards some kind of airship management game, and it ended up doing extremely well for them once released. But the youtube comments where he was explaining his process post-release were LIVID. They were furious that it was such a cold, calculated commercialized process - but hey that's business.

tbbfjotllf• 3 years ago

If you don't know how to sell, There's no point in worrying/focusing too much on the engineering side. While the engineering side is Important, People have to buy the product first for you to be able to earn anything.

jart• 3 years ago

at the end of the day, we're trying to exchange useful products for money

If you're just trying to make money, then you shouldn't call yourself a hacker.

hbien2• 3 years ago

> at the end of the day, we're trying to exchange useful products for money
If you're just trying to make money, then you shouldn't call yourself a hacker.

I hate gatekeeping like this.

For anyone who needs to hear it: you don't need to be a starving artist. You are not a sell-out for wanting to exchange useful products for money. You can call yourself a hacker.

DantesKite2• 3 years ago

Since when did financial success invalidate technical expertise?

tomcam• 3 years ago

If you're just trying to make money, then you shouldn't call yourself a hacker.

jart is one of my heroes but strong disagree here. Not sure why we can call ourselves progressive or trans or feminist whether or not we are trying to scrape by. But hacker? Heaven forfend.

foooorsyth2• 3 years ago

His speed is what most impressed me. Had his ChatGPT tool out in 5 days. Seriously impressive. Being early in the hype cycle is important.

report-to-trees• 3 years ago

I think the initial reaction of many (myself included) is pretty negative just based on the niche these products fall into. Something about a Twitter Influencer selling various products to other Twitter Influencers to manage their own business hyping is a bit off putting.

After some reflection I don't think this is better or worse than any other niche you might market towards.

allenu2• 3 years ago

That's fair. My initial reaction on just seeing the headline was "Oh, I wonder what indie dev-focused tool this guy made." It's definitely a cliche now to see someone going into the solo SaaS business and then pivoting to being an influencer or someone selling "tools" to help other solopreneurs.

bruce5112• 3 years ago

All our lives we're told that skills matter. Society will reward those who are most skilled.

Inevitably groups form around a skill, programmers hang around programmers and so on. Since programmers "create" all the value we believe we should get paid the most etc.

Alas schools emphasise "hard" skills (programming, math, doctors, lawyers etc) and those are all good jobs that make decent money. They ignore "soft" skills like selling, marketing, and so on.

In truth sales and marketing are orders of magnitude more valuable, and their pay reflects that. There are a lot of pharma reps, realtors, insurance salesman that earn mega bucks.

This is not something the average hacker wants to hear. I expect to get down-voted for saying it. But if you're reading this, and you're thinking of starting out on your own, then I recommend you consider;

Who will you sell to? How will you reach them? What can they afford?

Only then start thinking about what to make.

AussieWog93• 3 years ago

In truth sales and marketing are orders of magnitude more valuable

As someone who's been on both sides of the fence, this isn't true either.

Both engineering and sales are important, and there are probably as many entrepreneurs who have failed by spending all their time marketing and selling a shit product as there are those who get bogged down in technical minutiae.

Aurornis7• 3 years ago

Inevitably groups form around a skill, programmers hang around programmers and so on. Since programmers "create" all the value we believe we should get paid the most etc.

Programmers do get paid a lot, relatively speaking.

The disconnect is that programming and creating a business are different skills.

There are occasional examples of someone programming a thing so useful that it sells itself, but they are extremely rare. Most of these success stories come with major marketing attached, although it’s often hidden. In this case the person was marketing through Twitter, including promoted Tweets. It’s not mentioned in the article, but the business is more about cultivating a social media presence and getting a fractional percentage of them to convert into sales.

There’s nothing wrong with this, of course! However, the marketing and personal brand angle are often overlooked by indie hackers who think they’re going to make a great business that people will just discover randomly and pay them for.

One of the best examples would be the indie hacker who first got a lot of attention for his job board business. There have been hundreds of indie hacker job boards popping up ever since, but none of them get the same traction as the person who built it as a Twitter sensation. The Twitter presence and ensuing brand recognition was a key part of the business, but it gets overlooked by people who are just wowed by the MRR numbers.

throwing_away• 3 years ago

All our lives we're told that skills matter. Society will reward those who are most skilled.

Remember, kids: you don't get what you deserve -- you get what you negotiate.

michaelfeathers• 3 years ago

I think it goes deeper.

When people become very skilled at programming they have the urge to scratch their own itch, either writing tools to solve software development problems or creating something with a technology that they want to use. They are uninterested in mundane, boring, vertical applications, but that's often where the money is.

The guy in the article did some development tools but some other things too. At the end of the day, imagining a market is no substitute for finding one.

aragonite• 3 years ago

There are two kinds of jealousy, the motivating kind and the demotivating kind. For example, most folks here are probably somewhat jealous of how rich Linus Torvald is, but this kind of jealousy motivates one to perfect one's craft and pursue ambitious projects. The story posted here tends to generate the kind of jealousy that demotivates. I think that's where the negativity comes from.

meiraleal3• 3 years ago

A lot of people who try to go from being a dev to entrepreneur focus entirely too much on the engineering side (I'm guilty of that) and think that what matters most is the product and how well it's made.

This is important, at least for me. Some people can be confident without backing or just fake confidence, some people can't. It is a natural process to take a long time building the right abstractions and just then get into marketing mode, when you have a solid platform to back your confidence.

yusufmalikul• 3 years ago

Tony = 7 years of dev before going indie also Tony = 2-4 years of saving

losers = no dev exp, learn no code in a week then quit 9-5 also losers = spend all their one month saving

frabjoused• 3 years ago

Don't know why this is trending on HN. It's not a coincidence that in a majority of these stories, they also have a large blog, social media following or in some other way are selling their success. This is just another person being successful by talking about how they are successful.

uoaei2• 3 years ago

One lesson I've learned from this post is if you create products for people who are on their computers all the time and who are not very price-sensitive to double-digit recurring costs, it's easy to make a lot of money.

moneywoes5• 3 years ago

can you elaborate? seems like a vague icp

uoaei2• 3 years ago

Marketing is easy when you know your audience is spending all their time on platforms like HN and Twitter, and they have itchy clicker-fingers for new shiny software that they think will help them optimize their life. Then it's just making the simplest possible software that works reliably (market it as "UNIX philosophy", either explicitly or implicitly), stick to the modern landing page + checkout flow aesthetic, and the marks are on familiar ground and will happily play your game to give you $4/mo til they redo their budgets. Mutiply this by ~1000, keep the subscription low enough that they get bored before hyperoptimizing their budget to that level, and you've got a steady stream of income.

jarekceborski• 3 years ago

Well deserved! And you are great inspiration for fellow solopreneurs and indie hackers! Keep shipping!

uconnectlol• 3 years ago

but i don't care because it involves doing web dev and using twitter. i already easily enter any math domain so i can work for some stupid company and get $300K/year in a week of job searching. what you are doing is no different than 90s microsoft devs making products to sell on microsoft's platform. none of these solutions are "freedom", since you still have to work terribly long amounts of time like 9-5, and sit on top of foundations that randomly move on peoples whims, your twitter suddenly requesting 45K/month being a prime example. the only freedom is skill. making a screenshot app is something anyone can do. you can also invest your time fully into marketing and that's what people do and why the world sucks.

jcytong• 3 years ago

It's wonderful the world is big enough to celebrate whether you run a $45k/mo company solo, or find joy in nature walks, rock climbing, reading or raised VC to go big.

thenerdhead• 3 years ago

Cool to see someone use and abuse Twitter to make money.

Seems that every successful indie hacker story has a component of being somewhat known on twitter.

mjwhansen• 3 years ago

A lot of the successful indie hacker stories you’ve heard are because they’re active on Twitter. There are thousands of solo dev entrepreneurs that don’t post on Twitter and are very quietly running great little internet businesses.

alex_lav• 3 years ago

Until using Twitter drops out of these types of post, I'll continue to suggest retitling them to "How I became a tech influencer that writes software at 45k/mo". Also would love to see usage rates on these products instead of subscriptions alone, as very clearly Twitch has demonstrated people will give money to influencers they like regardless of (even in absence of) their product.

axegon_• 3 years ago

unit test suite with >95% test coverage

I'm sorry, but that claim is wild. This is nearly impossible unless your application consists of 5 classes and you are moving a few bits in memory. For a large application, anything over 75% sounds a bit fishy to say the least. And beyond that, it's practically unsustainable: the odds of making even a small refactor(which sooner or later you will need to), without wasting a week fixing your tests is a fairy tale.

andrei_says_• 3 years ago

I bought his devutils for $9 and love it!

cynicalsecurity• 3 years ago

Looks like a marketing bullshit article.

redbell2• 3 years ago

“People are rewarded in public for what they practice for years in private.” — Tony Robbins

Whenever I heard about a success story, especially, when the hero is an indie hacker, the above quote hits my brain.

I would assume that nobody here would disagree that zero to $45K/mo in 2 years is a jaw-dropping number but once you read the full story with all behind-the-scenes challenges, blood, sweet and tears you quickly realize that this is a lot of work multiplied by some coefficient of uncertainty.

I’ve discovered and been following Tony for about a year now on Twitter and on IndieHackers and must say I was inspired by him.

If ONLY he posted this on HN himself and was here for an AMA

Best of luck..

trungdq883• 3 years ago

Thank you the kind words! I did post the link myself but it didn't get a lot of votes like this one.

redbell2• 3 years ago

Oh, you are here Tony.. Welcome back!

I see that you already submitted this story yourself but, unfortunately, didn't get much traction like this one. This is one of the weirdest parts of Hacker News, where a submission may go totally unnoticed but could go viral and even hit #1 after being resubmitted a few hours later.

braza2• 3 years ago

Reading those comments I think this is a tale of two cities.

City one here several corporate developers can see how a raw and crystalline feedback from the user is: attention and money. no fluff, no Hippo, no assumptions of what a customer is. Well done an we salute you.

Another city has people that is tired with that renaissance of this dollar-menu version of the hustle culture, that as a stubborn Phoenix always reappears and now fuelled with social attention.

And here I am not talking about people doing important things to the world, but my message is for the several clout chasers from Twitter that their “product” is selling courses to build products, how to hustle and show stats in social media, and generate twitter impressions as “qualified leads”.

prakhar897• 3 years ago

I was also interested in this. So, I scraped and crunched a lot of IndieHackers data. Things like which fields are most pursued, how many ventures succeed etc. You can read the complete report here: https://prakgupta.com/blog/real_world_stats_for_bootstrappin...

beacham• 3 years ago

Interesting analysis. I enjoyed reading it. Seemed pretty much in line with what I would expect.

I am curious where you came up with the 30,000 guess for bootstrapped startups in the following statement:

“X (My guess is 30000 startups) start bootstrapping —-> 2868 list on IH —-> 915 making 10k$ MRR

That puts the actual percentage to be : 3.5% chance of success.”

guzik• 3 years ago

Xnapper is really cool. Anything similar but for videos?

dmoura• 3 years ago

Thank you for sharing your learnings and for your transparency! Congrats!

Supply5411• 3 years ago

I tried to read this with an open mind to learn something that may help me on a similar journey. However, I found it challenging to get any new nuggets of advice or wisdom. Maybe the "#buildinpublic" movement and interacting with that community? Otherwise it just seems like he found his groove, but it's not really transferable.

haven_xia• 3 years ago

Great topic, really impressive, though the first step is still hard for me.

shinycode• 3 years ago

It’s really close to shottr.cc which is free and the support paid version is cheaper. I use it 20 times every day and it has many options. Really useful tool

atleastoptimal• 3 years ago

Its amazing that as a senior developer he was making 1700 a month USD, which is about 20k a year. Salaries for software devs outside America are so comically low. I understand why the remote work sphere is completely flooded, simply being a junior dev in America doing simple stuff right out of college and you make 6 figs. That's a platinum ticket in 99% of countries.

doublemint2202• 3 years ago

horses. lots of 'em.

gabesullice• 3 years ago

What does this mean?

gumballindie10• 3 years ago

That's a platinum ticket in 99% of countries.

Few companies pay that though. Pay is usually adjusted to local cost of living. The uk for instance is way cheaper than the us. Germany as well.

system24• 3 years ago

Eastern EU countries usually pay $2-4k range. That's why hiring offshore is very easy for American companies.

game_the0ry• 3 years ago

Its amazing that as a senior developer he was making 1700 a month USD, which is about 20k a year

I mostly agree with you, but let me make it less amazing.

Outside of the US, you will likely have no student debt, low cost and high quality healthcare, lower rent, and lower cost of living. 20-year olds living in SF, NY, or Seattle, probably have student loans, rent that costs 2-3,000 per month in rent, a routine doctors bill costs $250, a lunch sandwich costs $13.

In other words, the cost of living is so high that the quality of life in a different country doing the same role will likely be higher.

skwee35723• 3 years ago

I’m very happy for Tony, it’s a great achievement indeed.

Having said that, as an aspiring solopreneur myself, this article misses a very big part.

Engineers like to talk about how they build products, but we rarely talk about how to market them.

I quit my job 5 months ago, launched my first SaaS 3 months ago, and got zero users. I then started to tweet, write in LinkedIn, and focus on my newsletter. But I barely get any followers. So building is the easy part.

I refuse to participate in algorithm games, and try to be authentic. But maybe that’s not what people like.

Anyway, great read. Thanks for sharing!

system24• 3 years ago

What are you planning to do in the following months without an income if the project doesn't pick up?

skwee35723• 3 years ago

I’m working on a different project, this time with #buildinpublic on twitter/mastodon.

I’m also working on getting some consulting/freelance. And sadly, and with big regret, I started to look for a job.

nico7• 3 years ago

It’s very hard to build a following without a system and without copying content

For LinkedIn, ideally you should be posting at least 5 times a week, reposting your best performing content, re-phrasing or straight up copying viral content, and adding as many people to your contacts as possible every day (there’s a weekly limit, and there’s also a 20k total limit, so you also need to figure out what type of contacts you want to be adding, the more focus, the better your content will perform). Additionally, on LinkedIn, commenting and liking posts related to your audience can go a long way

Definitely use ChatGPT for drafts and to help you iterate, but don’t just post whatever it gives you on the first try. Also lean heavily on scheduling tools

It takes a couple of months to get going, but if you can keep a consistent pace, you will definitely figure it out

Follow (on LinkedIn) the creators of https://www.shieldapp.ai/ their whole thing is helping people build their personal brands on that platform

Finally, make sure to build a newsletter and own your list, that’s one of the biggest moats you can build

4gotunameagain4• 3 years ago

I'd rather be unemployed and live off charity kitchen soups than engage in these juvenile games.

As a society we need to find a way to stop rewarding slyness and trickery (aka marketing)

skwee35723• 3 years ago

Not to be offensive, but you sound like the guy who I don’t want to be.

Sitting there, figuring out the perfect number of posts to share at the perfect time. I don’t want to do that.

I post a lot. On all platforms. But I don’t want to play games. Maybe I’m stupid, but I believe there is more than one way to succeed.

Edit: I also feel like this entire industry is based on survivorship bias. You post into the void, than the algorithm picks up one of your tweets. And you are like “oh yeah! Now I know”. And then you come up with a bunch of random number such as “post 5 times a week”, “no more than 4 hashtags”, and “must have a cat picture”.

Edit 2: I found mastodon, which does not have any algorithm games, to be far more authentic and helpful to me. I share pretty much the same content there and on Twitter, and my content performs better on Mastodon.

jmstfv• 3 years ago

A fellow solopreneur here, I've been doing it for several years now.

I browsed through your profile, website, Twitter account, and I'm still not sure what your product is and what it does. Is it consulting? Coaching? Book?

You don't have a lot of followers (me neither), so tweeting won't get you far as you're talking into a void. Instead, join existing discussions where people already are. Also, don't use too many hashtags - it looks spammy.

Not trying to put you down, just offering a different perspective you might not hear otherwise. I hope you succeed.

skwee35723• 3 years ago

Thanks for the tips on posting.

I do offer multiple services, including coaching/consulting and my book. I’m also working on. SaaS that is in progress.

basisword• 3 years ago

> I refuse to participate in algorithm games, and try to be authentic. But maybe that’s not what people like.

This is a mistake. It’s great to authentic when you tweet, post on LinkedIn or write in your newsletter - but if you have zero followers you’re just shouting into the void. You need to play “the algorithm game” so people see your messaging.

hsn9153• 3 years ago

"I refuse to succeed!"

To each their own, I guess?

skwee35723• 3 years ago

If success is posting stupid click bait questions on twitter, then yes, I refuse to do that.

I’m not a clown or an entertainer. I share my journey and provide value to people. The people who are drawn to click bait content, are not the people I want to interact with.

tacker20002• 3 years ago

What kind of product are you selling that you need to be active on Linkedin and Twitter?

skwee35723• 3 years ago

My recent book. My coaching and consulting sessions. And soon, a SaaS that target software engineers and people with an “anti-establishment” mind set.

adammarples• 3 years ago

There are thousands of HN users now who have read your comment and not one of them knows what you're saas is, how to find it, or even what it's called, but we know you think marketing is hard...

skwee35723• 3 years ago

One of the moves in the game that I refuse to play, is shoving your product down the throat of everyone.

I’ve seen it live on LinkedIn when one of my followers started to post generic comments, under my posts, such as: “totally agree with you! Subscribe to my newsletter”.

I find it disgusting.

This might be a surprise for you, but sometimes I just want to engage in authentic discussion.

I promote my stuff via Show HN or when it has relevance to the post/comment. But I’m not going to be the “Great story Tony. Subscribe to my newsletter <link here>”, guy.

xhfloz2• 3 years ago

Left my job in 2020 to do the same. Nowhere near as profitable as OP, but now make enough to cover rent + basic expenses in New York. Crucially: I didn't want to do hypeman social media content that (a) sold the dream of solopreneur as a marketing tactic, or (b) added excessive noise into the ether.

I'm not saying Tony did either -- I haven't followed along -- but certainly a lot of people do. I can't fully blame the people who do, though.

Anyway. The project I've built [1] is still going, and I feel proud of it on merits of software: that it pushes the bounds, however slightly; that it feels good to exist in the world; and that I genuinely care for the people using it.

All that's to say: I think there's a software solopreneur path that doesn't involve excessive hype, gross self-promotion (some degree of self-branding is necessary though), while allowing you to work by principles and also explore interesting software problems.

Feel free to DM me [2] if you have questions, or are interested in bootstrapping your own project. Especially consumer-facing. I do have some writing online [3] that covers this too.

---

[1] https://mmm.page

[2] https://twitter.com/xhfloz

[3] https://woolgather.sh

skwee35723• 3 years ago

Thanks for sharing! DMed you on twitter

abareplace• 3 years ago

Thank you. Unfortunately, my experience is the same: it's hard to promote a software project on today's Internet without investing a lot of money or spending 4 hours/day on social media like the original poster did. There are many interesting projects like yours that remain invisible to their potential users.

nicbou2• 3 years ago

You can also post about things that are genuinely interesting to you, and achievements that you are proud of. See my post history on HN. I would never have thought that people care about that stuff so I was pleasantly surprised by the warm reception.

I do something similar on social media. I share little updates mixed with factoids about my job. Even if it brought zero new visitors, it feels good to share what I’m working on.

TheAnkurTyagi2• 3 years ago

building is great but most developers don't understand the value of marketing till they ask people to pay for their projects like SaaS etc... I've made some good money in writing in the last 3 years but without marketing it was highly impossible that's why I always encourage to people to start writing be it a tweet, LinkedIn or newsletter etc... and it's again a huge task along with building your products that's why it looks easy from outside but needs more work inside. but before going I've learned from Daniel a lot of things about marketing. Maybe this is useful. Take a look.

A 12 step marketing crash course for non-marketers:

1. If you're trying to sell something, everything you do is marketing.

2. The technical term for trying to sell something is a go-to-market (GTM) strategy.

3. Building a product is part of your GTM strategy.

4. Your combination of skills, knowledge, experience, reputation, assets, connections, etc, create opportunities for you in the market.

5. Once you find an opportunity you'd like to pursue, you should set a payoff expectation. Example: you plan to bring a particular project to market with the expectation of making $100K within 12mo.

6. You should have a viable hypothesis of how that expectation can be realized. Example: to make $100K selling a $100 product, you need 1,000 customers. To get 1,000 customers at 1% conversion you need 100K visits on your landing page. To get 100K visits you need to spend X on ads. And so on.

7. If you can't convince yourself you have a viable and profitable hypothesis, you need to adjust your payoff expectation, or pick another opportunity. You don't have an obligation to pursue every opportunity you encounter.

8. If your payoff expectation is too small for the time and money you're investing to bring your project to market, you should abandon it.

9. If the worst case scenario of your GTM strategy has a chance to put you out of business (by running out of time, money, motivation, etc), you should abandon it. Take risks, but never put yourself at risk.

10. Once you have a project on the market, you have the option (but not the obligation) to improve that project by repeating steps 5-9 on the same project. Every new feature is a new thing you're brining to market.

11. A business with no attention is a business that doesn't exist. You can have the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, it's like multiplying by zero — a recipe for failure.

12. Remember: there is no distinction between building and marketing. You build whatever you need to build to realize your payoff expectation. Everything is marketing.

eruci• 3 years ago

Marketing is a tax you pay when you are not good enough.

RagnarD• 3 years ago

Question for Tony (trungdq88) - did you develop difficulties with your Twitter app(s) due to changes in the platform? If so, how hard were they to fix?

thewarpaint• 3 years ago

It’s covered in the article.

kamel3d• 3 years ago

I dont get all the negative comments here! it is sickening! I am not even jealous I would like to have his success one day and I wish Toney all the best

n_ary• 3 years ago

Very inspiring story and well written, heartfelt kudos.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

benknight87• 3 years ago

It's worth keeping in mind that Tony's current monthly figure ($45k/mo) is a a single snapshot in time. Past performance is no guarantee of future success. Certainly, a talented engineer consistently making ballpark $100-200/k a year over the same period and saving a reasonable percentage of that is going to be more financially successful and basically guaranteed lifetime of employment at a high tech salary.

Long story short, it's a worthwhile achievement but it only happens to a lucky few. Focusing on building a long term career and becoming quietly rich is probably a better play.

TheAnkurTyagi2• 3 years ago

This is such a nice story and congratulations Tony. I've seen your journey from the start and always get inspiration. Good luck for the future.

One quick question- Any 2 tips you would like to give to others on "How you did marketing about your projects" I know you tweeted, sent newsletters etc.... but anything else like SEO or hiring any marketers?

My solopreneur story

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