HumanPredictions – Bootstrapping a SaaS app to $18k/mo in under a year
indiehackers.com
indiehackers.com
Indiehackers, in my opinion, provides a very valuable service of providing a reality check for those dreaming with "easy" revenue from digital products. "Oh, this guy actually built an audience for years before launching the business", "Oh, this other guy actually had a successful business to work as launchpad of his business", "Oh, thi guy actually started from scratch, but his revenue is in the hundreds per month for now and I have doubts if even that is sustainable".
If someone is planning to launch a bootstrapping business and stumble upon Indiehackers I have no doubt he/she will be better prepared to do it after reading these interviews.
Elliot hustled his ass off doing his own thing, working recruiting for Groupon, working as one of the founding employees of DevBootcamp Chicago to get graduates gigs (and doing so with great success), and then back to his own recruiting before launching Human Predictions based on feedback from his clients and experiences.
He became, at least in my circles, the most trusted recruiter amongst developers. Many thought of him as more of an "agent" than a recruiter. Someone you could grab coffee with every six months who'd keep you in mind if the perfect gig came up. I referred friends to him all the time without concern that he'd spam them, hard-sell them, put them in whatever spot that was open just to reap the commission. He's always had the developer's interest in mind first and foremost.
I understand the sentiment that these stories can sometimes over-simplify the journey. Yes, he had the privilege of learning the family business at a young age. But it's not as if "having a dad that does X" makes it a trivial effort to launch a SaaS that does X. In Elliot's case, there was at least ten years of self-motivated hustle in-between.
> No problem with what he did and it sounds like he does a great job
My comment was about the indiehackers title and link. It seems to be a pretty common occurrence for that site to greatly exaggerate the 0 to $X and this article is unfortunately no exception. Much respect to Elliot for all he has accomplished.
Of course, any business depends on the skillset and knowledge that its founders started to build previous to its founding, but how do you put a start date on that? To build a company, you need business skills, a network, money, programming knowledge... for that you probably need professional experience... for that you need the ability to read and write... etc. Where do you draw the line? Everything always depends on what came before it. People get this. They aren't naive enough to believe that founders are born on day 1 of their companies with no previous life experience or knowledge of the world.
I agree it's dishonest to refer to a 5-year-old business as "an overnight success" as often happens, but how exactly is it misleading to call a 1-year old-business a 1-year-old business?
Groupon is a scam, not really something you would want to advertise.
> Only twenty per cent of the Inc. 500, the five hundred fastest-growing private companies, raised outside funding.
How is Hacker News performing as part of your interview promotion?
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Chrome Version 54.0.2840.71
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The agency spam approach you mention is irritating, but I would imagine that if you're correctly predicting when someone is looking to jump that would be less of a problem.
For now though if you reach out to me at david@humanpredictions.io I'd be happy to let you know what our current prediction for you is.
I have few recruiters that always hit me around the time when I get a little more free. They don't have this tool, just their spidey sense, but I bet they would like something like this.
How well do those work if an entirely different issue.
For discussion's purposes, it's worth pointing out that there is a venture-funded company that is doing the same thing (but with a big data science team): https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/entelo
I wonder what their next line of business is at this company...selling this data to current employers to see when their employee is about to jump ship?