How ironic of you showing in the particular post. He's precisely referring to people like you and your illegitimate interviewees at IndieHackers who all claim to be overnight successes.
This is a complete bullshit statement.
I've read every interview and Csallen has made on IH - it's a solid site with great interviews. I haven't read anywhere where he or any of the interviewees has claimed overnight success. Quite the opposite really. He's done a lot of hard work.
I don't think he's misrepresented anything and he built a great site. I wish him all the best!
"Jason Grishkoff built a $55,000/mo SaaS business helping musicians promote their music, and he did it in under a year. Here's how."
Of course him being able to accomplish this feat stems from skills/knowledge he acquired earlier (his blog, music industry experience, learning to code, learning to design, etc), but that's true of any business. Nobody starts from scratch, and the interviews cover people's histories pretty thoroughly.
First, Jason didn't "pivot" from Indie Shuffle. It's a separate standalone business that he never shut down, and in fact continues to spend many hours running even today.
Second, SubmitHub's user base consists of hundreds of other blogs and labels, whom he spent a painstaking 4 months sending 1000+ personalized emails to trying to convince them to sign up. They're responsible for the vast majority of his revenue. He did not simply keep "the same audience".
This is exactly what I was talking about when I said that people read these stories and conclude that everything was easy.
The rapid success of submitHub is directly correlated to success of IndieShuffle, which he spent an immense amount of time building.
Everyone is quite aware that founders acquire domain knowledge, contacts/network, programming ability, business acumen, ideas, etc before the very day they start their company. I know you mean well, but this comment thread itself suggests the only people misled by the title were those who mistakenly believed that SubmitHub was a simple continuation of Indie Shuffle.
If SubmitHub's users had simply come from Indie Shuffle, or if Jason had simply pivoted Indie Shuffle into SubmitHub, then I would agree with you. But neither is the case.
I always knew I was sitting on a great source of users with the ~300 daily emails, and sure enough, as soon as I started pointing them to SubmitHub they latched on...
...Given Indie Shuffle's prominence in the digital music industry, word spread fast.
> If SubmitHub's users had simply come from Indie Shuffle, or if Jason had simply pivoted Indie Shuffle into SubmitHub, then I would agree with you. But neither is the case.
That's exactly what happened, isn't it? No one is belittling it, no one is claiming he didn't work for it. We're simply saying, SubmitHub wasn't successful over night.
Not quite. I suppose I just know more of what happened behind the scenes than is apparent in the text-based interview, because I recorded a podcast episode with Jason afterwards. Two things:
1) Yes, Indie Shuffle's users latched onto SubmitHub, but Indie Shuffle is just one of 250+ blogs and labels whose readers use SubmitHub. It's a small percentage of the total revenue and users. 2) Yes, others in the industry knew about Indie Shuffle, but Jason had to spend months and months sending cold emails and doing sales in order to land other blogs and labels as customers.
I agree with you that it didn't happen overnight. And I also don't think you're belittling what Jason did, at least not intentionally. My only point is that it's easy to conclude that the surface level details of any business' story played a much bigger role than they actually did.
In this case, Indie Shuffle was crucial for Jason understanding the problem, coming up with the idea, and even beta testing the product. But the user acquisition responsible for the massive sales happened the hard way, and it happened in the last year.