Things I’ve Learned from Reading IndieHackers
toomas.net
toomas.net
I feel that there is a world of difference between a side-project that is free, to one where you ask customers for their credit cards. Of all professional experiences, I have never learnt as much as I did taking a side-project idea from idea to MVP, then to beta users, then to paying customers, scaling server issues, and marketing strategies. It's not so much about the money, than the fact that you learn so much on so many dimensions.
Sincere thanks + shameless plug, the interview about Smooz was fun, a good self-reflection exercise, and a good source of traffic too (https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/smooz)
What worked was publishing some articles on Medium and optimizing a bit for SEO, so that the handful of people who actually has the problem, can find me. The Slack app Directory helped quite a bit at first, but I should take better advantage of it now that they have add features.
But really, the main growth factor is : almost no churn. People are super satisfied. So even if I don't spend much time finding customers, the very low growth keeps adding up...
I'm sure spending more time on sales would increase the revenue, but not sure if that'd be enough to offset the cost of time spent
Contrary to the lottery though much fewer people ship and there are much more winning lottery coupons.
There is nothing to learn about how to build a successful product.
If you want to read anything read about specific obstacles you get into.
Great read!
Domain knowledge obviously plays a role as well, if you can't code you're going to have a hard time making software. There's a lot of money to be made in AI right, the timing is good but it doesn't matter if you don't know anything about it.
By your logic some random guy off the street would have the same chances of building a successful business as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.
You're saying that skill and knowledge play no part in success. A mentally handicapped person would have as good a chance at success as Steve Jobs by your logic, because it's all luck.
High. The first success is luck and the rest are a consequence of this initial lucky break (namely via generous access to capital).
Increases total number of opportunity chances.
I don't like the lottery metaphor, because the math doesn't work out (you can't buy out the total # of lottery numbers to guarantee a win and still profit), but basically, the more money you got, the more tickets you can buy, the higher your chance of winning.
Mark Cuban said something along the lines of "You only have to be right once." Get your first couple million, and from there on it's just intelligent investing, which you can literally pay an intelligent investor to do for you.
There are literally thousands of talented people executing like there is no tomorrow and failing.
Access to capital, access to distribution, luck, timing. Thats what you primarily have the other factors are less relevant because most people playing the entrepreneur game have those.
That said, of the 2 companies he explicitly founded and ran, only Apple was successful. NeXT was a spectacular failure.
Hardly a failure, let alone a spectacular one.
Pixar was a tiny struggling business spun out of Lucasfilm and sold to Jobs any employees.
Pixar was a software company when he purchased control. What turned them around was their switch to making feature films. I'm pretty sure that they would have gotten distribution from anyone once Toy Story was far enough along, the question is whether they could have financed the effort. Having Steve Jobs helped a lot because he believed in them and people would return his calls.
Let me put it another way. There is a whole army of successful technology CEOs who could have run NeXt or Pixar into the ground. The fact that both became huge successes wasn't just luck, Steve Jobs played a huge role in both.
Apple was going to switch to Windows NT or buy BeOS before Jobs convinced them that NextStep was the better option. He connived Disney to partner with Pixar. Could Steve Ballmer have done that?
And no Next wouldn't have made it by any stretch it was only because Jobs forced them into Apple that they survived. The world belonged to windows at that point and Next had no chance to actually do anything with that.
Can I ask what metrics you're judging by?
There are many extremely talented people doing exactly the same not succeeding. You have the same in everything from music to movies and art.
The primary defining factor are things which has nothing to do with the talent but with timing and luck. So the primary insight is to play the game to have a chance to win.
There are hundreds of thousands of people who have gotten the same training on valuing companies as Warren Buffett has. But no one comes close to his long term results because the talent of doing an accurate valuation is not as important as the psychological abilities needed to make smart investment decisions, as well as the ability to determine enduring competitive advantages. So few of these talented people actually have remotely the talents of Warren Buffett.
For entrepreneurs just a few of those key talents include recognizing opportunities, the balls to actually quit a job to pursue opportunities, and an innate ability to understand how to find or build significant competitive advantages.
People with those skills won't succeed 100% of the time, but they succeed far more than people who only have one or two of them.
You can read as many books and follow his strategies as much as you want you will never be him and it's not because you can't be as talented as him and that was the point my comment. You can't read your way to success.
Buffett would have beat any market, any where any time. That's what you don't understand. He didn't succeed because he invested in the US, he did better because he invested in the US. He averaged 40% returns his first 12 years as a professional investor, quadrupling market returns. He's only had a couple down years in over 50 years of investing. How is that luck? His diverse set of skills is the reason.
Again his set of skills is similar to a successful entrepreneurs skills. The average entrepreneur may only succeed 20% of the time, but a skilled entrepreneur clearly succeeds at a far higher rate.
Do you really think that someone ignorant of competitive advantages, budgeting, market research, leadership skills, etc, etc, has the same chances of succeeding as an entrepreneur as someone who is very skilled at all of them?
Many people were predicting they would be rich were wrong. Again survivor bias.
And no he wouldn't have beat it in any market which is also why he didn't really invest in other markets and mostly advice people to do it.
But it doesn't really matter because Buffet is not useful for anything in this discussion which was about whether luck and timing played a crucial and defining role in companies success. Pointing to Buffet or Gates makes absolutely no sense what so ever anyone who invested in the US market the last 50 years would have gotten out on the good side. Just because they didn't made as much as Buffet doesn't change that fact.
You are missing the point entirely because you think that I am saying that luck and timing are the ONLY things that matter.
What I actually said was that out of the talented people there are, luck and timing become the defining factor not superhuman abilities to predict the market. The same reason the VC community in general is doing really bad and even companies like YC are mostly wrong.
There are no secrets to success. They are mostly unique stories not formulas which means they are mostly about luck and timing NOT about talent as there are plenty of talent out there.
If you're really lucky, then luck doesn't affect your business.
There has been a lot of indiehackers that have started as contractors and built startups. I think the biggest value I learned is, "Understand you market" and "find problems that people have" and its brilliant to be a contractor cause you learn both for a living!
To be fair, there's about sixteen million articles on how to eliminate this.
>it's not easy to get that golden ticket for such circles
Not sure I agree. I want to remember the book I read this in but I can't, but in this case the dude just rented in an super expensive apartment complex. I guess he was able to do that because he had a job, sure, but the point was he rented higher than he was comfortable doing, yet it paid off in the end.
Most of the ways I'm thinking of involve money (get VIP badges at conferences, clubs, whatever), but a simple and free way is to go to shitloads of meetups and other "people gathering" events, being gregarious and meeting everyone you can. No reason you couldn't bump into a high falutin CEO at a motorcycle ride day or on the Frisbee golf course or something.
So far I have not been all that impressed. Just in general it seems so light on anything really concrete and more just a motivational book. Where it does have concrete things though they are just really out of date (One example is that they recommend Yahoo Stores where today someone would probably use Shopify or another alternative. Another example is there is a LOT of talk about using magazine ads, but how many people are actually still reading/buying print mags today?).
What are other people's thoughts on this particular book, and what about the updates in the latest edition? Has it changed enough to be somewhat current when the realities of today?
I can't think of a single magazine that doesn't have an accompanying website.
EDIT: Might as well include my thoughts on the book. For me, it was the second "success genre" or "self help" style book I had read, the first being How to Win Friends and Influence People. I was about 22 at the time, fresh out of college, living abroad in Taiwan, trying to figure myself out and find myself. Very impactful time, so for me it was a very impactful book. Not so much for anything specific, but because the specifics were there. Here was a guy laying out concrete plans, concrete schedules, to making money. It guided me to how it really was possible to make money on my own, to live the kind of life I wanted to, to work remote etc. It planted a seed that took a long fucking time to grow, but it did grow, and the result is by the time I was 25 I had managed to sneak my way out of my liberal arts degree'd relatively futureless life into software engineering. Now my goals and objectives are framed by that first read - I haven't looked at it since, though I should.
In short, it's a great book for those new to the whole concept of working for yourself, creating a life for yourself, stepping outside the "normal boundaries" of life (go to school, get job, poop kids, die). Those on this site reading this may not think it's such a big deal, to those of us here it's pretty normal to step outside the box, but there's a reason I'm here now and this book contributed in a big way to it.
Many things are outdated now or simply more mainstream, as it's been read by almost everyone and part of the culture of many.
I consider it a book marking an "era", at least to myself, much like "The Web Startup Success Guide" or "Micro-ISV" by Bob Walsh.
You can't ask Tim to "update" the concrete steps, as those are the ones that worked for him at the time, and now he's doing very different things and he's a very different person.
You can find wildly varying statistics, but somewhere between 50% and 90% of startups will fail within 2 years. What did those companies do (or failed to do) that made them close up shop?
For those of us who didn't go to college, can you translate "maps to something very concrete in your domain" into concrete terms? It's pretty abstract.
1) We didn't have any advertising since we were operating on a shoestring (hehe) budget - losing customers
2) Our low prices actually made us seem like a low quality entry in the market, and hurt our sales.
3) We could have invested more into our production line to reduce recurrent costs.
Or any number of things. But it ultimately comes down to "we didn't have enough money"
Personally I think there is a lot of luck involved (right time, right place, meet the right people) but maybe with enough data one could find lessons for how to do better.
Beware survivor bias. They may not have succeeded due to what they did (or say they did).
EDIT: thanks for the answers! This analogy is pretty good for simple cases (improvement on planes' armor). But if you optimize only this variable, your war plane will be heavier and you'll have a lot of other problems and fail, too.
Found it, the guys name was Abraham Wald.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald#Life_and_career
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research#Second_Wor...
[1] https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle
[2]: https://shubhamjain.co/2017/05/12/contradictory-startup-advi...
If I was going to go with your thesis, the common thread of failure is to be found very early - people are working on startups that just will never be successful because the underlying idea is bad. It is really hard to come up with an idea that can allow the unavoidable mistakes to be made and still succeed.
"All happy companies are different, all unhappy companies are alike (in that they failed to escape "sameness" or competition).
I wouldn't be surprised if 50%-90% of startups begin life as side-projects and the founder(s) get lazy and decide to fold before even really attempting to get off the ground.
Out of the remaining startups that either succeed or fail after substantial effort, I'd be most of the failures can be attributed to rather mundane, predictable circumstances (most of which are mentioned in TFA):
- Building a product or features no one wants
- Taking too long to ship and offering a discounted beta in the meantime
- Wasting time & resources on non-revenue tasks because "business"
"Honestly, negativity about my business model is more likely to come from a community like Hacker News than it is from my readers."[1]
He's not wrong.
[1]: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/site-builder-report
> Ship. Ship. SHIP. The overwhelming failure case among people who read interviews like this one is that they spend 98 units of effort reading about running a business for every 2 units of effort running a business. Flip that on its head.
I wonder how many successful entrepreneurs actually spent time reading advice blogs when they were starting.
I can't stand reading about startups, advice, etc. I regularly watch my friends, people on HN or Reddit fall into the folly of discussing different strategies or trying to create the "perfect team" or "perfect business" prior to launch.
I create products regularly, and many of them make a profit (not a ton yet, but all growing). My consumer facing apps include https://easy-a.net/ or https://projectpiglet.com/ both are (clearly) boot strapped together, but I launched as soon as I had anything resembling a product. What I will caution is that I did wait to launch the products until they were stable and easy enough to use. Sure, they don't look pretty, but it works.
I think advice (blogs or otherwise) are one of the largest hurdles an entrepreneur has to over come. Starting a business isn't about other people, it's about yourself and your business. Even going through things like YC's Startup School can be a detriment, because they fixate so heavily on various components of the business. Often, you just have to tune it out and do what's right. In this case, that's building something, speaking to customers, and improving.
Ironically, I think even this article is the same rehash of the 30 other stories I've seen (assuming the quote you took is from the article, as I didn't read it).
That being said, I do see value in interaction. Which is why I post comments like these on HN or discuss an idea. It's generated tons of leads and that is much more valuable.
Those people are also my target customers though, so it makes it easy.
When "marketing" to companies, a cold call, email, or intro from a friend usually can pique their interest. Then you just need a really good demo / app. Even then, they likely wont bite; hence I'm moving away from that business and mostly to consumer apps.
Of course this is useless advice if you are doing a one-person business. :)
That aside, I think a lot of this is relative to where one is at in terms of education, network, support structure, access to capital, and a raft of other factors
Eg, if you're an MBA with a deep and narrow understanding of a certain niche, you're not going to lean on startup blogs in the same way an enterprising trucker from Wyoming is who's fuelling the hustle with Youtube tutorials on Java and epub torrents.
Entrepreneurship is a very long and lonely road, so it's perfectly reasonable that many of us look at these sites to (re)validate our decision to take a risk and steer off-course in our career choices from the rest of our peers.
I suffer from this in many ways, not just shipping a product, but even when just starting a dumb side project it is easy to get sidetracked with simple decisions, such as language, framework, etc.(the infamous JS fatigue)
So forget about perfect and just do it. Once you start moving it is easier to get going. You will get a chance to improve things later on.
The best advice I got was to: Just Do It and Learn While You Go.
I'm a pretty analytical person, so I havent made any gigantic mistakes, but I've made mistakes.
Learn from it, and move on. Most of the stuff people told me or I read either is- Baseless Opinion, or not useful and I forget it.
I think I enjoy reading about writing more than actual writing.
Exactly. I believe Paul Graham actually uses this example on one of his early essays.
So what's the alternative?
Go contracting. Reduce your expenses to the bone, and limit the contracts you do. I now only take 3 month contracts and I do one a year. I make about £24K from that - I know many developers making double my rate. That £24K is more than double my expenses though. If there's a 6 month contract I really like the look of I will do it (especially if it's remote working) - but then I'll take at least a year off.
The great thing about a contract is you go in, do your thing, get out. Job done. No stress. No worry. No customers giving you grief and wanting their money back. No infrastructure going down with admin alerts at 3.00am. No hassle. I don't even have my own limited company. I use an umbrella company and while not as tax efficient I have no dealing with accountants, HMRC, tax returns and all that nonsense.
I think there are many good reasons to start a 'lifestyle' business. I'm just not convinced it's the way to go if work-life balance is what you are looking for.
I haven't found a huge number of jobs near each other in the UK outside of London.
Anyway, as to the commuting. Yes - you are right - it's a total pain in the bum. Sometimes if the gig is a long way away I will stay up in cheap B&B. It depends. But - you can put up almost anything for three months right? That's the beauty of it. You know the pain will end - you know the exact day.
The commuting is soon forgotten when you are heading out to a wreck dive by boat in the Philippines. :)
Sure, if you can hit on a business idea that works, and is stress free, and doesn't take much time and effort to set up, then good luck to you!
I want to emphasize something though - for me the money is not the important thing, as long as I have enough. For me the work-life balance is the priority. Had too much stress in the past to want to go back to that lifestyle again!
However, I still think the same rules apply. Ram down expenses as much as possible. I did this when my kids were much younger. I couldn't get away with working 3 months a year, but I often did a six and maybe a 3 and had 3 months off. Back then I'd spend the free time with my kids. These days because they do their own thing I head off to Phils or Thailand and go diving.
I've considered this approach myself too but more 6 months on, 6 months off. Scala in particular seems to pay extremely well (£600-£650 /day) so easy to make the money to live a comfortable lifestyle in 3 or 6 months per year. I think other dev contracts are usually around £450 in London which is still more than enough.
Id love a permanent 2-3 day a week job too for work/life balance but those seem non existent for devs unfortunately.
With regards the 9 months. I write code (Python), read (a lot), watch movies, relax, listen to music. The point for me is I have to do this. Many years ago (I'm 55 now) I got very, very depressed and considered suicide. I was totally and utterly burnt out due to never ending work.
I spend quite a lot of time in Philippines and Thailand - mostly for the diving. My partner and I are keen divers (she's a nurse - but only does contract work now too). I also like photography, hiking, camping, biking and so on. I am studying for mountain leader exams.
I read Hacker News too but rarely comment. Just today and yesterday. Probably today will be the last day!
p.s. I used to work with a guy who negotiated a four day week. He is still doing that to date as far as I know. You might be able to negotiate fewer days but it's not easy.
It's hard to know what we'd all do with so much free time and I think some people would be a bit lost, but it certainly sounds like you make the most of it and live a nice lifestyle. Particularly all the outdoor activities is something id like to spend more time on myself.
Thanks for sharing!
Yes, I must admit I got absolutely sick to death of sitting in a stuffy office every day staring at a screen. No wonder I nearly topped myself!
All the best!
My question for you is how do you manage healthcare costs?
I live in UK so healthcare is free here. Many years ago I had some mental health problems and the NHS here literally saved my life. I am so grateful for that. I also have a private medical plan that covers myself and my partner but it only costs about £1k a year, and I only have that because it can potentially reduce waiting times. I am considering just doing without it though.
I know you pay for it in other taxes and what not, but... for comparison, we're paying more than half that per month, and it doesn't cover any expenses until we spend $10k in a year. We are in a really crazy situation here.
It doesn't cover tourists anymore in theory. They'd treat and then bill you but you could probably go home and not pay.
You might have problems getting residence
I don't know how easy it is to do what you describe but some people evidently do it. I imagine if you're an EU citizen you can come right in but if you're non EU you might have some more difficulty.
I’ve been doing remote consulting for the past three years - product design & development - but over the last several months I decided to bump up my work rate from the usual 2-3 days per week I had. Realizing now that I prefered the more leisurely schedule I had before.
I’ve been to the Philippines a few times and strongly considering working from there next year to avoid Canadian Winter for at least a few months of my life. Just good to hear more references about expat life there. :)
I'm so glad you posted. I'm a 57-year-old tech writer (UK-based) who followed a similar pattern to you for 10 years.
Then I got sick of static daily rates and now work as a permie (2 days in Birmingham, 3 days from home) for a US based tech company.
My first contract rate in 2004 was £350 a day, and now I'd probably struggle to make that again. Maybe £400, but above that, I'd need some special USPs. And from where I live, it's £50 a day to get to London, not to mention the extra 4 hour journey times!
Great to know you've found a perfect formula!
PS: Topping was also on my agenda until I reached 50.
My way was to find maintenance contract where I do programming few hours a week that pays my bills and mortgage + occasionally taking some contract work (about once a year, month - three months long).
Contracts could be very stressful (as I am usually picking on some VC type of startup as they use to pay more), but I know it is going to be over soon so it is easy to just go through it.
I am doing that for more then a decade and it works, the only thing is to figure out what you are going to do with your off time: I used to start startups, side projects, travel the world, but for past few years I am just farming and spending time with my kid.
More people should really think about this alternative.
Yes, contracts can be stressful, but like you say you know the exact day when the pain will end. In most jobs the pain is never ending!
Not quite. I still pay National Insurance contributions, and in fact am already entitled to a full UK state pension (at age 66). I also pay into a private pension plan and have done so for years. I also built up my tax free savings in cash and stocks and shares (low cost index tracker). I can access the private pension and private savings whenever I want.
So the plan is I will continue to do this as long as it makes sense to do so.
My partner and I are actually considering complete early retirement (I'm 55 now) to Philippines next year - but that's another story.
The only one I strongly disagree with is "raise your prices". While this is common advice on HN as well, I think it should come with a caveat that it mostly applies to B2B businesses. If you're running a B2C business, your customers are spending their own money, and possibly on something that isn't a necessity and isn't immediately going to make or save them a greater amount of money in return. Customers in this situation may well be extremely price-sensitive, and even small adjustments in pricing can have dramatic effects on conversion rates. As a counter-example showing that a big price cut can be effective, look at the way that games suppliers like Steam and GoG run their sales.
Just add a pdf checklist at the bottom that needs an opt-in (anybody who reads this will have a very conversion rate) and soon you've got a small list. Pitch them the startup tools or whatever you think is best for the list (using affiliate links) and soon you have a site that is making a passive income. It's easier said than done, but creating a passive income is really that easy and if you're doing the effort you may as well reap the rewards.
I believe audience is the most important currency in today's world, especially for digital products. Audience may be followers on Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, etc. Audience may be an email list. Audience may be traditional networking (as if you are in a B2B niche business). If you do not have audience, you can buy one with ads (even so it is easier said than done); or you can borrow the audience from someone else, an influencer (I know there are ways to pay for influencer's audiences, but I do not believe it is very effective, to get some influencer to legitimately love your product and act as your referrer seems to me to be more effective, if harder). Or you can borrow the audience from something else, like HN, Reddit, PH.
All of the steps of launching and building a business, especially the very first ones are enormously easier if you have an audience. And enormously - some times impossibly - harder if you do not have one. This is derived from the adage that your first idea is always wrong. You have to learn everything by shipping early and talking to customers, but if you ship early to 20 eyeballs and talks to luckily one or two potential users, this feedback loop just doesn't count. But if you launch to thousands to eyeballs, even if you are making the mistake of no shipping early or not focused on talking to customers, you will receive unsolicited feedback from some of them.
And a previously built audience of people who trust you at a basic level will be much more responsive and engaged in rationalizing and vocalizing their opinions about your product. They will be "early adopters" type (hard to get that when you buy an audience). And they also will (likely) be people that are your target audience (hard to get that when you borrow an audience from HN and similar).
Some of the most impressive successful business in IndieHackers (according to my own criteria) are the ones who had years of building an audience. Through foruns, email lists, blogs.
A genuine audience is hard to plan ahead. Does not seem plausible to have the vision, the will, and the diligence to think about the industry/niche where I want to launch a business years ahead. So it is good to launch a business where you have genuine passion, somehow you will have the network (even so, not necessarily a large audience).
If you are in that position of having a large audience, seriously consider launching a business because you have a very big unfair advantage (and follow all the advice on this list). If you are not, pay a lot of attention on how to reach your target audience. It is a very tough problem to crack.
While the items mentioned on this list are certainly valuable, every 1,000 followers you have amplifies your chances of success. Even if the product doesn't work out, there are more people to hear about it—perhaps, you can fail faster.
Here's another great comment about the "minimum amount of attention": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7207943
Good audience, network, reputation or community involvement doesn't just get you product validation or your first customers, it gets you free ambassadors for your business.
1. "Be patient" as success does not appear overnight. 2. "Don't be afraid to fail". It's hard to get it right from first time.
I guess second point is covered in ship,ship,SHIP :)
All of my business ventures so far have failed due to a noted lack of actually shipping anything.
(Apologies for the absence of credit; this isn't original, but I can't remember where I first saw it.)