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Comment by citizenpaul | Hacker News Reader

My experience is that anything that spending significant amounts of your time on anything that assists others with building their thing is a total waste of time. Tech or otherwise. Those people are mainly doing it with the goal of making money for no one but themselves. The fact that they don't have money already proves that they likely are not good at making money. One of those primary early ways to make money is that early on you may have to strike some potentially less favorable deals when you have no money to get your first projects off the ground. Which of course they are NEVER EVER are willing to do. ie profit sharing or something.

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My experience has shown me that tools that help others build faster can be quite profitable. Currently make my living from one such tool and most of my customers are indie hackers (https://divjoy.com).

Very nice work! I've written a small API (https://m8.fyi/chord) to generate beautiful diagrams easily and quickly from Python. It's definitely not making a living from the income, but it is enough for a coffee every now and then.

Nice, cool idea. Is that a one-time fee or monthly? If one-time then I'd suggest emphasizing that fact and saying something like "lifetime access" (from my experience most people assume monthly for something like this). Also fyi, your PayPal button does nothing when I click it. Best of luck with everything!

Thank you for the great suggestion - I've already updated the page to add "Lifetime Access"!

Fixing the Paypal button issue will be more tricky! I just tried it in Firefox and it's fine, but I'm seeing temperamental issues in Safari. Will look into it further - thanks for the heads up.

Looks like the issue is that the element below it has a negative top margin of -22vw and is overlapping the button. Removing that fixes it for me ;)

Game engines are different. It's a tiny market relative to web, and really the only people in the market for an engine other than Unity or Unreal are indies, who have near zero revenue and even less willingness to spend it. Those two are so far ahead in terms of features, support, and battle-hardening that you'd pretty much have to be insane to pick anything else if you had paying users.

Always be wary of any market where someone's willingness to try your product is in itself a negative indicator of ability to pay. Hit-driven markets that attract large numbers of non-serious dabblers are extremely difficult to sell tools profitably to, but it's easy enough to get minor attention that makes you think you might have something worthwhile (music production is another one that scatters corpses all over the place despite seeming large at first glance).

Yeah I guess the game equivalent to my tool would be one that helps people build faster with Unity or Unreal. Like I do with React, better to latch on to a tech that already has huge mindshare.

> Hit-driven markets that attract large numbers of non-serious dabblers are extremely difficult to sell tools profitably.

If I'm understanding correctly, do you mean it's easy to overestimate the size of the market? That makes sense to me. And there's certainly an upper-limit to how much dabblers are willing to pay. Still, for a solo founder that can sometimes be more than enough. I can think of a few tools like mine doing over $10k/month.

And Godot. You know, the 15 year old totally free engine of 30,000 commits 2.5 million LOCs that also does pretty much everything.

What I noticed is that it's actually much harder to use Godot than expected. Yes it does significantly reduce the amount of code you have to write for your game but it opens up questions of how to structure your project because the scene editor doesn't actually match how I would make my own games if all I had was SDL2. For example if you just straight up write code to add nodes to the scene graph it will create a disconnect between what is displayed in the editor and the actual game. Figuring out how to keep the editor and code in sync is a problem unique to Godot and this is very disconnected from general software development.

It does happen in Unity and Unreal too when you strictly work in the visual editor without writing much code.

It also happens in Qt and similar WYSIWYG visual editors where they often cannot render full dynamic content in the editors. But in all those cases you can just write everything in code without using the visual tools, and you can do that with Godot as well.

> What I noticed is that it's actually much harder to use Godot than expected. Yes it does significantly reduce the amount of code you have to write for your game but it opens up questions of how to structure your project because the scene editor doesn't actually match how I would make my own games if all I had was SDL2.

I agree. But what I've learned in my short time using Godot is embracing Godot's scene system and not fighting it seems to help.

This area in the documentation is helpful: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/workf...

You can also bypass the scene system. The scene system is a optional abstraction on top of a seemingly more data-oriented core where everything is just a RID (Resource ID).

More here: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/optimizatio...

> For example if you just straight up write code to add nodes to the scene graph it will create a disconnect between what is displayed in the editor and the actual game

You can solve this to some degree by putting "tool" at the top of your scripts. See https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/misc/runnin...

No offense the product looks cool but this is basically just WIX for for hackers. Basically its a market share shaver from another successful product. Rather than a builder assistance tool. Either way I'm glad you have success with it. (I might use it one day)

I'm not saying you can never make money but as someone else put it, there are a lot more corpses than success stories in this field.

I'll happily take "WIX for hackers" :)

> that anything that spending significant amounts of your time on anything that assists others with building their thing is a total waste of time. Tech or otherwise.

I would with your sentiment if you said helping indie devs wasn’t profitable opposed to a waste of time. There is real value in supporting a community, you just have to know when you are doing charity work.

I agree with this interpretation. The article OP experienced a real and true 'failure' because his goal was income generation and the project didn't provide that. The guys he handed it off to may have a goal of just being a recognized name in the space (clout?) and so consider their time and effort to be a success.

The whole one mans garbage is another mans treasure taken from another angle.

I wouldn't say it's a waste a time, just that in tech industry people have a tendency to overrate "selling shovels in a gold rush" when they have about the same odds of success. ie. Making a successful game vs successful game engine

I am not sure about that. There's this small company called Stripe whose entire business model is about making it easier to make your online store: They don't do anything you couldn't do yourself, but it sure mes it a lot easier. Similarly, in videogames, Epic makes quite a bit of money licensing engines, which, in practice, is all about helping other people build faster. We all built websites and ran companies before AWS, and yet they are also they might be Amazon's best division.

What is difficult in those kinds of businesses is to identify whether there's a real market there, and to convince enough people to try your product. For a new kind of product, you have to easily show large amounts of value, because people are used to get things done without your product.

So I'd not say that it's a waste of time, but it's just a difficult kind of business to enter.

I'm not sure if this is what the parent comment meant, but it seems reasonable that it's not a lucrative path to focus on anyone who doesn't already have a functional business without you. Partnering with that existing coffeeshop can pay off a lot more easily than the dozens of weekend game devs that will probably never make a cent themselves.

> The fact that [your potential supporters] don't have money already proves that they likely are not good at making money.

This is a critical thing to assess in any case where you’re investing time and effort and expecting to get support (either financial or “in kind”) in return. I see this ignored in many “startups” of all kinds (companies, social clubs, workout groups... anything that requires some effort to make happen).

The key test is: “Can this thing continue running without me? Do people care enough to give something if I’m not pushing?” (Pay a fee, volunteer for well defined role, resolve disputes, etc.)

This is pretty contradictory even in its biases. You assume people can't do anything for motivations other than money and then you say people should give away their work for free.

The first one isn't true and the second one is simply not doable for poor people.

Counterpoint: almost all paid work is assisting someone with building their thing.

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