Comment by dbg31415 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbg31415 | Hacker News Reader

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Right, well it's not really by design that they make so little... but the way most of them they run their businesses, is it any wonder?

A lot of people do these as side projects. A way to sort of build a model train in their basement, free from all the complexities and compromises of "real" software development... They are trying to avoid product managers, sales people, designers, testers... countless others... getting a say in what they build.

And, as a result, there's no business plan past a dream of, "If you build it, they will come." Hard to see any "indie hacker" project that wouldn't be improved with more testing, more marketing, more UX design... more customer research... but most of the time, it's just some guy with a boring day job trying to make $5 selling a widget nobody asked him to build in the first place.

Anyway not to be negative... but like, if you're a small indie hacker who is trying to make a buck, remember that all of the software we use today has a village of people involved in the creation and support of it. If you're trying to do it all on your own... man, that's an up-hill battle. Bring in others as soon as you can.

Then make sure you have a business plan that has the capacity to reward everyone, and be patient. A lot of people in tech... we're early-adopters. This means we do things well before a lot of people even know they exist, and by the time an audience has grown we've already moved on thinking our ideas were a flop. Sometimes they just take a little longer to pan out. (=

I'd argue a lot of these indie hackers ARE probably profitable. If you take Pieter Levels as an example: He builds a shit ton of small projects, tries to monetize them, many fail, but a couple (NomadList and RemoteOk) take off and earn BIG revenue. He's a one man company, brings in almost $3m USD per year and only has 2 part time contractors to assist with community moderation (on his Slack and Discord channels) and server uptime (which he says hasn't been necessary in months (years?) and security). He profits 80-90% on his companies so that $2m + per year now? And he automates the businesses so he doesn't have to do maintenance - just build new features the community requests when he wants to: No sales team, no marketing team, no stable of devs, no customer support team. Just one man and 2 part time contractors.

Point is: you don't need a huge team to scale. You don't need to throw money at the company to grow. He's not the only one who's achieved this, but he is a great example of what's possible by one guy with mediocre dev skills and a passion to help others can do.

it can take a village of wage earners with no meaningful stake (and often stolen wages or exploited salaried overtime, plus all the managers needed to herd) to create the work of a few owner-laborers properly aligned with business interests and vision. but then these owners need to do work and LPs stand to gain less from not pumping it into a moonshot

I see you've also listened to the My First Million podcast episode with Levels.

>> Bring in others as soon as you can.

But then you're no longer profitable. Barely any of these projects can sustain 1 person, let alone 2 people.

Takes money to make money...

Have a valid idea. Build a business around it. Get an angel investor.

But then they aren't indie hackers!

Touche. But they are profitable. (=

Or rather, "but then you have a full-time job again".

I assume most of these people just want a more or less passive lifestyle business.

if you're a small indie hacker who is trying to make a buck, remember that all of the software we use today has a village of people involved in the creation and support of it.

Much of it does. And yet sometimes extremely successful software, even a few products that entire industries have relied on every day, has been created by a single person. In software of all industries one really good dev or a small tech-heavy team can punch way above their weight.

In any case for stereotype indie hackers the goal isn't necessarily to found the next unicorn. Not everyone wants to follow that path, even among people reading HN. For some the dream is just to make a decent living doing something they enjoy without having red tape and office politics bringing down their day. I know several people who have made that particular dream come true and are entirely content with that result even if they're not going to be the next Web3 billionaire.

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