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Comment by ed_mercer | Hacker News Reader

Check out levelsio, a single guy pulling in ~200k MRR using pretty much outdated tech stacks https://twitter.com/levelsio

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Thanks, I especially liked the pinned tweet at the top of his account:

> Only 4 out of 70+ projects I ever did made money and grew

> >95% of everything I ever did failed

> My hit rate is only about ~5%

> So...ship more

Great, great advice IMO!

Not to detract from Pieter (he actually says this often) but his success is strongly tied to his persona and the brand and community he's built around it, starting from his "12 Startups in 12 Months" stint.

Without marketing/outreach, your hit rate will be much closer to 0%.

He even had an audience BEFORE he did the 12 startups in 12 months things: he had a succesful youtube electronic music channel

Which doesn't make its success less impressive though but people might want to know that

Nice, I didn't know that!

This guy is the legend. Many other so-called solopreneurs sell shovels to other solopreneurs (and most of those are valuable), but levelsio makes several impactful sites with PHP and plain JavaScript.

>jquery

Nice, I almost forgot about it, however for after a few months. Jquery always resulted in huge mess with one insanely long file

All his projects are in 1 file. Like 14k lines. What impressed by isn't that he's successful but that he can work in a mess like that. That's a whole lot of scrolling

Unless you lean heavily on the project tree, it's surprisingly not too different than a project, if you have reasonable tooling (search, LSP, ctags, etc)

My personal preference is certainly using a reasonable folder structure.

I think he commented ITT and said he had an epiphany of sorts where he realized the tech doesn't matter.

People love debating the merits of one JS framework over another, debating back end languages/frameworks, etc. and in the end, for most solo SaaS none of that makes a difference in success as defined by MRR. I think, myself included, so many side-projects with the intent of revenue get lost in the SeaOfShinyThings™ and never find a port.

index.php is a bit of a meme at this point with his projects. It's not just one file anymore, but he does focus on radical simplicity with the tech.

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