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Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

All our lives we're told that skills matter. Society will reward those who are most skilled.

Inevitably groups form around a skill, programmers hang around programmers and so on. Since programmers "create" all the value we believe we should get paid the most etc.

Alas schools emphasise "hard" skills (programming, math, doctors, lawyers etc) and those are all good jobs that make decent money. They ignore "soft" skills like selling, marketing, and so on.

In truth sales and marketing are orders of magnitude more valuable, and their pay reflects that. There are a lot of pharma reps, realtors, insurance salesman that earn mega bucks.

This is not something the average hacker wants to hear. I expect to get down-voted for saying it. But if you're reading this, and you're thinking of starting out on your own, then I recommend you consider;

Who will you sell to? How will you reach them? What can they afford?

Only then start thinking about what to make.

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> Inevitably groups form around a skill, programmers hang around programmers and so on. Since programmers "create" all the value we believe we should get paid the most etc.

Programmers do get paid a lot, relatively speaking.

The disconnect is that programming and creating a business are different skills.

There are occasional examples of someone programming a thing so useful that it sells itself, but they are extremely rare. Most of these success stories come with major marketing attached, although it’s often hidden. In this case the person was marketing through Twitter, including promoted Tweets. It’s not mentioned in the article, but the business is more about cultivating a social media presence and getting a fractional percentage of them to convert into sales.

There’s nothing wrong with this, of course! However, the marketing and personal brand angle are often overlooked by indie hackers who think they’re going to make a great business that people will just discover randomly and pay them for.

One of the best examples would be the indie hacker who first got a lot of attention for his job board business. There have been hundreds of indie hacker job boards popping up ever since, but none of them get the same traction as the person who built it as a Twitter sensation. The Twitter presence and ensuing brand recognition was a key part of the business, but it gets overlooked by people who are just wowed by the MRR numbers.

>In truth sales and marketing are orders of magnitude more valuable

As someone who's been on both sides of the fence, this isn't true either.

Both engineering and sales are important, and there are probably as many entrepreneurs who have failed by spending all their time marketing and selling a shit product as there are those who get bogged down in technical minutiae.

> All our lives we're told that skills matter. Society will reward those who are most skilled.

Remember, kids: you don't get what you deserve -- you get what you negotiate.

I think it goes deeper.

When people become very skilled at programming they have the urge to scratch their own itch, either writing tools to solve software development problems or creating something with a technology that they want to use. They are uninterested in mundane, boring, vertical applications, but that's often where the money is.

The guy in the article did some development tools but some other things too. At the end of the day, imagining a market is no substitute for finding one.

Can you give examples of boring, mundane, vertical applications?

Pretty much all business software. All the stuff you never see.

Think accounting, insurance, banking payroll, time keeping, invoicing, stock control production control, resource management, rostering, and so on.

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