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Comment by danjac | Hacker News Reader

"Build it and they will come" is almost never a winning strategy. Of course sometimes it works, you build the right thing at the right time and it goes viral, but most of the time you get crickets even if it gets to the top of Product Hunt or Hacker News (neither of which are of any importance outside of tech circles).

The right way is to talk to prospective customers first in a given niche, listen carefully to their problems, and figure out which problems are worth solving, i.e. you have the skills and resources to solve them and people will pay you to solve them. This is difficult if you don't have a network or experience in specific industries so tech people just wait around for a business person to tell them what to build instead.

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It really depends on your definition of "winning." My partner and I decided to make a small game together back in 2020, release it, and maintain it. "Winning" for me meant that it should earn $500 per year and have regular players who got the same joy from it that we got from making it. It was a really modest goal

We kept working on it over the last three years. It has just been slowly, but consistently getting better, with more players. Now it's earning $500/month

There's always the fantasy and the lure of building something that goes viral and becomes a sensation overnight, but there's something to be said for slow-and-steady, consistency, and doing something joyful!

Sure, if your aim is to build something for fun or learning or your portfolio, those are valid goals.

The OP however considered their effort a failure, because they aimed at making something that would be a successful business venture (they are not clear about this, but one can read between the lines).

Fair point. Though in my case it is also a business venture, but with very modest goals and building it consistently because I want it to exist

I guess my point is I just hope the author wasn't too quick to write off their attempt as a failure. Things can succeed after their first year, or even after their fifth

The problem I have with this is $500/month is a lot more than $500 per-month. Hear me out.

If Steam is taking 30% and uncle Sam is taking 35%, $500 is really $175. You need to earn roughly $1450 per-month to make around $500 per-month. Of course, that doesn't count any marketing/domain/asset/license/etc fees.

Everyone pays taxes so I’m not sure why uncle Sam’s cut matters; it’s going to be nearly the same as working in a regular job.

As per your math, you added them together… percentages like that are multiplicative since you wouldn’t get taxed on the fees paid to steam, so it’s really more like $227.50 in your example. Still less than half, but all your additional fees or whatever get deducted out of the big 35% bucket.

True-- but a regular job you may work 40-50 hours a week and have many other benefits (like health insurance, and so on). Most people making games (especially on their own) put in far more hours, zero benefits and a lot less money.

I have nothing but respect for people that do. I've dreamed of it. I could never pull the trigger though. I can't justify putting four to seven years in a game to make pocket change out of it.

Sure... the creative aspect is great. Having players enjoy it is great. But eating and keeping my house is pretty good too.

Sure, but maintaining a video game - depending on the type of game - could be anywhere from a full time job to a few hours a week. Is a few hours a week worth an extra $500/mo? Yea, probably. And with network effect of games, it's possible that $500 grows to $5000 over time and you really can think about replacing your actual job.

It sounds like this was a passion project, not something intended to replace a full time job, though.

Exactly that. "Build it and they will come" is one of those stories only the victors tell. My own approach was to tell everyone to go away who was asking stuff and finally give in to the most persistent person, then reluctantly build something and sell it to them because I couldn't be bothered to deal with it. This gets you a comfortable life but not rolling in cash and you get to retain your sanity, your dignity and your ethics.

Same exact thing for me. Although I built lots of things (and no one came), I also heeded a piece of advice I got very early on, that your career is shaped as much by what jobs you refuse as by what jobs you take on. You are in charge of plotting the trajectory of your future CV and deciding the best use of your time. Steady and comfortable is great, and leaves time for side projects and the occasional moonshot.

> Build it and they will come

Is my exact strategy. My first startup I desperately tried to find any form of confirmation that my product has a need. I couldn't find it, nobody appeared to need what I was creating.

But I was half done and published it anyway and it was a huge success for me. Still haven't met a potential customer since outside of my customers. Also no paid ads, just Reddit, hn, ...

I think the actual problem with the approach is how much time people spent before they actually test their idea.

It's a full time gig for me, I can afford coding 2 months just for throwing the project. Wasting a year, next to working a normal job, on a MVP that won't sell is a stupid idea. But if you can built 6 ideas in that year it might work out.

Confirmation bias. For your success, how many failures are there? That is why in general "build it and they will come" is not a winning strategy. What I do instead is just find products I like but am frustrated with for whatever reason, and so I make an improved version and release it, run some ads for marketing or cold email sales, it works great because the market is already validated.

In my experience making into the top 10 here means nothing but 10k-20k visitors in the first two days.

Solopreuners have to be better focus on SEO

Unless your product depends on eyeballs, SEO is just another vanity metric.

Nonsense. No sales will convert from 0 eyeballs

With B2B sales in an industry niche it's not about SEO. You need to talk to people in that industry and you know, sell to them.

Yes there’s outbound sales. There’s also inbound too and it would be foolish to ignore them

> This is difficult if you don't have a network or experience in specific industries so tech people just wait around for a business person to tell them what to build instead

This is really not as difficult as it seems. After having done this a couple of times, I recently wrote a blog post to document my process - https://open.substack.com/pub/toluakinola/p/how-to-do-idea-d...

Hey, this is one of the first posts I've read about this that contains real actionable steps instead of bs. Thanks.

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