2023: Focusing on a single product pays off
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It works for the influencers because their audience is big enough, but for everyone else it’s very unlikely to work and they will just pay for the courses and boilerplates the influencers are shilling.
Most things that create significant sustained value will take a lot of time.
It’s sad to read the blog posts of people spending so much time building crappy products no one will ever use, and still trying to sell you on their latest idea.
It’s sad that this is what indie hacking has become.
More nuanced answer: I have a project that I've been plugging away at for years now. It may never pay for itself if I value my time at the same rate that I charge it out to others, but in that time it's improved the quality and speed of my other outputs significantly.
In that regard it's probably already paid for itself, but I wouldn't sell it because it continues to be valuable to me both in that regard and as a creative outlet.
If it were a throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks saas I'd have no problem selling it for a reasonable valuation of future earnings.
If I was at that point, probably.
The thousands of man hours are a sunk cost. If you wouldn't start the business today knowing what you know now, you should probably sell.
Sunk time isn’t always invaluable.
My first product worked, but very average. My second project worked excellently, there was quasi-immediate traction. That second thing was resolving an actual business issue.
It’s stagnating now. It’s probably because, even though I don’t feel it, I’m bored (it’s been 7 years). I have difficulty waking up in the morning.
You need to innovate. If not just for your brain and sanity, the market didn’t recognize your first product. Evaluate whether you should trust the sign that the market gives you.
Launch a second product.
It shouldn't be about the time spend but how quickly you can validate assumptions, those are different things.
My point is: It's not "that easy". I'm pro indie hacking, but it's hard work and difficult to create a profitable business that you can live off. Spinning off crappy quick projects only works if you have a big audience you can sell to, and most don't have that, so they will have to put in a lot more effort and time.
I know someone in the UK who has been in a very poor situation and told them they can make a bit of money by building a small side project and charging for it.
About 6 months later, I caught up with them and they made over £700,000+ by just learning to code, taking advice from others, discipline, and turning around their dire and desperate current situation they really wanted to get out of.
Depending on the situation it actually changes lives.
They usually build a landing page or bad prototype, wait for people to come, then move on to "the next startup" if it inevitably doesn't work. Their ideas usually don't have enough potential to sell, and if they do they don't take them far enough to actually realize even a fraction of the potential.
I love bootstrapped companies, I'm all for building side projects and turning them into jobs, but this movement has moved away from that and is now about selling the dream instead of the work.
It sounds like the person you know did not do this and actually created something valuable, that's amazing and I congratulate them. I would like the indie hacker movement to move back to celebrating these success stories instead of the influencer BS.
Edit: and maybe I am a bit bitter as I loved the indie hacker movement. I found it to be incredibly inspiring, and I truly miss the stories of people doing lots of hard work, solving difficult problems, and building incredible products and companies.
Surely worth a post on its own.
Or was this person already an expert in a certain business domain, which helped to come up with a business idea in that domain?
At the end of the day if you want to gamble, buy a lottery ticket, then at least you are being honest with yourself.
It takes tremendous effort launching products that have integrity, and its something that should be respected, the journey is what its all about.
Being a solution in search of a problem is being everything on one hypothesis of what you built being correct instead of problem based thinking that would line up multiple hypotheses to then select one to start with.
Startups are a learning engine and most don’t get setup to learn and iterate based on customer feedback.
It’s been almost 4 years now I think, and within the past year, I’ve started getting traction commercially. (But the first paying customer was after two years or so.)
I guess what I’m saying is that it’s okay to abandon ideas when you feel like they don’t work. Your gut feeling may be right.
You learn something from it, you move on and eventually you hopefully find something that sticks. It’s almost like love.
It’s embarrassing to go out with a product that you know isn’t perfect, but if you are meeting a need in the market, people are willing to pay even for an imperfect product.
And it’s much easier to improve a product that has a market, then to find a market for a perfect product that has none.
Also some advice on hyper-optimising for cheap hardware. Don't. Buy something with a warranty from a respectable company. Or buy two of everything else. Downtime will cost you customers. I say that having spent most of those years running off cranky ex corporate thinkpads. They will let you down and you will need an exit plan. At this point I'd rather just buy an off the shelf MacBook config I can walk into the local Apple store and just buy another one if I break it or lose it. No waiting 4-5 days for another ebay thinkpad to turn up and hope it works ok. I run off a base model 14" M1 MacBook Pro now.
I don't think it's a huge deal, just keep your secrets backed up in multiple ways you can retrieve
Yeah, but ... what is in my hands can be replaced in a matter of hours: just go out and get a new laptop at the nearest place!
It's even easier than that, because I primarily use Linux, there are times, in 2023, that I used a Core2 Duo with 2GB of RAM for days at a time on a particular project.
That's about 10m to pull the old laptop out of the cupboard, due `git pull`, and carry on working.
The downtime he speaks of is developer downtime. He isn't implying he served from used Thinkpads before, or that he serves off of MacBooks now.
Most people aren't looking at it from the perspective of making a killing. They just want to get away from having a boss. For whatever reason they don't fit the corporate mould. Running their own show represents freedom.
http://reactionwheel.net/2019/01/schumpeter-on-strategy.html
In an ideal SaaS scenario, your customer can cut off a tiny percentage of your revenue.
There are plenty of companies, SaaS or otherwise, in which a single "whale" customer makes up so much revenue that losing them would instantly make the company unprofitable. Similarly there are plenty of employees who can handle being fired perfectly well, financially speaking.
A customer firing you might affect 2% of your income. A real boss firing you will cut 100% of your income.
Also, if you are the founder and CEO of a startup you have to answer to the board and investors, but there is much less power imbalance. Sometimes a CEO being fired is financially better than continuing to work. Think of the founder of WeWork.
“You always have a boss” is a bland phrase that doesn’t account for all the very important nuances of the matter.
Definitely not an “illusion”. There are very practical differences between the different types of bosses.
If you’ve got a MacBook Pro budget you can buy 2 prev gen Thinkpads. Have the 2nd as a backup. I have a 7 year old Thinkpad as a backup and it’s great, more than good enough to last while main laptop is fixed or replaced. Was even able to upgrade RAM and storage vs everything is soldered on the mainboard like it’s on MacBooks.
Or buy latest gen thinkpad with 3 year warranty and optional on-site repair.
Really depends on what your needs are.
Certification: Cisco, Red Hat, AWS, Azure. Pick one and finish it. Then do more. Having basic certifications in all of them sounds like a good idea, but employers don't seem to care. Keep going with whichever one you pick.
Programming languages: don't spend a month on every language you can find, or every framework you can find. It's great to know more than just one language or framework but it's more important to actually make interesting shit in whichever one you pick.
However, I can definitely agree with the comments on tools / frameworks though. Don't focus on the "newest thing", just work with what you know you are fastest with.
Always loved this advice from Steve Jobs, but it can be hard to put into practice in a startup.
From my own experience, I’ve found there is a strong temptation (and also external advice) to try many different things in trying to get traction.
From my experience meeting highly successful people, or whatever that means, meant deducing most of your interactions should have a straight no from you right away after listening attently, many times no eye contact is made (to make it more objectively perhaps). Then that "no" can be a blunt, almost out of place surprising no at the start "I don't like/see it", "not interested", "can't do that" etc. Which should quickly lead the conversation into solving your objections. Think of it as a figure of speech or a Socratic rhetoric. Once your petty or founded objections are resolved your "real no" may materialize as non-rhetoric. Remember, if you are the one saying yes or no it means you have some, if not all, leverage in that interaction.
Like I said, I've seen this from extremely rich, old money, people with whom I've interacted, so it's anecdotal and take it with a punch of salt. It's easier said than done anyway.
>That can’t make you money unless you’re a trust fund kid.
Yes, Jobs indeed comes from a very priveledged background that can afford to send their kid to college, have them drop out less than a year later, then send them on a 2 year soul searching journey before founding and crashing 2 startup businesses. And Buffet was a son of a congressman who bought stocks at 11 and land at 15 (I dont think either of those things are even legal o do today at those ages).
They very much were trust fund kids.
Many small business ideas which can be built quickly are really hard to scale beyond a certain point so having many is the only way to build reasonable income. These small bets also need to require low effort to build and support (eg. think b2c with advertising income or a product with little support costs).
Of course if you can scale up a single business, good for you, you can focus all your energies there and provide a great service.
I've always felt it was a part of the HN spirit with lots of threads, but it's completely died down, maybe because of the economy?
I'm well aware it's luck and lottery, but it's a hobby for many of us anyway, finding a market for our tinkering.
Even Indiehackers seems saturated with a lot of the spam and very little profitable. Like this gibberish wix template making 100k a month on the frontpage https://www.indiehackers.com/product/gibble-ai.
Is the discussion IRL only now, or are we just in a downturn?
I’ve recently stumbled on an exciting niche that’s showing a lot of traction. The customers know very well how to use technology but the notion of joining forums / discussing their frustrations anywhere online just doesn’t seem to be something they consider doing. It’s all word of mouth.
My “luck” completely shifted when I stopped trying to find these users online and instead physically walked into a shop and started asking for opinions.
All that to say: I’m coming to feel that niches can more easily be found offline, even for SaaS type businesses. Just walk up and ask a business owner what they find annoying!
A lot of entrepreneurial types are very much running around in the same circles jumping on the same trends and seeing life from the same perspective.
I remember being part of an incubator where there were 4 coffee distribution companies at the same time, pretty funny. Many others were doing online services for other tech people like some ouroboros.
At the same time designers and hacker types are often a bit introverted and isolate themselves with their work.
This creates a very deep disconnect between "the vast majority of people" that aren't very vocal online about problems, even more so the huge elderly demographic, but even zoomers are not tech savvy these days. So there should really be lots of opportunities out there if you don't focus on the tiny hot niches or techy spheres that so many people here target paradoxically.
Ie. combining "techy, nerdy or design skills" while forcing yourself out there is honestly a potential superpower - the other way around is not feasible for most, ie. the sales type learning tech that takes years and years to learn. Off course you can also always team up.
> ...but even zoomers are not tech savvy these days.
Though I would actually challenge this. The idea I'm (slowly) building out deals with owners of a small blue collar type business.
These people aren't "tech savvy" in that they're not tech nerds. They don't know about coding languages or SPA vs server rendered. They don't give a shit TypeScript vs Python vs Go vs Kotlin.
But they absolutely know how to use their phones. They know how to use apps and websites. That's as tech savvy as is needed to build a small business.
They're also working daily with these TERRIBLY outdated systems that were made decades ago and only work on 1 single Windows machine they have sitting somewhere in their shop, covered in grease.
Just show them a responsive web app that addresses their frustrations and they'll be shocked at how much of an insane genius you are. And they won't even ask about the tech, because they don't give a shit. They just want it to work.
IMO this approach is where the next wave of small business SaaS ideas are. YMMV
Thus you may be “selling shovels” - your customers are software devs etc. Since the problems you face building are the problems you aim to solve.
This is something you can’t get at your day job unless it is a true startup, est. 2023 because they are probably doing things the old way and a very peculiar way to boot :-). The work problem is usually solved by convincing the team to do something less dumb :-) rather than another SaaS sub.
> Monitoring thats simple, effective, and lets you sleep a bit better at night.
> Check as often as every 30 seconds, and catch the issues take your website down for less than a minute.
So I've pivoted again. I've watched what works within the group, what the members want, and my current focus is implementing a completely new platform OFF facebook that allows me to provide the same features but without Facebook's limitations.
Focus on a single product or feature yes, to start, but don't give up too early on your dreams.
> Turns out they got fed up with their existing service, remembered my pitch, and checked out what I built since.
Marketing and selling pay off. The sad part is, you never know when.
Hackintosh a T480 and it's the best of both worlds.
I try to setup a system with i3 or sway every once and then but then I always end up back on KDE eventually.
I do miss good window tiling though!
Basically my main annoyances with macOS are window management & the way settings/preferences work and are stored. Windows is just worse in that sense to me I suppose.