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Comment by nudpiedo | Hacker News Reader

this is highly dated... 2004-2008, the opportunities were others than today's

This attitude is bad, but it is kinda justified. If you spend any time in the "indie hacker" entrepreneur space today it is oversaturated with people trying to root out every single angle they can possibly try to address with their tech solution. They are all listening to podcasts, newsletters and buying courses about how to be a tech entrepreneur, but the people selling the 'how to get rich' info are the only ones consistently making money.

Total admiration for the author, it was very savvy to identify that opportunity and they put their money on the line. The modern self-made entrepreneur is less appealing. Success stories nowadays are like "We dropship japanese candy boxes" or "My Crypto Substack has 5k subscribers".

I might be way off the mark, but I get the sense with a lot of the indie hackers it is less about the money and more about the attraction of the community and the sense of belonging. If you "build in public" you'll get attention and will be cheered on by the others doing the same.

If they were really in it for the money then spending all of their free time for a couple of years to get a few hundred dollars MRR would be a fail, yet many of them keep at it. I suspect the rewards they get from being an active part of the community feel worth it.

I think a better choice is to either go day job + hobby that isn't for money, as restricting yourself to what makes money is going to be less enjoyable. Or day job + heavily profit focused side business with the goal of quickly replacing your day job with said business, then freeing up some time to have your hobbies again. I think the mistake is trying to do both at the same time. You can't really focus on both profit and personal enjoyment in the same project (unless profit is a big source of enjoyment for you).

The opportunities are different, but the attitude of keeping your eyes open to opportunities and figuring out what works is still true.

It is so noisy and crowded that I wonder if it is worth spending time and energy looking for opportunities.

Is it?

Who are the top players in pest-management software? How much of the market do they have? How much of the market wants another application because the existing ones don't cover their niche? How easy/difficult would it be to market to them?

I pulled Pest Management Software out of my ass because about 20 years ago I responded to a similar attitude by mentioning that while gardening I wondered if there was such a thing as pest management software (there is. It's a huge field) and also because last summer I was asked to build a small wireless interface to a mosquito sprayer so -- wait for it -- someone's mosquito control app could automatically monitor the amount that was being sprayed without the driver having to enter any data.

Opportunities are everywhere but you won't find them unless you look.

We are at a low point, where everything is gated and huge corporations will decide to scare your customers away. Of course, there are always lots of opportunities. But currently they are fewer.

Anyway, I do think we have already seen the bottom of that curve.

as someone who's living off of the tiny business income, there are plenty of opportunities to be found on the internets. some of these opportunities have a shorter shelf life than others, and that's okay; you can still make a killing before moving on to the next wave.

you probably won't start ranking as easily as you could have 10 or 20 years ago, and there is lots of competition these days — that's true.

> highly dated

Article is published:

> June, 2024

I don't understand what you mean.

Most of the stuff in the article happened between ~2003-2010 at first glance, which is what he means probably (even though it was published in 2024.)

(author here) just published this story today, correct.., been writing it for months, as I've been forgetting all the weird steps I took to get here..

The initial events described in the article happened around 20 years ago.

The stories presented are from an earlier era but maybe still relevant.

but the story took place in the early 2000s.

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