Ask HN: How do Indie makers and solopreneurs get back into 9 to 5 again? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do Indie makers and solopreneurs get back into 9 to 5 again?

15 pointssarvpriy8 comments

I was working in a seed stage B2B startup. But it didn’t go well. Their potential customers lost interest in the product. And I was the one who did all the Product research and built the entire backend infra. Which gave me confidence to build my own SAAS.

After doing some research about which Saas to build. I decided to go with a Social media manager. But very soon I realized that it is not a small project as I thought in the beginning. Then I built a simple feedback management tool that can be embedded in the site.

In that process I read a lot of books on building a SAAS like Rework, the lean startup, Traction and many more. So I was aware of this developer’s hell. Questions like “Just one more feature, just one more change on the Home page, just one more line of code. Why would anyone use it. It can be built by anyone. What's so special about it.” came across my mind which delayed the launch. After so many ifs and buts I launched that on product hunt. Did cold messaging on linkedin and twitter. Got some 50 signups. Nothing big.

Very soon I realized that Entrepreneurship is not my cup of tea. Founding a product is more close to marketing, networking and selling the idea rather than building or coding the product. And I had no experience with that. Even in my circle no one is into marketing or sales. And I am very poor at networking too.

Now I am going for 9 to 5 again. But I am realizing something that Companies do not seem very welcoming towards entrepreneurship. They are ok if a guy has been in only one company since the beginning. It's ironic that Founders of those companies often complain about the lack of an entrepreneurial mindset in their employees. But HRs of the same company will not even consider your entrepreneurial experience.

Has anyone else faced this challenge? How did you navigate the transition back into a traditional role after trying your hand at building something on your own?

Companies are hesitant to hire entrepreneurial people as they often don't make good employees. Entrepreneurs like having broad work while employees want deep specialists. Entrepreneurial people are also independent, which can sometimes make them difficult to manage. I think those are the two main hurdles. Also that your resume doesn't look a traditional employee staying in their field.

Do you want to go back to a corporate job? If so, I would just tweak your resume to look like an employee. Don't say you were a solo founder, say you were a full-stack engineer working on a social media platform. That is true and explains what you're trying to convey in terms they'll understand.

There's value to your experience. Most engineers on the market have not really built anything. They know how to connect the pipes. Which is not an insult - pipe connection and building something from scratch are entirely different markets. One does serverless, the other builds servers underwater. One does microservices, the other does monorepos. One goes for full test coverage, the other hires lots of QA.

If you're in a very large company, you'll very rarely be building new products, they'd simply be acquiring them and redoing all the pipes. There's no need for a person who understands a product end to end.

Your experience isn't being considered because you might be applying for the wrong market. It's like a Wordpress dev applying for a React job. Similar field, similar products, entirely different skillsets.

> I am realizing something that Companies do not seem very welcoming towards entrepreneurship

I'm not a HR person, but I do interviews. If someone introduced themselves as an "indie maker" or "solopreneur", that'd be a major turn-off. These terms are very easy to interpret as "unemployed person who tries to stay busy" or worse "unemployed person who tries to misrepresent themselves". Staying busy is not a bad thing, but is obviously unimpressive when compared with folks with actual work experience. Calling that "enterpreneurship" may even come across as lying to yourself or being deceitful. It's not surprising that "companies don't seem very welcoming towards [it]".

Maybe focus on the skills you got out of it that are relevant to your job prospects, or better cut it entirely from your resume and just market yourself as a junior dev; or whatever position/level you can aspire to based on your non-solopreneur work history.

Okay , what about employed people that introduce themselves as such?

I ask because I’m employed, yet I’m always building things on the side - which I feel gives me an edge against the competition

Call that time “consulting“ that you did for family reasons, but the need has passed. Tell them you learned an enormous amount but you’re just not built to be a freelancer.

Employers don’t want to hire entrepreneurs. And that’s because true entrepreneurs tend to quit jobs unexpectedly to try something else out.

>How do Indie makers and solopreneurs get back into 9 to 5 again?

There's not supposed to be a way ;)

HR people are very conservative and go for sure bets. They want obedient workers who will not give them trouble, not people who ask questions, write blogs or books and may quit without much notice because they decide the time has come to do their own thing.

So if you want to be hired by such people, now you know how to present yourself and how not to present yourself.

I have found it useful to reframe such work as being a specific role and delivering specific results. That is, to make your "employer" an arms length and separate entity.

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