Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?

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I, like many engineers, dream about turning my love to programming into a side business. Nothing crazy, but enough to replace an average SWE income. And I, like many engineers, fell into the "build, and they will come" trap.

I tried to build, calibrate, engage in SEO, talk to customers, but I can't seem to find traction. On one hand, people say that you need to build to solve a problem. You find a problem in a niche, say accounting for plumbers, and build for that, then you just go and market to these people. On the other hand, I see people who advocate for "I just built something that I needed, and it got traction". There are multiple examples for both camps, but the problem is that they contradict each other.

This leads me to believe that most people either get lucky and then apply a framework in retrospect to justify their luck, or they simply don't tell the whole truth.

I want to escape a salaried coder job, more so with the "push" of vibe coding across the board. But I have no idea how to approach a business. I refuse to believe that everyone who succeeded with a side project and replaced their job - is a liar, but maybe the truth is that it does not take 7 months, but 7 years?

Anyone got something helpful to share in that regard?

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Coincidentally it's been almost exactly 7 years since I started my solo SaaS business, which is now how I make my living.

My product started off 25 years ago as a simple intranet web app I wrote in Classic ASP running on a PC in the office of my father's mobile home dealership. I had taken a break from corporate software development to run the dealership for him. I did that for seven years, then got back into software, first working for Symantec for two years (Ugh), and then as a freelancer/contractor.

Then in 2019 I noticed that the handful of small software businesses that used to service the mobile home dealership industry had all gone under. So I revisited my old dealership program and revamped/rewrote it to turn it into a SaaS product. My first two customers were in the summer of 2019, and it's grown steadily since then to about 80 dealerships using it in 13 states.

In my case, I knew a lot about the industry (mobile home retail) I was creating a product for, and was also lucky in that there were not (at the time) any competitors. (Unfortunately, since then there are at least three companies competing with me in the space.)

Creating a real, money-making business like this as solo developer is not easy. The programming is the fun part for me, but, as much as I don't like to admit it, that's the less important part in many ways. Selling is the hard part. And providing good support is crucial. I actually like doing support, but I suspect that a lot of developers would hate it.

The whole thing has been kind of a slow grind in many ways, but there's something very satisfying about making real money (and adding real values to customers) from something you created yourself from scratch.

Don’t dismiss the fact that you didn’t start trying to find a problem to start a business without knowing the vertical. You knew the industry not just from talking to customers - you were the first best customer of your own product. You had an “unfair advantage”.

I just can’t fathom how anyone thinks about starting a software business especially these days without first thinking about what their unfair advantage is when writing software is so easy with AI.

I will forever remember my experience with the development of a new tool in my job as an engineer in hazardous gas processing. We had a consultant who was developing this tool that worked in a double-act with one of our engineers, and they sat there watching us use the tool. Whenever there was something we found confusing or didn't work how we wanted it to, she just said "oh I'll change that right now, give me a sec... ok press refresh it should be working now".

This tool was mainly just a form with some free-text fields, some drop-down and email notifications of each workflow step. But the fact that it was developed by constantly iterating with the users, meant that it has been adopted universally and been incredibly efficient at managing this particular workflow.

It's the only example I can remember in my 20-year career where that happened. It is more typical that there's a vast disconnect between the people with the industry experience and the people with the skills to apply fundamental IT skills to product development.

In my particular example, the IT skills required were probably completely trivial for a professional, and all the value came from tight cooperation with users.

It's not impossible, it's just difficult :) Luck plays part like in anything, but consistency and persistence also makes it possible for luck to happen.

I'd recommend scratching your itch first and then finding people in a similar situation. You know enough about your own problem to be able to design a solution around it, and you likely know some other people around that as well. Slice that segment into something worth attacking first. Bill Aulet defined the first group of people worth solving for as a "beachhead market". This is his test for that first segment:

- the customers within the market should all buy similar products

- the customers within the market should have a similar sales cycle and expect products to provide value in similar ways

- the customers within the market talk to each other, and there is a high probability of word-of-mouth referrals, where customers can serve as a “compelling and high-value references for one another in making purchases”.

The third one is for me the key to open doors as a solo founder. You probably don't have the marketing budget to compete with large companies, so word of mouth and happy customers will be your first best marketing strategy. SEO is black magic, and from my experience takes a long time to actually start working - happy customers doing word of mouth and writing/recommending you also helps significantly with that.

Once this segment opens the doors, things will likely change for something else, then you follow the trail.

I don't think it's impossible, but absolutely incredibly difficult. I tried everything.

Shopify stores, blogs (even owned a #1 tech blog), local job boards, global job boards, dating sites (which were shut down due to payment providers refusing to service these types of sites), various SaaS sites, etc.

Nothing made any real money. I don't know if it's just me - perhaps I'm just not meant to succeed here - but I'm still trying. Still building.

I think the biggest downer was when I built the coolest SaaS for martial arts academies. I thought it was guaranteed success, as I am involved in these communities, know a ton of owners. I reached out to all of them. Offered a free setup/trial. None of them cared, or even attempted to use it.

Likewise, I just built the coolest browser extension for chess players (in my opinion). I run a local chess club. Thought everyone would want to at least try it out. Maybe 2 users installed it. Lol.

I just stopped caring, and I look at it in a new way. Yeah, I may not have paying customers for projects, but I am expanding my portfolio. These are real assets that I own. The process is fun. Abandon the idea of making money, and it becomes more enjoyable.

> I think the biggest downer was when I built the coolest SaaS for martial arts academies. I thought it was guaranteed success, as I am involved in these communities, know a ton of owners. I reached out to all of them. Offered a free setup/trial. None of them cared, or even attempted to use it.

Did you speak with them about the idea before building the platform?

Some of them, yes. It seemed like they'd use it. I don't know. Maybe bad execution, or something. Although, maybe I should try again. Perhaps they were busy. I also didn't market beyond reaching out to people (which involved the people I know + cold email outreach).

It’s hard for these companies to switch once they’ve picked a platform. Just an idea, but I’ve seen people have success by looking up new business registrations. Get all new martial arts gyms daily, and try reaching out to them.

don't give up, i spent 20 years like you, tried different things until I found something that worked really well.

>> The process is fun. Abandon the idea of making money, and it becomes more enjoyable.

100% this. Some things you do in life are for money. Other things are for fun. Turning fun into money usually removes the fun part.

We have a word for this, it's called "hobby" and somewhere along the line it acquired negative connotations. But in fact a hobiest has the ability to spend lots of time perfecting their skill.

A long time ago, if you wanted the best craftsmanship you went to an amateur not a professional. The amateur had time to make things perfect. (John Harrison spent years making a single clock) whereas the professional had to make money, so was forced to compromise.

Yes, you can turn your hobby into money, but it will remove the fun part. It will require lots of extra stuff (marketing, support etc) which all erodes the fun part. Plus the pressure of release requires compromising perfection.

If you think going this route makes your job into "fun" then think again. Yes, you'll still enjoy the coding part, but its an ever shrinking part.

So I think you've done the right thing. Stick to this as soon hobby, not your job. And I mean that in the most positive way.

It's possible, but "solo" is a lie told to keep you motivated.

Shipped a B2B vertical platform in 12 months alone (paying customers now). What actually made it possible was: three prior jobs where I learned the boring parts (auth, payments, ops, CI), domain expertise I happened to have from family (HVAC engineering, which is what the product vertical turned out to be), plus forums and OSS libraries that are effectively hundreds of past engineer-years I'm standing on.

So "alone" is really "me full-time + 20 years of accumulated industry + 10 years of accumulated open source". The actual solo part is attention allocation across features vs. bugs vs. support vs. sales. That part, yes, is brutal.

What's actually impossible for one person: doing sales at the same time as shipping. You alternate. When I'm coding I'm leaving money on the table. When I'm selling my codebase accrues bugs. That's the real solo trap.

Hang in there. It does take longer than you think and it's a marathon with a lot of peaks and valleys.

You do need a market, not just a product. You also need to network to get input, partners, and build a BD pipeline. You don't necessarily need revenue at first, you need to prove external interest, whether that's a beta, pilot, or collaboration/partnership. All these things will add to your momentum.

Not impossible, but the asymmetry is brutal. You can ship anything in weeks, and nobody will find it. The thing nobody tells you up front: "build it and they will come" was true in 2005 and hasn't been true since 2015. Distribution is the whole game. Every product idea should be evaluated partly on "can I distribute this without buying ads," because most solo devs can't sustain paid acquisition and paid acquisition with a weak funnel just burns cash anyway.

This is so relevant for me at the moment.

Built a product about 12 months ago, pivoted slightly about 6 months ago.

Had some decent traffic but it has been a serious grind.

I'm doing a few more tweaks to the product then I am going to leave it running in the background for a while.

I need to build something that solved a real genuine problem

>> build it and they will come" was true in 2005 and hasn't been true since 2015.

It wasn't true in 2005. It wasn't true in 1995. It's never been true.

I joined a fledgling industry in the mid 90s. There were some established names. (Established in those days meant your ad appeared in a trade magazine a couple times a year.) My offering was good, maybe even very good. I advertised in the same places and sales were ok. (Without the advertising it would have been nil.)

I started traveling to do in-person demos at conferences, user groups and so on. Sales rocketed up, and stayed up. I won simply by taking the time to market a different way. By meeting prospective customers in person. In many ways they responded to the marketing effort, not the product.

Obviously today marketing channels are different. But the approach is the same. Marketing matters. And the mouse trap thing? It was never true.

7 years, or rather, more time than you expected is correct. Generally, success happens slowly. To succeed, just don't fail. If you keep your job, muddle along with your side business, avoiding debt, keeping your fixed costs low, and most importantly, survive, your customer base will grow and your competitors will melt away. If you are not luckier or earlier than others, you will still succeed by being more patient than others.

> Maybe the truth is that it does not take 7 months, but 7 years?

Yes, that is the truth. I run a business solo and it takes a long time to get to the point where you're making decent income, because running a business has its own costs, and those costs scale as you scale, so it never feels like "enough" until it finally does. I personally do believe in the whole "build and they will come" bit, but the 'coming' part is on the order of years, not weeks or months, and it's a slow linear trickle, not an exponential curve like the talking heads like to tout. Of course, you do have to build something people actually want, and something those people will actually pay for, but your number one goal should simply be Don't Die. Live long enough so that people know you exist, carve out a little niche for yourself, and fight for that linear trickle until it's "enough."

You mentioned that people might be applying frameworks in retrospect to justify luck. There’s definitely truth in that, but the "framework" that actually works is narrowing the information gap between you and the user.

Instead of trying to find a "niche" like accounting for plumbers from thin air, go to where the "plumbers" (or whoever your target is) are actually venting. Reddit is a goldmine for this because people are surprisingly honest when they are frustrated.

I’ve found that spending two weeks just reading subreddits related to a specific industry—and looking for the most upvoted "pain" posts—is worth more than six months of SEO and "calibrating" a product no one asked for. The goal is to find a problem that is currently being solved badly. If you build the "not-bad" version of that solution, you don't need a massive marketing budget; you just need to show up where the complaining is happening.

At lot of advice for solo founders is from people with survivalship bias, vocal sales biz dev and people that had right connections. I think tech solo founder path is different and in today market is very difficult. I can give advice on things that I did wrong so far. Avoid direct stripe integration and complex subscriptions models this would be time sink, use merchant of record and as simple as possible subscription model. Ignore everything non essential for product like usage charts, account management etc. Get decent designer but limit his scope to product features say NO to design system and custom components, use off the shelf UI toolkit with minimal customisation. If you want to raise wait for more traction and avoid startup conferences, better to go for your industry conference instead.

> This leads me to believe that most people either get lucky and then apply a framework in retrospect to justify their luck

Bingo. It's much easier to get a new product started when there is little or no competition. Clients can be tolerating (like early days of Crypto or now the early days of AI). But once a market is mature, clients are very unlikely to accept your service (even for free!), if it seems risky let alone incomplete.

> or they simply don't tell the whole truth.

You hit another nail. No one is going to tell you what dark/grey/shady actions they took to get where they are. YC call it "naughty" founders.

> but maybe the truth is that it does not take 7 months, but 7 years?

Another nail. Bare some exceptions, most businesses take years to build. A product will take years of polishing to become mature enough to be used.

Building a tech business is very hard these days if you're doing it as a technical founder.

Almost everything with clear use has been built. You can make slight improvements to existing products here and there but you'll struggle to be ranked well in search because you'll find there's typically at least 10-20 direct competitors which have been doing what you're doing for way longer. Additionally today Google is more or less an ad search platform rather than a website search tool, which means even if you could just do some SEO and get on the front page, you'll always place below the ads anyway.

In my experience these days you need to be reasonably good and sales and marketing to start a successful business online. Generally that will mean you need a good ad strategy and you need to be able to convert those who click your ads, which will mean you need to aggressively pursue leads.

Another thing that can work if you're b2b is having a good network to sale into to. If you have a few contacts in corporations you can sign a couple contracts then you're good.

This isn't 2008 anymore. You can't just launch some random thing online, do a little SEO and be ranked at the top of Google with only 1-2 viable competitors. You need a good sales and marketing strategy.

it's not like this. You need a very good product that solves a real pain much better than competitors and word of mouth will work wonders with a little marketing push.

Sometimes, people just have luck in the beginning. They have the idea, they implement it in the right moment, they find their clients fast, by luck. And those success stories stick, because people proudly talk about them. And there are people that work somewhere, see where the problem is find their customers there, and just continue by their own, providing better service.

But most people don't talk about their failures, because, maybe they are ashamed. In order to make a good product , the software development is just one peace of the cake. But in the technical universities, nobody teaches us marketing, and entrepreneurship, at least not in mine. ;) Those are the subject they explain about success stories, journeys, personas, financial aspects, support, marketing campaigns, specifics in other countries, laws, etc. You can easily see that the development is only a small part of the whole process.

You need a lot of time, a lot of books to read, and a lot of people to talk about: clients, partners, concurrents, etc.

And don't just use AI to give you answer. I tried to do a marketing campaign the way AI suggested, and I failed, because I did not have the proper basis to make the right decisions ;)

I can help you fix this, it seems like there are so many steps you are missing, things dont manifest without a chain of permissions. "build it and they will come" yea not in todays time, attentions span is too short. If you want to talk about this further i'll be glad to give you some advice >> james.exec@proton.me

Since I was 17 I built projects and sold some kind of digital product, from desktop apps to services and finally a 8 figure exit of a web app.

In my first 20 years of trials i made enough to support myself, i had multiple projects + consulting work that got me some money. I tried everything, but I got better and better on spotting what works.

I didn't chase unicorns, I chase things that I needed personally in my projects and also had an established market. I found out that building simpler, improved and niched versions of bigger products gives me a higher chance of making higher revenue faster. This was before the indie hacker movement started.

Eventually one of my many projects grew faster than previous trials and I knew something is there. 7 years later I had a 8 figure exit with a team of 20 people, 100% owned and fully bootstrapped.

Was luck involved? Maybe, but after 20 years of grinding was it more luck or persistence and continuous learning? How many opportunities for finding "luck" would someone that tried methodically for 20 years to launch a successful business will get?

I too am in a similar situation, where I am building a niche product - partly for my own benefit, partly for learning, but mostly with the idea of selling it as a commercial product.

I have plenty of worries about it - will the product sell at all, is the product too niche so I'll have sales but not enough to make it full time, am I barking up the wrong tree and there is already an open source free alternative that I've somehow missed, what if nobody likes it? All sorts of stuff, some warranted, and some just the usual fear of making something and putting it out there.

With that being said I do consider a big portion of success being luck, as any one lucky event could catapult you to riches, and any unlucky event could ruin any chance of that happening, but in the end you have to take a risk and put yourself out there for the lucky events to happen.

But as with all risky things you have to be prepared for it all to go to shit, and then have enough of a support network which will help you get back onto your feet.

I genuinely hope that other people have some more concrete advice here or even war stories to tell.

It is “simple” Find out what people want Make it Sell it to them Unfortunately, engineer brain loves to skip step 1

Ive recently become friends with a younger person who makes a lot of money off vibe coded mini saas. He is fanatical about step 1. If he can’t find n people begging him to make it he will go validate the next idea. He’s ruthless with this aspect and will drop an idea instantly if people dont care. It really woke me up to the reality of it all. Made me realise how much i delude myself into making things people dont want because i enjoy the making process. I will at best half ass step 1 and the proceed to spend a few months hand crafting some software no one wants. Meanwhile he spends two months validating and one month vibe coding something that people would be embarrassed to post on HN and then sell 100usd/month subscriptions to it. Its crazy

I just don’t understand how does it work. Like where do you find such people? How do you make them beg you? Isn’t building in a saturated market kind of proves that there is demand?

the begging thing is a bit of a myth imo. what it actually looks like is you describe the problem out loud to someone and they go , god yes that's exactly it - before you've even mentioned a solution. that reaction is the signal. you're not manufacturing demand you're just finding where it already exists. the hardest part is you need to talk to a lot of people before you find that reaction, that was the biggest pitfall i fell into during my first startup. trying hard not to make the same mistake twice, youve to be really mindful

Begging is hyperbole, its as you describe. Just looking for the strong reaction

If you cant find the people, may not be the right market for you :) ideally you are exposed to target market directly, and daily. Or you team up with a cofounder who is. Re: building in saturated market - “prove” is a strong word. It’s another signal. And you can judge for yourself how strong :) i dont think anything can replace direct customer feedback

> kind of proves that there is demand?

It proves that there's demand but you might not get a piece of the cake. That's being able to sell/speak to the people in your market is so important

This is exactly the trap. I keep catching myself spending weeks on the tech stack and architecture before I've talked to a single person.. the building feels productive and quite comfortable, it's like a quick reward to us for having an idea without needing to battle test in the field

Engineering is not running a business. Different skill set.. you can learn it, but a side business skill needs marketing, operations, etc.. even a small one. You could make the best mousetrap in the world, but if no one knows about it, it goes no where. I ran into this many times.. great idea, could solve a lot of problems, but could never figure out how to market it.

I have spent couple of decades in an IT industry, few years of which I tried to setup LLC as a solo entrepreneur. Few things I learned - great product (in this case my expertise) is required, but it is only part of the whole game. You also require strong sales and marketing skills so people are even aware that the product exists. You also would want strong (or at least good) negotiating skills, if for nothing else than to negotiate product pricing / fees. In addition, be ready to spend time in back office work such as accounting, chasing payments, etc. If the business grows you can hire people to do that, but initially you will be the only one. If you are driven by only the cerebral aspect of the product, other required activities may not feel exciting enough It requires specific type of personality. I realized after few years that my personality was not aligned ... so i closed my LLC. Hope this helps.

Do some freelancing to see what problems people will pay you to solve, then figure out if it is a good problem to solve at scale.

I know one guy who actually succeeded. He ran a hard-mode outsourcing shop for like, 15 years, for many years making 100-150K/month net in his pocket, but with AI, it went to zero by about end of 2024, so he was left with no income and lost all his (rather large) team. He started experimenting with products and after about 3-4 failed tries, landed a successful one which nearly replicates his old income, it is a mixed (live women and AI) porn webcam app. Took more than $2M sunk into dev and marketing costs before he hit PMF. He still spends almost everything he makes on research into new niches - fintech, trading, various scam niches, and more porn, but so far nothing else sticks.

Yet, he is delighted to not have to run outsourcing shop anymore, and make same income with much smaller team and much more ethical line of business than outsourcing.

Delivery and porn are basically 95% of the new economy so good for him getting into position - so to speak.

>... it is a mixed (live women and AI) porn webcam app.

>... various scam niches ...

>... and much more ethical line of business than outsourcing.

Wild.

Morality aside: To be fair, having ran many legitimate businesses and knowing few people that did the opposite, I must admit that the difficulty level in running "elaborated grey activity" is actually quite complex, people have this belief that it's actually "easier" but I doubt it's the case, many many more guardrails (accounts, anonymity, money where it goes, how can it be sustained...)

That's right. That shit is hard. But it's the only possible niche for someone who's an outsider and doesn't have a Valley network: do something legit companies can't do for regulatory reasons. Otherwise, well-funded companies with deeply networked founders where both funding and actual sales are done between people who knew each other from school or are relatives, they will just eat your market and will never even notice you.

Or the better formula: Find a small niche you're passionate about, thats too small for the large companies but perfectly reasonable for you and small/mid size team.

Yes, people who never did outsourcing don't know how dirty it is.

I wasn't judging nor disputing that, just think it's a sad commentary on the current state of the world when outsourcing is considered as dirty as scam and cam girl operations.

There's a major difference: scam and cam girls work and make money, outsourcing these days... not so much. Even top outsourcers who have armies of lawyers and can afford to play harder than others, are in a sorry state: EPAM stock is 5x down from peak while rest of the stock market is 2x up from same point.

I work with a company that outsources to a foreign IT firm. They are slow, expensive, and the quality of work is poor. They often hire subcontractors that are kids just out of school, now doing everything with AI. I've seen their prompts and often they are little more than "fix the tests." They charge $200+ hour or more for this in some cases. Insane.

And here's the trick: they use insiders to negotiate these deals, give massive kickbacks, and sometimes literally take over and destroy their victim (and i literally heard this term for a 'client' in outsourcer chats - 'victim')

Yep. I'm pretty sure the people who negotiated this "deal" did it for their own self interest, since they later went to work for the contractor directly. Too bad. We could've hired some solid independent developers.

I relate to this so much. I work in accounting and got so fed up with constantly juggling full screen spreadsheets that I ended up building a Mac utility just to force a picture in picture mode for any window.

The coding phase was actually the easy part because it felt productive. But now that the app is done and I am literally launching it today, I am hitting that exact same wall. The build it and they will come mindset is a total trap.

My unfair advantage was knowing the exact pain point of my own workflow but my massive blind spot is distribution. Reading this thread is a harsh reminder that building the thing is only 10 percent of the battle. The other 90 percent is the brutal grind of getting people to actually see it.

There is def some luck involved, as in you don't know beforehand what's going to be successful.

"You find a problem in a niche, say accounting for plumbers, and build for that, then you just go and market to these people". It's way better to work on something you are familiar with and you like.

Personal story time: for me it was falling for the indie hacker stuff near covid and realizing the same stuff.

The best solo business is to pretend you are successful i.e. "I'm sitting on the beach sipping my drink while Claude is coding my app that's raking in 20k MRR, just use my {SEO|Social Media|Referral} tool and that will be you!". Hope to get enough people suckered in to become a "voice in the bootstrapper community" i.e. your posts filled with generic tropes get shared around X. But ultimately the product is the (fake) lifestyle. Most of the products in that eco system are not used by anyone in the productive economy, it's a pyramid ponzi of users believing they are getting valuable advice.

That said, I do still build stuff "Solo", because I enjoy the process of making and I can take the time time to meet my own quality standards (classic trope in that community even before AI was "you just gotta build you MVP in 3 days, ship quickly!" and it ends up causing you to churn out soulless software that obviously nobody will use unless they are your bootstrapping internet buddy).

Lot of people I know from those days are still trying to make it and wasted a lot of time/money! Not all bad for me personally though - I learned a lot about entrepeneurship, spotting fakes, etc. and was much more naive and younger then.

How are dealing with the fact that building is not important, more so with AI, and how do you get traction?

Building is not any less important now, AI just highlights this fact. The software I work on is the difference between people getting paid or not, which those people consider very important - I use AI to do that by letting it improve the quality of the software, with less bugs, more performance etc.

The 10000th social media spammming SaaS being built in public is no less important now than it was before AI - we can just see how irrelevant it is now that it can also be built faster, by virtually anybody.

I'm attempting to solve this cold start problem by pooling money with other operators to buy an existing business. We're currently closing on our first acquisition and plan to do more if the experiment goes well[0].

Please feel free to reach out (contact in profile) if you're curious about the approach, I'm happy to answer any questions.

[0] https://www.notion.so/notventurescale/Wild-Built-Incubator-2...

I've been working on golfcourse.wiki on and off for like five years. It's a good website, it has users (probably, you never can tell these days), monetization is going to be much more difficult than I originally imagined. I run the thing on a shoe string (about $60/month), and it shows, plenty of 502 Errors when the App Engine server has to restart. It's hard to be cheap, have tons of data loading, and also be polished.

Still... Build something! Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. I'm just trying to leave the world better than I found it.

> On one hand, people say that you need to build to solve a problem. You find a problem in a niche, say accounting for plumbers, and build for that, then you just go and market to these people. On the other hand, I see people who advocate for "I just built something that I needed, and it got traction". There are multiple examples for both camps, but the problem is that they contradict each other.

Where is the contradiction? You do need to solve a real problem, and it's very convenient if that problem is one you yourself have.

> both camps, but the problem is that they contradict each other

They don't strictly contradict each other because they are not mutually exclusive. Both methods are valid

> This leads me to believe that most people either get lucky and then apply a framework in retrospect to justify their luck

Definitely a thing. Survivorship bias.

> tried to build, calibrate, engage in SEO, talk to customers, but I can't seem to find traction

Are you speaking with people? Face to face, in person. That's more important than the online marketing methods at first. Manual onboarding.

> Anyone got something helpful to share in that regard?

If you can afford it, go work in a non-software domain for a while (maybe a year or two). You'll see all kinds of problems wherever you are, and you'll learn about the domain and other solutions.

Make a note of the ones connected to revenue.

Leave and go start your own thing, selling it back to wherever you worked (first customer problem solved).

Of course, it's not that easy, but I think digging in deep to a non-software domain is a great way to learn how to build a solo business.

I'm in this step. I joined a company in March and I just hate it. I do not see myself doing this for two years (they're behind on a lot of technology, and we have government customers that just do whatever. Its slow and boring. Some say its amazing, but you're losing your precious time sitting behind a screen.)

I'm genuinely thinking of taking up a skill, and then applying it to a new job. The pay is going to suck, though, but I'm not sure if I can spend my time behind a Monitor doing things I hate.

Have you learned anything that could help you build a solo business? (Other than motivation because you hate the current position, of course?)

This has been talked about before and in here as well, but to try and keep it short, it's not impossible but very difficult, and you need to really work hard to find your first customer(s).

Then, continuously keep in touch to ensure you're building and tweaking the product according to their needs, not what _you think_ is important.

It's mostly customer support and business development work, not as much development/engineering, which is what most software engineers believe and hope it to be.

I am in same boat as well. What I learned from my experience and others' experience after talking to them is that

1. You need to focus on the problems that really do exist and for which people might willing to pay for.

2. Marketing and Distribution skills are more Important than your Engineering skills.

3. Good Things take time, if your product is useful and good as well, then it is just a matter of time and marketing. Eventually it will gain traction, so don't loose hope.

go to the Harvard MBA for Bootstrappers i.e https://longform.asmartbear.com

one of the recommended posts: https://longform.asmartbear.com/problem/ which goes to the heart of what you're experiencing.

play in large markets, very large in absolute numbers i.e B2B but small enough not to attract major VC companies - again play in large markets - don't listen to indie-hacker influencers that are making stuff for other indie hackers.

luckily everyone is running into A.I now - so there's plenty of things to be solved. not sexy, you've to look hard, screen hard (cz some opportunities look credible till you do the math i.e is there a large number of people, what is the willingness of those people to pay)

most of your work will be in marketing (marketing not selling) i.e researching to find out which problem will people actually pay for - what are the market dynamics - then only will you code a product.

tip: for a solo business - you've to be in an ecosystem kinda place.

just to add - you've to work the marketing problem from reverse.

how much money do you want to make - have an absolute cap on the annual amount e.g in 5 years you want to make 2m|5m|10m a year.

then choose your markets based on whether they can support that amount.

I myself am facing marketing as the biggest challenge. I used to believe "a product so good that it sells itself" has to be the biggest lie. We're in this era where building and shipping are super fast, and reaching TAM has become the hardest problem.

It is very difficult, especially if you need it to be an instant success (i.e. replace your salary before you are homeless).

I have a project (a new kind of general-purpose data management system) that I have worked on for over 10 years. In the beginning, I hoped it would 'take off' and replace my salary. I was never able to quit my day job because it was so lucrative.

Now I am retired. I still work on it in bursts (spend many hours for a week to get something working, then don't touch it for a month); but I treat it like a hobby.

Maybe it will catch on (it does some amazing things with large data sets), but maybe it won't. I try to spread the word on forums or in my blog, but I am not a big marketing guy and there is so much noise out there that everything gets lost.

Good luck. You will probably need it.

here's my take - the hardest part isn't doing more computer programming, it is context switching between technical and sales. It has been done, so it is possible, but it is very difficult as people said.

very few computer programmers have good business insight. we know how to build cool stuff, but most of the cool stuff are either - unable to directly bring values to people or cool but no one cares. that's why we need a cofounder, ideally, a person closer to product/sales, who can help you to make connection, understand what people want, shapes product... all the non computer programming stuff.

also - we tend to work in isolation when being the only founder. at least for myself, i sometimes live in my own head, which can be very far from reality...

despite that - i share the same sentiment with you and will not give up trying to found a business :)

Yes, switching between development and sales/marketing is probably the hardest aspect for me.

Most years I have a booth at an industry trade show. For a couple of weeks preparing for it, the week during the show, and a couple of weeks after that, following up with potential customers I met at there, I find it virtually impossible to get an development done.

Also, onboarding new customers with my software is usually labor-intensive. So that also takes time from development.

It's hard but not impossible, imo you should stop it instead of building. Nowadays people like us (swe) are stuck in the building process, but we should take the majority of the time thinking to solve real problems and to find them we should just take our time off the coding.

If you’re an expert in a particular niche and people just bring you work, then being a solo operator works fine.

You choose which engagements to take on based on your own capacity, and you’re not burning cycles on business development etc.

The problem with such advice is that it requires me to go back in time and fix my life. I am not an expert, I started this career when I was barely an adult, and did it for fun because I liked it and the money was good. I wasn't thinking about "building a professional circle" or staying in touch with past colleagues.

So advice like "use your network to find freelance / contracting" is not helpful to me. So there are two options for me: either find a way to make it work now, or accept the fact that I fucked up my life and I just need to wait for the inevitable replacement by AI. I doubt that every successful entrepreneur started to build a professional circle at the age of 21. But I might be wrong.

Best time to start was back then, but second best time to start is now. Give it a whopping try before you toss in towels.

I've been working in software dilligence for 7 years now and have worked with 100+ companies getting purchased or raising late-stage investement as an assessor, so I've had the rare privilege of seeing the insides of a whole bunch of companies that are doing well (PE doesn't buy companies that aren't doing well). And if there's one conclusion I can draw from this its...

Your idea bloody well does matter.

The myth that "your idea doesn't matter, it's all about execution" is complete nonsense. Successful businesses are built by people who understand a problem domain well enough to see how to solve a problem that people will pay more for than it costs to solve the problem, where "costs to solve the problem" encompasses everything, especially all the non-functional requirements.

The world is full of failed software companies where no one thought through all the cost ramifications of getting and serving a customer and figured out whether their idea will fly as a long-term profitable business. And it's also full of complete crap software (or software that started out as crap and then improved) that makes founders lots of cash because the idea was actually something people want to pay for.

I will also say, yes it takes years for most of these companies.

the execution vs idea debate always felt like a false binary to me. bad idea executed perfectly is still a bad idea. but also a great idea with zero distribution instinct goes nowhere. your comment made me think about is that most founders who say "ideas don't matter" had a good idea and dont realize it because prolly they were too close to it

There is a saying that it takes 10 years to be an overnight success.

I think distribution and reach are the hardest part. I've really been struggling with that. How do I spread the word to the right audience.

I feel like it's not luck vs strategy.May be it's just time+ exposure.The more you build and put things out there,the higher you chances something clicks.

exactly

Solving a problem in my area and timing is my experience. My sideline is 18 years old and paid for a lot of my family life.

The issue is that building is the easy bit, but most devs lack sales and marketing

Its like a builder cpuld build a doctor surgery but it doesnt make them a doctor

I used to think the same few months back about the process. But then I learnt that 80% of sales is marketing efforts and that too educational.

The "build it and they will come" trap is real, I fell into it too. Been building a P2P marketplace solo for ~2 years and spent way too long on features nobody asked for.

What changed for me was accepting that the code is the easy part. I can ship endpoints all day with Claude Code but that doesn't mean anyone cares. The hard part is the stuff that doesn't feel like "real work" to an engineer -- talking to potential users, figuring out distribution, writing landing page copy that actually communicates the value.

I don't think most people who succeeded are liars but I do think they massively understate how much of their success was finding the right niche before writing a single line of code. The "build something you need" advice only works if you're representative of a paying market. I needed my own tool once and built it. Turns out I was the only person who needed it that way.

The vibe coding push makes it worse imo because it makes the building part feel even more trivial, which tricks you into thinking you're closer to a business than you are. You're not. You have an artifact. A business needs distribution and that's a completely different skill that most of us never learned.

No silver bullet from me either, still figuring it out myself. But at least I stopped building features and started talking to people.

the vibe coding point is the one nobody's saying out loud enough. it doesn't just make building faster, it makes the gap between "i have a thing" and "i have a business" feel smaller than it actually is. you ship in a week and it works and you think you're close. you're not, you just moved faster to the same hard problem the distribution bit is where we are right now honestly. talking to users before writing most of the code was the one thing that changed how we think about it

Make things people want and are willing to pay for.

Verify that.

Done.

The coding is the easy part in 2026.

I fell into the same trap of "build, and they will come" multiple times. Reading The Mom Test changed my perspective on things. I cannot recommend that book enough. Good luck. It's possible. I started my SaaS 8 yrs ago and it more than pays for my lifestyle.

I read the book. It’s more entertainment than useful. I just don’t know how to find the people who have problems. I don’t have specific domain knowledge nor I built a following / circle of people to whom I can sell

> I just don’t know how to find the people who have problems

They are all over the internet. Including in this thread, if you read carefully. e.g., OP is clearly stating a problem.

People were sold on the lie that solo was the way to go.

Solo, not one time in all of human history, has ever been the way to go.

Of all the lies you could chose to believe in life, this one is the worst.

Obvious thought: don't go solo?

> This leads me to believe that most people either get lucky and then apply a framework in retrospect to justify their luck

Yes, congratulations on finding the truth.

This is the pattern 95% of business, psychology and other pseudoscience is built upon.

The 2 main system reasons behind it: 1) any complex system cannot be really calculated farther in the future than a very short timeframe 2) natural human brain tendency to organize the observed universe into patterns.

The good news is that if you keep buying lottery tickets your chances of winning at least once also grow.

Yes, first you have to accept that it doesn't take 7 months but rather years. It is really really really hard to build a business with real revenue (did I stress on the word really?). It is even harder to build it solo.

Most of the solo success story you hear either had expertise in their fields OR built something to truly solve their own problem first and then expanded to others and it usually takes 18-24 months or higher to hit some sort of escape velocity. Most people think that magic will happen in 2-3 months and then give up after that and you have to go longer than that. The risk is high but that is what it takes.

Now with AI and vibe coding, more products will be built but the hard part remains: how to find customers, sustainably support them and keep growing. There is no shortcut to it.

My suggestion:

1. Pick a very niche problem that you have some familiarity or can relate to. You don't need to be an expert in it but you have to feel that you truly want to work on it to make a sustainably living.

2. Build an MVP in 30 days max. With AI, this shouldn't be an issue. If going beyond 30 days, you are doing too much coding.

3. You have to find where your potential customers are and you have to do it MANUALLY. no automation bs. no ads (you don't have money and unsure if you know your target audience yet). So right now, you are trying to figure out who your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) may be. You don't know yet. This can take months or even a couple of years (the scary part). But you have to do this manually. Go on Linkedin or use services like builtwith etc to figure out who may be using a similar product or a potential competitor. Then you have to email/call them directly.

4. You must have a social media profile. Look at the successful solo ones. they talk about EVERYGTHING online, I mean EVERYTHING. That helps build a personal brand which helps as a solo business owner.

5. Content Marketing. Sorry you are the marketer for your company. You cannot hire someone else to do that for you. YOU have to write the blog posts, YOU have to post the social media posts, YOU have to make those videos. And you gotta do it all if you want any chance of succeeding in 2026.

6. You have to go hard and specific for at least 12-18 months. This is the hardest part. Most people want quick results and if they don't see anything in 3-4 months, they give up. The goal is to see if you got at least 1 customer in say first 3 months. If you did, keep going and get the 2nd then 3rd. Note that your first few customers MAY NOT be your ICP but they will teach you what you need to know to build a successful product.

7. One tip: Being completely solo is overrated. I am not talking about co-founders. I am not talking about being solo founder but with a small team. That gives you a lot more mileage than just being by yourself. Yes it is hard to build a small team especially early on with no money but don't overthink the solo stuff and find 2-3 google people to work with if you can. Not necessarily as founders but freelancers/employees who can work in a small setup.

Source: Even though I am not solo by myself, I am a solo bootstrapped founder with a very small team that built a reasonably successful B2B SAAS business doing single digit million ARR. Not impressive by an VC standard but has given me everything for 10+ years and I love it.

I enjoyed reading it. But the big problem is always going to be how to fund everything from the start without any return while living on a low salary :*(

Hello, I'm a freelance startup programmer in Korea, and my name is Jeong Dong-woo.I share many of the same concerns as you.I've been on an unconventional career path for about 7 years. My specialty is building factory equipment control programs using WPF on the frontend with Ladder Diagram logic as the backend. In this field, ladder logic interpretation is still weak for AI, and because of the security restrictions at Korean factories AI tools are difficult to use on site, so I've been able to keep making a living here.My typical work involves building PLC-based control programs with WPF and integrating them with MES systems, and this is my core specialization. The downside is that because of the labor-intensive nature of this work, scaling up is genuinely difficult. In practice, it feels very much like being a subcontractor to the actual equipment vendors.I started out on a freelance community platform, and for the first 3 years I had almost no work, so I took on manual labor in parallel. Currently I'm delivering code to Hyundai Motors as a second-tier subcontractor, but I still have many of the same worries you describe.Even calling it a business, I only earn around 4 to 5 million Korean won per month, and I honestly don't know how to grow it beyond this. Reading your posts, I feel reassured to see that many people are wrestling with similar concerns.To try to expand, I've also built and delivered SaaS products. My typical engagement is a solution of around 60,000 lines of code. (Over 7 years, I've completed roughly 40 corporate outsourcing projects.)Every product I launched directly to the market has failed. The only things that worked for me were building SaaS for companies that already had revenue, and making industrial control programs.Reading the advice posted here, I keep coming back to the same realistic conclusion: in the current AI era, because of the AI SLOP problem, no matter how good a program you build, it simply doesn't reach users. That's the core issue. I've been increasingly convinced that flooding the market with many AI-generated programs is actually a more effective strategy than carefully crafting one good one. When I look at the programs that are generating real revenue recently, they seem to follow this pattern.I no longer believe that a good program necessarily succeeds.In the end, the key is exposure, and this is where I keep hitting a wall. No matter how much I invest in SEO, my Korean website struggles to gain visibility. Right now I'm using an AI API to translate my Korean articles into English and posting them as a form of promotion, though I'm not yet sure whether this approach will work.Paths to success differ from person to person and from country to country, which makes specific advice difficult to give. But in my view, what matters most is how much initial capital you can put into Google ads.Expensive ad inventory is generally personalized. Users who don't provide much information to Google get served low-tier ads instead. So my current thinking is the opposite of the conventional approach: place a large volume of low-tier ads, and build programs that appeal to users in the "internet-underserved" demographic, meaning people who don't hand over their information to the major platforms.That said, I don't want to go down an illegal path, which is why I'm not building dating apps (in Korea, dating apps often end up tied to drug dealing or prostitution, so I'd rather stay away from that space).Unlike many of the other comments here, I don't believe that a good program necessarily succeeds. The real question, in my view, is how to gain direct access to consumers.

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