waprin

It’s good to be aware of survivor bias but the discussion around it has been overdone and leads to pointless defeatism.

The airplane example is the canonical example but also ironic because it’s an example where there was a ton to learn from survivors. Their first takeaway was logically inconsistent but eventually they realized that places without bullet holes were the most important to armor. Because planes shot in other places survived. If no planes survived they’d learn nothing but instead they learned something useful from the survivors.

It doesn’t change that a WW2 fighter pilot would need some luck to survive but if he took the right lessons from survivors and armored his plane in the correct places he’d improve his probability of surviving.

One of my favorite pieces of business advice is since 90% of businesses fail, start 10 businesses and you’ll probably succeed. Of course that oversimplifies things but so does the original statistic . It’s also useful advice that helps you re-frame “luck” as stochastic risk that you can manage. And learning ways to lower probability of failure is a great way to manage risk even if there’s always some element of randomness at play.

Not really, it's akin to saying Youtube Shorts will help Youtube beat TikTok, as both Youtube Shorts and Substack Notes are the short-form version of their product.

I think if we were to see an X killer I’d much sooner predict Substack does it. I was sleeping on Substack a bit but it has many of the positive qualities of Twitter with many of the downsides removed:

* Notes are a short form platform but Substack itself is more long form centric. A huge problem of Twitter was excessive short form creates emphasis on snappy talking points over substance, but Substack more naturally lets you make your talking point but expound on it long form

* More creator-friendly letting you export your email list and leave the platform

* But has many the social media network strengths such as likes, retweets, recommends, etc

* Focused on strong writers as early users which lends itself more naturally to short form writing than the pictures of Instagram

* Doesn’t have the Facebook stigma that Threads has

Substack just feels like it has so many of the advantages of what Twitter offers while also being a new , unique thing. Threads feels more like Twitter, but by Zuckerberg, and the IG crowd seem less like natural writers than the journalists on Substack

I initially rolled my eyes at Substack being this big YC company around email lists, but I did admire some of their writers and since I’ve checked out their platform I’ve been extremely impressed.

It of course doesn’t have the same cultural cachet as Twitter but it also has none of the Taylor Swift deepfakes or bot armies. So a lot of headwinds. If I could bet on Threads, X, or Substack I’d wager on the Stack.

“When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” ― Pablo Picasso

The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavor upon the business known as gambling.

Always great to see indie hackers content.

Since Channing mentions interstitial journaling, I want to share my interstitial journaling app called Interstitch at https://Interstitch.app

I shared it here on HN and PH and got 2 upvotes and zero people checking it out. But I realized half the problem is most people don’t know what interstitial journaling is. Many people understandly confuse it for a journaling app. But it’s closer to a time tracking app but more for individual performance than invoicing. But I assumed I was the only person who finds this useful, which was ok since I’ve been using it to set “deep work” daily goals and summarize how I spent my week so at least I use it.

Then the CEO of Medium somehow sees the HN post and emails me that he coined the term, but I probably heard it from Ness Labs founder that Channing links to. So then I email her and she adds me to her newsletter which has like 100k subscribers and about 100 people are now using it which is cool. Good lesson in reaching the right audience.

Figma mocks give most of the info you need to map to HTML/CSS pretty easily, much more so than image mocks

It tells you the colors and will show you spacing etc

I am a long-time developer who's always dreamed of building an indie software business but design skills hold me back.

I recognize this and get plenty of feedback around it. So this year I set out to improve to at least try to get to "mediocre" instead of "terrible".

Refactoring UI and Erik Kennedys blog / class are mentioned and are great resources and I own both.

I did Dribbble's Figma UI design class which was $600. It's biggest strength is that its a cohort based class, and cohort classes tend to have much higher finishing rates than self-paced classes. Their instructor will review your Figma designs but only if you finish in time so if you want to get your $600 worth you better open up Figma, so I recommend it for that reason. Kennedy's is self-paced and while it's extremely high quality, I haven't even worked through most of it for this reason.

Of course, the single most important thing you can do is build lots of UIs. If you're like me, your UIs will suck, but if you do it more regularly, you will also notice more UI/UX techniques on other websites. I save all those in a Notion database organized by category and refer to them.

One thing I almost never see mentioned but it was a really good piece of advice. I told someone that I was between hiring contractor designers for my project, and trying to improve at design and do it myself. One person told me, it's not mutually exclusive. So you can design an app, and it will probably look bad. Then hire an experienced UI/UX designer off Upwork to do a better job. And pay attention to the decisions they made and the decsions you made and compare the difference. Figma is a great tool these days because it's much more collaborative than just getting a big stack of PNGs or SVGs at the end, you can discuss design choices in Figma comments as the designer works.

Another thing worth noting - professional designers will make several versions and iterations of everything, each screen and each component on that screen. And then pick the best one. The Dribbble instructor said, the best design is almost never the first one. This is time consuming and tedious if you don't love design but it's how you get the best results.

If you just have a one-off project and don't truly care about improving at design, the simplest option is to hire a contractor. UI/UX is not something you learn in a weekend and then you're good to go, it's more like learning a language or an instrument in that you're either going to invest a lot of time to learn it well or you're going to suck. It's pretty affordable to hire-out because it's mostly up-front work.

Hiring contractors and spending for classes is the expensive route but spending money can expedite the process. But, there's lots of free resources if you're broke. The single most important thing is design a lot, and pay attention to other people's designs and what they're doing.

A pitch deck is something you make for investors. I'm not talking about investors, I'm talking about customers.

Lots of management consultants can make a pitch deck. Very few can actually find people willing to pay for an MVP of a software product.

That was pretty much the point of my post. Most "business" guys are bad at the business side. Making pitch decks and raising funds is not the business side - except in some people's little side-circus. Understanding what customers want and figuring out what's the minimal version that people will pay for is.

You show me a management consultant that actually has 50 people willing to pay for an MVP, and that person can easily have a side startup. In fact, please put me in touch. Very, very few of them can actually do that. And even if they don't have a developer, I imagine an investor would be pretty impressed by that too.

Again, I'm speaking in generalities. If your technology is "turn common trash into gasoline" or "teleports people across contintents safely", then yeah, you don't need many business skills. But if your technology is "a scalable web app", or "I forked stable diffusion and did something cute with it", then the business skills are more critical than the tech skills.

Thanks!

I'm in a similar boat. I'm not lecturing anyone having learned from success but having learned from failure.

I just spent an entire year spent building software products and they almost all failed. I wrote a long retro (too long, not edited, more for myself than for others, but if curious: https://www.billprin.com/notes/one-year-retro ) and the #1 cause of failure I wrote down was not doing enough talking to customers and customer development.

The one project I have that has a tiny bit of recurring revenue was not originally a project I had set out to build. I cold-DMed some people in a Facebook group and pitched a different project, and one guy told me he didn't like what I built but might pay if I built something different in the same space. And that was the only product I have thats worked. Goes to show the obvious - talk to users!

I see a lot of indie hackers talk about "audience building", and my initial read of that the purpose was that if you get a ton of followers on Twitter, then when you launch a product, you have a bunch of people ready to sign up. Increasingly, I'm thinking the much bigger value of audience building is that it's easier to get people to tell you what to build in the first place.

So yeah, customer development is not some magical thing that requires you to be a "business guy" or anything else, but it's hard, it's important, and sounds like we both need to do more of it :)

Technical expertise is very rarely where the core value of a product comes from. If you're really pushing some boundary and just have a better technology product, like original Google or ChatGPT, then sure, tech is your special sauce.

For 99% of software businesses, the tech can cause the business to fail but its almost never what makes the business succeed. Things like customer development and sales are actually far more important.

Its hard to build a well-architected web app that scales, but theres many people who can do a reasonable job at it. But translating that to business value is much harder.

Theres many people can build a React project in a week, fewer who know how to turn that React project into money. That should be self-evident on a site full of people who know how to make a React app, but begrudglingly work for others because they dont know how to turn a React app into money.

The thing about "the business guys" is most of them are actually pretty bad at the business side. And a lot of developers are actually better at the business side, because they have more relevant experience.

The "business guys" get their MBA and learn about merges and acquisitions for billion dollar business and do case studies about how GM optimizes their supply chain, information that's useful in some contexts but mostly entirely useless when it comes to getting your first 100 paying customers for your SaaS.

The developer is actually more likely to have the relevant business skills since they're more likely to have put some sort of SaaS on the internet and tried to get users for it, even if they failed.

I was on YC cofounder matchmaking for a while and was inundated with "business guys" who were just bad at the business side. It didn't bug me that they were non-technical, but their non-technical nature led to some bad business planning. For example, one guy who worked in VC wanted to make a GMail / Superhuman competitor oriented towards VCs. I suggested we start with a Chrome extension for Gmail, he insisted we build an entirely new email stack from scratch for the MVP.

Making a realistic plan is part of making a business plan and his lack of technical acumen made him bad at business.

If someone came to me and said, hey I have a super pared down MVP, it's just 4 screens in Figma with a minimal data model, and I have 100 people who I showed the Figma screens to and they signed up to pay $50 a month, can you build it ? I'd be thrilled to pair up with a "business guy" like that but they are far more rare than a good tech co-founder and the business types that get that far tend to offer things like "founding engineer" instead of actual co-founder because they, somewhat fairly, assume that the skills you're bringing to the table aren't actually that difficult to find.

But to recap, my high level point is that the technical expertise is not really the money printer. The money printer is mapping market demand to technical products, which is a business skill. And that business skill is worth a lot more than technical skills. Its just a type of business skill that you find more often in developers than you do in MBA, and so we don't associate it with "business guys". But it's the most fundamental of all skills to make money from software, other than a handful of "exceptions that prove the rule".

If you’re required to install software on your phone for work then your employer should be legally required to pay for your phone. And then if you want your own phone you pay for it yourself. And if your employers IT team lets corporate devices get malware that’s on them. This is a weird edge case to get hung up on.

You’re making a very simple issue way more complicated than it needs to be. Having Apple spin out EU specific new corporate entities with unclear relationships to its parent company sounds extremely complex.

Requiring Apple to allow people to install apps they want on their own device is pretty simple and should be a fundamental expectation of a free society.

If normal user wants the walled garden Apple experience, that’s fine. Make it unintuitive to install third party apps. Require checking a big red disclaimer that you might brick your phone. But just have some sort of path where if party A made an app and party B wants it on the device they paid a lot of money for, they can do that without some unqualified drone in Cupertino blocking it .

Countless examples of the App Store review being broken , and just on principle, Apple has what’s effectively a monopoly on mobile phones in that you can’t make a mobile app and ignore iPhone and for them to unilaterally decide all software that’s allowed is way too much power.

Somehow Microsoft went to the Supreme Court for putting IE on the desktop but Apple is off the hook for a complete lockdown. At least you could download Netscape on Windows 95! What Apple is doing is like if AOL and AOL keywords became the only entry point to the web. Then you go on Hacker News and people say that’s s good thing because AOL only allows quality websites and otherwise people make malware and scam websites. It doesn’t matter, it’s too much power for one company and mobile phones are more critical to society in 2023 than the web was in the 90s. Mobile phones are not appliances.

It’s still unfathomable to me this is even a conversation on this website. Apples complete lockdown of the most important computing devices is plainly bad for consumers and society.

Well, there's obvious problems with online, starting with that it's technically illegal and unregulated in most US states, which is a pretty big one. Secondly, the rise of solvers and other AI have greatly increased the risk of your opponents using them to beat you (RTA aka real-time assistance). Besides that, many other forms of software assistance such as HUDs and database datamining were pretty much always accepted so if you don't want to do those things you're at a disadvantage. There's also serious risk of collusion , team play, card sharing, doubly so on unregulated sites.

It's hard to overstate the difference in skill between online and live. You see VERY weak players buying into games with $5k stacks live while online games with $200 buyins are considered very tough. Even regular players in high stakes live games make surprisingly fundamental mistakes, like checking back extremely strong hands on the river rather than betting them for value, or almost never bluffing.

I would say that if someone plays poker 20+ hours a week and has a losing year live they are also probably just a losing player. I'm friends with many live poker pros, and I've never heard of any of them having losing years. Obviously they pick games they know they can beat and mostly stick to them.

Tournament variance is extremely high and I think being a live tournament pro is unnecessarily risky unless you sell / swap action which most pros do. Or pray you run good and win one. But cash is a safer bet.

As far as spending all your time in a casino in order to make a living, that's basically the equivalent of spending all your time in an office, it's a job and you go to it. It certainly can be grindy. I understand it's not for everyone. But it's not super far removed from many other in-person jobs. And as others have said, it can actually be nicer than staring at a screen 10 hours a day, especially staring at a screen to play poker, because it has the social aspect with the other players and the dealers, the tactile aspect of the chips and the cards, etc.

I'm not advocating for anyone to become a live poker pro, certainly I'm sharing my project on hacker news with the hope that some "serious recreational" players take interest in it since very few poker pros lurk here. Most people should not play pro poker for various reasons - on Hacker News the obvious one being they can almost certainly make more money and easier money with plain software engineering, software engineering is generally more intellectually engaging, and also most people aren't mentally equipped to deal with the swings.

I'm mostly doing it currently because it's a niche that I understand well having done it in the past, and I wanted to do an indie software project and "make money playing poker to reduce my burn rate while building a poker blog and training app" has a natural synergy to it as an entry point into bootstrapped software entrepreneurship. Plus so far its my best received project, has a small but growing audience and respectable retention on the app despite it being an MVP.

Moreso than advocating people become live poker pros, I'm just noting that basically anyone who wants to can win a bunch of money at poker, if they're willing to study the massive amount of resources that exist now. Those resources always existed but the advent of solvers has changed those resources from "these are very good heuristics beating the games" to "this is the solution to the game under certain constraints".

Based on experience talking to "hacker news" type people, they tend to be introverted and so would strongly prefer the nature of online poker rather than casino poker, but I would again warn people that online games are both far tougher and require a lot of extra tooling and precautions that aren't necessary in a casino game.

Plus, at some point, in live poker, you get to put all the solver nonsense away and just look a man in the eye and decide if he's bluffing you or not :)

Poker is one of America's favorite past time and many losing players enjoy the act of going to a cardroom and playing with others. We've often bemonaed the lack of "third places" like churches and the ensuing rise of loneliness, and cardrooms can serve as one of these third places.

I find it interesting that professional poker players are frequently criticized for this but I've never seen someone criticize a casino dealer or other employee for this.

Live poker is still quite soft. While you do have to be better compared to years past, it's also far easier to get better because you can study solvers. I used to be a "good but not great" online player, but the extent to which you could truly understand hands was limited due to the limitations of the software at the time (mostly equity calculators that could not truly calculate EV). That changed with the release of Piosolver in 2015 that lets you calculate the EV of various strategies and give you the "correct" answer assuming various assumptions. Those assumptions are always wrong but it's still informative in the "all models are wrong, some are useful". I used to "plateau" in my undertsanding of the game but you no longer plateau because the game can now be understood at a more complete level.

Live poker will always be soft because there will always be plenty of people there to have fun and gamble no matter how much software exists. Furthermore, only a slim minority of players even actively trying to win actually put serious effort into studying (see also, dan luu's post on how it's relatively easy to reach the top 5% of any endeavour, even if very difficult to reach the top 1%).

I can't help but use the opportunity of poker on the front page of Hacker News to note that I have a strategy blog and training app on this exact topic:

www.livepokertheory.com

There's a lot of beginner to advanced strategy articles on applying practical solver outputs to live poker games as well as a preflop training based on solver generated preflop charts. Poker is currently my only significant source of income and I "eat my own dogfood" on this site so I'm very incentivized for it to be good!

Maybe? Not super up to date on that to be honest, split between too many projects already :)

Yet multiple times I’ve seen people on this site defend Apples approval process as a good thing since they get such a great curated experience as a consumer. But here’s the thing - you don’t know what you’re missing because you never see it. If this persons idea was for iPhone instead of macOS it would never benefit those thousands of users that it did.

And - I’m going to put this bluntly while trying not to be too rude - Apple does not assign the best of the best to their App Store approval process. The experience is rife with reviewers who seem to have never looked at your app and are incapable of communicating in English outside the scope of auto form responses. Imagine the worst call center experience you’ve ever had as a customer - now you get that experience after having put hundreds or thousands of hours into a project and in some cases , a business of yours. And your concerns are a speck of dust to this trillion dollar company.

And let’s be real - you can’t seriously make a mobile app and ignore iPhones. It’s not a pure monopoly but they effectively have the leverage of one.

It’s unimaginable to me that on a site called hacker news I would see support for such incredibly antagonistic behavior towards developers that Apple exhibits but unfortunately I have multiple times so I hope this persons brilliant keyboard app that has helped so many people serves as one of the many many examples as to how Apples broken App Store process hurts developers and hurts consumers and benefits absolutely nobody.

I haven’t even touched upon the fact that you have to pay $99/year and THIRTY percent of revenue for the privilege of this experience.

The simple solution is a legal mandate to allow third party app stores. It’s fine if Apple wants the official rails to be highly curated but there simply must be an off-ramp.

We are so lucky that European regulators have some sense here.

I am a strong believer in spaced repetition. My current primary focus is building a spaced repetition platform for learning poker solver solutions with the aim of winning money at live poker games ( www.livepokertheory.com ) . The motivation for the project is just to work on an indie hacker project that self-funds itself since I use my own tool to make money. My app is not based on Anki since , besides wanting to independently monetize my work , I also wanted to build a poker-centric UX for it.

Now, within the poker community there is an idea that “GTO robots” (players who memorize game-theory equilibrium solutions produced by solver software) are inferior to intuitive players who exploit their opponents mistakes rather than play an equilibrium strategy which is suboptimal vs a non optimal opponent. For example, a GTO strategy will bluff very aggressively which is not good against opponents that never or rarely fold. Especially GTO play is criticized in live games where there is other info such as opponent “tells” such as shaking hands when making bets.

But it’s a false dichotomy as I believe studying equilibrium gives you a strong baseline understanding of the mechanics and in live play you can still listen to your gut and make adjustments.

The OP talks about math and I’m talking about poker but I’ve seen this concept discussed in a few other places. Basically, some education systems way overindex on rote memorization. And just rote memorization is a really bad way to learn and understand since you miss high level reasoning, problem solving, and abstraction. But some rote memorization can be good as a foundation for abstraction. I’ve seen some studies suggest people who can do arithmetic and basic algebra more quickly can do higher level proofs more effectively. They are less “bogged down” with low level mechanics when doing higher level thinking. Musicians who want to creatively and improvisationally “jam out” might still drill scales to build that low level technique to unlock the high level creativity on top of it.

And within learning and memorization, spaces repetition works really well. It matches something with our brain chemistry to review mostly new stuff but occasionally review old stuff that might be fading, it’s the right mix of novelty and preventing forgetting. Anki is heavily associated with flash cards for language learning Vocab and MCAT test prep so nice to see some others exploring it’s possibilities outside of that.

I have a 2 year old daughter and even though I intuitively know it's important to set a good example, I've already been shocked to the extent this is true.

My daughter loves grabbing our phones and watching whatever she can pull up on them, dialing people. If you take it away she gets upset. At first I was thinking, wow phones are very addictive on a primal level, she's addicted to just the flashy screens.

I think the flashy screen being tempting might be a little true, but then I came to a different conclusion about why she was so fascinated with the phone.

I noticed she also "changes" her stuffed animals diaper including pretending to apply rash cream, pretends to read books laying around she's seen me read, fidgets with the same household items she's seen me fidget with. That's when I realized what may be obvious to people experienced with kids - they constantly imitate the adults in their lives.

So my daughter was probably obsessed with staring at a phone because she saw her parents obsessed with staring at their phones and wanted to imitate them.

Of course this may be more relevant for very young kids moreso than teenagers, where the smart phone addictions work at a higher more cognitive level. But it did drill home the message that our children can be a reflection of ourselves so if you want to improve their lives, improve your own.

Thanks for the kind words and the heads up on the broken link.

I think Next has a great DevEx, but I'm just using it for some projects as a solo dev without a ton of traffic so perhaps there's some rough corners I haven't experienced yet.

I do think they are going down some risky paths where they do things like rewrite your code files depending on whether you're on server or client, and in general with "framework-defined infrastructure" where if you write certain functions the framework "knows" that it's supposed to be on the server or in a background job or whatever. But so far I've gotten the benefits without the drawbacks, though I might be jynxing myself.

I built a website that was super simple using server side rendering using Django. Then I got a bunch of feature requests that made it less simple and the client-side javascript started getting crazy spaghetti code.

I actually somewhat knew React before this project but besides not wanting to overcomplicate things I was hesitant because I didn't like pure client-side rendering. Then I learned NextJS makes it easy to mix/match client-side rendering and server-side rendering so I just switched to that.

So now, even for a simple website, I'll probably start with React because I don't want to dig myself into a needless hole.

I wrote about the experience here:

https://www.billprin.com/articles/why-i-ditched-django-for-n...

And yes that post upset some people who thought I should use htmx, but React is actually pretty easy and simple. Now most of my websites are React because I know it so it's easy and simple to use what you're used to.

Also, "I did it in React because that's the way it's done" isn't the worst reason because you benefit from that popularity, e.g. some library you need will have clear examples of integrating with React.

I think the frontend and JS community have certainly gone off some crazy rails at points, but I also think there's a popular sentiment on HN exaggerating how off-the-rails things have gone, usually expressed by people who don't actually develop many modern-looking websites. Most of the trends have gotten popular for somewhat rational reasons, and even that stuff that has gotten a little crazy like an explosion in dependencies, is really just about tradeoffs e.g. lots of dependencies cause lots of problems but also enable code re-use so it has pros and cons.

Not a successful self-funded entrepreneur but Im working on it and I’ve studied a lot of the greats.

DHH and Jason Fried blog and books like Rework

Arvid Kahl is a successful software bootstrapper and has a few great books and a bootstrapper newsletter

Everything by Rob Walling is focused on software bootstrappers, and his associates brands / YouTube channel, Microconf community etc

Indie Hackers podcast , interviews, and website

Founders at Work is written by a YC founder but ironically had lots of bootstrapped interviews like Craigslist and Joel Spolsky (Trello)

Patio11 blog is classic

MJ Demarco is non tech and writes more “motivational” style books about bootstrapped entrepreneurship

Once you go down this rabbit hole you’ll discover many more . Especially since bootstrappers love making content about their experiences as it’s marketing and potentially more revenue (what DHH calls “selling your byproducts”)

Thanks for sharing.

I think the #1 thing most bootstrappers struggle with is finding the right market, idea, validation etc. As much as people say “ideas are overrated” I increasingly think that’s not true, it’s that a good idea has to include things like “can realistically get done by a self-funded tiny team and make revenue soon” which the “idea guys” rarely have.

As far as not coding too much, I’m increasingly finding this true. One thing I’ve noticed is that most non tech founders outsource development and most technical founders don’t even though technical founders can outsource far more efficiently since they can play more of a “tech lead” role rather than hand it to a dev shop. I really regret not hiring designers sooner since I’m bad at it and there’s tons of affordable talented designers on Upwork.

Still, hiring is a little nerve wracking since it eats into your runway. It’s really tough to know when to burn money or time when you have minimal or no revenue. After PMF , hiring makes sense but before then it’s really ambiguous how to make that call.

I really enjoy the concept of unknown knowns, but I don’t agree with your example, which is an unknown unknown.

To me the corporate version of the unknown known is when a a project is certainly doomed, for reasons everyone on the ground knows about, yet nobody wants to say anything and be the messenger that inevitably gets killed, as long as paycheck keeps clearing. An exec ten thousand feet from the ground sets a “vision” which can’t be blown off course by minor details such as reality, until the day it does.

Theranos is a famous example of this but I’ve had less extreme versions happen to me many times throughout my career.

Another example of unknown knowns might be the conflict between companies stated values (Focus on the User) and the unstated values that are often much more important (Make Lots of Money)

My hypothesis is not that people are spoiled but psychologically anchored.

We buy thousands of items and for most people it’s impossible to know how much something “should” cost. So we anchor our expectations to what we know.

Web software was mostly free for years because it was either ad-supported or a speculative venture capital investment. Or a dev releasing it for free thinking that “if we get lots of users we can raise money and figure out monetization later”. The Social Network came out in 2009 and there’s a scene where Zuckerberg was made to look like a genius for rejecting monetization. People who wanted to be like Zuckerberg made stuff for free then hoped to raise money. Finally add in many developers made software for free for personal or ideological reasons.

The end result is that consumers are psychologically anchored to expect that web software “should” be free, an app “should” cost $1 at most, etc It’s not really about the $10 as much as people don’t like feeling ripped off and paying $10 for something that should cost nothing makes them feel ripped off.

An experience is burned into my brain when a friend who was an aspiring yoga teacher was doing a Twitch stream for 10k viewers as part of an online festival but at the last moment needed to stream to Twitch from his iPhone. There was an app that worked perfectly that cost $15 but he almost sabotaged his whole show frantically searching the App Store for a free alternative because $15 was a ripoff. He caved eventually and unhappily, then to celebrate the stream led friends and family to a sushi restaurant that was $200/person . It was never about his inability to afford $15 but his psychological feeling that a $15 app is a ripoff. But fancy sushi “should” be expensive so $200 is a fair price.

We are very slowly seeing this change as interest rates rise and everyone understands software monetization better but it’s a gradual process. For whatever reason it’s often devs themselves who push back the hardest against monetization, in their warped world view someone charging $10/mo for a SaaS is deeply unethical but going to work for some FAANG company and fighting hard to maximize TC is completely fine and in fact encouraged. That way your boss worries about monetization and you are free of any moral qualms about it. FAANG devs complaining about subscriptions, privacy , and paywalls are quite common and similar to vegetarians who only eat beef and pork but avoid eating cows or pigs.

I don’t work in crypto but I read a ton of tech blogs and this guy:

https://cmichel.io/

Seems legit and claims to have made one million in 14 months in bug bounties, although he was #1 on some leaderboard. Based on his blog I think he’s probably one of the best in the world at smart contract security so it’s probably not a realistic goal for most people , but assuming the blogger is honest I think you underestimate the potential for top white hats. Certainly the big black hat hacks are far bigger money but a million is nothing to sneeze at especially for no legal or moral risk.

Especially since 2015 when public nash solvers became available that calculate equilibrium strategies across the whole game tree (previously they only did preflop)

I have a blog dedicated to the topic

www.livepokertheory.com

I would stop short of saying it’s more math or more complex than chess though . The math to code a solver is hard but using one to improve at the game is easy. Most top poker pros are not mathematicians nor do they need to be. Poker is also many mixed strategies so often it doesn’t even matter what you do as long as you don’t always do the same thing

But yes it’s both a skill game and a gambling game and currently my primary source of income

My anecdotal experience agrees that blog posts with promotions are better than "here's my product" , on average. Though you can just do both.

I've front paged Hacker News a few times and I've recently had a lot of success promoting a product on Reddit.

Often times I see boostrappers hype up Twitter as a marketing channel and lament that Reddit / Hacker News is impossible since it's a lottery to get upvotes, mods take stuff down, and users are hostile to promotion. While there's some truth to that, I think these people don't "get" these upvote platforms.

If you drive-by and drop off a link to a product, it'll probably get lost. If you write something really interesting then leave a promotional message at the end, it'll probably work fine. On sites like Reddit specifically, it's better to put more content in the post rather than link out (sucks for your site's SEO but much more likely to get upvoted).

There's definitely some luck to Hacker News but cream also does tend to rise to the top and you're allowed to re-submit.

It's annoying that there's a subset of HN and Reddit that think that anyone trying to make a dime on the internet is somehow sub-human, but they are a minority . I followed my strategy with a a Reddit post recently and the person complaining about my promotion of a paid product at the end got 13 downvotes ( https://www.reddit.com/r/poker/comments/13wt05l/lsg_hanks_ri... ) . Because people liked the content so will forgive a promotion if there's some value add.

Ultimately people value being entertained and value learning useful information. So if you can do one of those two things, they will probably forgive a product shoutout.

Funny thing is I really struggle with Twitter and have the "tweeting into a void" problem but Reddit / HN seem to come more naturally to me. Though I'm guessing the secret is another variation of "be more entertaining or more informative".

But you can also try different stuff, you can do a Show HN and a blog post.

There's one last really important thing I don't see mention on Max Woolf's Hacker News undocumented. If you submit your own blog too many times without enough upvotes, you will get auto-flagged. So make sure you submit some random other stuff you find interesting to please the algorithm gods. But that goes back to "act like a regular member of the community and the community will forgive some self-promotion".

More thought out blog posts:

billprin.com/articles

Weekly updates, rants:

billprin.com/notes

Been off and on with blogging but next half of 2023 really committing to at least posting more monthly retrospectives and hopefully more articles .

In the past I've written more technical articles but going forward I'll be writing more articles about boostrapping , indie hacking, and software entrepeneurship which I am full time focused on

My most popular Hacker News posts were

Simplest App That Makes Money : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34101016 (213 points, 94 comments) - post about making simple and monetizable apps as an indie hacking starting point

Real Problems That Web3 Solves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29797310 (168 points, 305 comments) - arguing that there are some valid use cases that ethereum enables

Both of those articles were somewhat controversial and I am no longer working on the first app in question nor anything in crypto. The controversy of both posts was a small factor in me deciding to focus on other things. But I guess controversy gets views since they are by far my most popular posts. But going forward hoping to get the views without the controversy by just posting useful stuff (although even then, I thought my Django vs NextJS post was as tame as it gets and I got a shocking amount of hate mail for that one).

daniel vassallo's small bets (costs a bit to join)