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Things I’ve Learned from Reading IndieHackers

611 points by scribu 9y ago

Oras 9y ago
Nice article, I would add: 1. "Be patient" as success does not appear overnight. 2. "Don't be afraid to fail". It's hard to get it right from first time. I guess second point is covered in ship,ship,SHIP :)
- corobo 9y ago
  I think "ship ship ship" should be the title. Name of the website even if you really wanted to make a point. All of my business ventures so far have failed due to a noted lack of actually shipping anything.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  Indeed. A remarkable number of overnight successes take ten years to reach that night. (Apologies for the absence of credit; this isn't original, but I can't remember where I first saw it.)
noxToken 9y ago
I've always wondered what the advice would look like if you compiled a list of what not to do from failed companies. TFA is a list of the successful ones who got it right, so we know what they did to make it. Yet I'm sure many people follow this advice and still fail. You can find wildly varying statistics, but somewhere between 50% and 90% of startups will fail within 2 years. What did those companies do (or failed to do) that made them close up shop?
- ihaveajob 9y ago
  Virtually all of them ran out of money because they didn't have enough customers to cover their expenses. It seems silly but if you put it in basic terms, this usually maps to something very concrete in your domain.
  - collyw 9y ago
    I guess thats similar to saying all deaths occur by hypoxia. What caused that to happen it is usually the part we are interested in.
  - rhizome 9y ago
    if you put it in basic terms, this usually maps to something very concrete in your domain. For those of us who didn't go to college, can you translate "maps to something very concrete in your domain" into concrete terms? It's pretty abstract.
    - yathern 9y ago
      It means that in the area in which a (failed) business tried to operate, the failure can be more specific than "couldn't cover expenses". For example, a shoe company that makes very cheap shoes. Costs 5 dollars to make, sells them for 10 dollars. They have basic operating expenses of 50 dollars a day. They need to sell 10 shoes a day to stay in business by the skin of their teeth. If they don't, they 'failed to attract enough customers to cover expenses'. But they could have a more specific view: 1) We didn't have any advertising since we were operating on a shoestring (hehe) budget - losing customers 2) Our low prices actually made us seem like a low quality entry in the market, and hurt our sales. 3) We could have invested more into our production line to reduce recurrent costs. Or any number of things. But it ultimately comes down to "we didn't have enough money"
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  Agreed. I know plenty of people including myself who tried to start something and didn't go anywhere despite putting in a lot of time and effort. It would be good to look at what the failed attempts did vs the ones that succeeded. Personally I think there is a lot of luck involved (right time, right place, meet the right people) but maybe with enough data one could find lessons for how to do better.
- andyjohnson0 9y ago
  > TFA is a list of the successful ones who got it right, so we know what they did to make it. Beware survivor bias. They may not have succeeded due to what they did (or say they did).
  - noxToken 9y ago
    Which is exactly why I posted this! We know what the survivors did. We get their interviews all of the time. Did the failures follow the same path and fail? Did they fail to follow some golden rule? How much of startup culture can be distilled down to follow some given advice versus some dumb luck?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- collyw 9y ago
  Maybe they followed the advice given by those that did succeed. Would be interesting to see.
- taneq 9y ago
  Kind of like that old story about the war planes needing armour in the places where returning planes hadn't been shot.
  - owebmaster 9y ago
    This is genius. Where does this old story come from? Never heard it. EDIT: thanks for the answers! This analogy is pretty good for simple cases (improvement on planes' armor). But if you optimize only this variable, your war plane will be heavier and you'll have a lot of other problems and fail, too.
    - fhood 9y ago
      World War II I think? Found it, the guys name was Abraham Wald.
    - noxToken 9y ago
      Fourth paragraph in the entry about Wald[0]. 7th paragraph in the entry about Ops Research[1]. I'm sure that there are more in-depth stories about this on the web. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald#Life_and_career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald#Life_and_career [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research#Second_World_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research#Second_Wor...
    - bluejekyll 9y ago
      https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/01/21/selection-bias-and-bombers/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/01/21/selection-bias-and...
    - chasely 9y ago
      You've already received the right responses (Abraham Wald), but this is my favorite excerpt/article about it [1]. [1] https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-be-wrong-by-jordan-ellenberg-664e708cfc3d https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-...
      - 9y ago
- owebmaster 9y ago
  Things you do to achieve success are limited, but to fail aren't.
- shubhamjain 9y ago
  Startup success is Anna Karenina Principle[1] flipped. I wrote about it some time back[2]. Every startup dies either because it failed to build something that people would want to pay for, or failed to create a profitable business around it (or, maybe the founders just got burned out). Successful businesses, on the other hand, find their own path to make it to the top. That doesn't mean you can't learn from articles and books, but it takes plenty of learnings and failures of your own to 'get' it. That's why it's important to keep shipping and trying. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle [2]: https://shubhamjain.co/2017/05/12/contradictory-startup-advice/ https://shubhamjain.co/2017/05/12/contradictory-startup-advi...
  - danieltillett 9y ago
    We are obviously thinking along the same lines :)
    - shubhamjain 9y ago
      Quite a bit of coincidence. Unfortunately, our conclusions are poles apart.
      - danieltillett 9y ago
        Yes that is an interesting point. While on some level I agree with you (in the same way all people die from lack of oxygen to the brain stem), the path that failed startups take to get to the point of failure is very diverse. Every time I think I have seen every possible way for a startup to fail I am surprised with something new. If I was going to go with your thesis, the common thread of failure is to be found very early - people are working on startups that just will never be successful because the underlying idea is bad. It is really hard to come up with an idea that can allow the unavoidable mistakes to be made and still succeed.
        shubhamjain 9y ago
        More than anything, it proves that you can use quotes and statistics in a manner to confirm your own biases. :) The decision tree has far too many branches to predict where the starting point will lead you but my point was, even when the recipe of successful startup (build something people want, talk to people, start small ... etc) sounds so obvious, the process of accomplishing it is anything but obvious.
- danieltillett 9y ago
  I can’t add anything concrete, but anecdotally the reasons I have personally seen are very diverse. To misquote Tolstoy all successful startups are all alike; every failed startup is a failure in its own way.
  - sah2ed 9y ago
    Peter Thiel's version: "All happy companies are different, all unhappy companies are alike (in that they failed to escape "sameness" or competition).
- mi100hael 9y ago
  I think it would be less insightful than you think to hear from failed companies. I wouldn't be surprised if 50%-90% of startups begin life as side-projects and the founder(s) get lazy and decide to fold before even really attempting to get off the ground. Out of the remaining startups that either succeed or fail after substantial effort, I'd be most of the failures can be attributed to rather mundane, predictable circumstances (most of which are mentioned in TFA): - Building a product or features no one wants - Taking too long to ship and offering a discounted beta in the meantime - Wasting time & resources on non-revenue tasks because "business"
deleted 9y ago
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rb808 9y ago
Yeah this is the best for me: > Ship. Ship. SHIP. The overwhelming failure case among people who read interviews like this one is that they spend 98 units of effort reading about running a business for every 2 units of effort running a business. Flip that on its head. I wonder how many successful entrepreneurs actually spent time reading advice blogs when they were starting.
- kfriede 9y ago
  Not yet successful, but I recently launched a product that I'm sure wouldn't be launched yet if I hadn't read the recommendation to ship early.
  - tertius 9y ago
    It's all about proportion :)
- lettergram 9y ago
  It's interesting. I can't stand reading about startups, advice, etc. I regularly watch my friends, people on HN or Reddit fall into the folly of discussing different strategies or trying to create the "perfect team" or "perfect business" prior to launch. I create products regularly, and many of them make a profit (not a ton yet, but all growing). My consumer facing apps include https://easy-a.net/ https://easy-a.net/ or https://projectpiglet.com/ https://projectpiglet.com/ both are (clearly) boot strapped together, but I launched as soon as I had anything resembling a product. What I will caution is that I did wait to launch the products until they were stable and easy enough to use. Sure, they don't look pretty, but it works. I think advice (blogs or otherwise) are one of the largest hurdles an entrepreneur has to over come. Starting a business isn't about other people, it's about yourself and your business. Even going through things like YC's Startup School can be a detriment, because they fixate so heavily on various components of the business. Often, you just have to tune it out and do what's right. In this case, that's building something, speaking to customers, and improving. Ironically, I think even this article is the same rehash of the 30 other stories I've seen (assuming the quote you took is from the article, as I didn't read it). That being said, I do see value in interaction. Which is why I post comments like these on HN or discuss an idea. It's generated tons of leads and that is much more valuable.
zapperdapper 9y ago
All good advice, but I'm going to propose something that may be a bit contrary to current wisdom: if you really want a decent lifestyle/work-life balance don't start a business! So what's the alternative? Go contracting. Reduce your expenses to the bone, and limit the contracts you do. I now only take 3 month contracts and I do one a year. I make about £24K from that - I know many developers making double my rate. That £24K is more than double my expenses though. If there's a 6 month contract I really like the look of I will do it (especially if it's remote working) - but then I'll take at least a year off. The great thing about a contract is you go in, do your thing, get out. Job done. No stress. No worry. No customers giving you grief and wanting their money back. No infrastructure going down with admin alerts at 3.00am. No hassle. I don't even have my own limited company. I use an umbrella company and while not as tax efficient I have no dealing with accountants, HMRC, tax returns and all that nonsense. I think there are many good reasons to start a 'lifestyle' business. I'm just not convinced it's the way to go if work-life balance is what you are looking for.
- Dayshine 9y ago
  How did you get started with contracting? And do you find yourself having to commute a lot? I haven't found a huge number of jobs near each other in the UK outside of London.
  - zapperdapper 9y ago
    Good question. The company I was working for at the time went bust - I'd been with them about 7 years. I just searched online for contracts (I'm actually a tech writer, not a developer, but have coding skills - there are a lot more contracts out there for coders compared to writers). My very first contract was with a wonderful web company in London. Anyway, as to the commuting. Yes - you are right - it's a total pain in the bum. Sometimes if the gig is a long way away I will stay up in cheap B&B. It depends. But - you can put up almost anything for three months right? That's the beauty of it. You know the pain will end - you know the exact day. The commuting is soon forgotten when you are heading out to a wreck dive by boat in the Philippines. :)
- bubbleRefuge 9y ago
jacobrobbins 9y ago
this is a great resource, a lot more stuff in here than a typical blog post
soneca 9y ago
I believe this list is missing what I consider to be the most important factor for success, an underlying strength that the most successful business I read on IndieHackers (and elsewhere) have that is systematically underestimated as a reason for success: previously acquired audience. I believe audience is the most important currency in today's world, especially for digital products. Audience may be followers on Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, etc. Audience may be an email list. Audience may be traditional networking (as if you are in a B2B niche business). If you do not have audience, you can buy one with ads (even so it is easier said than done); or you can borrow the audience from someone else, an influencer (I know there are ways to pay for influencer's audiences, but I do not believe it is very effective, to get some influencer to legitimately love your product and act as your referrer seems to me to be more effective, if harder). Or you can borrow the audience from something else, like HN, Reddit, PH. All of the steps of launching and building a business, especially the very first ones are enormously easier if you have an audience. And enormously - some times impossibly - harder if you do not have one. This is derived from the adage that your first idea is always wrong. You have to learn everything by shipping early and talking to customers, but if you ship early to 20 eyeballs and talks to luckily one or two potential users, this feedback loop just doesn't count. But if you launch to thousands to eyeballs, even if you are making the mistake of no shipping early or not focused on talking to customers, you will receive unsolicited feedback from some of them. And a previously built audience of people who trust you at a basic level will be much more responsive and engaged in rationalizing and vocalizing their opinions about your product. They will be "early adopters" type (hard to get that when you buy an audience). And they also will (likely) be people that are your target audience (hard to get that when you borrow an audience from HN and similar). Some of the most impressive successful business in IndieHackers (according to my own criteria) are the ones who had years of building an audience. Through foruns, email lists, blogs. A genuine audience is hard to plan ahead. Does not seem plausible to have the vision, the will, and the diligence to think about the industry/niche where I want to launch a business years ahead. So it is good to launch a business where you have genuine passion, somehow you will have the network (even so, not necessarily a large audience). If you are in that position of having a large audience, seriously consider launching a business because you have a very big unfair advantage (and follow all the advice on this list). If you are not, pay a lot of attention on how to reach your target audience. It is a very tough problem to crack.
dahoramanodoceu 9y ago
I work one hour a morning. W00t!
- dahoramanodoceu 9y ago
  Actually I should rephrase thatand say, the way I make money, my profession, takes up 3 hours of my day, counting commute time. I can live off that money. The rest of the time I just do what I want, which is what I generally consider to be 'the work.'
  - yeahsure 9y ago
    Your comment would add more value if you actually explained what you do and something related to the link. Right now I only know someone, somewhere, can work for 3 hours a day and play for the rest of time.
  - anotheryou 9y ago
    so what do you do? I want a piece of that cake :)
donmatito 9y ago
What I find interesting with Indie Hackers is that it covers a wide range a personal/business situations. It goes from real lifestyle business, to beer-money-making side-projects. I feel that there is a world of difference between a side-project that is free, to one where you ask customers for their credit cards. Of all professional experiences, I have never learnt as much as I did taking a side-project idea from idea to MVP, then to beta users, then to paying customers, scaling server issues, and marketing strategies. It's not so much about the money, than the fact that you learn so much on so many dimensions. Sincere thanks + shameless plug, the interview about Smooz was fun, a good self-reflection exercise, and a good source of traffic too (https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/smooz https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/smooz)
- tixocloud 9y ago
  Thanks for sharing your story as it resonates deeply with me, especially the family life part of things. The idea is also pretty good as well. I'm also curious about your direct sales efforts and what happened there that made it not so successful? I have my assumptions but I'd love to hear your side of things.
  - donmatito 9y ago
    Well, direct sales is a bit difficult because my core target is "Agencies that use Slack, of which clients use Slack". So I need to convince a layer of users (let say 10% conversion) and they have to convince another layer (10% again) => 1% conversion rate. What worked was publishing some articles on Medium and optimizing a bit for SEO, so that the handful of people who actually has the problem, can find me. The Slack app Directory helped quite a bit at first, but I should take better advantage of it now that they have add features. But really, the main growth factor is : almost no churn. People are super satisfied. So even if I don't spend much time finding customers, the very low growth keeps adding up...
    - tixocloud 9y ago
      Yeah, that's an interesting core target and quite pleasantly surprised that agencies themselves are using Slack. I would've guessed that the clients themselves would be the ones who would use Slack and then maybe you can work with agencies on setting Slack up for them like a concierge service of some sort.
ThomPete 9y ago
In other words. Reading about success to become successful is like reading the autobiography of lotterywinners. There are no secrets to success other than luck, timing and actually shipping your product (or play the lottery). Contrary to the lottery though much fewer people ship and there are much more winning lottery coupons. There is nothing to learn about how to build a successful product. If you want to read anything read about specific obstacles you get into. Great read!
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- cmahler7 9y ago
  How is a business anything like the lottery? Thousands of decisions over years vs 1 random event. Domain knowledge obviously plays a role as well, if you can't code you're going to have a hard time making software. There's a lot of money to be made in AI right, the timing is good but it doesn't matter if you don't know anything about it. By your logic some random guy off the street would have the same chances of building a successful business as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.
  - open_bear 9y ago
    Survivorship bias: because for every Steve Jobs and Bill Gates there are millions of folks, whose business ended without any success (something like 80% of businesses close during the first year).
    - cmahler7 9y ago
      That's my point, 80% of entrepreneurs can't make it one year, so what are the odds of Steve Jobs starting multiple multi-billion dollar companies over multiple decades, with tens of thousands of decisions, through pure luck? You're saying that skill and knowledge play no part in success. A mentally handicapped person would have as good a chance at success as Steve Jobs by your logic, because it's all luck.
Silhouette 9y ago
A lot of this seems to reflect the consensus among experienced HN posters as well: you have to actually ship something and charge for it, it has to be something people actually want instead of just what you enjoy making, and so on. Arguably much of this is just common sense, but maybe that's just hindsight talking. The only one I strongly disagree with is "raise your prices". While this is common advice on HN as well, I think it should come with a caveat that it mostly applies to B2B businesses. If you're running a B2C business, your customers are spending their own money, and possibly on something that isn't a necessity and isn't immediately going to make or save them a greater amount of money in return. Customers in this situation may well be extremely price-sensitive, and even small adjustments in pricing can have dramatic effects on conversion rates. As a counter-example showing that a big price cut can be effective, look at the way that games suppliers like Steam and GoG run their sales.
tmaly 9y ago
One other thing not mentioned in the article is the community on Indie Hackers. If you are working on a side project, the majority of the people in the forum are there to help you. They have given me great feedback and ideas for my project.
bigtunacan 9y ago
The 4-Hour Workweek is the first book listed and I have heard of it so many times I finally decided to read it. I picked up an old copy from the local library and I'm a little over 1/2 way through. So far I have not been all that impressed. Just in general it seems so light on anything really concrete and more just a motivational book. Where it does have concrete things though they are just really out of date (One example is that they recommend Yahoo Stores where today someone would probably use Shopify or another alternative. Another example is there is a LOT of talk about using magazine ads, but how many people are actually still reading/buying print mags today?). What are other people's thoughts on this particular book, and what about the updates in the latest edition? Has it changed enough to be somewhat current when the realities of today?
- komali2 9y ago
  He specifically recommends niche magazine ads, which then and today will probably get you a print + ad on their site. So like, take an ad out in PCGamer, and get yourself an ad on their website as well, if you're making an indie game. Better yet, find a magazine + website that specifically is about indie gaming. I can't think of a single magazine that doesn't have an accompanying website. EDIT: Might as well include my thoughts on the book. For me, it was the second "success genre" or "self help" style book I had read, the first being How to Win Friends and Influence People. I was about 22 at the time, fresh out of college, living abroad in Taiwan, trying to figure myself out and find myself. Very impactful time, so for me it was a very impactful book. Not so much for anything specific, but because the specifics were there. Here was a guy laying out concrete plans, concrete schedules, to making money. It guided me to how it really was possible to make money on my own, to live the kind of life I wanted to, to work remote etc. It planted a seed that took a long fucking time to grow, but it did grow, and the result is by the time I was 25 I had managed to sneak my way out of my liberal arts degree'd relatively futureless life into software engineering. Now my goals and objectives are framed by that first read - I haven't looked at it since, though I should. In short, it's a great book for those new to the whole concept of working for yourself, creating a life for yourself, stepping outside the "normal boundaries" of life (go to school, get job, poop kids, die). Those on this site reading this may not think it's such a big deal, to those of us here it's pretty normal to step outside the box, but there's a reason I'm here now and this book contributed in a big way to it.
konpikwastaken 9y ago
Heh, something I read earlier on indiehackers made me chuckle. "Honestly, negativity about my business model is more likely to come from a community like Hacker News than it is from my readers."[1] He's not wrong. [1]: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/site-builder-report https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/site-builder-report
deleted 9y ago
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superasn 9y ago
Very interesting post. I think the author can head his own advice and could have hosted it on a domain like startuptools.com or something, because this blog post is going to be backlinked heavily and with a touch of SEO this can be a regular source of targeted traffic. Just add a pdf checklist at the bottom that needs an opt-in (anybody who reads this will have a very conversion rate) and soon you've got a small list. Pitch them the startup tools or whatever you think is best for the list (using affiliate links) and soon you have a site that is making a passive income. It's easier said than done, but creating a passive income is really that easy and if you're doing the effort you may as well reap the rewards.
cbar_tx 9y ago
digital nomadism doesn't mean anything.

611 points by scribu 9y ago

Oras 9y ago

Nice article, I would add: 1. "Be patient" as success does not appear overnight. 2. "Don't be afraid to fail". It's hard to get it right from first time. I guess second point is covered in ship,ship,SHIP :)

corobo 9y ago
I think "ship ship ship" should be the title. Name of the website even if you really wanted to make a point. All of my business ventures so far have failed due to a noted lack of actually shipping anything.
Silhouette 9y ago
Indeed. A remarkable number of overnight successes take ten years to reach that night. (Apologies for the absence of credit; this isn't original, but I can't remember where I first saw it.)

noxToken 9y ago

I've always wondered what the advice would look like if you compiled a list of what not to do from failed companies. TFA is a list of the successful ones who got it right, so we know what they did to make it. Yet I'm sure many people follow this advice and still fail. You can find wildly varying statistics, but somewhere between 50% and 90% of startups will fail within 2 years. What did those companies do (or failed to do) that made them close up shop?

ihaveajob 9y ago
Virtually all of them ran out of money because they didn't have enough customers to cover their expenses. It seems silly but if you put it in basic terms, this usually maps to something very concrete in your domain.
- collyw 9y ago
  I guess thats similar to saying all deaths occur by hypoxia. What caused that to happen it is usually the part we are interested in.
- rhizome 9y ago
  if you put it in basic terms, this usually maps to something very concrete in your domain. For those of us who didn't go to college, can you translate "maps to something very concrete in your domain" into concrete terms? It's pretty abstract.
  - yathern 9y ago
    It means that in the area in which a (failed) business tried to operate, the failure can be more specific than "couldn't cover expenses". For example, a shoe company that makes very cheap shoes. Costs 5 dollars to make, sells them for 10 dollars. They have basic operating expenses of 50 dollars a day. They need to sell 10 shoes a day to stay in business by the skin of their teeth. If they don't, they 'failed to attract enough customers to cover expenses'. But they could have a more specific view: 1) We didn't have any advertising since we were operating on a shoestring (hehe) budget - losing customers 2) Our low prices actually made us seem like a low quality entry in the market, and hurt our sales. 3) We could have invested more into our production line to reduce recurrent costs. Or any number of things. But it ultimately comes down to "we didn't have enough money"
maxxxxx 9y ago
Agreed. I know plenty of people including myself who tried to start something and didn't go anywhere despite putting in a lot of time and effort. It would be good to look at what the failed attempts did vs the ones that succeeded. Personally I think there is a lot of luck involved (right time, right place, meet the right people) but maybe with enough data one could find lessons for how to do better.
andyjohnson0 9y ago
> TFA is a list of the successful ones who got it right, so we know what they did to make it. Beware survivor bias. They may not have succeeded due to what they did (or say they did).
- noxToken 9y ago
  Which is exactly why I posted this! We know what the survivors did. We get their interviews all of the time. Did the failures follow the same path and fail? Did they fail to follow some golden rule? How much of startup culture can be distilled down to follow some given advice versus some dumb luck?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
collyw 9y ago
Maybe they followed the advice given by those that did succeed. Would be interesting to see.
taneq 9y ago
Kind of like that old story about the war planes needing armour in the places where returning planes hadn't been shot.
- owebmaster 9y ago
  This is genius. Where does this old story come from? Never heard it. EDIT: thanks for the answers! This analogy is pretty good for simple cases (improvement on planes' armor). But if you optimize only this variable, your war plane will be heavier and you'll have a lot of other problems and fail, too.
  - fhood 9y ago
    World War II I think? Found it, the guys name was Abraham Wald.
  - noxToken 9y ago
    Fourth paragraph in the entry about Wald[0]. 7th paragraph in the entry about Ops Research[1]. I'm sure that there are more in-depth stories about this on the web. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald#Life_and_career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald#Life_and_career [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research#Second_World_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research#Second_Wor...
  - bluejekyll 9y ago
    https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/01/21/selection-bias-and-bombers/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/01/21/selection-bias-and...
  - chasely 9y ago
    You've already received the right responses (Abraham Wald), but this is my favorite excerpt/article about it [1]. [1] https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-be-wrong-by-jordan-ellenberg-664e708cfc3d https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-...
    - 9y ago
owebmaster 9y ago
Things you do to achieve success are limited, but to fail aren't.
shubhamjain 9y ago
Startup success is Anna Karenina Principle[1] flipped. I wrote about it some time back[2]. Every startup dies either because it failed to build something that people would want to pay for, or failed to create a profitable business around it (or, maybe the founders just got burned out). Successful businesses, on the other hand, find their own path to make it to the top. That doesn't mean you can't learn from articles and books, but it takes plenty of learnings and failures of your own to 'get' it. That's why it's important to keep shipping and trying. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Karenina_principle [2]: https://shubhamjain.co/2017/05/12/contradictory-startup-advice/ https://shubhamjain.co/2017/05/12/contradictory-startup-advi...
- danieltillett 9y ago
  We are obviously thinking along the same lines :)
  - shubhamjain 9y ago
    Quite a bit of coincidence. Unfortunately, our conclusions are poles apart.
    - danieltillett 9y ago
      Yes that is an interesting point. While on some level I agree with you (in the same way all people die from lack of oxygen to the brain stem), the path that failed startups take to get to the point of failure is very diverse. Every time I think I have seen every possible way for a startup to fail I am surprised with something new. If I was going to go with your thesis, the common thread of failure is to be found very early - people are working on startups that just will never be successful because the underlying idea is bad. It is really hard to come up with an idea that can allow the unavoidable mistakes to be made and still succeed.
      - shubhamjain 9y ago
        More than anything, it proves that you can use quotes and statistics in a manner to confirm your own biases. :) The decision tree has far too many branches to predict where the starting point will lead you but my point was, even when the recipe of successful startup (build something people want, talk to people, start small ... etc) sounds so obvious, the process of accomplishing it is anything but obvious.
danieltillett 9y ago
I can’t add anything concrete, but anecdotally the reasons I have personally seen are very diverse. To misquote Tolstoy all successful startups are all alike; every failed startup is a failure in its own way.
- sah2ed 9y ago
  Peter Thiel's version: "All happy companies are different, all unhappy companies are alike (in that they failed to escape "sameness" or competition).
mi100hael 9y ago
I think it would be less insightful than you think to hear from failed companies. I wouldn't be surprised if 50%-90% of startups begin life as side-projects and the founder(s) get lazy and decide to fold before even really attempting to get off the ground. Out of the remaining startups that either succeed or fail after substantial effort, I'd be most of the failures can be attributed to rather mundane, predictable circumstances (most of which are mentioned in TFA): - Building a product or features no one wants - Taking too long to ship and offering a discounted beta in the meantime - Wasting time & resources on non-revenue tasks because "business"

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rb808 9y ago

Yeah this is the best for me: > Ship. Ship. SHIP. The overwhelming failure case among people who read interviews like this one is that they spend 98 units of effort reading about running a business for every 2 units of effort running a business. Flip that on its head. I wonder how many successful entrepreneurs actually spent time reading advice blogs when they were starting.

kfriede 9y ago
Not yet successful, but I recently launched a product that I'm sure wouldn't be launched yet if I hadn't read the recommendation to ship early.
- tertius 9y ago
  It's all about proportion :)
lettergram 9y ago
It's interesting. I can't stand reading about startups, advice, etc. I regularly watch my friends, people on HN or Reddit fall into the folly of discussing different strategies or trying to create the "perfect team" or "perfect business" prior to launch. I create products regularly, and many of them make a profit (not a ton yet, but all growing). My consumer facing apps include https://easy-a.net/ https://easy-a.net/ or https://projectpiglet.com/ https://projectpiglet.com/ both are (clearly) boot strapped together, but I launched as soon as I had anything resembling a product. What I will caution is that I did wait to launch the products until they were stable and easy enough to use. Sure, they don't look pretty, but it works. I think advice (blogs or otherwise) are one of the largest hurdles an entrepreneur has to over come. Starting a business isn't about other people, it's about yourself and your business. Even going through things like YC's Startup School can be a detriment, because they fixate so heavily on various components of the business. Often, you just have to tune it out and do what's right. In this case, that's building something, speaking to customers, and improving. Ironically, I think even this article is the same rehash of the 30 other stories I've seen (assuming the quote you took is from the article, as I didn't read it). That being said, I do see value in interaction. Which is why I post comments like these on HN or discuss an idea. It's generated tons of leads and that is much more valuable.

zapperdapper 9y ago

All good advice, but I'm going to propose something that may be a bit contrary to current wisdom: if you really want a decent lifestyle/work-life balance don't start a business! So what's the alternative? Go contracting. Reduce your expenses to the bone, and limit the contracts you do. I now only take 3 month contracts and I do one a year. I make about £24K from that - I know many developers making double my rate. That £24K is more than double my expenses though. If there's a 6 month contract I really like the look of I will do it (especially if it's remote working) - but then I'll take at least a year off. The great thing about a contract is you go in, do your thing, get out. Job done. No stress. No worry. No customers giving you grief and wanting their money back. No infrastructure going down with admin alerts at 3.00am. No hassle. I don't even have my own limited company. I use an umbrella company and while not as tax efficient I have no dealing with accountants, HMRC, tax returns and all that nonsense. I think there are many good reasons to start a 'lifestyle' business. I'm just not convinced it's the way to go if work-life balance is what you are looking for.

Dayshine 9y ago
How did you get started with contracting? And do you find yourself having to commute a lot? I haven't found a huge number of jobs near each other in the UK outside of London.
- zapperdapper 9y ago
  Good question. The company I was working for at the time went bust - I'd been with them about 7 years. I just searched online for contracts (I'm actually a tech writer, not a developer, but have coding skills - there are a lot more contracts out there for coders compared to writers). My very first contract was with a wonderful web company in London. Anyway, as to the commuting. Yes - you are right - it's a total pain in the bum. Sometimes if the gig is a long way away I will stay up in cheap B&B. It depends. But - you can put up almost anything for three months right? That's the beauty of it. You know the pain will end - you know the exact day. The commuting is soon forgotten when you are heading out to a wreck dive by boat in the Philippines. :)
bubbleRefuge 9y ago

jacobrobbins 9y ago

this is a great resource, a lot more stuff in here than a typical blog post

soneca 9y ago

I believe this list is missing what I consider to be the most important factor for success, an underlying strength that the most successful business I read on IndieHackers (and elsewhere) have that is systematically underestimated as a reason for success: previously acquired audience. I believe audience is the most important currency in today's world, especially for digital products. Audience may be followers on Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, etc. Audience may be an email list. Audience may be traditional networking (as if you are in a B2B niche business). If you do not have audience, you can buy one with ads (even so it is easier said than done); or you can borrow the audience from someone else, an influencer (I know there are ways to pay for influencer's audiences, but I do not believe it is very effective, to get some influencer to legitimately love your product and act as your referrer seems to me to be more effective, if harder). Or you can borrow the audience from something else, like HN, Reddit, PH. All of the steps of launching and building a business, especially the very first ones are enormously easier if you have an audience. And enormously - some times impossibly - harder if you do not have one. This is derived from the adage that your first idea is always wrong. You have to learn everything by shipping early and talking to customers, but if you ship early to 20 eyeballs and talks to luckily one or two potential users, this feedback loop just doesn't count. But if you launch to thousands to eyeballs, even if you are making the mistake of no shipping early or not focused on talking to customers, you will receive unsolicited feedback from some of them. And a previously built audience of people who trust you at a basic level will be much more responsive and engaged in rationalizing and vocalizing their opinions about your product. They will be "early adopters" type (hard to get that when you buy an audience). And they also will (likely) be people that are your target audience (hard to get that when you borrow an audience from HN and similar). Some of the most impressive successful business in IndieHackers (according to my own criteria) are the ones who had years of building an audience. Through foruns, email lists, blogs. A genuine audience is hard to plan ahead. Does not seem plausible to have the vision, the will, and the diligence to think about the industry/niche where I want to launch a business years ahead. So it is good to launch a business where you have genuine passion, somehow you will have the network (even so, not necessarily a large audience). If you are in that position of having a large audience, seriously consider launching a business because you have a very big unfair advantage (and follow all the advice on this list). If you are not, pay a lot of attention on how to reach your target audience. It is a very tough problem to crack.

dahoramanodoceu 9y ago

I work one hour a morning. W00t!

dahoramanodoceu 9y ago
Actually I should rephrase thatand say, the way I make money, my profession, takes up 3 hours of my day, counting commute time. I can live off that money. The rest of the time I just do what I want, which is what I generally consider to be 'the work.'
- yeahsure 9y ago
  Your comment would add more value if you actually explained what you do and something related to the link. Right now I only know someone, somewhere, can work for 3 hours a day and play for the rest of time.
- anotheryou 9y ago
  so what do you do? I want a piece of that cake :)

donmatito 9y ago

What I find interesting with Indie Hackers is that it covers a wide range a personal/business situations. It goes from real lifestyle business, to beer-money-making side-projects. I feel that there is a world of difference between a side-project that is free, to one where you ask customers for their credit cards. Of all professional experiences, I have never learnt as much as I did taking a side-project idea from idea to MVP, then to beta users, then to paying customers, scaling server issues, and marketing strategies. It's not so much about the money, than the fact that you learn so much on so many dimensions. Sincere thanks + shameless plug, the interview about Smooz was fun, a good self-reflection exercise, and a good source of traffic too (https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/smooz https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/smooz)

tixocloud 9y ago
Thanks for sharing your story as it resonates deeply with me, especially the family life part of things. The idea is also pretty good as well. I'm also curious about your direct sales efforts and what happened there that made it not so successful? I have my assumptions but I'd love to hear your side of things.
- donmatito 9y ago
  Well, direct sales is a bit difficult because my core target is "Agencies that use Slack, of which clients use Slack". So I need to convince a layer of users (let say 10% conversion) and they have to convince another layer (10% again) => 1% conversion rate. What worked was publishing some articles on Medium and optimizing a bit for SEO, so that the handful of people who actually has the problem, can find me. The Slack app Directory helped quite a bit at first, but I should take better advantage of it now that they have add features. But really, the main growth factor is : almost no churn. People are super satisfied. So even if I don't spend much time finding customers, the very low growth keeps adding up...
  - tixocloud 9y ago
    Yeah, that's an interesting core target and quite pleasantly surprised that agencies themselves are using Slack. I would've guessed that the clients themselves would be the ones who would use Slack and then maybe you can work with agencies on setting Slack up for them like a concierge service of some sort.

ThomPete 9y ago

In other words. Reading about success to become successful is like reading the autobiography of lotterywinners. There are no secrets to success other than luck, timing and actually shipping your product (or play the lottery). Contrary to the lottery though much fewer people ship and there are much more winning lottery coupons. There is nothing to learn about how to build a successful product. If you want to read anything read about specific obstacles you get into. Great read!

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cmahler7 9y ago
How is a business anything like the lottery? Thousands of decisions over years vs 1 random event. Domain knowledge obviously plays a role as well, if you can't code you're going to have a hard time making software. There's a lot of money to be made in AI right, the timing is good but it doesn't matter if you don't know anything about it. By your logic some random guy off the street would have the same chances of building a successful business as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.
- open_bear 9y ago
  Survivorship bias: because for every Steve Jobs and Bill Gates there are millions of folks, whose business ended without any success (something like 80% of businesses close during the first year).
  - cmahler7 9y ago
    That's my point, 80% of entrepreneurs can't make it one year, so what are the odds of Steve Jobs starting multiple multi-billion dollar companies over multiple decades, with tens of thousands of decisions, through pure luck? You're saying that skill and knowledge play no part in success. A mentally handicapped person would have as good a chance at success as Steve Jobs by your logic, because it's all luck.

Silhouette 9y ago

A lot of this seems to reflect the consensus among experienced HN posters as well: you have to actually ship something and charge for it, it has to be something people actually want instead of just what you enjoy making, and so on. Arguably much of this is just common sense, but maybe that's just hindsight talking. The only one I strongly disagree with is "raise your prices". While this is common advice on HN as well, I think it should come with a caveat that it mostly applies to B2B businesses. If you're running a B2C business, your customers are spending their own money, and possibly on something that isn't a necessity and isn't immediately going to make or save them a greater amount of money in return. Customers in this situation may well be extremely price-sensitive, and even small adjustments in pricing can have dramatic effects on conversion rates. As a counter-example showing that a big price cut can be effective, look at the way that games suppliers like Steam and GoG run their sales.

tmaly 9y ago

One other thing not mentioned in the article is the community on Indie Hackers. If you are working on a side project, the majority of the people in the forum are there to help you. They have given me great feedback and ideas for my project.

bigtunacan 9y ago

The 4-Hour Workweek is the first book listed and I have heard of it so many times I finally decided to read it. I picked up an old copy from the local library and I'm a little over 1/2 way through. So far I have not been all that impressed. Just in general it seems so light on anything really concrete and more just a motivational book. Where it does have concrete things though they are just really out of date (One example is that they recommend Yahoo Stores where today someone would probably use Shopify or another alternative. Another example is there is a LOT of talk about using magazine ads, but how many people are actually still reading/buying print mags today?). What are other people's thoughts on this particular book, and what about the updates in the latest edition? Has it changed enough to be somewhat current when the realities of today?

komali2 9y ago
He specifically recommends niche magazine ads, which then and today will probably get you a print + ad on their site. So like, take an ad out in PCGamer, and get yourself an ad on their website as well, if you're making an indie game. Better yet, find a magazine + website that specifically is about indie gaming. I can't think of a single magazine that doesn't have an accompanying website. EDIT: Might as well include my thoughts on the book. For me, it was the second "success genre" or "self help" style book I had read, the first being How to Win Friends and Influence People. I was about 22 at the time, fresh out of college, living abroad in Taiwan, trying to figure myself out and find myself. Very impactful time, so for me it was a very impactful book. Not so much for anything specific, but because the specifics were there. Here was a guy laying out concrete plans, concrete schedules, to making money. It guided me to how it really was possible to make money on my own, to live the kind of life I wanted to, to work remote etc. It planted a seed that took a long fucking time to grow, but it did grow, and the result is by the time I was 25 I had managed to sneak my way out of my liberal arts degree'd relatively futureless life into software engineering. Now my goals and objectives are framed by that first read - I haven't looked at it since, though I should. In short, it's a great book for those new to the whole concept of working for yourself, creating a life for yourself, stepping outside the "normal boundaries" of life (go to school, get job, poop kids, die). Those on this site reading this may not think it's such a big deal, to those of us here it's pretty normal to step outside the box, but there's a reason I'm here now and this book contributed in a big way to it.

konpikwastaken 9y ago

Heh, something I read earlier on indiehackers made me chuckle. "Honestly, negativity about my business model is more likely to come from a community like Hacker News than it is from my readers."[1] He's not wrong. [1]: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/site-builder-report https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/site-builder-report

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superasn 9y ago

Very interesting post. I think the author can head his own advice and could have hosted it on a domain like startuptools.com or something, because this blog post is going to be backlinked heavily and with a touch of SEO this can be a regular source of targeted traffic. Just add a pdf checklist at the bottom that needs an opt-in (anybody who reads this will have a very conversion rate) and soon you've got a small list. Pitch them the startup tools or whatever you think is best for the list (using affiliate links) and soon you have a site that is making a passive income. It's easier said than done, but creating a passive income is really that easy and if you're doing the effort you may as well reap the rewards.

cbar_tx 9y ago

digital nomadism doesn't mean anything.