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If you're interested in a survivorship bias-less(?) write up on trying to be like Pieter, I've been at this for years: - https://maxrozen.com/2018-review-start

If you're interested in a survivorship bias-less(?) write up on trying to be like Pieter, I've been at this for years: - https://maxrozen.com/2018-review-starting-an-internet-business https://maxrozen.com/2018-review-starting-an-internet-busine... - https://maxrozen.com/2019-further-reflections-trying-to-start-an-internet-business https://maxrozen.com/2019-further-reflections-trying-to-star... - https://maxrozen.com/indiehacking-3-year-review https://maxrozen.com/indiehacking-3-year-review

ianjakobs 5y ago
Great reads, thanks for posting. I've very recently been inspired to start being more open about my projects, so it's good to have a few more real-life examples of others doing it.
bckr 5y ago
Wow, i loved the first link. Raw, like a field journal summary
ricardobayes 5y ago
It's definitely difficult, I started a remote work site before covid but it didn't take off. Couldn't solve the 'chicken-or-egg' marketplace problem, I couldn't get enough companies to post jobs and people found an empty site apalling.
- randomsearch 5y ago
  Posting in case people haven’t come across this advice: the trick to a two sided market startup is usually to find a way to provide value to one side without the other side being present. So, for example, you build a free platform that helps remote contractors manage their hours, billing, invoices, leads etc. Then, once you’ve built up an audience of contractors you say to the companies “hey, I have a million people working on here, I think they’d be interested in job opportunities, so I’ve made an opt in jobs board / newsletter” and go from there. Of course, it might not succeed, but AFAICT this is the general strategy for solving this problem.
  - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
    This is great advice, but you also have to be really strategic about this as the solution you create to try to acquire one side of the market can easily become a full-time burden that distracts from what you really want to offer. Using your example, the market for time tracking, invoicing, etc. is very mature and highly competitive, so if you launched a solution in this space, you'd have a steep uphill battle to gain traction.
    - cblconfederate 5y ago
      Make it free then
      - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
        Making something free doesn't automatically guarantee it will be competitive or appealing, especially in mature markets where the entrenched competitions' offerings are hard for upstarts to come close to parity with. Sometimes "free" makes a product less appealing. In the example market, there are already established players with free tiers.
      - bsenftner 5y ago
        Plus, "free" customers are very demanding, far more so than paying customers.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    Yeah this, people come for the utility, and community then arises naturally. Unfortunately it's very hard to lure users from the big platforms with community only.
dumbfoundded 5y ago
Thank you for candidly sharing your thoughts & experiences. As a fellow bootstrapped entrepreneur (& programmer), I sympathize with what you're going through. Maybe it's the survivorship bias but I think you could try some things differently. I'm not sure you're open to receiving advice but I hope you find it at least well intentioned. My biggest piece of advice is that only the sales channel really matters. People talk about product-market fit but that's kind of ambiguous. What you need to do is really understand some sales channel. Your real goal isn't to create the best product in the world, it's to own some sales channel for a particular category. Take movie theater food for example. It's shitty & expensive but keeps selling because it's the only thing available. It may even be helpful to ignore the actual product part and learn about understanding and identifying opportunities in sales channels first. Then you build the product to dominate that category. Sales channels can be content marketing, google, facebook, amazon, trade shows, in person meetings, and more. For example, if you wanted to do content marketing. Instead of building a product and hoping that content marketing would work, you should learn about how content marketing actually works. Things like link building, content optimization, technical SEO, and keyword research. Then you could find categories you're interested and start seeing where the competitiveness is relatively low compared to the volume. You may also learn that content marketing usually takes 5-figure investments + months to work even in niche categories. If you really understand a sales channel, the opportunities become obvious. Most people don't really understand why Gitlab succeeded or how it's different from Github. If you're running a dev ops team with a requirement for an on-prem OSS solution, then it starts to make a lot more sense. Another example is the dozens of companies working to port Wordpress apps to Shopify. They're not making the apps any better, they're just making them work on shopify by owning their category in the Shopify App Marketplace. Here's one idea I posted on Shopify hoping someone would build it: https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-apps/how-to-add-a-table-of-contents-for-your-blog-posts/td-p/1223631 https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-apps/how-to-add-a-ta... All in all, I wish you the best. It seems like your heart is in the right place but you need improvement on strategy. You want to build something that people use but thought experiments aren't the way to figure it out. Coming up with more ideas probably isn't going to work out if you don't understand why the other ones didn't work out. An idea without understanding the context of how it will be sold is only a prayer. Talking to customers is great & reaching out manually is a sales strategy as old as time, but it's hard to build a company out of this without 4+ figure deals. For me, it was figuring SEO and micro influencers. My first business was CBD products got to ~$500K/month in 2.5 years before selling it. I'm now investing in (and helping build for a few months) a cardboard cat homes business. It's completely unrelated except for the sales channels. It sells exactly the same ways and it hit $10K in its 2nd month of sales. After this 3rd month, it should be profitable and I can step away to help other founders start more ecommerce businesses.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
Pieter had a successful YouTube before starting online businesses His Twitter account was powerful and perfect for reaching wannabe nomads and remote workers.
- jslakro 5y ago
  Sure, in that sense, how anybody could consider his case replicable? additionally, each job post cost 600 bucks, unbelievable
ornornor 5y ago
Thanks, I enjoyed reading these. Did you see value in the 30x500 course? Would you say it’s worth the price tag (I think it was 4K last I checked)? I’m in a similar spot where I’m mostly disillusioned from salaried work. I enjoy writing quality and long term code and companies tell me it’s what they want when they hire me, but when the rubber meets the road, what they want is quick and dirty quality be damned. But I can’t think of anything that I could sell for myself (either a course or a SaaS). I’ve had ideas before but always ran out of steam before they were useable. I usually spend a lot of energy on the project setup (deploy from git push, tooling config, etc) And honestly, it doesn’t feel like I have the stamina to work so hard for year for maybe a payoff in the future. Any thoughts on the above? How would you tackle it?
- rozenmd 5y ago
  I did see value - and after accounting for the tax deduction, I've reached a positive ROI after about 9 months of work. I mean it when I say work, researching and publishing a new article weekly and also coming up with a product to sell was challenging. In terms of raw money earned per hour, it hasn't been particularly impressive, but 30x500 taught me to see customer pain in a completely different way, and to stop continuously reaching for SaaS as a solution to every problem.
  - amotinga 5y ago
    30x500?
    - kjksf 5y ago
      https://30x500.com/academy/ https://30x500.com/academy/ It's online course that teaches (or at least tries to teach) how to come up with ideas for products by getting better at spotting problems.
owenversteeg 5y ago
> In my experience, getting your first 10 customers from content marketing alone is: 1) Extremely difficult to get right 2) Kind of a waste of time (unless you've got thousands of people in your mailing list). Talking to customers is the fastest way to figure out if the problem you're solving is even a problem at all. Golden advice for many people launching things on HN who get this wrong.

ianjakobs 5y ago

Great reads, thanks for posting. I've very recently been inspired to start being more open about my projects, so it's good to have a few more real-life examples of others doing it.

bckr 5y ago

Wow, i loved the first link. Raw, like a field journal summary

ricardobayes 5y ago

It's definitely difficult, I started a remote work site before covid but it didn't take off. Couldn't solve the 'chicken-or-egg' marketplace problem, I couldn't get enough companies to post jobs and people found an empty site apalling.

randomsearch 5y ago
Posting in case people haven’t come across this advice: the trick to a two sided market startup is usually to find a way to provide value to one side without the other side being present. So, for example, you build a free platform that helps remote contractors manage their hours, billing, invoices, leads etc. Then, once you’ve built up an audience of contractors you say to the companies “hey, I have a million people working on here, I think they’d be interested in job opportunities, so I’ve made an opt in jobs board / newsletter” and go from there. Of course, it might not succeed, but AFAICT this is the general strategy for solving this problem.
- LurkingPenguin 5y ago
  This is great advice, but you also have to be really strategic about this as the solution you create to try to acquire one side of the market can easily become a full-time burden that distracts from what you really want to offer. Using your example, the market for time tracking, invoicing, etc. is very mature and highly competitive, so if you launched a solution in this space, you'd have a steep uphill battle to gain traction.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    Make it free then
    - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
      Making something free doesn't automatically guarantee it will be competitive or appealing, especially in mature markets where the entrenched competitions' offerings are hard for upstarts to come close to parity with. Sometimes "free" makes a product less appealing. In the example market, there are already established players with free tiers.
    - bsenftner 5y ago
      Plus, "free" customers are very demanding, far more so than paying customers.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  Yeah this, people come for the utility, and community then arises naturally. Unfortunately it's very hard to lure users from the big platforms with community only.

dumbfoundded 5y ago

Thank you for candidly sharing your thoughts & experiences. As a fellow bootstrapped entrepreneur (& programmer), I sympathize with what you're going through. Maybe it's the survivorship bias but I think you could try some things differently. I'm not sure you're open to receiving advice but I hope you find it at least well intentioned. My biggest piece of advice is that only the sales channel really matters. People talk about product-market fit but that's kind of ambiguous. What you need to do is really understand some sales channel. Your real goal isn't to create the best product in the world, it's to own some sales channel for a particular category. Take movie theater food for example. It's shitty & expensive but keeps selling because it's the only thing available. It may even be helpful to ignore the actual product part and learn about understanding and identifying opportunities in sales channels first. Then you build the product to dominate that category. Sales channels can be content marketing, google, facebook, amazon, trade shows, in person meetings, and more. For example, if you wanted to do content marketing. Instead of building a product and hoping that content marketing would work, you should learn about how content marketing actually works. Things like link building, content optimization, technical SEO, and keyword research. Then you could find categories you're interested and start seeing where the competitiveness is relatively low compared to the volume. You may also learn that content marketing usually takes 5-figure investments + months to work even in niche categories. If you really understand a sales channel, the opportunities become obvious. Most people don't really understand why Gitlab succeeded or how it's different from Github. If you're running a dev ops team with a requirement for an on-prem OSS solution, then it starts to make a lot more sense. Another example is the dozens of companies working to port Wordpress apps to Shopify. They're not making the apps any better, they're just making them work on shopify by owning their category in the Shopify App Marketplace. Here's one idea I posted on Shopify hoping someone would build it: https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-apps/how-to-add-a-table-of-contents-for-your-blog-posts/td-p/1223631 https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-apps/how-to-add-a-ta... All in all, I wish you the best. It seems like your heart is in the right place but you need improvement on strategy. You want to build something that people use but thought experiments aren't the way to figure it out. Coming up with more ideas probably isn't going to work out if you don't understand why the other ones didn't work out. An idea without understanding the context of how it will be sold is only a prayer. Talking to customers is great & reaching out manually is a sales strategy as old as time, but it's hard to build a company out of this without 4+ figure deals. For me, it was figuring SEO and micro influencers. My first business was CBD products got to ~$500K/month in 2.5 years before selling it. I'm now investing in (and helping build for a few months) a cardboard cat homes business. It's completely unrelated except for the sales channels. It sells exactly the same ways and it hit $10K in its 2nd month of sales. After this 3rd month, it should be profitable and I can step away to help other founders start more ecommerce businesses.

jokethrowaway 5y ago

Pieter had a successful YouTube before starting online businesses His Twitter account was powerful and perfect for reaching wannabe nomads and remote workers.

jslakro 5y ago
Sure, in that sense, how anybody could consider his case replicable? additionally, each job post cost 600 bucks, unbelievable

ornornor 5y ago

Thanks, I enjoyed reading these. Did you see value in the 30x500 course? Would you say it’s worth the price tag (I think it was 4K last I checked)? I’m in a similar spot where I’m mostly disillusioned from salaried work. I enjoy writing quality and long term code and companies tell me it’s what they want when they hire me, but when the rubber meets the road, what they want is quick and dirty quality be damned. But I can’t think of anything that I could sell for myself (either a course or a SaaS). I’ve had ideas before but always ran out of steam before they were useable. I usually spend a lot of energy on the project setup (deploy from git push, tooling config, etc) And honestly, it doesn’t feel like I have the stamina to work so hard for year for maybe a payoff in the future. Any thoughts on the above? How would you tackle it?

rozenmd 5y ago
I did see value - and after accounting for the tax deduction, I've reached a positive ROI after about 9 months of work. I mean it when I say work, researching and publishing a new article weekly and also coming up with a product to sell was challenging. In terms of raw money earned per hour, it hasn't been particularly impressive, but 30x500 taught me to see customer pain in a completely different way, and to stop continuously reaching for SaaS as a solution to every problem.
- amotinga 5y ago
  30x500?
  - kjksf 5y ago
    https://30x500.com/academy/ https://30x500.com/academy/ It's online course that teaches (or at least tries to teach) how to come up with ideas for products by getting better at spotting problems.

owenversteeg 5y ago

> In my experience, getting your first 10 customers from content marketing alone is: 1) Extremely difficult to get right 2) Kind of a waste of time (unless you've got thousands of people in your mailing list). Talking to customers is the fastest way to figure out if the problem you're solving is even a problem at all. Golden advice for many people launching things on HN who get this wrong.