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My solopreneur story

852 points by alexzeitler 3y ago

NickC25 3y ago
Good on you Tony. $45k monthly revenue is nothing to shake a stick at, and it seems you're quite happy with the lifestyle it's afforded you. An inspiration.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  Amazingly done for one time payments as well. People like them. Forever licenses are maybe more tolerable as well for self host and client side local applications. Could be good money combined with b2b pricing on top of it
benknight87 3y ago
It's worth keeping in mind that Tony's current monthly figure ($45k/mo) is a a single snapshot in time. Past performance is no guarantee of future success. Certainly, a talented engineer consistently making ballpark $100-200/k a year over the same period and saving a reasonable percentage of that is going to be more financially successful and basically guaranteed lifetime of employment at a high tech salary. Long story short, it's a worthwhile achievement but it only happens to a lucky few. Focusing on building a long term career and becoming quietly rich is probably a better play.
TheAnkurTyagi 3y ago
This is such a nice story and congratulations Tony. I've seen your journey from the start and always get inspiration. Good luck for the future. One quick question- Any 2 tips you would like to give to others on "How you did marketing about your projects" I know you tweeted, sent newsletters etc.... but anything else like SEO or hiring any marketers?
gumballindie 3y ago
[flagged]
- swayvil 3y ago
  I sold my kidney and bought a Tesla. Everybody in the trailer-park is green with envy.
- agentofoblivion 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - dubcanada 3y ago
    I'm sorry but what? I think they are getting downvoted because they somehow turned a story of a guys venture into the business world into politics.
  - public_defender 3y ago
    Maybe I'm an optimist, but I'd like to think the downvotes are because the user showed in the space of a haiku that they understand neither capitalism nor communism.
    - gumballindie 3y ago
      Au contraire. Corporate communism is very much alive and kicking. Capital is clogged. The only way to make it move is to allow small to medium sized true capital makers and movers to thrive. Corporations are the new communist apparatus. Roles have been reversed.
      - hooverd 3y ago
        TIL communism is when organizations do things.
        kljkjkjlkju 3y ago
        If capitalism (incidentally, a term coined by Marx) is whatever one feels like it is, and no-one ever would call you out for that in an internet discussion, then it's pretty consistent to apply the same approach to communism.
unsupp0rted 3y ago
I paid for & use one of Tony's products (Xnapper for screenshots). It's good, but I reported a cropping bug, along with a replication bullet list and .gif screencast of me replicating the bug. I got a response from a support person telling me to increase border padding beyond any reasonable aesthetic level. Aesthetics is the purpose of buying the product, otherwise non-aesthetic screenshots are built into macOS. The support person asked if this error happens regularly... well replicate it for yourself using my screencast and that's your answer. There was no bug fix. No point version update in the works. The last software update was 9 months ago on 15 Jan, 2023. I feel like Tony's able to be a profitable solopreneur because he outsources all support to people who don't really care about the quality of the output.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  You got an unsatisfactory reply to a support ticket. What's the realistic alternative with other software vendors of $20-50 products? IMO, the most common is not "a satisfactory reply" but rather "no [edit to add: human-generated] reply".
  - antisthenes 3y ago
    The solution to receiving an unsatisfactory reply on a support ticket is not "lower your expectations", regardless of how that business may be structured. If we lower our expectations of software, we'll get exactly that, shitty software.
    - cellis 3y ago
      If you don’t like it you can always stop paying, or better yet build your own. That’s how things get better.
      - Capricorn2481 3y ago
        I stopped paying for Youtube Premium. Did that make Youtube better? Maybe I'll find time to build that when I'm not building API integrations with Youtube.
demondemidi 3y ago
An arrow indicator for a twitter profile pic, a screen cap tool, and a wrapper around ChatGPT. I kinda want to shoot myself. Largely useless products that made someone rich that rely on two other ecosystems. That’s the way I guess? I’m so not an entrepreneur. Edit: apologies for using a suicide metaphor. I was being sarcastic. I’m in my 50s, really like my job, and am on a path to a good retirement. It just amazes me that there are so many opportunities for “pet rocks” in this era. Go get some if you know how! It I think it is safer to do things the old fashioned way and not rely on extreme luck and social media. But again, I’m old.
- intelVISA 3y ago
  Whilst it is absurd, it should be encouraging that you can escape from the grind so easily nowadays!
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - donnythecroc 3y ago
    Why is it absurd? Chat GPT UI is pretty bad, he created a better one, people pay him for it. That seems like a pretty sensible exchange.
  - moooo99 3y ago
    > it should be encouraging that you can escape from the grind so easily nowadays! And this exactly the false fallacy. This is a perfect example of survivorship bias. For everywhere successful solopreneur/indie maker/whatever, there are a hundred failed attempts that didn't fail for a lack of trying hard. A common denominator between many successful solopreneurs is a strong social media presence, so this image isn't surprising. That being said, giving it a try yourself is fairly accessible as opposed to starting a startup with external funding. So if you can afford to, give it a try. But do not expect it to be easy
- Whiteshadow12 3y ago
  I get it, with the right positioning, you can convince people to buy bottled water for $30 or more, Tony built or found really good positions, you can do the same.
donnythecroc 3y ago
Good job Tony Dinh. I think the lesson here is to keep going, a bunch of failures and then a success.
aogaili 3y ago
So many envious people, including myself, but at least I admit it. Go back to your corporate cusion or VC lap, and resolve that jira please.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  And be sure to return to your field (office as they call it these days), peasant.
- ink_13 3y ago
  It's possible to find this kind of thing distasteful without being motivated by envy.
  - aogaili 3y ago
    It is, I agree, at the end of the day he built his products on top of corporate workers and exploited good opportunities and niches, and he brags about it, to market it, which I personally find distasteful, but that what it takes for solo devs. But it's not the vibe I get from most of the comments, it seems a lot of comments are knee-jerk reaction promted by envy.
    - DandyDev 3y ago
      How is this guy "exploiting" people? He sells products mostly for a one-time fee - something HN often reminds us is way better than "subscription for everything". And these products obviously serve people well. And since when is being successful and in detail explaining how you went about it "bragging"?
      - aogaili 3y ago
        I didn't say exploiting people. I said exploiting niche opportunities and piggybacking on the shoulders of corporate workers, ain't nothing wrong in that. In fact, I praise his hustling and envious of it.
endisneigh 3y ago
mixed feelings - this is a good story, but it's sort of impressive in the same way it's impressive Six Flags gets away with selling Corn Dogs for $10. but all in all I wish more people did this. it would create a more competitive environment the ultimately result in driving the price down for many things and lowering hopefully making BigCo weaker.
- kyawzazaw 3y ago
  Same way how?
Lemmi 3y ago
I read it and I don't know it's a story I would not want to have. It feels like the good friend who always has some side hussle instead of just doing something useful.
- rwhyan 3y ago
  $45k/month is more than a "side hustle." And Tony's products ARE useful. Or else people wouldn't buy them. Value is subjective.
- DandyDev 3y ago
  Making enough money to support the lifestyle you want is useful, no?
  - Lemmi 3y ago
    I still wouldn't do sex work.
- deleted 3y ago
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mihaic 3y ago
While I admire the can-do attitude and independent mindset, stories like this strike me primarily as how unscalable doing something like this is. I mean, it only works because not more then 1-2% of developers even try to do something like this, since it's really hard to ensure you have enough edge in understanding user needs, building and being able to find a distribution chanel, and there simply isn't enough revenue to support many more developers to sell their niche products. I hate this conclusion, but most developers have to rely on salaries, since only a few companies have captured revenue streams big enough to justify a full time job.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  Why isn't there enough revenue to support other devs? Lots of people have money to spend, they just don't want to spend it on bad products. Induced demand via increased competition is a real phenomenon [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
  - mihaic 3y ago
    Induced demand leads often also to a race-to-the-bottom in pricing. Almost everyone is just using a few basic apps, going against the consumer train is very hard, and only companies are spending money on software.
    - satvikpendem 3y ago
      There is always a competitive advantage to be had; products, especially software products, are not commodities.
- whiplash451 3y ago
  Good point, although I am less worried about the lack of scale and more about the lack of temporal persistence. It seems like he needs to constantly push new products out there to maintain a steady income.
  - 3y ago
Aurornis 3y ago
I always enjoy reading success stories of developers of small apps. At the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re seeing only a cherry picked part of the picture. There is no mention of advertising spend or customer acquisition costs. The trend among indie hackers is to talk about MRR without mentioning a single expense, then to interleave it all with “follow me on Twitter” so you’re inspired to join their audience. This is a bit cynical, but I’ve been following accounts like this for a decade and it’s depressing to watch how many of them pivot into trying to sell me courses and/or private community access based on their success. Audience building (which he readily talks about in the article) becomes a conflict of interest for real information because it incentivizes big numbers while hiding costs. Maybe his apps are growing entirely organically and it’s pure profit. Or maybe he’s spent huge amounts of money on ads or marketing to get more installs to grow his user base as fast as possible. He mentions spending 16 hour days between coding the app and promoting it. The thing is, we don’t know how he got the users, and he won’t tell us because admitting anything other than MRR would only detract from his story. And as any small business operator knows, getting the customers is the hardest part. I wish him the best and enjoy following these success stories, but having seen enough of these I always take the isolated MRR numbers with a grain of salt. It’s not the full picture. This isn’t unique to this developer. It’s the trend among social media “indie hackers”: They know people are hungry for success stories and want to learn the secrets of how to build a successful indie company, so they build narratives to make themselves look like the person who will share those secrets. But then the more you read and the more you follow, the more you start seeing how they’re leaving out all of the actual secrets and keys to success, such as how they’re marketing their apps and getting downloads.
- nomilk 3y ago
  > without mentioning a single expense The article does appear to give a general indication of expenses: > At the moment, my total revenue across all products is about $45K/month at ~90% profit.
- keiferski 3y ago
  > The thing is, we don’t know In the first paragraph: At the moment, my total revenue across all products is about $45K/month at ~90% profit.
unsupp0rted 3y ago
HN: "It's okay to make something nobody wants = damn right! Do it for the craft and the process and the learning and the joy." Also HN: "A guy makes 45K/mo by building tiny time-saving apps, starting with ones he himself wants = what a sad world of frivolous side-hustles!"
- kolbe 3y ago
  I see a large diversity of opinion about this guy's business. Who is this "HN" you're talking about?
  - pbj1968 3y ago
    And here’s the third bucket - can’t see the forest for the semantic trees.
    - kolbe 3y ago
      Is there a 4th bucket of people who are so eager to pigeonhole ideologies instead of reading that it makes them functionally illiterate? Or are we done at three buckets?
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  I wish this absolutely ridiculous, unthinking trope of treating communities of thousands of people as one mind that’s only allowed to have one opinion would finally stop.
  - fullstackchris 3y ago
    but reading the comments, they mostly fall in to one of these two buckets...
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    in consensus based communities that only show you a reality based on what comments people upvote, it is not ridiculous at all when a different community would have completely different sentiment it is reflective of the audience
keiferski 3y ago
I think there is a lot of money to be made in building "human accessible" frontends to AI tools, so I'm not surprised that his ChatGPT wrapper product does well. Setting up Midjourney, for example, is such a convoluted mess, where you have to create an account on another service (Discord) before creating a Midjourney account, then understand the different chat channels and figure out where the best place to use the app is (private DM with Midjourney bot.) And that's all before even generating an image! Even their website looks like someone's art project, not a cutting-edge image generation service: https://www.midjourney.com/ https://www.midjourney.com/
- naillo 3y ago
  Well dalle3 pretty much has that niche covered
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Meh, I still am not convinced that the blank chat box is a good UI. You still need to know what to say and how to say it. Too much implicit knowledge is required.
    - vunderba 3y ago
      You should watch the dall-e 3 trailers. The whole leap forward is that you can just write a description of the scene, the more descriptive the better. The coherence and accuracy seems to be far better than MJ or even SDXL. There's less prompt fu nonsense (aka 4k, hdr, trending on art station, etc) than ever.
- ferennag 3y ago
  Leonardo.ai is much better in this regard. I hated midjourney, and if they don’t change this ridiculous way of interacting with the app they will fail.
wx30 3y ago
Thanks for the article. What tools do you use to quickly build websites? Stripe? Something else?
m3kw9 3y ago
Doesn’t look easy
ag56 3y ago
> Probably 12 hours a day, or even 16 hours/day if you also count Twitter as “work”. It’s the marketing effort that puts me off. I know I’m a 10x developer with a great product sense, but spending hours every day on Twitter and blogging sounds awful. I very definitely count those 4 twitter hours as ‘work’.
- tspike 3y ago
  Sounds like you need a business partner. Me too.
  - intelVISA 3y ago
    If only there was some way to connect 10x SWEs with 10x MBAs :/ An 'accelerator' of some description, perhaps.
    - satvikpendem 3y ago
      Perhaps one named after an obscure mathematical operation, one that relies on a fixed form submission over networking with VCs.
    - grvdrm 3y ago
      Is this something that we can facilitate through IH or elsewhere? I am on the other side - not good enough of a dev but plenty of experience on the biz side.
      - tspike 3y ago
        Let me know if you're interested in brainstorming. I've got extensive dev experience across the stack and can slog my way through marketing/sales but it wears on me quickly and I'm not great at it. I've got some time off coming up and will be looking to pick up a side project or two.
        grvdrm 3y ago
        Could be fun! Email: crcbos at g mail
benjaminwootton 3y ago
I don't know if I'm in an algorithmic rabbit hole, but my Twitter shows hundreds of people like this talking about how much they are making, how many signups they are getting for their products, how many Twitter followers they have. It seems like some strange playbook where you build a very simple product and shout about (possibly exaggerate) your success to attract eyeballs. Then you sell the real thing which is a course or info product to the people who want to replicate your success. No bitterness here and I haven't even read this particular post properly to cast aspersions at him. I've just felt something didn't add up with this corner of the internet for some time. Here are a few more random ones from the top of my "For You" feed. Again nothing against the specific posters, just to illustrate what I am seeing: https://twitter.com/MrNick_Buzz https://twitter.com/MrNick_Buzz https://twitter.com/marc_louvion https://twitter.com/marc_louvion https://twitter.com/Timb03 https://twitter.com/Timb03
- antigirl 3y ago
  Agree with this, it's mostly talking about numbers and the success instead of the product itself [which you'd expect to be the forefront of all their posts as its the main reason they are tweeting?]
  - diimdeep 3y ago
    And author of this article is happy about #1 on front page of HN https://twitter.com/tdinh_me/status/1705597632876626166 https://twitter.com/tdinh_me/status/1705597632876626166 And there is one with critique of HN comments, like https://twitter.com/LBacaj/status/1705601091981754482 https://twitter.com/LBacaj/status/1705601091981754482 > @LBacaj This top comment on HN, to this post on getting to $45K/MO, captures everything wrong with the developer mindset today. > ”everything has to be crazy hard technically or it’s not valuable.” > You’ve all been duped into delusions of grandeur, only so they can take advantage of you. > @circleseer HN has become the old man yelling at the cloud meme > @madmaxbr5 A pizza shop is just a thin rapper around the agricultural supply chain and restaurant equipment industry. The recipes are centuries old. Zero actual innovation.
- michaelsalim 3y ago
DecayingOrganic 3y ago
I've noticed that negative comments often float to the top. That’s a bit of a bummer. No one's entrepreneurial success should make you question your life choices or become a reason for your frustration. Congratulations Tony! I remember the time you quit your job and set a goal of reaching $10K/mo with a few products on twitter, it seemed crazy. But you pulled it off! Hats off to you.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  It's ok for folks to express skepticism in response to someone selling shovels and dreams. Despite any insinuation in their marketing, luck isn't repeatable. All that said congrats to them on seizing the opportunity. (I too sell trinkets ;) yet am too ashamed to sell dreams) It would be nice to see a survey of all those who quit and it didn't work out compared to those who did, and their strategies. My guess is the losers tried most of the same things yet just didn't get lucky, or ran out of money before luck could come along.
  - kyawzazaw 3y ago
    I don't see how this is shovels and dreams. There is no courses involved here or book deals.
- xyst 3y ago
  Crab mentality
- deleted 3y ago
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janmo 3y ago
A lot of people here complaining that Soloproneurs only make "useless" "pet rocks". There is a big bias here, only the pet rock solopreneurs are very public about what they are doing and their success at it, because that is their marketing, YOU (their audience on HN and Twitter) are the pet rocks buyers. Solopreneurs with stuff other than pet rocks often don't want to share their success and how much they are making especially not to a tech savvy and entrepreneurial audience, as this would just cause more competition.
- proxyon 3y ago
  bullseye. when I read this I specifically thought of a few guys I know that made proprietary license SDKs that tons of corporations are paying for. there's a dude well known in the mobile space for example that sells the background geolocation plugins that everyone uses. it's a very tough problem to solve and he works on it full time and probably make a boatload of money owning his own business.
- deleted 3y ago
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umvi 3y ago
The hard part here is the spending hours on Twitter each day to "become more influential" and "engage with your audience"
- Existenceblinks 3y ago
  I mute a lot of these accounts that try to farm me as their audience. I used to engage some, they just don't care to reply at all. And they are annoying real fast. Imaging you have 10 posts of garbage a day / influencer
didip 3y ago
I am surprised people reduced this article as just another pet rock. Dude's journey has some interesting nuggets. He knows how to time box himself and build the smallest MVP that will actually make money. And his journey is not an overnight success either, it took him years to build everything including his social presence. Compare that to a W-2 job where you just have to show up 9am-5pm. HN is showing its overly critical self again, just like when Dropbox first appeared on HN.
- mt_ 3y ago
  He's a good marketeer, I'll give you that. Just this week I've seen one of his tweets being promoted on X and now he's top of hacker news on my feed. Not particularly interested in his tools but congratulations on his way to achieve engagement.
  - Existenceblinks 3y ago
    I mute all of these guys who have posted 10 times+ a day. If everyone doing this, there will be lots of garbage.
- nomilk 3y ago
  > HN is showing its overly critical self again, just like when Dropbox first appeared on HN Was HN overly critical of Dropbox? If so, how so? (genuinely curious) I did some digging and found some interesting sources but didn't come across anything overly critical of Dropbox in its early years (yet): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dhouston https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dhouston https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1253750400&dateRange=custom&dateStart=337996800&page=0&prefix=false&query=dropbox&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1253750400&dateRange=custom&... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR7tJ8wAI3M&t=27s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR7tJ8wAI3M&t=27s
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    When someone mentions HN and Dropbox, they are usually mentioning the infamous comment by BrandonM which is the top comment in your first link.
TheGigaChad 3y ago
[dead]
EddTheSDET 3y ago
Hackernews seems overly critical and anti-“hacker” nowadays (new acc but been around for years). Anyone have a guess why that’s the case? Influx of new users?
- elboru 3y ago
  I’ve also been around for years, but I don’t see it as a recent phenomenon. I’ve noticed that usually most top comments (for most topics) contain contra-arguments, or critical comments of any sort against the article. Sometimes it’s useful to learn about other perspectives, but often it feels forced or just plain negative/ego inspired. I could go back years and check old posts and notice that same trend. One famous example is the Dropbox post.
  - dang 3y ago
    > most top comments (for most topics) contain contra-arguments, or critical comments of any sort against the article That's true until the top comments start objecting to the objections. The current thread is a clear example. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22contrarian%20dynamic%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... It's a surprisingly reliable phenomenon.
  - braza 3y ago
    I think this is the beauty of HN: having people that does not share the hive mind from Social Media, edgy comments, contrarians, insiders, builders and people that reflects over the topics posted here.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  New users are more likely to be positive, actually. HN has always been more negative, it even has the infamous Dropbox comment by BrandonM.
  - lylejantzi3rd 3y ago
    I'm also guessing the bounce rate on HN is pretty high. New users come in, see a post like this where the top 5 posts are all long and very negative, and they bounce. Who wants to stick around for that? Other people who like to post negative comments. It's a self-reinforcing cycle.
arthurofbabylon 3y ago
I am really fed up with this kind of indie hacker story. MMR updates are superficial. Weak signal. I'm confident most are absent of critical info and some are entirely made up. I don't disbelieve anyone in particular, but when a mechanism of virality proliferates, it often gets deployed without the backing substance. "How I XYZ" around money is similarly misleading. Most entrepreneurs I know cannot recreate their own success – when they set out on a new venture, they need to look with fresh eyes, invent some new techniques, and discard a lot of methods that previously worked. If entrepreneurs aren't even able to reuse their own "how I xyz," then how will a stranger with even less nuance be able to learn or apply much from the blog post? Again, some of these stories have great lessons, but as a category I believe they are more noise than signal. Finally, the sheer obsession with money saddens me. The great entrepreneurs of our world are hardly motivated by money – to them, money is a tool that they factor in as they work to realize a vision, not an end goal. How ethically/morally impoverished is this technical class to be so obsessed with money? There's a term for this – greed. I know that a lot of jobs suck, a lot of stuff in life is expensive, we need money to do a lot of basic things, etcetera. But money is not the only solution, and more money is not an even better solution. I don't think this incessant messaging around money is virtuous – I think it is both a product of greed and a means of harnessing the greed in others. (And where are the entrepreneurs bragging about impact?) (For the record, I am not jealous – I make my money doing literally whatever I want, on projects that I find much more exciting, with ample time left over for nature walks, rock climbing, reading, and more. Unlike these authors, the money I make is not the most interesting part of my story.)
- unmole 3y ago
  I can't tell if this is satire.
  - charles_f 3y ago
    Yeah I waa asking myself the same question, this is such a stereotypical hn answer, but it lacks just enough emphasis to make it satirical
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
tamimio 3y ago
In reality the title should be: this is how I got lucky in my journey, I jumped into the AI hype just like thousands of other developers, but pure luck made it for me, and now I make X amount of money. I’m not the first to jump into it, I’m not the brightest since there are way smarter people than me who tried similar ideas, I didn’t build anything groundbreaking, and I didn’t invent anything new. I just got lucky. Now all you have to do is to sustain that, make an article about it, write a book on how you are successful and sell it because everyone subconsciously likes to read stuff that gives them hope, and maybe even later make a TED talk talking about how X attribute is all you need for success. But in reality, it is just luck! A lot of people did what OP did, and a lot will try to mimic it too, only to find out years later that they didn’t make it, ending up in a worse financial situation plus all the mental health issues they had/have to deal with. I am not trying to be pessimistic, but I always wish that in all these inspirational stories, they would make it clear that it is all luck. Sure, try your luck too, but keep your hopes just like how you do when you gamble.
- deleted 3y ago
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- DandyDev 3y ago
  How do you even get to this take? The guy clearly explained how he has built MULTIPLE successful products. So there is obviously more going on than sheer luck. And jumping on the AI hype is exactly what being a good entrepreneur is all about: recognizing an opportunity/gap and capitalizing on it. And the reason he was more successful than those thousands other developers is because he understands that there is more to business than building a cool product. For example marketing, something that he is clearly very good at.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    The first is the hardest. After that you can leverage your brand
  - shrimpx 3y ago
    Stretching your take to the extreme, it's like saying Kim Kardashian makes money from perfume because she's a genius fragrance designer and really understands the nuances and opportunities in the fragrance market, not because she had built an 'influential celebrity' persona with 400 million followers.
lucgagan 3y ago
Been following your story on Twitter for a long time. Very inspiring. I really like the DevUtils app that you built. You never mention what MRR it is generating today, though. Would love to know if you managed to grow it to anything of meaningful MRR.
hubraumhugo 3y ago
Business advice is often just someone handing you their winning lottery ticket. It worked perfectly for them but will probably be totally useless and not repeatable for you.
- system2 3y ago
  That's a stretch. There is still lots to learn from their journey. I can list at least 5 things to take from Tony's success.
  - mym1990 3y ago
    One thing to keep in mind is survivorship bias…not saying that Tony’s experience is not one to glean some things from, but be very careful about what those things are and how you implement them in your journey.
  - Existenceblinks 3y ago
    Tbh, this is very repetitive story .. seen 100 times before.
- hahamaster 3y ago
  Someone handing me their winning lottery ticket is wonderful, not totally useless.
- imgabe 3y ago
  Nobody can ever do anything. Things only happen by random chance. What a bleak and pointless worldview.
DantesKite 3y ago
So much envy.
tuyenhx 3y ago
Congratz Tony! He has been very good at creating products for years. Since he was a student. The way he studied, the way he worked, just so different from the rest of us. It feels so good that your story in the front page of HN. 45k is not a big number for HN crowd, but it is a fortune here in my country. Keep going my friend! P/s: I am his classmate at the university.
- whiplash451 3y ago
  I'd think that 45K per month is a big number for most people on HN.
nico 3y ago
Very interesting read. Highlights how important having an audience is The key was building his Twitter following and mailing list
zygo 3y ago
Pettiness and entitlement in the comments are another level! Kudos to Tony for having the guts to take the leap and reaching this milestone
- deleted 3y ago
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gejose 3y ago
Great read! I don't know why there's so much negativity in the comments, but great job Tony!
- michaelteter 3y ago
  Jealousy maybe. Or frustration that marketing often seems to be more important than anything else. HN probably has more good devs than good marketers, and some of us (dev) really hate doing marketing. A story like this seems to reinforce that just being good at product development or software development isn't enough, and that it _might_ be more effective to be mediocre at development and good at marketing. (Not to suggest that TFA author is mediocre at development.)
sgu999 3y ago
> ~90% profit Even though I understand the mechanics of the free market, in how many other fields do we consider this kind of profit margins to be honest? What about a farmer selling at a 90% profit? A pharmacist? A banker? Good for him though, "why not if he can", after all. I'm just not sure how I feel about it...
- sothatsit 3y ago
  This is why investors love software: the marginal cost of product is tiny. However, real money must be spent on R&D and marketing to keep those profit margins going, especially if you don't have a technology moat (e.g., AI wrappers).
- fy20 3y ago
  I like to look at it the other way: if a single person can make so much on their own, how much inefficiency must there be in big companies? Even at the medium size VC backed startup (~120 people) I work for, the amount of inefficiency I see on a day to day basis is sometimes unbelievable. Also I'm not sure banks are a good example. Over the course of my mortgage, I will end up paying more than I borrowed in interest.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    “so much”? This is 40k thats little. And it’s good that indies are able to achieve it.
- tpetry 3y ago
  The 90% didn‘t account for his time working on the stuff. So you can reduce from the $500k/year his salary - and now the 90% margin is far away. Indie hackers never factor in their working time.
danbruc 3y ago
90% profit is a market failure, you should not be able to overcharge your customers almost 10x in a working market.
- nickkao 3y ago
  Drop your LinkedIn I wanna see something
- DandyDev 3y ago
  I agree that it is a market failure, but it is for sure a marketing success. I cannot help but feel that there must be dozen competitors to his simple products that gather more "honest" profit margins (aka are cheaper or more feature rich) but have a hard time with marketing. This is obviously something Tony put a lot of time and effort in, and it paid off. Good on him!
- free_energy_min 3y ago
  It’s not the same as profit margin in other business it doesn’t take into account labor costs. How much is his time worth?
  - danbruc 3y ago
    Pick some random full-time developer salary, say $100k per year, and cut this in half as he says he works four hours per day.
- ayushchat 3y ago
  Have you ever heard of a company called Apple?
  - danbruc 3y ago
    I have no idea how high Apple's profit margins are, but I am quite sure they are not small. But what is your point, that is also a market failure.
- hackerdrew 3y ago
xyst 3y ago
When I was an avid Twitter user this person was pretty active in selling his product. Particularly in the “indie hacker” hashtag. My take from this is: know how to market and sell your product. If not, get someone that can
admildo 3y ago
Congratulations on such a huge milestone. What an inspiration, I know you’re going to achieve even greater milestones. Keep on building
admildo 3y ago
Congratulations on such a big win. That’s a huge milestone. Keep on building you’re such an inspiration. Don’t listen to the haters. It’s easy to talk down when you’re not in the arena. Keep on building, keep on hacking, keeps on winning.
jackbridger 3y ago
Very interesting and inspiring Story
allenu 3y ago
As a fellow indie hacker (I quit my job 18 months ago to build and sell my own apps), I am super jealous. I don't have the success of this guy (only getting close to $1k/mo these days), but I can understand the success. This guy knows how to market and ship product. I've seen him pop up a few times on indiehackers.com and social media. His "brand" is super simple to understand, which helps gain followers. He knows marketing. A lot of people who try to go from being a dev to entrepreneur focus entirely too much on the engineering side (I'm guilty of that) and think that what matters most is the product and how well it's made. We focus way too much on tools, processes, and forget that at the end of the day, we're trying to exchange useful products for money. Getting your product(s) out the door and telling people about it (and iterating) are way more important than what stack you use. I'm a little disappointed by all the negativity here, but I suspect most of us are just jealous.
- eddmakesio 3y ago
  > We focus way too much on tools, processes, and forget that at the end of the day, we're trying to exchange useful products for mone Yep, just look at @levelsio and his $250k MRR stack of apps built with PHP and jQuery > I'm a little disappointed by all the negativity here, but I suspect most of us are just jealous. Yep x2, for a website built around startups a huge number seem to be against a solo founder bootstrapping apps successfully
  - thelastparadise 3y ago
    > Yep x2, for a website built around startups a huge number seem to be against a solo founder bootstrapping apps successfully x3 Solo bootstrapper as well, ~20K ARR on one SaaS app about to launch another. It's clear to me there's money to be made, and yes engineers tend to overweight engineering effort and underweight distribution. Make something that makes someone's life better, saves or makes them money, and ask a fair amount for it. That's what I've done and have modest recurring revenue after only 6-8 months or so.
    - eddmakesio 3y ago
yusufmalikul 3y ago
Tony = 7 years of dev before going indie also Tony = 2-4 years of saving losers = no dev exp, learn no code in a week then quit 9-5 also losers = spend all their one month saving
uoaei 3y ago
One lesson I've learned from this post is if you create products for people who are on their computers all the time and who are not very price-sensitive to double-digit recurring costs, it's easy to make a lot of money.
- moneywoes 3y ago
  can you elaborate? seems like a vague icp
  - uoaei 3y ago
    Marketing is easy when you know your audience is spending all their time on platforms like HN and Twitter, and they have itchy clicker-fingers for new shiny software that they think will help them optimize their life. Then it's just making the simplest possible software that works reliably (market it as "UNIX philosophy", either explicitly or implicitly), stick to the modern landing page + checkout flow aesthetic, and the marks are on familiar ground and will happily play your game to give you $4/mo til they redo their budgets. Mutiply this by ~1000, keep the subscription low enough that they get bored before hyperoptimizing their budget to that level, and you've got a steady stream of income.
frabjoused 3y ago
Don't know why this is trending on HN. It's not a coincidence that in a majority of these stories, they also have a large blog, social media following or in some other way are selling their success. This is just another person being successful by talking about how they are successful.
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jarekceborski 3y ago
Well deserved! And you are great inspiration for fellow solopreneurs and indie hackers! Keep shipping!
uconnectlol 3y ago
but i don't care because it involves doing web dev and using twitter. i already easily enter any math domain so i can work for some stupid company and get $300K/year in a week of job searching. what you are doing is no different than 90s microsoft devs making products to sell on microsoft's platform. none of these solutions are "freedom", since you still have to work terribly long amounts of time like 9-5, and sit on top of foundations that randomly move on peoples whims, your twitter suddenly requesting 45K/month being a prime example. the only freedom is skill. making a screenshot app is something anyone can do. you can also invest your time fully into marketing and that's what people do and why the world sucks.
jcytong 3y ago
It's wonderful the world is big enough to celebrate whether you run a $45k/mo company solo, or find joy in nature walks, rock climbing, reading or raised VC to go big.
thenerdhead 3y ago
Cool to see someone use and abuse Twitter to make money. Seems that every successful indie hacker story has a component of being somewhat known on twitter.
- mjwhansen 3y ago
  A lot of the successful indie hacker stories you’ve heard are because they’re active on Twitter. There are thousands of solo dev entrepreneurs that don’t post on Twitter and are very quietly running great little internet businesses.
alex_lav 3y ago
Until using Twitter drops out of these types of post, I'll continue to suggest retitling them to "How I became a tech influencer that writes software at 45k/mo". Also would love to see usage rates on these products instead of subscriptions alone, as very clearly Twitch has demonstrated people will give money to influencers they like regardless of (even in absence of) their product.
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axegon_ 3y ago
> unit test suite with >95% test coverage I'm sorry, but that claim is wild. This is nearly impossible unless your application consists of 5 classes and you are moving a few bits in memory. For a large application, anything over 75% sounds a bit fishy to say the least. And beyond that, it's practically unsustainable: the odds of making even a small refactor(which sooner or later you will need to), without wasting a week fixing your tests is a fairy tale.
andrei_says_ 3y ago
I bought his devutils for $9 and love it!
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cynicalsecurity 3y ago
Looks like a marketing bullshit article.
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redbell 3y ago
“People are rewarded in public for what they practice for years in private.” — Tony Robbins Whenever I heard about a success story, especially, when the hero is an indie hacker, the above quote hits my brain. I would assume that nobody here would disagree that zero to $45K/mo in 2 years is a jaw-dropping number but once you read the full story with all behind-the-scenes challenges, blood, sweet and tears you quickly realize that this is a lot of work multiplied by some coefficient of uncertainty. I’ve discovered and been following Tony for about a year now on Twitter and on IndieHackers and must say I was inspired by him. If ONLY he posted this on HN himself and was here for an AMA Best of luck..
- trungdq88 3y ago
  Thank you the kind words! I did post the link myself but it didn't get a lot of votes like this one.
  - redbell 3y ago
    Oh, you are here Tony.. Welcome back! I see that you already submitted this story yourself but, unfortunately, didn't get much traction like this one. This is one of the weirdest parts of Hacker News, where a submission may go totally unnoticed but could go viral and even hit #1 after being resubmitted a few hours later.
braza 3y ago
Reading those comments I think this is a tale of two cities. City one here several corporate developers can see how a raw and crystalline feedback from the user is: attention and money. no fluff, no Hippo, no assumptions of what a customer is. Well done an we salute you. Another city has people that is tired with that renaissance of this dollar-menu version of the hustle culture, that as a stubborn Phoenix always reappears and now fuelled with social attention. And here I am not talking about people doing important things to the world, but my message is for the several clout chasers from Twitter that their “product” is selling courses to build products, how to hustle and show stats in social media, and generate twitter impressions as “qualified leads”.
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prakhar897 3y ago
I was also interested in this. So, I scraped and crunched a lot of IndieHackers data. Things like which fields are most pursued, how many ventures succeed etc. You can read the complete report here: https://prakgupta.com/blog/real_world_stats_for_bootstrapping https://prakgupta.com/blog/real_world_stats_for_bootstrappin...
- beacham 3y ago
  Interesting analysis. I enjoyed reading it. Seemed pretty much in line with what I would expect. I am curious where you came up with the 30,000 guess for bootstrapped startups in the following statement: “X (My guess is 30000 startups) start bootstrapping —-> 2868 list on IH —-> 915 making 10k$ MRR That puts the actual percentage to be : 3.5% chance of success.”
guzik 3y ago
Xnapper is really cool. Anything similar but for videos?
dmoura 3y ago
Thank you for sharing your learnings and for your transparency! Congrats!
Supply5411 3y ago
I tried to read this with an open mind to learn something that may help me on a similar journey. However, I found it challenging to get any new nuggets of advice or wisdom. Maybe the "#buildinpublic" movement and interacting with that community? Otherwise it just seems like he found his groove, but it's not really transferable.
- deleted 3y ago
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haven_xia 3y ago
Great topic, really impressive, though the first step is still hard for me.
shinycode 3y ago
It’s really close to shottr.cc which is free and the support paid version is cheaper. I use it 20 times every day and it has many options. Really useful tool
atleastoptimal 3y ago
Its amazing that as a senior developer he was making 1700 a month USD, which is about 20k a year. Salaries for software devs outside America are so comically low. I understand why the remote work sphere is completely flooded, simply being a junior dev in America doing simple stuff right out of college and you make 6 figs. That's a platinum ticket in 99% of countries.
- doublemint2202 3y ago
  horses. lots of 'em.
  - gabesullice 3y ago
    What does this mean?
- gumballindie 3y ago
  > That's a platinum ticket in 99% of countries. Few companies pay that though. Pay is usually adjusted to local cost of living. The uk for instance is way cheaper than the us. Germany as well.
- system2 3y ago
  Eastern EU countries usually pay $2-4k range. That's why hiring offshore is very easy for American companies.
- game_the0ry 3y ago
  > Its amazing that as a senior developer he was making 1700 a month USD, which is about 20k a year I mostly agree with you, but let me make it less amazing. Outside of the US, you will likely have no student debt, low cost and high quality healthcare, lower rent, and lower cost of living. 20-year olds living in SF, NY, or Seattle, probably have student loans, rent that costs 2-3,000 per month in rent, a routine doctors bill costs $250, a lunch sandwich costs $13. In other words, the cost of living is so high that the quality of life in a different country doing the same role will likely be higher.
skwee357 3y ago
I’m very happy for Tony, it’s a great achievement indeed. Having said that, as an aspiring solopreneur myself, this article misses a very big part. Engineers like to talk about how they build products, but we rarely talk about how to market them. I quit my job 5 months ago, launched my first SaaS 3 months ago, and got zero users. I then started to tweet, write in LinkedIn, and focus on my newsletter. But I barely get any followers. So building is the easy part. I refuse to participate in algorithm games, and try to be authentic. But maybe that’s not what people like. Anyway, great read. Thanks for sharing!
- eruci 3y ago
  Marketing is a tax you pay when you are not good enough.
- nicbou 3y ago
  You can also post about things that are genuinely interesting to you, and achievements that you are proud of. See my post history on HN. I would never have thought that people care about that stuff so I was pleasantly surprised by the warm reception. I do something similar on social media. I share little updates mixed with factoids about my job. Even if it brought zero new visitors, it feels good to share what I’m working on.
- TheAnkurTyagi 3y ago
  building is great but most developers don't understand the value of marketing till they ask people to pay for their projects like SaaS etc... I've made some good money in writing in the last 3 years but without marketing it was highly impossible that's why I always encourage to people to start writing be it a tweet, LinkedIn or newsletter etc... and it's again a huge task along with building your products that's why it looks easy from outside but needs more work inside. but before going I've learned from Daniel a lot of things about marketing. Maybe this is useful. Take a look. A 12 step marketing crash course for non-marketers: 1. If you're trying to sell something, everything you do is marketing. 2. The technical term for trying to sell something is a go-to-market (GTM) strategy. 3. Building a product is part of your GTM strategy. 4. Your combination of skills, knowledge, experience, reputation, assets, connections, etc, create opportunities for you in the market. 5. Once you find an opportunity you'd like to pursue, you should set a payoff expectation. Example: you plan to bring a particular project to market with the expectation of making $100K within 12mo. 6. You should have a viable hypothesis of how that expectation can be realized. Example: to make $100K selling a $100 product, you need 1,000 customers. To get 1,000 customers at 1% conversion you need 100K visits on your landing page. To get 100K visits you need to spend X on ads. And so on. 7. If you can't convince yourself you have a viable and profitable hypothesis, you need to adjust your payoff expectation, or pick another opportunity. You don't have an obligation to pursue every opportunity you encounter. 8. If your payoff expectation is too small for the time and money you're investing to bring your project to market, you should abandon it. 9. If the worst case scenario of your GTM strategy has a chance to put you out of business (by running out of time, money, motivation, etc), you should abandon it. Take risks, but never put yourself at risk. 10. Once you have a project on the market, you have the option (but not the obligation) to improve that project by repeating steps 5-9 on the same project. Every new feature is a new thing you're brining to market. 11. A business with no attention is a business that doesn't exist. You can have the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, it's like multiplying by zero — a recipe for failure. 12. Remember: there is no distinction between building and marketing. You build whatever you need to build to realize your payoff expectation. Everything is marketing.
RagnarD 3y ago
Question for Tony (trungdq88) - did you develop difficulties with your Twitter app(s) due to changes in the platform? If so, how hard were they to fix?
- thewarpaint 3y ago
  It’s covered in the article.
kamel3d 3y ago
I dont get all the negative comments here! it is sickening! I am not even jealous I would like to have his success one day and I wish Toney all the best
n_ary 3y ago
Very inspiring story and well written, heartfelt kudos. For all the negativity comments here, I feel like these commenters read the intro paragraph and started complaining. Unlike most of the similar indieHacker stories, this one has most details I would want to know. 99.999999% of the stories by “IndieHackers” are mostly self-congratulatory marketing bs leading to selling a consulting/book mostly about how they “followed their passion while everyone else was naysayer and how their corporate boss was a d*k” while handwaving the whole real details. As I read the article from top-2-bottom, here are some useful tl;dr * he had plenty time during COVID working from home while polishing his first product * he started posting interesting daily hobby stuff(most of us do) on twitter, which people found interesting and follower grew * he gained some initial traction from one HN & then ProductHunt posting of his product * he lived in Singapore and earned ~$8800(~12k in SGD) and average cost of living is nearly half(or cheaper if he lived as single person) and usually tax is progressive reaching up to 22%, so he saved a good amount of cushion money(he mentioned in the post that he saved up for 2 years of living cost if he moved back to Vietnam or if frugally living then easily 4 years) * in his post, he mentioned that $1k/month is adequate for comfortable living in his home country(Vietnam), so at $45k/month, even accounting for all taxes and misc. he is probably a very wealthy person if he moved back to Vietnam * majority of his marketing channel was newsletter and twitter followers(first difficult 100 were probably gained from HN & PH posting) * his products might not be ground breaking but it was very useful for average joe on twitter(remember we HN folks are very tech sophisticated, to most average joe, finding some pretty numbers about how many people their tweet reached is like feeling lightyears ahead and magic!) * unlike other high ego IndieHackers, Tony didn’t engage in hiding his risks, he came clean about his twitter product being unsustainable due to sudden subscription model of twitter-post-elon, and sold it off($128k) which gave him good amount of cash to grow his other projects * COL in vietnam is pretty cheap compared to our Western lands of dream and $45k/month minus other stuff is still a lot of money, which can give a QOL x10 better than what we can afford for x10 that amount here * from the article he is not selling any coaching/tutoring/here-is-how-I-won-some-lottery-pay-me-money-to-read book or anything.

852 points by alexzeitler 3y ago

Good on you Tony. $45k monthly revenue is nothing to shake a stick at, and it seems you're quite happy with the lifestyle it's afforded you. An inspiration.

wahnfrieden 3y ago
Amazingly done for one time payments as well. People like them. Forever licenses are maybe more tolerable as well for self host and client side local applications. Could be good money combined with b2b pricing on top of it

benknight87 3y ago

It's worth keeping in mind that Tony's current monthly figure ($45k/mo) is a a single snapshot in time. Past performance is no guarantee of future success. Certainly, a talented engineer consistently making ballpark $100-200/k a year over the same period and saving a reasonable percentage of that is going to be more financially successful and basically guaranteed lifetime of employment at a high tech salary. Long story short, it's a worthwhile achievement but it only happens to a lucky few. Focusing on building a long term career and becoming quietly rich is probably a better play.

TheAnkurTyagi 3y ago

This is such a nice story and congratulations Tony. I've seen your journey from the start and always get inspiration. Good luck for the future. One quick question- Any 2 tips you would like to give to others on "How you did marketing about your projects" I know you tweeted, sent newsletters etc.... but anything else like SEO or hiring any marketers?

gumballindie 3y ago

[flagged]

swayvil 3y ago
I sold my kidney and bought a Tesla. Everybody in the trailer-park is green with envy.
agentofoblivion 3y ago
[flagged]
- dubcanada 3y ago
  I'm sorry but what? I think they are getting downvoted because they somehow turned a story of a guys venture into the business world into politics.
- public_defender 3y ago
  Maybe I'm an optimist, but I'd like to think the downvotes are because the user showed in the space of a haiku that they understand neither capitalism nor communism.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Au contraire. Corporate communism is very much alive and kicking. Capital is clogged. The only way to make it move is to allow small to medium sized true capital makers and movers to thrive. Corporations are the new communist apparatus. Roles have been reversed.
    - hooverd 3y ago
      TIL communism is when organizations do things.
      - kljkjkjlkju 3y ago
        If capitalism (incidentally, a term coined by Marx) is whatever one feels like it is, and no-one ever would call you out for that in an internet discussion, then it's pretty consistent to apply the same approach to communism.

unsupp0rted 3y ago

I paid for & use one of Tony's products (Xnapper for screenshots). It's good, but I reported a cropping bug, along with a replication bullet list and .gif screencast of me replicating the bug. I got a response from a support person telling me to increase border padding beyond any reasonable aesthetic level. Aesthetics is the purpose of buying the product, otherwise non-aesthetic screenshots are built into macOS. The support person asked if this error happens regularly... well replicate it for yourself using my screencast and that's your answer. There was no bug fix. No point version update in the works. The last software update was 9 months ago on 15 Jan, 2023. I feel like Tony's able to be a profitable solopreneur because he outsources all support to people who don't really care about the quality of the output.

sokoloff 3y ago
You got an unsatisfactory reply to a support ticket. What's the realistic alternative with other software vendors of $20-50 products? IMO, the most common is not "a satisfactory reply" but rather "no [edit to add: human-generated] reply".
- antisthenes 3y ago
  The solution to receiving an unsatisfactory reply on a support ticket is not "lower your expectations", regardless of how that business may be structured. If we lower our expectations of software, we'll get exactly that, shitty software.
  - cellis 3y ago
    If you don’t like it you can always stop paying, or better yet build your own. That’s how things get better.
    - Capricorn2481 3y ago
      I stopped paying for Youtube Premium. Did that make Youtube better? Maybe I'll find time to build that when I'm not building API integrations with Youtube.

demondemidi 3y ago

An arrow indicator for a twitter profile pic, a screen cap tool, and a wrapper around ChatGPT. I kinda want to shoot myself. Largely useless products that made someone rich that rely on two other ecosystems. That’s the way I guess? I’m so not an entrepreneur. Edit: apologies for using a suicide metaphor. I was being sarcastic. I’m in my 50s, really like my job, and am on a path to a good retirement. It just amazes me that there are so many opportunities for “pet rocks” in this era. Go get some if you know how! It I think it is safer to do things the old fashioned way and not rely on extreme luck and social media. But again, I’m old.

intelVISA 3y ago
Whilst it is absurd, it should be encouraging that you can escape from the grind so easily nowadays!
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- donnythecroc 3y ago
  Why is it absurd? Chat GPT UI is pretty bad, he created a better one, people pay him for it. That seems like a pretty sensible exchange.
- moooo99 3y ago
  > it should be encouraging that you can escape from the grind so easily nowadays! And this exactly the false fallacy. This is a perfect example of survivorship bias. For everywhere successful solopreneur/indie maker/whatever, there are a hundred failed attempts that didn't fail for a lack of trying hard. A common denominator between many successful solopreneurs is a strong social media presence, so this image isn't surprising. That being said, giving it a try yourself is fairly accessible as opposed to starting a startup with external funding. So if you can afford to, give it a try. But do not expect it to be easy
Whiteshadow12 3y ago
I get it, with the right positioning, you can convince people to buy bottled water for $30 or more, Tony built or found really good positions, you can do the same.

donnythecroc 3y ago

Good job Tony Dinh. I think the lesson here is to keep going, a bunch of failures and then a success.

aogaili 3y ago

So many envious people, including myself, but at least I admit it. Go back to your corporate cusion or VC lap, and resolve that jira please.

gumballindie 3y ago
And be sure to return to your field (office as they call it these days), peasant.
ink_13 3y ago
It's possible to find this kind of thing distasteful without being motivated by envy.
- aogaili 3y ago
  It is, I agree, at the end of the day he built his products on top of corporate workers and exploited good opportunities and niches, and he brags about it, to market it, which I personally find distasteful, but that what it takes for solo devs. But it's not the vibe I get from most of the comments, it seems a lot of comments are knee-jerk reaction promted by envy.
  - DandyDev 3y ago
    How is this guy "exploiting" people? He sells products mostly for a one-time fee - something HN often reminds us is way better than "subscription for everything". And these products obviously serve people well. And since when is being successful and in detail explaining how you went about it "bragging"?
    - aogaili 3y ago
      I didn't say exploiting people. I said exploiting niche opportunities and piggybacking on the shoulders of corporate workers, ain't nothing wrong in that. In fact, I praise his hustling and envious of it.

endisneigh 3y ago

mixed feelings - this is a good story, but it's sort of impressive in the same way it's impressive Six Flags gets away with selling Corn Dogs for $10. but all in all I wish more people did this. it would create a more competitive environment the ultimately result in driving the price down for many things and lowering hopefully making BigCo weaker.

kyawzazaw 3y ago
Same way how?

Lemmi 3y ago

I read it and I don't know it's a story I would not want to have. It feels like the good friend who always has some side hussle instead of just doing something useful.

rwhyan 3y ago
$45k/month is more than a "side hustle." And Tony's products ARE useful. Or else people wouldn't buy them. Value is subjective.
DandyDev 3y ago
Making enough money to support the lifestyle you want is useful, no?
- Lemmi 3y ago
  I still wouldn't do sex work.
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mihaic 3y ago

While I admire the can-do attitude and independent mindset, stories like this strike me primarily as how unscalable doing something like this is. I mean, it only works because not more then 1-2% of developers even try to do something like this, since it's really hard to ensure you have enough edge in understanding user needs, building and being able to find a distribution chanel, and there simply isn't enough revenue to support many more developers to sell their niche products. I hate this conclusion, but most developers have to rely on salaries, since only a few companies have captured revenue streams big enough to justify a full time job.

satvikpendem 3y ago
Why isn't there enough revenue to support other devs? Lots of people have money to spend, they just don't want to spend it on bad products. Induced demand via increased competition is a real phenomenon [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
- mihaic 3y ago
  Induced demand leads often also to a race-to-the-bottom in pricing. Almost everyone is just using a few basic apps, going against the consumer train is very hard, and only companies are spending money on software.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    There is always a competitive advantage to be had; products, especially software products, are not commodities.
whiplash451 3y ago
Good point, although I am less worried about the lack of scale and more about the lack of temporal persistence. It seems like he needs to constantly push new products out there to maintain a steady income.
- 3y ago

Aurornis 3y ago

I always enjoy reading success stories of developers of small apps. At the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re seeing only a cherry picked part of the picture. There is no mention of advertising spend or customer acquisition costs. The trend among indie hackers is to talk about MRR without mentioning a single expense, then to interleave it all with “follow me on Twitter” so you’re inspired to join their audience. This is a bit cynical, but I’ve been following accounts like this for a decade and it’s depressing to watch how many of them pivot into trying to sell me courses and/or private community access based on their success. Audience building (which he readily talks about in the article) becomes a conflict of interest for real information because it incentivizes big numbers while hiding costs. Maybe his apps are growing entirely organically and it’s pure profit. Or maybe he’s spent huge amounts of money on ads or marketing to get more installs to grow his user base as fast as possible. He mentions spending 16 hour days between coding the app and promoting it. The thing is, we don’t know how he got the users, and he won’t tell us because admitting anything other than MRR would only detract from his story. And as any small business operator knows, getting the customers is the hardest part. I wish him the best and enjoy following these success stories, but having seen enough of these I always take the isolated MRR numbers with a grain of salt. It’s not the full picture. This isn’t unique to this developer. It’s the trend among social media “indie hackers”: They know people are hungry for success stories and want to learn the secrets of how to build a successful indie company, so they build narratives to make themselves look like the person who will share those secrets. But then the more you read and the more you follow, the more you start seeing how they’re leaving out all of the actual secrets and keys to success, such as how they’re marketing their apps and getting downloads.

nomilk 3y ago
> without mentioning a single expense The article does appear to give a general indication of expenses: > At the moment, my total revenue across all products is about $45K/month at ~90% profit.
keiferski 3y ago
> The thing is, we don’t know In the first paragraph: At the moment, my total revenue across all products is about $45K/month at ~90% profit.

unsupp0rted 3y ago

HN: "It's okay to make something nobody wants = damn right! Do it for the craft and the process and the learning and the joy." Also HN: "A guy makes 45K/mo by building tiny time-saving apps, starting with ones he himself wants = what a sad world of frivolous side-hustles!"

kolbe 3y ago
I see a large diversity of opinion about this guy's business. Who is this "HN" you're talking about?
- pbj1968 3y ago
  And here’s the third bucket - can’t see the forest for the semantic trees.
  - kolbe 3y ago
    Is there a 4th bucket of people who are so eager to pigeonhole ideologies instead of reading that it makes them functionally illiterate? Or are we done at three buckets?
Waterluvian 3y ago
I wish this absolutely ridiculous, unthinking trope of treating communities of thousands of people as one mind that’s only allowed to have one opinion would finally stop.
- fullstackchris 3y ago
  but reading the comments, they mostly fall in to one of these two buckets...
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  in consensus based communities that only show you a reality based on what comments people upvote, it is not ridiculous at all when a different community would have completely different sentiment it is reflective of the audience

keiferski 3y ago

I think there is a lot of money to be made in building "human accessible" frontends to AI tools, so I'm not surprised that his ChatGPT wrapper product does well. Setting up Midjourney, for example, is such a convoluted mess, where you have to create an account on another service (Discord) before creating a Midjourney account, then understand the different chat channels and figure out where the best place to use the app is (private DM with Midjourney bot.) And that's all before even generating an image! Even their website looks like someone's art project, not a cutting-edge image generation service: https://www.midjourney.com/ https://www.midjourney.com/

naillo 3y ago
Well dalle3 pretty much has that niche covered
- keiferski 3y ago
  Meh, I still am not convinced that the blank chat box is a good UI. You still need to know what to say and how to say it. Too much implicit knowledge is required.
  - vunderba 3y ago
    You should watch the dall-e 3 trailers. The whole leap forward is that you can just write a description of the scene, the more descriptive the better. The coherence and accuracy seems to be far better than MJ or even SDXL. There's less prompt fu nonsense (aka 4k, hdr, trending on art station, etc) than ever.
ferennag 3y ago
Leonardo.ai is much better in this regard. I hated midjourney, and if they don’t change this ridiculous way of interacting with the app they will fail.

wx30 3y ago

Thanks for the article. What tools do you use to quickly build websites? Stripe? Something else?

m3kw9 3y ago

Doesn’t look easy

ag56 3y ago

> Probably 12 hours a day, or even 16 hours/day if you also count Twitter as “work”. It’s the marketing effort that puts me off. I know I’m a 10x developer with a great product sense, but spending hours every day on Twitter and blogging sounds awful. I very definitely count those 4 twitter hours as ‘work’.

tspike 3y ago
Sounds like you need a business partner. Me too.
- intelVISA 3y ago
  If only there was some way to connect 10x SWEs with 10x MBAs :/ An 'accelerator' of some description, perhaps.
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    Perhaps one named after an obscure mathematical operation, one that relies on a fixed form submission over networking with VCs.
  - grvdrm 3y ago
    Is this something that we can facilitate through IH or elsewhere? I am on the other side - not good enough of a dev but plenty of experience on the biz side.
    - tspike 3y ago
      Let me know if you're interested in brainstorming. I've got extensive dev experience across the stack and can slog my way through marketing/sales but it wears on me quickly and I'm not great at it. I've got some time off coming up and will be looking to pick up a side project or two.
      - grvdrm 3y ago
        Could be fun! Email: crcbos at g mail

benjaminwootton 3y ago

I don't know if I'm in an algorithmic rabbit hole, but my Twitter shows hundreds of people like this talking about how much they are making, how many signups they are getting for their products, how many Twitter followers they have. It seems like some strange playbook where you build a very simple product and shout about (possibly exaggerate) your success to attract eyeballs. Then you sell the real thing which is a course or info product to the people who want to replicate your success. No bitterness here and I haven't even read this particular post properly to cast aspersions at him. I've just felt something didn't add up with this corner of the internet for some time. Here are a few more random ones from the top of my "For You" feed. Again nothing against the specific posters, just to illustrate what I am seeing: https://twitter.com/MrNick_Buzz https://twitter.com/MrNick_Buzz https://twitter.com/marc_louvion https://twitter.com/marc_louvion https://twitter.com/Timb03 https://twitter.com/Timb03

antigirl 3y ago
Agree with this, it's mostly talking about numbers and the success instead of the product itself [which you'd expect to be the forefront of all their posts as its the main reason they are tweeting?]
- diimdeep 3y ago
  And author of this article is happy about #1 on front page of HN https://twitter.com/tdinh_me/status/1705597632876626166 https://twitter.com/tdinh_me/status/1705597632876626166 And there is one with critique of HN comments, like https://twitter.com/LBacaj/status/1705601091981754482 https://twitter.com/LBacaj/status/1705601091981754482 > @LBacaj This top comment on HN, to this post on getting to $45K/MO, captures everything wrong with the developer mindset today. > ”everything has to be crazy hard technically or it’s not valuable.” > You’ve all been duped into delusions of grandeur, only so they can take advantage of you. > @circleseer HN has become the old man yelling at the cloud meme > @madmaxbr5 A pizza shop is just a thin rapper around the agricultural supply chain and restaurant equipment industry. The recipes are centuries old. Zero actual innovation.
michaelsalim 3y ago

DecayingOrganic 3y ago

I've noticed that negative comments often float to the top. That’s a bit of a bummer. No one's entrepreneurial success should make you question your life choices or become a reason for your frustration. Congratulations Tony! I remember the time you quit your job and set a goal of reaching $10K/mo with a few products on twitter, it seemed crazy. But you pulled it off! Hats off to you.

paulryanrogers 3y ago
It's ok for folks to express skepticism in response to someone selling shovels and dreams. Despite any insinuation in their marketing, luck isn't repeatable. All that said congrats to them on seizing the opportunity. (I too sell trinkets ;) yet am too ashamed to sell dreams) It would be nice to see a survey of all those who quit and it didn't work out compared to those who did, and their strategies. My guess is the losers tried most of the same things yet just didn't get lucky, or ran out of money before luck could come along.
- kyawzazaw 3y ago
  I don't see how this is shovels and dreams. There is no courses involved here or book deals.
xyst 3y ago
Crab mentality
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janmo 3y ago

A lot of people here complaining that Soloproneurs only make "useless" "pet rocks". There is a big bias here, only the pet rock solopreneurs are very public about what they are doing and their success at it, because that is their marketing, YOU (their audience on HN and Twitter) are the pet rocks buyers. Solopreneurs with stuff other than pet rocks often don't want to share their success and how much they are making especially not to a tech savvy and entrepreneurial audience, as this would just cause more competition.

proxyon 3y ago
bullseye. when I read this I specifically thought of a few guys I know that made proprietary license SDKs that tons of corporations are paying for. there's a dude well known in the mobile space for example that sells the background geolocation plugins that everyone uses. it's a very tough problem to solve and he works on it full time and probably make a boatload of money owning his own business.
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umvi 3y ago

The hard part here is the spending hours on Twitter each day to "become more influential" and "engage with your audience"

Existenceblinks 3y ago
I mute a lot of these accounts that try to farm me as their audience. I used to engage some, they just don't care to reply at all. And they are annoying real fast. Imaging you have 10 posts of garbage a day / influencer

didip 3y ago

I am surprised people reduced this article as just another pet rock. Dude's journey has some interesting nuggets. He knows how to time box himself and build the smallest MVP that will actually make money. And his journey is not an overnight success either, it took him years to build everything including his social presence. Compare that to a W-2 job where you just have to show up 9am-5pm. HN is showing its overly critical self again, just like when Dropbox first appeared on HN.

mt_ 3y ago
He's a good marketeer, I'll give you that. Just this week I've seen one of his tweets being promoted on X and now he's top of hacker news on my feed. Not particularly interested in his tools but congratulations on his way to achieve engagement.
- Existenceblinks 3y ago
  I mute all of these guys who have posted 10 times+ a day. If everyone doing this, there will be lots of garbage.
nomilk 3y ago
> HN is showing its overly critical self again, just like when Dropbox first appeared on HN Was HN overly critical of Dropbox? If so, how so? (genuinely curious) I did some digging and found some interesting sources but didn't come across anything overly critical of Dropbox in its early years (yet): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dhouston https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=dhouston https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1253750400&dateRange=custom&dateStart=337996800&page=0&prefix=false&query=dropbox&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1253750400&dateRange=custom&... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR7tJ8wAI3M&t=27s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR7tJ8wAI3M&t=27s
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  When someone mentions HN and Dropbox, they are usually mentioning the infamous comment by BrandonM which is the top comment in your first link.

TheGigaChad 3y ago

[dead]

EddTheSDET 3y ago

Hackernews seems overly critical and anti-“hacker” nowadays (new acc but been around for years). Anyone have a guess why that’s the case? Influx of new users?

elboru 3y ago
I’ve also been around for years, but I don’t see it as a recent phenomenon. I’ve noticed that usually most top comments (for most topics) contain contra-arguments, or critical comments of any sort against the article. Sometimes it’s useful to learn about other perspectives, but often it feels forced or just plain negative/ego inspired. I could go back years and check old posts and notice that same trend. One famous example is the Dropbox post.
- dang 3y ago
  > most top comments (for most topics) contain contra-arguments, or critical comments of any sort against the article That's true until the top comments start objecting to the objections. The current thread is a clear example. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22contrarian%20dynamic%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... It's a surprisingly reliable phenomenon.
- braza 3y ago
  I think this is the beauty of HN: having people that does not share the hive mind from Social Media, edgy comments, contrarians, insiders, builders and people that reflects over the topics posted here.
satvikpendem 3y ago
New users are more likely to be positive, actually. HN has always been more negative, it even has the infamous Dropbox comment by BrandonM.
- lylejantzi3rd 3y ago
  I'm also guessing the bounce rate on HN is pretty high. New users come in, see a post like this where the top 5 posts are all long and very negative, and they bounce. Who wants to stick around for that? Other people who like to post negative comments. It's a self-reinforcing cycle.

arthurofbabylon 3y ago

I am really fed up with this kind of indie hacker story. MMR updates are superficial. Weak signal. I'm confident most are absent of critical info and some are entirely made up. I don't disbelieve anyone in particular, but when a mechanism of virality proliferates, it often gets deployed without the backing substance. "How I XYZ" around money is similarly misleading. Most entrepreneurs I know cannot recreate their own success – when they set out on a new venture, they need to look with fresh eyes, invent some new techniques, and discard a lot of methods that previously worked. If entrepreneurs aren't even able to reuse their own "how I xyz," then how will a stranger with even less nuance be able to learn or apply much from the blog post? Again, some of these stories have great lessons, but as a category I believe they are more noise than signal. Finally, the sheer obsession with money saddens me. The great entrepreneurs of our world are hardly motivated by money – to them, money is a tool that they factor in as they work to realize a vision, not an end goal. How ethically/morally impoverished is this technical class to be so obsessed with money? There's a term for this – greed. I know that a lot of jobs suck, a lot of stuff in life is expensive, we need money to do a lot of basic things, etcetera. But money is not the only solution, and more money is not an even better solution. I don't think this incessant messaging around money is virtuous – I think it is both a product of greed and a means of harnessing the greed in others. (And where are the entrepreneurs bragging about impact?) (For the record, I am not jealous – I make my money doing literally whatever I want, on projects that I find much more exciting, with ample time left over for nature walks, rock climbing, reading, and more. Unlike these authors, the money I make is not the most interesting part of my story.)

unmole 3y ago
I can't tell if this is satire.
- charles_f 3y ago
  Yeah I waa asking myself the same question, this is such a stereotypical hn answer, but it lacks just enough emphasis to make it satirical
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

tamimio 3y ago

In reality the title should be: this is how I got lucky in my journey, I jumped into the AI hype just like thousands of other developers, but pure luck made it for me, and now I make X amount of money. I’m not the first to jump into it, I’m not the brightest since there are way smarter people than me who tried similar ideas, I didn’t build anything groundbreaking, and I didn’t invent anything new. I just got lucky. Now all you have to do is to sustain that, make an article about it, write a book on how you are successful and sell it because everyone subconsciously likes to read stuff that gives them hope, and maybe even later make a TED talk talking about how X attribute is all you need for success. But in reality, it is just luck! A lot of people did what OP did, and a lot will try to mimic it too, only to find out years later that they didn’t make it, ending up in a worse financial situation plus all the mental health issues they had/have to deal with. I am not trying to be pessimistic, but I always wish that in all these inspirational stories, they would make it clear that it is all luck. Sure, try your luck too, but keep your hopes just like how you do when you gamble.

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DandyDev 3y ago
How do you even get to this take? The guy clearly explained how he has built MULTIPLE successful products. So there is obviously more going on than sheer luck. And jumping on the AI hype is exactly what being a good entrepreneur is all about: recognizing an opportunity/gap and capitalizing on it. And the reason he was more successful than those thousands other developers is because he understands that there is more to business than building a cool product. For example marketing, something that he is clearly very good at.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  The first is the hardest. After that you can leverage your brand
- shrimpx 3y ago
  Stretching your take to the extreme, it's like saying Kim Kardashian makes money from perfume because she's a genius fragrance designer and really understands the nuances and opportunities in the fragrance market, not because she had built an 'influential celebrity' persona with 400 million followers.

lucgagan 3y ago

Been following your story on Twitter for a long time. Very inspiring. I really like the DevUtils app that you built. You never mention what MRR it is generating today, though. Would love to know if you managed to grow it to anything of meaningful MRR.

hubraumhugo 3y ago

Business advice is often just someone handing you their winning lottery ticket. It worked perfectly for them but will probably be totally useless and not repeatable for you.

system2 3y ago
That's a stretch. There is still lots to learn from their journey. I can list at least 5 things to take from Tony's success.
- mym1990 3y ago
  One thing to keep in mind is survivorship bias…not saying that Tony’s experience is not one to glean some things from, but be very careful about what those things are and how you implement them in your journey.
- Existenceblinks 3y ago
  Tbh, this is very repetitive story .. seen 100 times before.
hahamaster 3y ago
Someone handing me their winning lottery ticket is wonderful, not totally useless.
imgabe 3y ago
Nobody can ever do anything. Things only happen by random chance. What a bleak and pointless worldview.

DantesKite 3y ago

So much envy.

tuyenhx 3y ago

Congratz Tony! He has been very good at creating products for years. Since he was a student. The way he studied, the way he worked, just so different from the rest of us. It feels so good that your story in the front page of HN. 45k is not a big number for HN crowd, but it is a fortune here in my country. Keep going my friend! P/s: I am his classmate at the university.

whiplash451 3y ago
I'd think that 45K per month is a big number for most people on HN.

nico 3y ago

Very interesting read. Highlights how important having an audience is The key was building his Twitter following and mailing list

zygo 3y ago

Pettiness and entitlement in the comments are another level! Kudos to Tony for having the guts to take the leap and reaching this milestone

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gejose 3y ago

Great read! I don't know why there's so much negativity in the comments, but great job Tony!

michaelteter 3y ago
Jealousy maybe. Or frustration that marketing often seems to be more important than anything else. HN probably has more good devs than good marketers, and some of us (dev) really hate doing marketing. A story like this seems to reinforce that just being good at product development or software development isn't enough, and that it _might_ be more effective to be mediocre at development and good at marketing. (Not to suggest that TFA author is mediocre at development.)

sgu999 3y ago

> ~90% profit Even though I understand the mechanics of the free market, in how many other fields do we consider this kind of profit margins to be honest? What about a farmer selling at a 90% profit? A pharmacist? A banker? Good for him though, "why not if he can", after all. I'm just not sure how I feel about it...

sothatsit 3y ago
This is why investors love software: the marginal cost of product is tiny. However, real money must be spent on R&D and marketing to keep those profit margins going, especially if you don't have a technology moat (e.g., AI wrappers).
fy20 3y ago
I like to look at it the other way: if a single person can make so much on their own, how much inefficiency must there be in big companies? Even at the medium size VC backed startup (~120 people) I work for, the amount of inefficiency I see on a day to day basis is sometimes unbelievable. Also I'm not sure banks are a good example. Over the course of my mortgage, I will end up paying more than I borrowed in interest.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  “so much”? This is 40k thats little. And it’s good that indies are able to achieve it.
tpetry 3y ago
The 90% didn‘t account for his time working on the stuff. So you can reduce from the $500k/year his salary - and now the 90% margin is far away. Indie hackers never factor in their working time.

danbruc 3y ago

90% profit is a market failure, you should not be able to overcharge your customers almost 10x in a working market.

nickkao 3y ago
Drop your LinkedIn I wanna see something
DandyDev 3y ago
I agree that it is a market failure, but it is for sure a marketing success. I cannot help but feel that there must be dozen competitors to his simple products that gather more "honest" profit margins (aka are cheaper or more feature rich) but have a hard time with marketing. This is obviously something Tony put a lot of time and effort in, and it paid off. Good on him!
free_energy_min 3y ago
It’s not the same as profit margin in other business it doesn’t take into account labor costs. How much is his time worth?
- danbruc 3y ago
  Pick some random full-time developer salary, say $100k per year, and cut this in half as he says he works four hours per day.
ayushchat 3y ago
Have you ever heard of a company called Apple?
- danbruc 3y ago
  I have no idea how high Apple's profit margins are, but I am quite sure they are not small. But what is your point, that is also a market failure.
hackerdrew 3y ago

xyst 3y ago

When I was an avid Twitter user this person was pretty active in selling his product. Particularly in the “indie hacker” hashtag. My take from this is: know how to market and sell your product. If not, get someone that can

admildo 3y ago

Congratulations on such a huge milestone. What an inspiration, I know you’re going to achieve even greater milestones. Keep on building

admildo 3y ago

Congratulations on such a big win. That’s a huge milestone. Keep on building you’re such an inspiration. Don’t listen to the haters. It’s easy to talk down when you’re not in the arena. Keep on building, keep on hacking, keeps on winning.

jackbridger 3y ago

Very interesting and inspiring Story

allenu 3y ago

As a fellow indie hacker (I quit my job 18 months ago to build and sell my own apps), I am super jealous. I don't have the success of this guy (only getting close to $1k/mo these days), but I can understand the success. This guy knows how to market and ship product. I've seen him pop up a few times on indiehackers.com and social media. His "brand" is super simple to understand, which helps gain followers. He knows marketing. A lot of people who try to go from being a dev to entrepreneur focus entirely too much on the engineering side (I'm guilty of that) and think that what matters most is the product and how well it's made. We focus way too much on tools, processes, and forget that at the end of the day, we're trying to exchange useful products for money. Getting your product(s) out the door and telling people about it (and iterating) are way more important than what stack you use. I'm a little disappointed by all the negativity here, but I suspect most of us are just jealous.

eddmakesio 3y ago
> We focus way too much on tools, processes, and forget that at the end of the day, we're trying to exchange useful products for mone Yep, just look at @levelsio and his $250k MRR stack of apps built with PHP and jQuery > I'm a little disappointed by all the negativity here, but I suspect most of us are just jealous. Yep x2, for a website built around startups a huge number seem to be against a solo founder bootstrapping apps successfully
- thelastparadise 3y ago
  > Yep x2, for a website built around startups a huge number seem to be against a solo founder bootstrapping apps successfully x3 Solo bootstrapper as well, ~20K ARR on one SaaS app about to launch another. It's clear to me there's money to be made, and yes engineers tend to overweight engineering effort and underweight distribution. Make something that makes someone's life better, saves or makes them money, and ask a fair amount for it. That's what I've done and have modest recurring revenue after only 6-8 months or so.
  - eddmakesio 3y ago

yusufmalikul 3y ago

Tony = 7 years of dev before going indie also Tony = 2-4 years of saving losers = no dev exp, learn no code in a week then quit 9-5 also losers = spend all their one month saving

uoaei 3y ago

One lesson I've learned from this post is if you create products for people who are on their computers all the time and who are not very price-sensitive to double-digit recurring costs, it's easy to make a lot of money.

moneywoes 3y ago
can you elaborate? seems like a vague icp
- uoaei 3y ago
  Marketing is easy when you know your audience is spending all their time on platforms like HN and Twitter, and they have itchy clicker-fingers for new shiny software that they think will help them optimize their life. Then it's just making the simplest possible software that works reliably (market it as "UNIX philosophy", either explicitly or implicitly), stick to the modern landing page + checkout flow aesthetic, and the marks are on familiar ground and will happily play your game to give you $4/mo til they redo their budgets. Mutiply this by ~1000, keep the subscription low enough that they get bored before hyperoptimizing their budget to that level, and you've got a steady stream of income.

frabjoused 3y ago

Don't know why this is trending on HN. It's not a coincidence that in a majority of these stories, they also have a large blog, social media following or in some other way are selling their success. This is just another person being successful by talking about how they are successful.

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jarekceborski 3y ago

Well deserved! And you are great inspiration for fellow solopreneurs and indie hackers! Keep shipping!

uconnectlol 3y ago

but i don't care because it involves doing web dev and using twitter. i already easily enter any math domain so i can work for some stupid company and get $300K/year in a week of job searching. what you are doing is no different than 90s microsoft devs making products to sell on microsoft's platform. none of these solutions are "freedom", since you still have to work terribly long amounts of time like 9-5, and sit on top of foundations that randomly move on peoples whims, your twitter suddenly requesting 45K/month being a prime example. the only freedom is skill. making a screenshot app is something anyone can do. you can also invest your time fully into marketing and that's what people do and why the world sucks.

jcytong 3y ago

It's wonderful the world is big enough to celebrate whether you run a $45k/mo company solo, or find joy in nature walks, rock climbing, reading or raised VC to go big.

thenerdhead 3y ago

Cool to see someone use and abuse Twitter to make money. Seems that every successful indie hacker story has a component of being somewhat known on twitter.

mjwhansen 3y ago
A lot of the successful indie hacker stories you’ve heard are because they’re active on Twitter. There are thousands of solo dev entrepreneurs that don’t post on Twitter and are very quietly running great little internet businesses.

alex_lav 3y ago

Until using Twitter drops out of these types of post, I'll continue to suggest retitling them to "How I became a tech influencer that writes software at 45k/mo". Also would love to see usage rates on these products instead of subscriptions alone, as very clearly Twitch has demonstrated people will give money to influencers they like regardless of (even in absence of) their product.

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axegon_ 3y ago

> unit test suite with >95% test coverage I'm sorry, but that claim is wild. This is nearly impossible unless your application consists of 5 classes and you are moving a few bits in memory. For a large application, anything over 75% sounds a bit fishy to say the least. And beyond that, it's practically unsustainable: the odds of making even a small refactor(which sooner or later you will need to), without wasting a week fixing your tests is a fairy tale.

andrei_says_ 3y ago

I bought his devutils for $9 and love it!

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cynicalsecurity 3y ago

Looks like a marketing bullshit article.

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redbell 3y ago

“People are rewarded in public for what they practice for years in private.” — Tony Robbins Whenever I heard about a success story, especially, when the hero is an indie hacker, the above quote hits my brain. I would assume that nobody here would disagree that zero to $45K/mo in 2 years is a jaw-dropping number but once you read the full story with all behind-the-scenes challenges, blood, sweet and tears you quickly realize that this is a lot of work multiplied by some coefficient of uncertainty. I’ve discovered and been following Tony for about a year now on Twitter and on IndieHackers and must say I was inspired by him. If ONLY he posted this on HN himself and was here for an AMA Best of luck..

trungdq88 3y ago
Thank you the kind words! I did post the link myself but it didn't get a lot of votes like this one.
- redbell 3y ago
  Oh, you are here Tony.. Welcome back! I see that you already submitted this story yourself but, unfortunately, didn't get much traction like this one. This is one of the weirdest parts of Hacker News, where a submission may go totally unnoticed but could go viral and even hit #1 after being resubmitted a few hours later.

braza 3y ago

Reading those comments I think this is a tale of two cities. City one here several corporate developers can see how a raw and crystalline feedback from the user is: attention and money. no fluff, no Hippo, no assumptions of what a customer is. Well done an we salute you. Another city has people that is tired with that renaissance of this dollar-menu version of the hustle culture, that as a stubborn Phoenix always reappears and now fuelled with social attention. And here I am not talking about people doing important things to the world, but my message is for the several clout chasers from Twitter that their “product” is selling courses to build products, how to hustle and show stats in social media, and generate twitter impressions as “qualified leads”.

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prakhar897 3y ago

I was also interested in this. So, I scraped and crunched a lot of IndieHackers data. Things like which fields are most pursued, how many ventures succeed etc. You can read the complete report here: https://prakgupta.com/blog/real_world_stats_for_bootstrapping https://prakgupta.com/blog/real_world_stats_for_bootstrappin...

beacham 3y ago
Interesting analysis. I enjoyed reading it. Seemed pretty much in line with what I would expect. I am curious where you came up with the 30,000 guess for bootstrapped startups in the following statement: “X (My guess is 30000 startups) start bootstrapping —-> 2868 list on IH —-> 915 making 10k$ MRR That puts the actual percentage to be : 3.5% chance of success.”

guzik 3y ago

Xnapper is really cool. Anything similar but for videos?

dmoura 3y ago

Thank you for sharing your learnings and for your transparency! Congrats!

Supply5411 3y ago

I tried to read this with an open mind to learn something that may help me on a similar journey. However, I found it challenging to get any new nuggets of advice or wisdom. Maybe the "#buildinpublic" movement and interacting with that community? Otherwise it just seems like he found his groove, but it's not really transferable.

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haven_xia 3y ago

Great topic, really impressive, though the first step is still hard for me.

shinycode 3y ago

It’s really close to shottr.cc which is free and the support paid version is cheaper. I use it 20 times every day and it has many options. Really useful tool

atleastoptimal 3y ago

Its amazing that as a senior developer he was making 1700 a month USD, which is about 20k a year. Salaries for software devs outside America are so comically low. I understand why the remote work sphere is completely flooded, simply being a junior dev in America doing simple stuff right out of college and you make 6 figs. That's a platinum ticket in 99% of countries.

doublemint2202 3y ago
horses. lots of 'em.
- gabesullice 3y ago
  What does this mean?
gumballindie 3y ago
> That's a platinum ticket in 99% of countries. Few companies pay that though. Pay is usually adjusted to local cost of living. The uk for instance is way cheaper than the us. Germany as well.
system2 3y ago
Eastern EU countries usually pay $2-4k range. That's why hiring offshore is very easy for American companies.
game_the0ry 3y ago
> Its amazing that as a senior developer he was making 1700 a month USD, which is about 20k a year I mostly agree with you, but let me make it less amazing. Outside of the US, you will likely have no student debt, low cost and high quality healthcare, lower rent, and lower cost of living. 20-year olds living in SF, NY, or Seattle, probably have student loans, rent that costs 2-3,000 per month in rent, a routine doctors bill costs $250, a lunch sandwich costs $13. In other words, the cost of living is so high that the quality of life in a different country doing the same role will likely be higher.

skwee357 3y ago

I’m very happy for Tony, it’s a great achievement indeed. Having said that, as an aspiring solopreneur myself, this article misses a very big part. Engineers like to talk about how they build products, but we rarely talk about how to market them. I quit my job 5 months ago, launched my first SaaS 3 months ago, and got zero users. I then started to tweet, write in LinkedIn, and focus on my newsletter. But I barely get any followers. So building is the easy part. I refuse to participate in algorithm games, and try to be authentic. But maybe that’s not what people like. Anyway, great read. Thanks for sharing!

eruci 3y ago
Marketing is a tax you pay when you are not good enough.
nicbou 3y ago
You can also post about things that are genuinely interesting to you, and achievements that you are proud of. See my post history on HN. I would never have thought that people care about that stuff so I was pleasantly surprised by the warm reception. I do something similar on social media. I share little updates mixed with factoids about my job. Even if it brought zero new visitors, it feels good to share what I’m working on.
TheAnkurTyagi 3y ago
building is great but most developers don't understand the value of marketing till they ask people to pay for their projects like SaaS etc... I've made some good money in writing in the last 3 years but without marketing it was highly impossible that's why I always encourage to people to start writing be it a tweet, LinkedIn or newsletter etc... and it's again a huge task along with building your products that's why it looks easy from outside but needs more work inside. but before going I've learned from Daniel a lot of things about marketing. Maybe this is useful. Take a look. A 12 step marketing crash course for non-marketers: 1. If you're trying to sell something, everything you do is marketing. 2. The technical term for trying to sell something is a go-to-market (GTM) strategy. 3. Building a product is part of your GTM strategy. 4. Your combination of skills, knowledge, experience, reputation, assets, connections, etc, create opportunities for you in the market. 5. Once you find an opportunity you'd like to pursue, you should set a payoff expectation. Example: you plan to bring a particular project to market with the expectation of making $100K within 12mo. 6. You should have a viable hypothesis of how that expectation can be realized. Example: to make $100K selling a $100 product, you need 1,000 customers. To get 1,000 customers at 1% conversion you need 100K visits on your landing page. To get 100K visits you need to spend X on ads. And so on. 7. If you can't convince yourself you have a viable and profitable hypothesis, you need to adjust your payoff expectation, or pick another opportunity. You don't have an obligation to pursue every opportunity you encounter. 8. If your payoff expectation is too small for the time and money you're investing to bring your project to market, you should abandon it. 9. If the worst case scenario of your GTM strategy has a chance to put you out of business (by running out of time, money, motivation, etc), you should abandon it. Take risks, but never put yourself at risk. 10. Once you have a project on the market, you have the option (but not the obligation) to improve that project by repeating steps 5-9 on the same project. Every new feature is a new thing you're brining to market. 11. A business with no attention is a business that doesn't exist. You can have the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, it's like multiplying by zero — a recipe for failure. 12. Remember: there is no distinction between building and marketing. You build whatever you need to build to realize your payoff expectation. Everything is marketing.

RagnarD 3y ago

Question for Tony (trungdq88) - did you develop difficulties with your Twitter app(s) due to changes in the platform? If so, how hard were they to fix?

thewarpaint 3y ago
It’s covered in the article.

kamel3d 3y ago

I dont get all the negative comments here! it is sickening! I am not even jealous I would like to have his success one day and I wish Toney all the best

n_ary 3y ago

Very inspiring story and well written, heartfelt kudos. For all the negativity comments here, I feel like these commenters read the intro paragraph and started complaining. Unlike most of the similar indieHacker stories, this one has most details I would want to know. 99.999999% of the stories by “IndieHackers” are mostly self-congratulatory marketing bs leading to selling a consulting/book mostly about how they “followed their passion while everyone else was naysayer and how their corporate boss was a d*k” while handwaving the whole real details. As I read the article from top-2-bottom, here are some useful tl;dr * he had plenty time during COVID working from home while polishing his first product * he started posting interesting daily hobby stuff(most of us do) on twitter, which people found interesting and follower grew * he gained some initial traction from one HN & then ProductHunt posting of his product * he lived in Singapore and earned ~$8800(~12k in SGD) and average cost of living is nearly half(or cheaper if he lived as single person) and usually tax is progressive reaching up to 22%, so he saved a good amount of cushion money(he mentioned in the post that he saved up for 2 years of living cost if he moved back to Vietnam or if frugally living then easily 4 years) * in his post, he mentioned that $1k/month is adequate for comfortable living in his home country(Vietnam), so at $45k/month, even accounting for all taxes and misc. he is probably a very wealthy person if he moved back to Vietnam * majority of his marketing channel was newsletter and twitter followers(first difficult 100 were probably gained from HN & PH posting) * his products might not be ground breaking but it was very useful for average joe on twitter(remember we HN folks are very tech sophisticated, to most average joe, finding some pretty numbers about how many people their tweet reached is like feeling lightyears ahead and magic!) * unlike other high ego IndieHackers, Tony didn’t engage in hiding his risks, he came clean about his twitter product being unsustainable due to sudden subscription model of twitter-post-elon, and sold it off($128k) which gave him good amount of cash to grow his other projects * COL in vietnam is pretty cheap compared to our Western lands of dream and $45k/month minus other stuff is still a lot of money, which can give a QOL x10 better than what we can afford for x10 that amount here * from the article he is not selling any coaching/tutoring/here-is-how-I-won-some-lottery-pay-me-money-to-read book or anything.