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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

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
  [deleted]
- 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.
- mrits 3y ago
  If you were first to market with a patent you'd be able to charge a lot more than that.
  - Whiteshadow12 3y ago
    A patent on bottled water, I would not want to live in that world but you are correct. I get what you mean.
OmarShehata 3y ago
There are two ways of approach entrepreneurship, and the conflict between each is why there's some dissonance here: 1) Do it to escape the grind, as one commenter here mentioned. In this way, it doesn't matter what product you make, or how you make it. The goal is self sufficiency, to find a niche that you can fill, etc. 2) Do it because you're trying to effect some specific change in the world. Something doesn't exist yet, so you will go out and make it happen. "2" is much harder, and more rare. And, if you believe 2 is the way, then it makes sense to NOT start a company & instead join an existing effort, if there are already people working on pressing problems & you have the skills to help them out. For "1", it almost always makes sense to start a company if you can. Because that life & amenities is itself the goal.
- intelVISA 3y ago
  I'm #2 for the history books but #1 pays the bills. :(
- OmarShehata 3y ago
  One the flipside here, you can argue that, every time you get another "1", this is great for the economy. You now have someone who's making their own money, leaving a salaried job spot open for another person. A lot of these indie hacking ventures probably wouldn't exist at all if the person making them decided not to. If that is, or for the subset of indie hacking companies for which it is true, it means this is growing the economy.
  - donnythecroc 3y ago
    This is a great point. He's literally created a job.
    - amelius 3y ago
      I'm not sure if I get the logic here. If he instead wrote a bunch of FOSS tools, then that would have been a worse outcome for society?
amelius 3y ago
Just accept that there exist people who get fulfillment out of looking for the low hanging fruit all the time. And spending lots of time on marketing.
ahoka 3y ago
Yes, you would only create products you really believe in and find useful to society. But you then would need to compete with the Tonys of the world, who try selling ice to eskimos or simply ads, malware and online casinos.
kubb 3y ago
Go for it, 1% of the time it works all the time. If you fail, you just weren’t good enough.
- harryquach 3y ago
  Self selection bias. It worked for me therefore anyone can do it! In reality people have ideas and build things all the time. The vast majority never make money. I read posts like this I rarely see any mention of luck surrounding the outcome.
gumballindie 3y ago
You are only angry because you too want to escape and are externalising the frustration of not finding a similar path. At least thats what i learned about myself when i had a similar reaction seeing such success stories. Then it struck me - this is it. This is the way for indie success. Build stuff that makes sense to a niche market. To me the product is irrelevant. But the fact that the author escaped is absolute bliss. Also arent most products just useless things relying on other ecosystems?
- Capricorn2481 3y ago
  I don't think the OP doesn't realize that, it just doesn't make it any less frustrating.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    But why let it frustrate people when one can start taking notes? Literarily when i started looking into these types of successful independent makers in all industries i discovered there are _loads_ of them and each make a little thing here and there. It’s fascinating, and i cant stop reading about them. And the more i read the more i realise that hey… it’s actually doable! But one need to stop overcomplicating things.
    - Capricorn2481 3y ago
      Because there are no notes to take on this. It's survivorship bias of a product that exists in 1000 other forms. It's not visibly doing anything better that other screen cap tools or chatGPT wrappers aren't doing. The main note is that you may not know what people want, and I've been around long enough to know people that advertise themselves as knowing what people want are usually full of shit.
      - ignoramous 3y ago
        > It's survivorship bias... tbf to TFA, it is exactly about how one could be one of those survivors if one did those totally not simple things. It is a crash course survival guide for a build-in-public solopreneur, if you will.
appleiigs 3y ago
People voluntarily pay him $45K/mo. for his products… Makes you claim of “largely useless products” obviously false.
- meheleventyone 3y ago
  People voluntarily pay to smoke products that give them cancer which is probably more "actively harmful" than "largely useless". Which is to say that the value proposition is largely subjective so the OP is entirely within their right to wonder why on earth people pay for those things! I think the better takeaway should be that other people have very different problems to you, don't always act rationally about things and waving something shiny at them is a good way to get them to spend.
  - ljfjklklj 3y ago
    > "largely useless" > don't always act rationally about things And by that you surely mean that they act in the way you do not approve of.
- carlossouza 3y ago
  Exactly. This story is excellent... truly inspiring! It reminds me of PG's mantra: make something people want.
kirse 3y ago
You must be new here / have never heard the legend of patio11: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 It ain't stupid if it works. If you find an ethical way to get people handing you a dollar, keep going. That's business.
- getrealyall 3y ago
  I doubt the people engaging in this behavior have stopped to consider the commons and the tragedies thereof that this kind of aggregate behavior might induce. Just because it works, doesn't mean it's not stupid.
  - kirse 3y ago
    Care to explain to me the tragedy part of a guy building a desktop app that organizes common dev utils into a single UI?
garganzol 3y ago
An entrepreneur sees a niche and acts. If his products satisfy the demand then good for him. He just makes some customers happy and receives money in return.
Mistletoe 3y ago
Keep in mind this money is very cyclical. It’s not a $45k a month salary until retirement. If he doesn’t find some other idea that hits pay dirt he can make $0 a month. I hope Tony is investing the money wisely.
- chx 3y ago
  For almost everyone, the wise strategy is to invest in unmanaged index funds. Please read Daniel Kahneman on the illusion of skill in investing: > Most of the buyers and sellers know that they have the same information; they exchange the stocks primarily because they have different opinions. The buyers think the price is too low and likely to rise, while the sellers think the price is high and likely to drop. The puzzle is why buyers and sellers alike think that the current price is wrong. What makes them believe they know more about what the price should be than the market does? For most of them, that belief is an illusion.
arcbyte 3y ago
You missed everything in the article. The key to his success was to Get Started. It wasn't an arrow indicator that brought him success. That was a trivial toy. But having gotten started, he was now able to identify the next step amd the next step that lead to Black Magic being a twitter analytics tool. He would never have planned to build the end product from sitting on his couch back in the beginning. It was only after taking the first step, then a few more, and gaining the perspective of a new vantage point that he was able to make such good progress. Get off the couch and get started is the first key. The second is to keep going and not to stop. That's it, that's the whole secret to getting rich. Now read his story with those two points in mind
- Aurornis 3y ago
  > The key to his success was to Get Started. Not really. The key was to find a niche that worked. He “Got Started” with tools he wanted to build and it didn’t work out. It wasn’t until he pivoted to identifying trends, building an audience, and building tools for them which he could market to his audience that he found success.
  - hyperfuturism 3y ago
    I would argue that that's what arcbyte is arguing. He's saying to just get started, and you will figure it out. So when you're arguing that "trends", "audience", etc. is what lead to his success, yes, that's what it means to: 1. Get started (just start, and improve) 2. Become better and learn (whether that's finding trends, building audience whatever) Many paths to success, so the lesson isn't specific in many cases imo. Hence, why arcbyte's comment is really good imo.
  - dev_tty01 3y ago
    He never would have been able to pivot if he didn't "Get Started" building tools in the first place.
- hyperfuturism 3y ago
  Beautifully put. Only something I learned recently, to stop psych:ing yourself out and just Get Started.
ignoramous 3y ago
> 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. Consider the fact that OP is perhaps an outlier [0]. They probably are super comfortable and super good at selling or marketing their product themselves and building way many number of experiments (bets) than most would / could. Consumer software (and usually product-led b2b2c software) is all about marketing, while b2b is mostly sales. You just can't know those are do-able by every eng on their own. > An arrow indicator for a twitter profile pic, a screen cap tool, and a wrapper around ChatGPT. But really, software has been lucrative, and Internet made it doubly so. Unlike most goods / services in the world, for software the distribution costs are non-existent, and manufacturing costs are subsidized heavily as number of users increase. Building a sustainable software business (as opposed to repeatedly building tools and services for the flavour of the day, which is AI right now) however is not easy. New comers (or call them copy cats) challenge incumbents like no tomorrow since the only investment required in light of new technological advancements is... time (assuming you've got the skill already). [0] Btw, Pieter Levels makes way more as solopreneur: ~$200k per month / https://levels.io/my-first-million/ https://levels.io/my-first-million/
croes 3y ago
Survivorship bias. These stories are the few lucky ones, the rest didn't have nearly the same success. Remember flappy bird?
- gumballindie 3y ago
  This is such a false statement. Amazon and apple are making trillions on the backs of small indie folks. Google too. The apple app store is monetised by nearly a million people, google makes money largely from small businesses, amazon’s filled with small independent sellers. Any time someone’s success reaches the bubble of corporate workers the workers that cant fathom there’s success out there and freedom claim “survivorship bias”. Couldnt be further from the truth.
  - croes 3y ago
    How many single entrepreneurs reach that income level? 10%, 1%, less than 1%? There are very few with really great ideas and only some of them have success and there are some with success with average ideas but the large mass aren't that lucky. The lucky ones post their stories but they aren't reproducible. They can't be. Otherwise the lucky ones wouldn't have succeeded in the first place. If attention gets evenly split it approaches zero for the single individual. BTW why mentioning Google and Apple? Yes the make millions of indie developers, but the developers don't nake nearly as much. They just hope to be the next lucky winner with app gone viral to generate enough revenue. That's why the app stores are full of copycats.
Aurornis 3y ago
> An arrow indicator for a twitter profile pic, a screen cap tool, and a wrapper around ChatGPT I’ve followed the “indie hacker” scene for about a decade, and this sounds about right. Notice how he started out with developer tools that scratched his own itch, but didn’t have much success. Could have been great tools, but developers are difficult to please and notoriously opposed to spending money on helpful tools. So he pivoted to social media and trend following. Instead of making tools for people who are good at technology and make things themselves, he now makes tools for people who don’t know how to accomplish simple tasks like putting an arrow on a profile picture. They just want that arrow on their picture and they’ll spend (or, often, expense) a couple dollars to make it happen. He took it a step further and built an audience around indie hacking. Now he’s selling shovels in a gold rush. Arrows on profile pictures were a hot trend for a minute among influencers. Building nice screenshots of things is key for making courses and marketing materials. ChatGPT is the hot topic among people who think it will build a business for them, so $40 is a drop in the bucket.
- mrieck 3y ago
  Oh man, this comment hits too close to home. Spent 2+ years building my developer tool extension SnipCSS as a side project and I still only make $1K MRR. You want to write 100k lines of code and make $1k / month? Sell a developer tool. You want $45k / mon, and travel the world? Sell shovels to influencers that exploit some trend.
IAmGraydon 3y ago
I think what a lot of would-be entrepreneurs don’t get is the sheer scale of the global market. There are many, many billions of dollars trading hands every single day. You only have to dip the very tip of your pinky finger into that economic stream and you can make more money than you imagined. If you ever think of a product and then talk yourself out of it with “no one will buy this”, just remember that there are 8.1 billion people out there. If you create a product for $10/month, you only have to convince 0.0001% of them of the value of your product to make $1M per year. Also, I completely disagree that OP’s product is useless or due to luck. He intentionally created something people want, and it’s actually a pretty cool product IMO.
crossroadsguy 3y ago
I wouldn’t mind escaping the grind if I can crack the next fruit cutting or a bird flapping or a site or an app that does something like, I don’t know, add random words to people’s names (?) and people can use it and I can just show ads and retire or so. Fuck yeah! Yeah I am evil.
getrealyall 3y ago
This is the endgame of rent-seeking and an abundance of (concentrated) capital, in a country that is largely comfortable letting everyone fend for themselves. Who needs to build cars when you can tickle Sam Altman's Markov chain generator for $45,000 a month? I mean, I don't blame anyone, and I need money as much as the next husk of a man, but I really wish hustle culture would stop permeating every last open space of our lives. I'm depressed about it, too, and I don't see it getting better any time soon. Edit: clerical error. Edit 2: added despair.
- jjallen 3y ago
  If you are saying that this person is from the US, he isn’t.
- chinchilla2020 3y ago
  He's not from the US. Typical hackernews: "Something bad happened in the world and this is why the US is bad"
  - getrealyall 3y ago
    There's that vaunted, cerebral HN discourse I've come to know and love.
    - ignoramous 3y ago
      I mean, you got too real like Casey in Manchester by the Sea ;)
- demondemidi 3y ago
  Well put. I think this take summarizes the lens of incredulity from which many in my generation view this new economy.
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  What a weird take, as if someone building cars is prevented by them also selling supposed pet rocks online. Lots of people, Musk included, made enough money from throwaway startups to then work on the bigger problems, as they're actually financially secure to do so at that point, the Maslow's hiararchy of needs in action. If you don't like someone's product, don't buy it, but if other people find them useful, good for them and good for the creator.
deleted 3y ago
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lnxg33k1 3y ago
I mean, you want to shoot yourself because someone is making 45k$ doing something useless? If you think about facebook making billions actively damaging humanity?
firtoz 3y ago
From reading the article, you probably skimmed it too fast, 1st is actually a "growth tools for Twitter", the arrow was only pointing to the first feature, and it grew to be more than that.
yayitswei 3y ago
I get the frustration of seeing someone else succeed through seemingly frivolous means. That said, you state that you're not willing to take the risk that he did, not to mention the hard work and stress that comes with it. By the numbers, he's created $45k/mo of usefulness.
glnarayanan 3y ago
You're right - you're so not an entrepreneur & you're clueless about customer-led development or new age problem solving. For context, I'm a TypingMind user (the ChatGPT wrapper) & it's so much better than ChatGPT that some of us bought the license & started paying for API, even to use the free GPT 3.5. Since then, it has evolved to support custom models & today, I could train a custom model on a bunch of research papers or product documentation & chat with them, something that takes a lot of effort to develop for non devs. Developers are not the primary market - non devs are & we are very happy with the product. BlackMagic again, is a revolutionary product - afaik, nothing like it existed when it came out & a ton of us happily jumped on it, realizing how much it helped with Twitter growth.
dahart 3y ago
I have two arguments to counter this that contradict each other :) One one hand, our entire economy is built on useless products. Chances are high that our good comfortable jobs involve making and marketing stuff people don’t really need at a larger scale than Tony’s solo projects. Large and so-called legitimate companies make billions and billions on things we don’t need. Coca-cola? Flavored sugar water that’s not good for you, you don’t need, and can make at home in seconds for a fraction of the price pulled in 44 billion last year for Coke. PepsiCo revenue was $86B. Starbucks: $32B, InBev: $58B. Does the global beverage industry top $1T? (Google says yes, many times over.) What about games and movies, fashion, apps, car accessories, music and sports equipment that’s unnecessarily high end and/or never gets used… the list is endless. On the other hand, it’s not accurate or fair to call Tony’s products useless, because people paid for them. It’s reductive and low effort to frame them as simple, since he added a lot of features that don’t fit your summary. But if they save someone time, or someone likes the way they feel or look, and they pay for it, then it was useful for them. Don’t make the mistake of conflating the value you get, or your idea of what you pay for, for annyone else’s idea of usefulness.
- demondemidi 3y ago
  > it’s not accurate or fair to call Tony’s products useless I'll cede that point. Having an arrow on your Twitter profile is of some use to someone, and just because I've never had a problem with iPhone screen capture "press two buttons" doesn't mean some people need to click through an app, a nd the teletype style of GPT3 doesn't bother me but I guess some people need faster response. I know snark is against the rules. Technically they aren't "useless" but they are single-task gadgets like you'd find for your kitchen drawer on QVC at night. The people that make the "banana slicer" probably made a ton of money and by your definition a "banana slicer" isn't useless because someone bought it.
  - dahart 3y ago
    > Obviously having an arrow on your Twitter profile is of some use to someone One of the reasons your upper comment isn’t fair is because the story was about how he pivoted the product away from just showing the arrow & circle progress bar, and moved toward something more complex that does analytics reporting, and that’s when he actually started making money on it. > I guess by your definition a “banana slicer” isn’t useless because someone bought it. That was half of my definition. The other half, I think, probably agreed with yours, and points out that banana slicers are useless and we have an economy that is built on banana slicers. So, anyway, what is your definition of useful?
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coldtrait 3y ago
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veeti 3y ago
How is a screen capture tool largely useless? Have you not ever taken screenshots yourself or at least read documentation that relies on screenshots? What a ridiculous take. It's not exactly a new concept either. Look at the office Snagit from 1990 built: https://www.msufoundation.org/techsmith-hq https://www.msufoundation.org/techsmith-hq and keep on going about "this era".

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.

mrits 3y ago
If you were first to market with a patent you'd be able to charge a lot more than that.
- Whiteshadow12 3y ago
  A patent on bottled water, I would not want to live in that world but you are correct. I get what you mean.

OmarShehata 3y ago

There are two ways of approach entrepreneurship, and the conflict between each is why there's some dissonance here: 1) Do it to escape the grind, as one commenter here mentioned. In this way, it doesn't matter what product you make, or how you make it. The goal is self sufficiency, to find a niche that you can fill, etc. 2) Do it because you're trying to effect some specific change in the world. Something doesn't exist yet, so you will go out and make it happen. "2" is much harder, and more rare. And, if you believe 2 is the way, then it makes sense to NOT start a company & instead join an existing effort, if there are already people working on pressing problems & you have the skills to help them out. For "1", it almost always makes sense to start a company if you can. Because that life & amenities is itself the goal.

intelVISA 3y ago
I'm #2 for the history books but #1 pays the bills. :(
OmarShehata 3y ago
One the flipside here, you can argue that, every time you get another "1", this is great for the economy. You now have someone who's making their own money, leaving a salaried job spot open for another person. A lot of these indie hacking ventures probably wouldn't exist at all if the person making them decided not to. If that is, or for the subset of indie hacking companies for which it is true, it means this is growing the economy.
- donnythecroc 3y ago
  This is a great point. He's literally created a job.
  - amelius 3y ago
    I'm not sure if I get the logic here. If he instead wrote a bunch of FOSS tools, then that would have been a worse outcome for society?

amelius 3y ago

Just accept that there exist people who get fulfillment out of looking for the low hanging fruit all the time. And spending lots of time on marketing.

ahoka 3y ago

Yes, you would only create products you really believe in and find useful to society. But you then would need to compete with the Tonys of the world, who try selling ice to eskimos or simply ads, malware and online casinos.

kubb 3y ago

Go for it, 1% of the time it works all the time. If you fail, you just weren’t good enough.

harryquach 3y ago
Self selection bias. It worked for me therefore anyone can do it! In reality people have ideas and build things all the time. The vast majority never make money. I read posts like this I rarely see any mention of luck surrounding the outcome.

gumballindie 3y ago

You are only angry because you too want to escape and are externalising the frustration of not finding a similar path. At least thats what i learned about myself when i had a similar reaction seeing such success stories. Then it struck me - this is it. This is the way for indie success. Build stuff that makes sense to a niche market. To me the product is irrelevant. But the fact that the author escaped is absolute bliss. Also arent most products just useless things relying on other ecosystems?

Capricorn2481 3y ago
I don't think the OP doesn't realize that, it just doesn't make it any less frustrating.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  But why let it frustrate people when one can start taking notes? Literarily when i started looking into these types of successful independent makers in all industries i discovered there are _loads_ of them and each make a little thing here and there. It’s fascinating, and i cant stop reading about them. And the more i read the more i realise that hey… it’s actually doable! But one need to stop overcomplicating things.
  - Capricorn2481 3y ago
    Because there are no notes to take on this. It's survivorship bias of a product that exists in 1000 other forms. It's not visibly doing anything better that other screen cap tools or chatGPT wrappers aren't doing. The main note is that you may not know what people want, and I've been around long enough to know people that advertise themselves as knowing what people want are usually full of shit.
    - ignoramous 3y ago
      > It's survivorship bias... tbf to TFA, it is exactly about how one could be one of those survivors if one did those totally not simple things. It is a crash course survival guide for a build-in-public solopreneur, if you will.

appleiigs 3y ago

People voluntarily pay him $45K/mo. for his products… Makes you claim of “largely useless products” obviously false.

meheleventyone 3y ago
People voluntarily pay to smoke products that give them cancer which is probably more "actively harmful" than "largely useless". Which is to say that the value proposition is largely subjective so the OP is entirely within their right to wonder why on earth people pay for those things! I think the better takeaway should be that other people have very different problems to you, don't always act rationally about things and waving something shiny at them is a good way to get them to spend.
- ljfjklklj 3y ago
  > "largely useless" > don't always act rationally about things And by that you surely mean that they act in the way you do not approve of.
carlossouza 3y ago
Exactly. This story is excellent... truly inspiring! It reminds me of PG's mantra: make something people want.

kirse 3y ago

You must be new here / have never heard the legend of patio11: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 It ain't stupid if it works. If you find an ethical way to get people handing you a dollar, keep going. That's business.

getrealyall 3y ago
I doubt the people engaging in this behavior have stopped to consider the commons and the tragedies thereof that this kind of aggregate behavior might induce. Just because it works, doesn't mean it's not stupid.
- kirse 3y ago
  Care to explain to me the tragedy part of a guy building a desktop app that organizes common dev utils into a single UI?

garganzol 3y ago

An entrepreneur sees a niche and acts. If his products satisfy the demand then good for him. He just makes some customers happy and receives money in return.

Mistletoe 3y ago

Keep in mind this money is very cyclical. It’s not a $45k a month salary until retirement. If he doesn’t find some other idea that hits pay dirt he can make $0 a month. I hope Tony is investing the money wisely.

chx 3y ago
For almost everyone, the wise strategy is to invest in unmanaged index funds. Please read Daniel Kahneman on the illusion of skill in investing: > Most of the buyers and sellers know that they have the same information; they exchange the stocks primarily because they have different opinions. The buyers think the price is too low and likely to rise, while the sellers think the price is high and likely to drop. The puzzle is why buyers and sellers alike think that the current price is wrong. What makes them believe they know more about what the price should be than the market does? For most of them, that belief is an illusion.

arcbyte 3y ago

You missed everything in the article. The key to his success was to Get Started. It wasn't an arrow indicator that brought him success. That was a trivial toy. But having gotten started, he was now able to identify the next step amd the next step that lead to Black Magic being a twitter analytics tool. He would never have planned to build the end product from sitting on his couch back in the beginning. It was only after taking the first step, then a few more, and gaining the perspective of a new vantage point that he was able to make such good progress. Get off the couch and get started is the first key. The second is to keep going and not to stop. That's it, that's the whole secret to getting rich. Now read his story with those two points in mind

Aurornis 3y ago
> The key to his success was to Get Started. Not really. The key was to find a niche that worked. He “Got Started” with tools he wanted to build and it didn’t work out. It wasn’t until he pivoted to identifying trends, building an audience, and building tools for them which he could market to his audience that he found success.
- hyperfuturism 3y ago
  I would argue that that's what arcbyte is arguing. He's saying to just get started, and you will figure it out. So when you're arguing that "trends", "audience", etc. is what lead to his success, yes, that's what it means to: 1. Get started (just start, and improve) 2. Become better and learn (whether that's finding trends, building audience whatever) Many paths to success, so the lesson isn't specific in many cases imo. Hence, why arcbyte's comment is really good imo.
- dev_tty01 3y ago
  He never would have been able to pivot if he didn't "Get Started" building tools in the first place.
hyperfuturism 3y ago
Beautifully put. Only something I learned recently, to stop psych:ing yourself out and just Get Started.

ignoramous 3y ago

> 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. Consider the fact that OP is perhaps an outlier [0]. They probably are super comfortable and super good at selling or marketing their product themselves and building way many number of experiments (bets) than most would / could. Consumer software (and usually product-led b2b2c software) is all about marketing, while b2b is mostly sales. You just can't know those are do-able by every eng on their own. > An arrow indicator for a twitter profile pic, a screen cap tool, and a wrapper around ChatGPT. But really, software has been lucrative, and Internet made it doubly so. Unlike most goods / services in the world, for software the distribution costs are non-existent, and manufacturing costs are subsidized heavily as number of users increase. Building a sustainable software business (as opposed to repeatedly building tools and services for the flavour of the day, which is AI right now) however is not easy. New comers (or call them copy cats) challenge incumbents like no tomorrow since the only investment required in light of new technological advancements is... time (assuming you've got the skill already). [0] Btw, Pieter Levels makes way more as solopreneur: ~$200k per month / https://levels.io/my-first-million/ https://levels.io/my-first-million/

croes 3y ago

Survivorship bias. These stories are the few lucky ones, the rest didn't have nearly the same success. Remember flappy bird?

gumballindie 3y ago
This is such a false statement. Amazon and apple are making trillions on the backs of small indie folks. Google too. The apple app store is monetised by nearly a million people, google makes money largely from small businesses, amazon’s filled with small independent sellers. Any time someone’s success reaches the bubble of corporate workers the workers that cant fathom there’s success out there and freedom claim “survivorship bias”. Couldnt be further from the truth.
- croes 3y ago
  How many single entrepreneurs reach that income level? 10%, 1%, less than 1%? There are very few with really great ideas and only some of them have success and there are some with success with average ideas but the large mass aren't that lucky. The lucky ones post their stories but they aren't reproducible. They can't be. Otherwise the lucky ones wouldn't have succeeded in the first place. If attention gets evenly split it approaches zero for the single individual. BTW why mentioning Google and Apple? Yes the make millions of indie developers, but the developers don't nake nearly as much. They just hope to be the next lucky winner with app gone viral to generate enough revenue. That's why the app stores are full of copycats.

Aurornis 3y ago

> An arrow indicator for a twitter profile pic, a screen cap tool, and a wrapper around ChatGPT I’ve followed the “indie hacker” scene for about a decade, and this sounds about right. Notice how he started out with developer tools that scratched his own itch, but didn’t have much success. Could have been great tools, but developers are difficult to please and notoriously opposed to spending money on helpful tools. So he pivoted to social media and trend following. Instead of making tools for people who are good at technology and make things themselves, he now makes tools for people who don’t know how to accomplish simple tasks like putting an arrow on a profile picture. They just want that arrow on their picture and they’ll spend (or, often, expense) a couple dollars to make it happen. He took it a step further and built an audience around indie hacking. Now he’s selling shovels in a gold rush. Arrows on profile pictures were a hot trend for a minute among influencers. Building nice screenshots of things is key for making courses and marketing materials. ChatGPT is the hot topic among people who think it will build a business for them, so $40 is a drop in the bucket.

mrieck 3y ago
Oh man, this comment hits too close to home. Spent 2+ years building my developer tool extension SnipCSS as a side project and I still only make $1K MRR. You want to write 100k lines of code and make $1k / month? Sell a developer tool. You want $45k / mon, and travel the world? Sell shovels to influencers that exploit some trend.

IAmGraydon 3y ago

I think what a lot of would-be entrepreneurs don’t get is the sheer scale of the global market. There are many, many billions of dollars trading hands every single day. You only have to dip the very tip of your pinky finger into that economic stream and you can make more money than you imagined. If you ever think of a product and then talk yourself out of it with “no one will buy this”, just remember that there are 8.1 billion people out there. If you create a product for $10/month, you only have to convince 0.0001% of them of the value of your product to make $1M per year. Also, I completely disagree that OP’s product is useless or due to luck. He intentionally created something people want, and it’s actually a pretty cool product IMO.

crossroadsguy 3y ago

I wouldn’t mind escaping the grind if I can crack the next fruit cutting or a bird flapping or a site or an app that does something like, I don’t know, add random words to people’s names (?) and people can use it and I can just show ads and retire or so. Fuck yeah! Yeah I am evil.

getrealyall 3y ago

This is the endgame of rent-seeking and an abundance of (concentrated) capital, in a country that is largely comfortable letting everyone fend for themselves. Who needs to build cars when you can tickle Sam Altman's Markov chain generator for $45,000 a month? I mean, I don't blame anyone, and I need money as much as the next husk of a man, but I really wish hustle culture would stop permeating every last open space of our lives. I'm depressed about it, too, and I don't see it getting better any time soon. Edit: clerical error. Edit 2: added despair.

jjallen 3y ago
If you are saying that this person is from the US, he isn’t.
chinchilla2020 3y ago
He's not from the US. Typical hackernews: "Something bad happened in the world and this is why the US is bad"
- getrealyall 3y ago
  There's that vaunted, cerebral HN discourse I've come to know and love.
  - ignoramous 3y ago
    I mean, you got too real like Casey in Manchester by the Sea ;)
demondemidi 3y ago
Well put. I think this take summarizes the lens of incredulity from which many in my generation view this new economy.
satvikpendem 3y ago
What a weird take, as if someone building cars is prevented by them also selling supposed pet rocks online. Lots of people, Musk included, made enough money from throwaway startups to then work on the bigger problems, as they're actually financially secure to do so at that point, the Maslow's hiararchy of needs in action. If you don't like someone's product, don't buy it, but if other people find them useful, good for them and good for the creator.

deleted 3y ago

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lnxg33k1 3y ago

I mean, you want to shoot yourself because someone is making 45k$ doing something useless? If you think about facebook making billions actively damaging humanity?

firtoz 3y ago

From reading the article, you probably skimmed it too fast, 1st is actually a "growth tools for Twitter", the arrow was only pointing to the first feature, and it grew to be more than that.

yayitswei 3y ago

I get the frustration of seeing someone else succeed through seemingly frivolous means. That said, you state that you're not willing to take the risk that he did, not to mention the hard work and stress that comes with it. By the numbers, he's created $45k/mo of usefulness.

glnarayanan 3y ago

You're right - you're so not an entrepreneur & you're clueless about customer-led development or new age problem solving. For context, I'm a TypingMind user (the ChatGPT wrapper) & it's so much better than ChatGPT that some of us bought the license & started paying for API, even to use the free GPT 3.5. Since then, it has evolved to support custom models & today, I could train a custom model on a bunch of research papers or product documentation & chat with them, something that takes a lot of effort to develop for non devs. Developers are not the primary market - non devs are & we are very happy with the product. BlackMagic again, is a revolutionary product - afaik, nothing like it existed when it came out & a ton of us happily jumped on it, realizing how much it helped with Twitter growth.

dahart 3y ago

I have two arguments to counter this that contradict each other :) One one hand, our entire economy is built on useless products. Chances are high that our good comfortable jobs involve making and marketing stuff people don’t really need at a larger scale than Tony’s solo projects. Large and so-called legitimate companies make billions and billions on things we don’t need. Coca-cola? Flavored sugar water that’s not good for you, you don’t need, and can make at home in seconds for a fraction of the price pulled in 44 billion last year for Coke. PepsiCo revenue was $86B. Starbucks: $32B, InBev: $58B. Does the global beverage industry top $1T? (Google says yes, many times over.) What about games and movies, fashion, apps, car accessories, music and sports equipment that’s unnecessarily high end and/or never gets used… the list is endless. On the other hand, it’s not accurate or fair to call Tony’s products useless, because people paid for them. It’s reductive and low effort to frame them as simple, since he added a lot of features that don’t fit your summary. But if they save someone time, or someone likes the way they feel or look, and they pay for it, then it was useful for them. Don’t make the mistake of conflating the value you get, or your idea of what you pay for, for annyone else’s idea of usefulness.

demondemidi 3y ago
> it’s not accurate or fair to call Tony’s products useless I'll cede that point. Having an arrow on your Twitter profile is of some use to someone, and just because I've never had a problem with iPhone screen capture "press two buttons" doesn't mean some people need to click through an app, a nd the teletype style of GPT3 doesn't bother me but I guess some people need faster response. I know snark is against the rules. Technically they aren't "useless" but they are single-task gadgets like you'd find for your kitchen drawer on QVC at night. The people that make the "banana slicer" probably made a ton of money and by your definition a "banana slicer" isn't useless because someone bought it.
- dahart 3y ago
  > Obviously having an arrow on your Twitter profile is of some use to someone One of the reasons your upper comment isn’t fair is because the story was about how he pivoted the product away from just showing the arrow & circle progress bar, and moved toward something more complex that does analytics reporting, and that’s when he actually started making money on it. > I guess by your definition a “banana slicer” isn’t useless because someone bought it. That was half of my definition. The other half, I think, probably agreed with yours, and points out that banana slicers are useless and we have an economy that is built on banana slicers. So, anyway, what is your definition of useful?

deleted 3y ago

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coldtrait 3y ago

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veeti 3y ago

How is a screen capture tool largely useless? Have you not ever taken screenshots yourself or at least read documentation that relies on screenshots? What a ridiculous take. It's not exactly a new concept either. Look at the office Snagit from 1990 built: https://www.msufoundation.org/techsmith-hq https://www.msufoundation.org/techsmith-hq and keep on going about "this era".