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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

• 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
    Yeah, it's such a bitter, and wrong, take, it seems like a caricature. I simply don't understand the "why is it all about money" take, at all. The author isn't saying he wants to but a Rolls and lots of gold chains. He simply want to make enough to be able to be independent (which he succeeded), and to indulge in relatively minor enjoyments, like travel. "Why is it all about money?" Because some of us like both independence and not starving.
• moneywoes 3y ago
  i agree this whole build in public is a growth hack
  • meiraleal 3y ago
    so build in private. Isn't it the default?
• lifechoseme123 3y ago
  I agree. Survivorship bias makes me say "I want to see the stories of all the solopreneurs who failed." HN-- Please share more failure stories. I want to balance the optimistic fun hype with pragmatic realism. I say this as a nascent "solopreneur" (I don't like that word) who is getting his agency & first product off the ground at the moment.
  • trashface 3y ago
    Failure reporting in. We can't actually post all the failures, or even the interesting ones, because the site would be overwhelmed and crash.
• RyeCombinator 3y ago
  These stories are reminding me of the "Doctors hate this one trick!" Ads in the 90s. Or the influencers who start selling content, dropshipping tricks or ebooks on how they have succeeded. There's a lot of merit for entrepreneurs sharing their journey, like a lot of the other comments here I just wished it was less about being "successful" or making money.
• goodmunky 3y ago
  At its best, money is a terrific measure of satisfaction you’ve provided to other people. This man builds products people like and shares the story of his success for free to build an audience. These are all good things. You respond with bitter vitriol, that is not a good thing. If this is how you approach life you will not deserve his success or money.
  • itsoktocry 3y ago
    >This man builds products people like and shares the story of his success for free to build an audience. Maybe people are getting tired of 90% of social media content being about "building an audience". Everyone is trying to sell us something, all the time.
• monero-xmr 3y ago
  The benefit to “how I XYZ” for me is not that I can copy them. It’s ideally to see a path, obstacles that come, decisions that were made, and try and understand why they made certain decisions and took certain actions. If something becomes so straightforwards that it can be replicated straightforwards, the value of it becomes a product of skills + time. So if I want to open a business mowing lawns, this is a very commodotized and high-competition industry, so I will earn a profit that is pretty much correlated to the unpleasantness of the job and the time it takes. Very little opportunity to earn a premium, and the only tactic is hacking around how quickly I can complete each job. If I want to create a brand new product from scratch (one that is not glorified consulting), then it will by its definition be totally unique and the journey unlike all others, including my previous journeys. The best I can do is take all information I can and try and make the best decisions and take the best actions.
• hncowardnum3 3y ago
  Arthur, despite agreeing with your thoughts, I think it's easy to not care about money when you have money that grows without your time investment. The rest of us have to place a dire importance on it, lest we end up destitute, unemployable, homeless, and so on. Though if you would like to write something up about "I made enough, and now I enrich my soul with leisure and nature walks," that would go further to disillusion some of the need to keep getting more and more money. But publicly decrying greed (and fear in greed's skin) will not achieve anything of lasting value.
  • itsoktocry 3y ago
    >The rest of us have to place a dire importance on it, lest we end up destitute, unemployable, homeless, and so on. This article is literally about a person quitting his job to do this, so it seems he's not part of "the rest of us".
  • arthurofbabylon 3y ago
    It's not about "not caring about money." It's about not letting money be so blindingly front and center that reality is obscured. I'm with you – we all need to be materially conscious to stay alive. We can't just throw our finances to the wind. As an entrepreneur, money is a particularly critical part of the equation. Similarly, we can't afford to be so enamored by strangers making money on the internet that we fail to see 1) the pitfalls, errors, and missed opportunities in their efforts 2) their actual method (MRR charts are not a method) 3) the gifts and opportunities of our unique situations.
• Aurornis 3y ago
  > 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 This sounds great until the bills arrive or you realize you need to save extra for retirement or home buying because your business’s income is unpredictable.
  • arthurofbabylon 3y ago
    Paying bills is not greed.
• blantonl 3y ago
  I concur with this assessment. I don't want to discount the hard work of the author of the post, but this post could have also literally been "My slot machine win: $3 to $1.2M with one pull of the handle" I'm under no illusions that my success has a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time, a lot of luck, and a lot of hard work.
  • johnfn 3y ago
    Are we reading the same article? "One pull of the handle"... the guy wrote about iterating through like 10-15 (more?) different ideas over the course of 2 years, with most of them failing for one reason or another. Apparently, the meme that success is entirely luck is so pervasive that when exact evidence to the contrary is provided people still miss it.
    • slig 3y ago
      Seriously. There are at least four different comments on this thread about how the author was lucky, is showing his lottery ticket, pulled the right lever and is writing about making money without doing anything.
• imiric 3y ago
  > There's a term for this – greed. Greed? You want to lecture about greed, when 95% of tech companies are _driven_ by profits, by driving the share price up by any means necessary, including exploiting their users and employees, being the reason for new consumer protection laws to come into place and then skirting around them, tax avoidance, and a million other shady tricks, all with the goal of becoming a "unicorn", to go public or be acquired, and to get to do it all over again. This very forum is built by, around and for serial entrepreneurs in this rat race, so it's a bit... rich to lecture about greed on here, of all places. And yet you criticize when a solo developer, without any venture capital as a safety net, manages to have the success entrepreneurs dream of, measured by the same measuring stick. It all reads like sour grapes to me. Good on OP for having the courage, persistence and skill to pull this off. Why shouldn't they talk about the steps they took, and the results they're seeing? We can call it survivorship bias, growth hacking, luck, etc. all we want, but it's encouraging to know that these stories _do_ happen. Achieving financial independence by building something people want to pay for, instead of relying on the usual advertising and VC get-rich-quick schemes, should be applauded.
  • demondemidi 3y ago
    What is your position? You're bashing the reply for not complaining about all greed, is that it? Like somehow the OP didn't go far enough? I'm struggling to understand your response, maybe it is to defend greed?
    • cj 3y ago
      The juxtaposition of a entrepreneur recounting his experience building/selling products, with the original commenter criticizing entrepreneurs for being greedy, alongside of stories/comments every week here complaining about how we aren’t paid enough in tech and how it’s immoral to ask tech workers to drive to an office is quite ironic. He has a point.. HN is full of greed (or lack of appreciation for the privilege most of us have) and criticizing a solo bootstrapped entrepreneur for greed feels completely misplaced. To a certain extent, yes, let’s defend and embrace greed when the outcome is a solo entrepreneur doing cool things and sharing the experience publicly.
• slig 3y ago
  > 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. Nice humblebragging. So you just read one blog post from the author and concluded that the most interesting part of their story is money? I bet they enjoy a lot of things and this is only a small piece of their life, as their blog post is specifically about being an entrepreneur, not about their hobbies.
• spencerchubb 3y ago
  Are we even reading the same story? It seems like you're trying to do a takedown of the story, but the author addresses all of those points (the author largely agrees with you)
• swagempire 3y ago
  Why is HN so opposed to people making money? He's literally made probably under $500k in revenue. And he's Vietnamese -- so that's really a fortune there. I don't see anything except a reason to be happy for him.
  • xyst 3y ago
    I think it’s crab mentality.
• cj 3y ago
  Sure, but this is a forum run by a bunch of startup founders and a startup VC. MRR is not a weak signal. If anything, I’d love to see more stories like this and less stories from popular media like NPR, Gizmodo, and NY Times (all 3 on the front page right now).
• shw1n 3y ago
  This is a strangely bitter take on someone sharing their business journey. Sure, someone can make up their MRR, just like anyone sharing any personal story of theirs can make anything up. But in a world full of wantrepreneurs and pseudo-intellectuals, revenue/profits is the best “objective” measure of a business’ progress Wanting money also does not necessarily correlate to greed, it can also correlate to desiring freedom in a world with bills and expenses
• nico_h 3y ago
  Where is the greed??? This article articulates pretty well everything i’ve read in all the wantreprenarial / bootstrap articles i’ve read, which is summed up as “build a following, ride rising trends, iterate fast”.(and dump things that slow you down / have peaked) This article is in line with the build a following, and shows which rising trend he’s riding. The part about the money irking you seems to come from a place of incredible privilege. He earned his independence and is selling a non-essential product on the free market, before B2B powerhouses move in. He shares what he’s done and experienced with the community and also hired employees. He escaped the 9-5 and says he’s only working part time, which allows him to do the non work things you mentioned though he prefers surfing travelling and gaming to your rock climbing and nature walk. The article is not even behind a paywall or part of a bootstrap course, so again where is the greed? More power to him.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• nico_h 3y ago
  Sounds to me like sour grapes from someone that’s doing high paying consulting but can’t escape it.
• yieldcrv 3y ago
  I liked this story because I’ve had a taste of what $45k/mo is like and it resonated with me how difficult this is to do as an employee, I’ve played around with running the numbers on overemployment and it is still not the same amount I’ve done many more projects than this person and just couldn't be compelled to build an audience on twitter religiously, or stick to one persona! many of my ideas have incompatible crowds its great for me to see examples of launching multiple projects another thing that stood out is what he considers a failed project has probably changed he wrote off two later in the story as a footnote, but they are probably viable ideas, just don't make enough, for him, anymore it is fulfilling for me to have lifestyle flexibility and capital, I’ve had it and it is objectively better. I can relate to how this author filled in his time doing other fulfilling things
• meiraleal 3y ago
  > (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.) If this was written in the beginning, the whole thing would make much more sense as you are clearly jealous.
• totallywrong 3y ago
  > For the record, I am not jealous You sure don't sound like it..
• brunojppb 3y ago
  > I make my money doing literally whatever I want… Classic take from somebody that most probably could spend their entire time just fiddling with ideas, with zero worries about money. Everything else was taken care of. Not everyone has this luxury pal. The author is plain, simple sharing his story. Can you replicate his success? Who knows. But I respect him for sharing this candid blog post documenting his steps.
  • slig 3y ago
    I'd love to read more about how the GP can live this lifestyle, maybe they can share and we all can learn and replicate their journey on how to make money doing literally whatever we want whist doing a lot of interesting hobbies.
    • chasd00 3y ago
      They likely sit deep in the bowels of a very large company in a position shielded from the market. No expectations of delivery and no accountability for failure. You don’t get hired into a role like that, it’s the end result of a multi-decade tenure where you slowly evolve into a potted plant in the corner. I know a handful of these at my current employer.
    • arthurofbabylon 3y ago
      Here are some of the principles I like to apply -> https://minimal.app/design https://minimal.app/design Generally my formula is about cultivating a healthy value set, becoming increasingly clear minded, and trying to do things that are worthwhile. I know that's vague, but those are the abstract principles that work in different circumstances. I've led many different lives within my life – rock climbing full time, building software – and those are the guiding themes that have most consistently offered the greatest results. (Write to me directly if you'd like me to flush out in more concrete detail, including how money and service factor in, how to avoid traps, what I currently struggle with, etc.)
      • slig 3y ago
        Thank you!
• ncallaway 3y ago
  > 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 Frankly, I think you’re being incredibly rude to assume that because someone shared their story on a topic, then it must be their entire identity. It’s just so presumptuous to assume that the author or authors of these pieces have nothing else in their lives of value, because they decided to share this piece of their life. There’s a lot in your comment I agree with, but this note struck me as just… extremely uncharitable, presumptuous, and rude.
  • williamtrask 3y ago
    To be fair. The title of the post only focuses on money and completely ignores whether the work has any real value to themself or society. Kindof implies pretty strongly “their identity”.
    • savanaly 3y ago
      No it doesn't? They just chose to write a tight, focused post. Rather than an autobiography. If they had written a larger sweeping piece focusing on all their hobbies and aspirations and well as their successful business people would still be salty in the comments.
      • williamtrask 3y ago
        Devils advocate, if the post was about building an open source non-profit with that level of financial success I don’t think there would be so much salt.
        • ncallaway 3y ago
          I don’t care about the salt, I don’t like people making wild assumptions that aren’t founded on anything, and then criticizing that. There’s plenty to criticize in the post, but I think making things up about the author is just not a kind thing to do.
• brigadier132 3y ago
  This reeks of moral superiority, you probably consider yourself to be a non-judgmental person too. Even if they were purely money driven, why is it bad for this person to have sought out money by creating a tool used by many that improves people's lives? It's not like this guy is a financier or middleman just pushing numbers around and taking a percent on every transaction. I'd think that someone with the ability to live and walk around in nature would not be so critical of others.
• aunty_helen 3y ago
  Sorry but you can’t fall downhill into 45k a month. You also can’t write down a cake recipe for 45k a month like you seem to be expecting. As someone who, over the last two years, has created a more modest 5 figure MRR business, I can assure you, you don’t know what you’re talking about. It takes a lot of skill and understanding of the market and market forces to be this successful. Being able to do the same thing again and get the same results is exactly what these people are not trying to do. There seems to be some disconnect between what you think would make a successful business and what people who are making successful businesses do. If I was to start again today and do the same thing, I would fail. If I wrote down what I did and someone else tried it, they would fail. The market has moved on since then and so every day when I get out of bed, I need to get my work done, manage my team and plan for tomorrow. And after all this, my little MRR is an important metric because it shows success and because it’s something that I’ve worked the hardest in my life for. Best of luck for your nature walks, people get to chose what they do in life.
  • williamtrask 3y ago
    Care to comment on the idea that $ is over celebrated as a metric of success? That seemed like a bigger point.
    • aunty_helen 3y ago
      $ or in this case MRR, is the easiest comparable thing. The question “How big is your agency/business?” Is often very nuanced and tedious to explain. It would probably take me 30+ seconds of boring conversation to get to the point. Humans optimize and now you have $xx / month. It’s easy to understand exactly where I am in my journey, how much “stuff” goes on in the day to day and the types of problems I have. I like talking to people that are doing six figures a month, it gives me insight into the problems that I hope to one day have. Like a child looking up to their bigger brother. But also, they’re often very direct and insightful with the problems that I’m dealing with. Not like they have the cake recipe I’m trying to make, but they can adapt their advice to my experience and tell me what temperature I should set my oven.
    • thegrim33 3y ago
• encoderer 3y ago
  It’s money-focused because that is what people want to read. I’ve been running a small successful software business for 10 years and we’ve posted here, Twitter, everywhere over the years, and nothing I write about attracts as much interest as when I open the kimono and share real numbers. Partly it generates feedback like yours which is cat nip for social feed algorithms, but I think mainly people just really like personal details about others lives and businesses. My advice would be to just not read these if they bother you.
• HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
  I find these stories somewhat inspirational but generally lacking anything actionable. What is far more interesting is the stories of people who detail the longer road. How they started, problems and setbacks they encountered, why business X failed or was shutdown, how they used the lessons learned to build the next business, how they recognized opportunities and which ones they were able to take advantage of and which ones they had to pass up, and so on... There's someone on twitter (I think it's The Gas Station Guy) who talked about having to fire sale a business that was worth close to $1M for $60,000 to a competitor because he was out of cash and desperate. How you get to that stage and how you recovered from it is far more interesting to me than these "0 to $XXX in 18 months" stories.
• ohrlly 3y ago
  That's awfully judgemental, calling people who care about money "greedy," no? I think your ingrained views around money and greed are preventing you from presenting a fair perspective. The author has something like 4 successful products, so the problem around reproducibility is... irrelevant. And the idea of great entrepreneurs not being motivated by money... I mean, ok, maybe give some evidence. I think you'll find many people have 2 reasons for doing something, the nice "non-greedy" one they tell everyone and some seem to take a face value, and the underlying one.
• charles_f 3y ago
  > 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. Is often a post rationalization. Not everyone has to be, or has to seek to be a great entrepreneur. A lot of people, myself included, want to just go by and have a happy life. A new business doesn't have to ambition being a game changer, and I actually quite like the approach of building several small marginally successful products. True, this is not a recipe, and there's always a luck factor, but at least the author is sharing his story, whatever their own design behind this was.
• arthur_sav 3y ago
  I don't understand the complaint here. He's sharing his journey - he's not selling you a course on how to be an indie hacker. If you want to take any lessons from this, that's up to you.
  • paulryanrogers 3y ago
    This sharing is also promotion for what they are selling: shovels and dreams
    • eddmakesio 3y ago
      Actually he's selling a web UI over ChatGPT
• huimang 3y ago
  This is a lot of words to merely say that you’re jealous. There a lot of assumptions here that have nothing to do with the author or the post.
• eb0la 3y ago
  Maybe I am a very sceptical person... but every time I see a similar story I can't help thinking about survivorship bias.
• pdyc 3y ago
  I would argue that if someone is not motivated by money why should he be in "for profit venture" at all? why not create non-profit? or may be become a govt official or senator where you can influence policy decision that has the potential to create whole industry catering to your selected cause? This is incredible story for me. I am not sure i can achieve same thing as he achieved. It is inspiring. Moreover his main business failed after twitters api policy changed so it is even more incredible that he was able to recover from that setback and managend to create a new business which is now surpassing his older biz. And he did it without taking any outside funding. In my eyes he is equal or greater than your so called great entreprenuers!
• whiplash451 3y ago
  I am not an indie hacker and I find this story great. The author is genuine and shares interesting insights. The tone is humble. He recognizes himself that MRR is a risky metric and that you need to keep building new products all the time. Finally, the "sheer obsession with money" is not at all what comes across in the post. A lot of it is about lifestyle topics, making news friends, etc. Honestly, I find your comment completely out of touch with the article.
• zedadex 3y ago
  > Finally, the sheer obsession with money saddens me You'd think they need it to live or something
• aatd86 3y ago
  You should read his post. It's a good one and he acknowledges what you're complaining about toward the end of it. :)
• Remnant44 3y ago
  On the contrary: while to you the other things you spend your time with might be more interesting, for the rest of us the means through which you have acquired all of this free time... is by far more interesting and useful. Care to share?
• patrec 3y ago
  So what is the most interesting part of your story?
• michaelmrose 3y ago
  > The great entrepreneurs of our world are hardly motivated by money The "great" entrepreneurs of our world have always been obsessed with money because it is literally the fuel and lifeblood of their endeavors. Only people with a lot of money can afford to pretend not to care about it while working strenuously their entire life to obtain it. >But money is not the only solution Money is literally the only solution its the only way to buy food medicine and live indoors. > There's a term for this – greed Greed is a natural response to a world so constructed that if you stop swimming you drown. It's as natural for people to be greedy as for a coyote to be hungry.
• foooorsyth 3y ago
  Is this HackerNews or some former communist Twitter enclave? Why is this mopey, undercutting, crabs-in-bucket post near the top of this comments section on HN? This is a website about software entrepreneurship and you don’t like articles about going solo and making it? Maybe find a different website.
• wiseowise 3y ago
  > 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. Good for you, little man. How did you manage to find a moment to write this spiteful comment with such an interesting life?
• samcat116 3y ago
  Buddy you’re writing on a venture capital website.
• hahamaster 3y ago
  > 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 You're deluded if you think anyone (other than your mom) is interested in your walking, climbing or reading.