16 ms·

I've launched 37 products in 5 years and not doing that again

242 points by AlexandrBel 1y ago

kypro 1y ago
Indiehackers was the place that finally made me realise trying to bootstrap a tech product is almost always pointless. There's almost always a far better way to allocate your time.
- esskay 1y ago
  Yup same, the whole toxic culture of lies surrounding it makes things worse as theres people trapped in this weird little bubble of believing half the stories on there. Most are completely fabricated. For me personally I gave up on SaaS a couple of years ago and shifted my focus elsewhere. I ended up building a site in a niche I've always loved, and it ended up making me love that hobby even more, and now I have a place to share knowledge on it, with the bonus being it puts a small amount of cash in my pocket (not at all job quitting kind of money, but that wasn't the goal).
  - satvikpendem 1y ago
    Lots of products on IH are Stripe verified though.
    - esskay 1y ago
      Oh I wasnt specifically talking about the IH site - that's been on death watch for years now, most of it's moved to Twitter, Reddit, etc at this point. Most people also removed their stripe integration on IH a long time ago when it became apparent people were scraping the site to work out what to clone. For a small snapshot of what it's like these days, check out the unmoderated /r/saas subreddit, currently being held hostage by two chaps who own a saas (legitcheckapp) and have zero intention of making it a workable community, and instead allow lies, scams and overall crap content to fester.
- satvikpendem 1y ago
  That's a strange conclusion to come to just based on some people on a website. What's a a "far better" way to allocate your time?
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
"After launching 37 different products over the last few years, I've had one go viral and almost all the others struggle to get any traction at all." Imagine if these "products" were subject to the laws of product liability in the United States like real products sold there. Why do software developers call websites or apps "products". Why not just call them "websites", "apps" or just "software". For example, "After creating 37 different websites and apps over the last few years, I've had one go viral and almost all the others struggle to get any traction at all." Is "products" more descriptive. Is it some sort of signalling. Do developers want there software to be treated like tangible products.
- nikolayasdf123 1y ago
  agree. if those websites were like "Google" that literally indexes whole internet, or "New York Times" which is 175 years old, or "Bloomberg" which is biggest financial data provider — then those can be called products. website is just a surface to provide some real value, backed by really good design and execution, marketing and operations. what we see instead is a myriad of half-backed, useless, un-maintained, poorly-executed, poorly-operated, poorly-designed solutions to non-existent problems, like shooting a gun into the sky and hoping it will land on a target.
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  "product" just means "something you sell for money to customers". Saying "37 products" rather than "37 websites" makes it clear that each of these were business ventures, and that "going viral" means "finding many paying customers" not "finding many users curious about my fan site". Wikipedia is a site, for example, but not a product.
- WA 1y ago
  > Imagine if these "products" were subject to the laws of product liability in the United States like real products sold there. Software products are products and they come with liability. Maybe many bullshit apps can't cause any harm and don't really matter, but most evident is software in the medical space. Also, if you step outside of the US, software products in the EU must comply with the GDPR. If you fail to comply, you are held liable.
oulu2006 1y ago
3 products 1st one didn't sell 2nd one sold for 000s 3rd one sold for 000000s 4th one ? so really went the other way, quality over quantity
- nunodonato 1y ago
  what do you think was the cause for that kind of increase? quality? different target? complexity?
  - oulu2006 1y ago
    right people mostly, I partnered with someone different for the 3rd startup; from my experience with the first 2 i realized the sort of person I needed as a co-founder. Someone to compliment my deficiencies, domain expertise and with the same focus and mindset to succeed -- most startups fail because of founder issues.
GianFabien 1y ago
Ok, guesstimating that the 6 figure sale was around 3x earnings, the total of all the revenue is less than $450k for 5 years. Then you need to allow for expenses and taxes. Might be Ok as a side hustle, but probably insufficient to replace a typical income. A reality check to counteract all the startup boosterism.
- raincole 1y ago
  It seems that all these products are 100% online. Therefore it's a very viable income source for people who live in, well, the majority part of the world.
- misiek08 1y ago
  $33k per year, so $165k for 5 years is good enough salary e.g. in Poland where I live, not achieved by 80% of people in country. Why I chose $33k? It's enough to have decent life with some good holidays and local trips along the years. Having $450k income, even if half will be taken by expenses - you still can live a very decent life in many places around the world.
reactordev 1y ago
I gave up after 20. Now I just work on other people’s ideas or consult. I burned myself out trying to make something of my own.
- KurSix 1y ago
  Burnout's real, and stepping back means you're being smart about your energy.
another_twist 1y ago
I feel like this is the same story for products that don't really solve a problem. Its probably a lot easier to focus on one broad market segment like e.g. marketing and learn as much about it as you possibly could. That way you'd know what to do next and maybe even have the power to shape the market.
kookamamie 1y ago
> 37 different products I guess we have different understandings of what a product is.
- bschwindHN 1y ago
  Yeah I feel kinda petty saying it, but given how easy it is to crap out a web app, I hardly consider most to be "products". That word in my mind is at least reserved for something that at least has some tangible aspect to it.
shahzaibmushtaq 1y ago
Earning $150000 + 1 viral product sold for 6 figures over the last 5 years isn't that bad in terms of experience which can help grow Refgrow faster using organic SEO and marketing. I guess all those ideas that never made $1 were because of the "If you build it, they will come" marketing approach.
- Oras 1y ago
  It is SO bad actually. That's $30,000 a year, a salary of a junior developer with 10 times less responsibility compared to running multiple products. I am not discouraging building tools, I do that myself but most of these could be done while having a full time job and learning on the side.
  - shahzaibmushtaq 1y ago
    You missed the other part of that equation. One viral product ReplyGuy would have sold for in the $300,000-$500,000 range (my guess) is equivalent to 4 years of salary of a senior developer. But the level of experience he has now cannot be achieved while having a full-time job and learning on the side.
KurSix 1y ago
Slow growth can feel like failure in the early days, especially in the indie/startup Twitter bubble where people post their $10k MRR screenshots two weeks after launch. But what was said really resonates: many of those "failed" projects are actually just early
mgax 1y ago
Wait, are these considered products? I think the whole indie hacker scene has totally lost it. A product takes time. ”Painkillerideas.com” doesn’t sounds like a product - and this was his biggest win
- alt227 1y ago
  If you look directly under that you will see that replyguy was his biggest win at a 6 figure sale.
3stripe 1y ago
The author states "Virality is rare and nearly impossible to predict" and yet one of his products aims to automate the creation of "viral LinkedIn posts"! Much irony.
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
I am actually a little intrigued in the inner workings of replyguy.com (the app OP sold for 6 figures) It just sounds like it relies on scraping reddit/twitter/some basic google/brave search api shenanigans... Seriously, all the posts on replyguy.com seems to particularly target reddit and I am pretty sure that they might be scraping since eating reddit's api cost might be hard. The autogenerate reply feature might be really easy to build (I think) I mean, I don't condone scraping since it might be a little grey area but apify has reddit scraping too with the ability to search for keyword. I mean, they are also raking as in as much if not more dollars per month than replyguy.com while being an api.. Now, we don't know if they are scraping or using api but I have assumed that they are scraping and so I may be wrong, I usually am but I am kinda impressed by how reddit scraping can lead to 6 figures.
- OldfieldFund 1y ago
  6 figures is not that much to a company that wants that specific product and it's well-built. It also has a user base with somewhat decent monthly visits.
bberenberg 1y ago
I build random things in the “indie hacker” way but it’s always more about doing stuff for me than others. I find it enjoyable and fun, and that’s what drives it. If I get some traction, then great, but if not, I also get the tool I wanted and the fun experience and learning of building it. While I wish this didn’t come at the expense of reading less, I am happy it means my TV backlog is growing.
tnolet 1y ago
Why, in all that this holy, won't anyone focus on one thing and stick with it until it stops making sense. Building a business takes time. - Stop diluting your attention. - Iterate, iterate, iterate. - Stick around for long enough so people have a chance to know you exist.
jokoon 1y ago
It felt good to hear what Gabe Newell had to say about startups. I don't mean to criticize how capitalism can turn sour, but the startup system can easily turns into some sort of pyramid scheme or snake oil, where some actors benefit, like online advertisers. Startuping feels like it comes from a libertarian, Reaganian beliefs of how capitalism works.
ErikAugust 1y ago
I don’t get how anyone thinks that spending 100s of hours over and over again on projects that make $0 is a good idea. “Definition of insanity” and all that. You are in denial that you are unemployed, you might as well do something more interesting or enjoyable.
- NilMostChill 1y ago
  There is an argument to be made that it's good training, like coding kata's just with the end to end. If you're looking to make a living off of it, the training argument only works if you then go on to used the trained skills though. In this instance, if the numbers provided are to be believed they made bank. i'm seeing a six figure sale on a five figure investment, among others. Though i suspect, like is usually it, that the provided cost numbers are much higher in reality when factoring in time and opportunity cost etc.
YoCurryOuthouse 1y ago
[flagged]
tomcam 1y ago
My instinct normally is to bat for a single or a double, not a home run. But we have different needs than most people. For us, owning our real estate outright and making mid 6 figures or below pretax in a HCOL area is the target. Any higher income and you spend too much time on business trips, emergencies, hiring people, HR issues, etc. Too old for that. Inflation and property taxes are running much hotter than we'd like but we assumed years ago it would happen at some point. It hasn't affected us at all on a day-to-day basis. So when my wife and I evaluate business ideas, it never crosses our mind to assume it will be picked up by a VC and hit the front page of HN. We try to project the worst, best, and most likely scenarios. We project these same terms a few years out to understand where problems might arise. Our businesses are always medium- to long-term plays that we can run with minimal to no staffing. We have about a 50% success rate, about 30% higher than we normally bet.
pbrum 1y ago
This stuff is hard. Today was the first time my little startup started sending out little videos of demo features to the group of about 20+ people (all friends/family/close colleagues) I'd interviewed in round 1 of customer work. How did it go? Ok, but not great. The disappointment in there is not from any negative reactions, but rather to the large amount of non-reactions (simple things like "oh cool" and nothing else from someone who knows full well how important this is to me). But that's ok! I know maybe they'll have more time later. If not, I will nudge them. And I have other people to ping and later will move on to cold pitching anyway. And I've read in countless founder books, testimonials, etc about how hard and laborious this is. Keep a firm mindset, be systematic about going through all the steps, never skip a day of work, meet your own deadlines, have a bulletproof work ethic. Rome wasn't built in a day!
Invictus0 1y ago
The indie hacker community builds worthless, visionless widgets and then fails to market them. Could you imagine Steve jobs talking about building 37 products in 5 years? Instead, talk to a customer. Build something that solves just one person's problem really well. Grow from there.
- ozim 1y ago
  Steve Jobs comparison is not great. You don’t have to be Jobs or have grand vision to make decent product that will make you money. „indie hacker community builds worthless, visionless widgets „ - I totally agree with this sentence. Those 37 „products” feel like huge waste of time even ones he sold.
- comechao 1y ago
  > Virality is rare and nearly impossible to predict People see viral products and early hackers who spent years building their reputation, and think that's not too hard, and maybe you need to try as many as possible... Nope, you need to build a business too! Low-hanging fruit saas can be built so fast nowadays that knowing how to build software is not a huge advantage. We know that building businesses takes time and a huge effort. Most businesses will not be Lovable like.
- oc1 1y ago
  I suspect the 2020's indie hacker community is now a byproduct of the "get rich" enshittification of social media and their role models are tiktok and instagram influencers who teach you how to "build" because with ai no tech skills needed anymore.
- askafriend 1y ago
  Exactly this. It's inherent in the process and way of thinking. It's a dangerous path to pursue for entrepreneurs. How can the results be anything but disposable and frivolous when the process treats them as such.
- fxtentacle 1y ago
  But how do you find that first customer who's willing to pay for a solution? In a way, that's the same problem as getting a job, which seems to be harsh for recent college graduates.
LargeWu 1y ago
Is making ~8 products a year for 5 years perceived as a viable way to be successful?
- dlcarrier 1y ago
  I worked for a company where I designed hardware products at that rate, although not for as long. Someone in management discovered that each time you release a new product you get a huge sales bump from distributors filling inventory. We already had a crowded and confusing product line, so the distributors eventually started sending the old unsold products back and asking for a refund, and that stopped that release cadence. It did limit the complexity of products, which could be good or bad, but the products were pipelined, so having one employee designing them in ~300 man-hours per design, spread out over six months or so, was totally doable. This included the whole gambit, from conceiving the design to component selection, schematic, layout, design for manufacturing, test fixtures and procedures to documentation and ad copy. I do feel like it's quicker with hardware than software, because hardware follows something like the theoretical "waterfall" method that software has never used, so everything is clearly documented. For example, I pulled up the cheapest transistor from a common supplier, and it has five pages of documentation plus an index: https://www.formosams.com/upload/product/Mosfets/FMSBSS138-Q1_REV_A.pdf https://www.formosams.com/upload/product/Mosfets/FMSBSS138-Q... Everything is always easy to look up, with consistent formatting from every supplier, and you're never dealing with APIs that don't do what you'd expect them to do. You also don't need to continuously fix older releases, because they worked when you shipped them. On top of that, if a component is commonly used, it'll stick around for a lifetime, even as newer products come out, so you don't need to update your product unless it's worth the cost savings.
  - KurSix 1y ago
    Yep, chasing short-term signals (like launch bumps) can backfire if it's not grounded in sustainable demand
- tiffanyh 1y ago
  A lot of people want to replicate Pieter Levels success https://x.com/levelsio https://x.com/levelsio https://x.com/levelsio/status/1457315274466594817 https://x.com/levelsio/status/1457315274466594817
lccerina 1y ago
The growing product is something that bolts in the worst of current internet (affiliation links). Hopefully it will fail too
- moondowner 1y ago
  Affiliate links have been here for three decades; (AutoWeb.com doing it since 1995)
  - olyjohn 1y ago
    That doesn't mean anything. It's still a huge reason for all the junk and bullshit that's ruined the internet.
forgotmypw17 1y ago
>Did you find success by focusing on one project and giving it time, or by making lots of new bets? Mostly focusing on one project at a time on most days, but running several projects in parallel, and cross-pollinating the knowledge I gain from one to the others. >Has "slow growth" ever paid off for you? My arguably most successful project (in terms of impact and popularity) went “almost nowhere” for the first 2-3 years. But I wasn’t really trying to make it go anywhere, it was just for the enjoyment of me and my friends. >If you had to start over, would you pick patience or a high volume of launches? Both. Be patient, let projects grow slowly, and grow multiple projects at a time while you wait.
- nunodonato 1y ago
  Slow and consistent. I truly believe this is the key to growth. Unfortunately, I also suck at it. If I don't see interesting growth after a few weeks ,I'm inclined to give up too quickly.
  - veidelis 1y ago
    Can you tell more, please? I'm interested to know what did you build that had an interesting growth to you. Could you please expand on one project of yours? Thank you!
  - forgotmypw17 1y ago
    What has helped me with this is committing to doing one small thing, a very small task, an outrageously small task per day. This might be one minute of meditation; one commit to my project, no matter how small; one pushup. I can then stop, or I can keep going, depending on how I feel. But there's basically no excuse for me not to do that one thing, which keeps me primed and there mentally. The other thing that has helped me is changing how I talk about myself and my struggles. Diligently and attentively remove negative talk (e.g. "I suck at x") and replace it with positive talk (e.g. I'm learning to get better at x").
deleted 1y ago
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rorylaitila 1y ago
Let's call this shotgun capitalism. It's all the rage over at indie X. It used to be that one had a unique interest, profession or capability. This uniqueness causes them to see a gap in the market that could be filled by a new business. They work on filling out that gap, going as far as the customers and their capabilities will take them. But that's too limiting. Because their interests and their customers might not lead to infinite growth! So instead you need to burn your life looking for that ONE business that will take off. So shoot at everything. Burn your business, burn your time, burn your customers (this I detest the most), burn your intellect. Maybe get a shot at joining some club that no one cares about, except the other shooters. The correct path is neither a shotgun blast on all available ideas, or a march to the death on your pet idea. It's a coherent expansion of effort based on feedback, capabilities, risk and likely return. Otherwise known as being in business.
- fxtentacle 1y ago
  The problem is that feedback is difficult to get without customers. Plus in many cases, the feedback of what people intend to do is not really helpful at predicting what they will do. I'll go with an example from my past: We built a SaaS for freelance photographers to organize and distribute their images. People loved it. We listened for feedback and people loved the new features. But churn was always a bit too high to make this a truly great business. We asked for feedback and got various reasons, none of which turned out to be correct. Most of our churn was photographers getting frustrated with the freelancer life and either signing up for an agency or changing jobs. That's how I learned the hard way that you cannot succeed in a bad market. But from the outside, it wasn't obvious that this market segment would be bad. You need to "test drive" the market with a product to learn if it can sustain a business or not. And that's what many of those indie builders are trying to do: feel out an acceptable market.
  - hermitcrab 1y ago
    This is my experience as well - it is very difficult to know what a market is really like without actually trying to sell a product into it. What people say and what they do are very loosely coupled. The only really good validation of a product idea is people giving you $.
nikolayasdf123 1y ago
> Did you find success by focusing on one project and giving it time, or by making lots of new bets? lots of new bets are technically impossible. unless you doing something super trivial, you will hit roadblocks that require effort and time (e.g. Apple App Store reviews are notoriously slow and can take a month for a single new app).
karel-3d 1y ago
I see one of the products and I already hate the OP. Thanks https://replyguy.com/ https://replyguy.com/
- egypturnash 1y ago
  same, that behavior's an insta-block.
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  Wow, they're actually proud of a marketing spam post that convinced a depressed person struggling with debt that they're being listened to and understood, while possibly convincing them to try some predatory lending service (I assume, since that "debt freedom now" site is telling me how much debt "Americans in București" are erasing right now!). Having this as a success story you brag about is sociopathic.
  - karel-3d 1y ago
    The website doesn't work anymore. But yeah it sucks
- phito 1y ago
  Gross. I would be ashamed to make such software.
- tuesdaynight 1y ago
  It makes me sad that I cannot trust comments that talk about products or services anymore. Now I understand why people are using TikTok for search. Seeing the person can helps with the trust, even if the problem is the same (they can be paid as well).
  - satvikpendem 1y ago
    There are lots of ads on TikTok too, even more insidious than on forums.
- hahn-kev 1y ago
TimPC 1y ago
A product with $6000 in revenue selling for only $12,500 seems crazy to me. Why were you so eager to get rid of it?
- prawn 1y ago
  Might only take months for traffic/attention/fad to completely die off, or a rival to supplant it.
- Arainach 1y ago
  Revenue isn't profit.
- fxtentacle 1y ago
  Most likely, they booked some advertisements to push revenue but didn't honestly account for the ad expenses. I've seen that way too many times with Indie products that they brag about large revenue numbers and "forget" to mention that profit margins are negative. I remember once hearing about a start-up that resold baby diapers at a loss. Obviously, they were easily able to scale up customers and revenue ...
  - fxtentacle 1y ago
    found it: "Critically, he did not understand margin. At the end of December when things were getting truly desperate, he said to me “Phil, just bring me a forecast that shows how much we need to sell to break even.” He did not understand, after three years of negative margin, that increased sales resulted in increased losses." from Ecomom Post Mortem by Philip Prentiss
    - AndrewOMartin 1y ago
      "We lose money on every sale, but make it up on volume" > https://barrypopik.com/blog/we_lose_money_on_every_sale_but_make_it_up_on_volume https://barrypopik.com/blog/we_lose_money_on_every_sale_but_...
  - deleted 1y ago
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farceSpherule 1y ago
Everyone is trying to "copy" Pieter Levels "success" which as of now is "brand effect." The guy started his thing over a decade ago and people look at it now and think they can replicate it. The stuff the guy codes is garbage and what he does is far from solving any problems. And, I do not believe his revenue numbers. At all. But people on the Internet see some shit posted, believe it, and then compare themselves to it. Gleaning anything from his "1 in a million success" is falling prey to survivorship bias.
- nikolayasdf123 1y ago
  same. his websites are indeed garbage.
- WA 1y ago
  I think Pieter is actually legit, even though his bad takes on things started to increase in the last few years. But his products? - Nomadlist solved a problem, especially back then: a social network for digital nomads. Nothing wrong with it. - Remoteok is a job board, but niched down, which is completely ok - photoai / interiorai: it pains me that an AI slop generator is obviously a viable business model, but apparently many people are willing to pay for this The rest is indeed brand effect. That shitty flight simulator wouldn't have gotten any traction if it wasn't for being part of "a community". But, and this is the most important thing I like about Pieter: he doesn't sell shovels in a gold rush. His products solve problems for quite different groups of people and X isn't necessarily the primary marketing platform for his stuff. There are others in the indie hacker scene that are way more shady, because they make their money from products that sell that lifestyle first and foremost.
- jf22 1y ago
  How are you defining garbage?
  - nikolayasdf123 1y ago
    like his flying simulator.
  - nikolayasdf123 1y ago
nzach 1y ago
I just want to share my recent personal experience. Recently I've finally decided to try creating something new that people would find useful hoping that some day I would be able to turn a profit from that. So I vibe coded a pretty bare-bones (but fully functional) version of my idea and started to talk about it in several platforms, including IndieHackers. And the main "advice" I've got after talking with a few people was "You are putting too much effort in your product, your focus should be on finding the right market fit for your idea". And after reading the logs in my server I found out nobody bothered to actually try what I built(and no, you don't need to create an account to use), which is fine. But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing? So, after a brief encounter with this community(people that are trying to build products) I can see how one could be tricked into the idea that success mainly comes from a good idea and not a good execution. I get that many people are in this space only to make money and that finding the "magic idea" is probably a good advice if you don't care about what you will build and you need to make money fast. But I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas.
- raincole 1y ago
  > But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing? Honestly most communities on the internet feel like that. That's one of the reasons why people migrated to discord servers. (This very comment of mine is generic af too and has as little insight as an LLM predicting how a random HN users would comment here.) Anyway, unless you made a tool for other devs (an IDE etc.), there is very little reason to ask what other devs think about your product. They're not your target audience. In the best case they're random people, in the worse case they're your competitors.
- bruce511 1y ago
  >> But I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas. I agree. As long as you make it explicit in your encouragement that they should do this as a hobby with no expectation of income. If their goal is to work on an interesting problem then discussing marketing is irrelevant. If however their goal is to get paid, then the nature of the code is irrelevant. If you want to get paid then marketing (finding a customer base, discussing their pain, solving that need at a price they can afford etc) is more important. Unfortunately in a lot of postings this context is not made clear. So the replier has to assume one or other context. Equally Unfortunately they often don't post which context they assumed. Incidentally marketing might be the most important part of commercial success, but it is not the only important part. It is the most difficult part though so it makes sense to start there. Execution still matters, good execution makes sales easier. But the best execution ever does not mean anything if marketing is missing.
jasonthorsness 1y ago
I've wondered about low-sum acquisitions commonly celebrated on indiehackers/build in public... I thought they were often likely scammers in some way, like using domains with traffic for then nefarious purposes? But maybe not, maybe this is just a way to avoid the dozens of $0 projects on OP's list, and the buyers sincerely want to grow. Navigated to a few OP sold and they still seem to be what they were.
- prawn 1y ago
  For many people, building out these projects feels impossible to avoid. Selling them on for almost anything at all gives them: some amount of cash, the positive signal of achieving a sale, and also clears headspace otherwise occupied with "I really should do some work on idea #3487."
deadbabe 1y ago
Looking over his list of products, it is clear the author is the quintessential late stage capitalist.
- dlcarrier 1y ago
  He hasn't bribed the government to make any of them mandatory, so they're all effectively worthless. It's just regular capitalism. He'll either randomly hit on something that's actually useful, or leave the low-effort software sector, or get a regular job writing low-effort software at one of the big conglomerates that already bribes the government to make their products mandatory.
- alchemyzach 1y ago
  "I cranked out 37 unoriginal, shitty products that have countless existing competitors and zero moat... and none of them made me rich :( "
  - GianFabien 1y ago
    Best TLDR;
danjl 1y ago
The biggest problem I have, is that, even though I know from experience that I should talk to customers to understand their problems and build a solution that provides them value, and spend time talking to them to understand the value proposition, how to communicate it, and how it fits into their workflow, I don't enjoy those bits, and I prefer to just code things I want to build. I prefer to willfully delude myself into thinking that the thing I want to build is something other people will want to pay for. Oh, wait, and I prefer not to charge people and not to sell ads. So there's that too. Am I doing this right?
- m0llusk 1y ago
  Sounds like you could use some input from someone experienced with product marketing. They are all about this kind of communication, both expressing ideas to potential customers and hearing their feedback from initial exposure.
- larrik 1y ago
  Probably if not you are trying to build a business. But! That's just one reason to code anything, and you are probably "doing this" well enough for the other reasons (education, experience, job hunting, and the best one: fun).
alchemyzach 1y ago
"You failed because you had the wrong dream." - Diego Delgado
bob1029 1y ago
37 is one of those numbers that keeps popping up in certain places. Whenever I see it in a headline, I go in feeling like I'm about to be bullshitted by the author.
- satvikpendem 1y ago
  You might be interested in this video by Veritasium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6iQrh2TK98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6iQrh2TK98
  - Torwald 1y ago
    I think that Jason Fried knew about that.
- DanielVZ 1y ago
  It’s because it’s what people think of when trying to come up with a random number. So when people use it it’s generally not because they naturally encountered it but they needed a relatively high random number to make a bullshit point.
amadeuspagel 1y ago
Many of these tools seem to be targeted at other indie hackers.
Luke25 1y ago
[dead]

242 points by AlexandrBel 1y ago

Indiehackers was the place that finally made me realise trying to bootstrap a tech product is almost always pointless. There's almost always a far better way to allocate your time.

esskay 1y ago
Yup same, the whole toxic culture of lies surrounding it makes things worse as theres people trapped in this weird little bubble of believing half the stories on there. Most are completely fabricated. For me personally I gave up on SaaS a couple of years ago and shifted my focus elsewhere. I ended up building a site in a niche I've always loved, and it ended up making me love that hobby even more, and now I have a place to share knowledge on it, with the bonus being it puts a small amount of cash in my pocket (not at all job quitting kind of money, but that wasn't the goal).
- satvikpendem 1y ago
  Lots of products on IH are Stripe verified though.
  - esskay 1y ago
    Oh I wasnt specifically talking about the IH site - that's been on death watch for years now, most of it's moved to Twitter, Reddit, etc at this point. Most people also removed their stripe integration on IH a long time ago when it became apparent people were scraping the site to work out what to clone. For a small snapshot of what it's like these days, check out the unmoderated /r/saas subreddit, currently being held hostage by two chaps who own a saas (legitcheckapp) and have zero intention of making it a workable community, and instead allow lies, scams and overall crap content to fester.
satvikpendem 1y ago
That's a strange conclusion to come to just based on some people on a website. What's a a "far better" way to allocate your time?

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

"After launching 37 different products over the last few years, I've had one go viral and almost all the others struggle to get any traction at all." Imagine if these "products" were subject to the laws of product liability in the United States like real products sold there. Why do software developers call websites or apps "products". Why not just call them "websites", "apps" or just "software". For example, "After creating 37 different websites and apps over the last few years, I've had one go viral and almost all the others struggle to get any traction at all." Is "products" more descriptive. Is it some sort of signalling. Do developers want there software to be treated like tangible products.

nikolayasdf123 1y ago
agree. if those websites were like "Google" that literally indexes whole internet, or "New York Times" which is 175 years old, or "Bloomberg" which is biggest financial data provider — then those can be called products. website is just a surface to provide some real value, backed by really good design and execution, marketing and operations. what we see instead is a myriad of half-backed, useless, un-maintained, poorly-executed, poorly-operated, poorly-designed solutions to non-existent problems, like shooting a gun into the sky and hoping it will land on a target.
tsimionescu 1y ago
"product" just means "something you sell for money to customers". Saying "37 products" rather than "37 websites" makes it clear that each of these were business ventures, and that "going viral" means "finding many paying customers" not "finding many users curious about my fan site". Wikipedia is a site, for example, but not a product.
WA 1y ago
> Imagine if these "products" were subject to the laws of product liability in the United States like real products sold there. Software products are products and they come with liability. Maybe many bullshit apps can't cause any harm and don't really matter, but most evident is software in the medical space. Also, if you step outside of the US, software products in the EU must comply with the GDPR. If you fail to comply, you are held liable.

oulu2006 1y ago

3 products 1st one didn't sell 2nd one sold for 000s 3rd one sold for 000000s 4th one ? so really went the other way, quality over quantity

nunodonato 1y ago
what do you think was the cause for that kind of increase? quality? different target? complexity?
- oulu2006 1y ago
  right people mostly, I partnered with someone different for the 3rd startup; from my experience with the first 2 i realized the sort of person I needed as a co-founder. Someone to compliment my deficiencies, domain expertise and with the same focus and mindset to succeed -- most startups fail because of founder issues.

GianFabien 1y ago

Ok, guesstimating that the 6 figure sale was around 3x earnings, the total of all the revenue is less than $450k for 5 years. Then you need to allow for expenses and taxes. Might be Ok as a side hustle, but probably insufficient to replace a typical income. A reality check to counteract all the startup boosterism.

raincole 1y ago
It seems that all these products are 100% online. Therefore it's a very viable income source for people who live in, well, the majority part of the world.
misiek08 1y ago
$33k per year, so $165k for 5 years is good enough salary e.g. in Poland where I live, not achieved by 80% of people in country. Why I chose $33k? It's enough to have decent life with some good holidays and local trips along the years. Having $450k income, even if half will be taken by expenses - you still can live a very decent life in many places around the world.

reactordev 1y ago

I gave up after 20. Now I just work on other people’s ideas or consult. I burned myself out trying to make something of my own.

KurSix 1y ago
Burnout's real, and stepping back means you're being smart about your energy.

another_twist 1y ago

I feel like this is the same story for products that don't really solve a problem. Its probably a lot easier to focus on one broad market segment like e.g. marketing and learn as much about it as you possibly could. That way you'd know what to do next and maybe even have the power to shape the market.

kookamamie 1y ago

> 37 different products I guess we have different understandings of what a product is.

bschwindHN 1y ago
Yeah I feel kinda petty saying it, but given how easy it is to crap out a web app, I hardly consider most to be "products". That word in my mind is at least reserved for something that at least has some tangible aspect to it.

shahzaibmushtaq 1y ago

Earning $150000 + 1 viral product sold for 6 figures over the last 5 years isn't that bad in terms of experience which can help grow Refgrow faster using organic SEO and marketing. I guess all those ideas that never made $1 were because of the "If you build it, they will come" marketing approach.

Oras 1y ago
It is SO bad actually. That's $30,000 a year, a salary of a junior developer with 10 times less responsibility compared to running multiple products. I am not discouraging building tools, I do that myself but most of these could be done while having a full time job and learning on the side.
- shahzaibmushtaq 1y ago
  You missed the other part of that equation. One viral product ReplyGuy would have sold for in the $300,000-$500,000 range (my guess) is equivalent to 4 years of salary of a senior developer. But the level of experience he has now cannot be achieved while having a full-time job and learning on the side.

KurSix 1y ago

Slow growth can feel like failure in the early days, especially in the indie/startup Twitter bubble where people post their $10k MRR screenshots two weeks after launch. But what was said really resonates: many of those "failed" projects are actually just early

mgax 1y ago

Wait, are these considered products? I think the whole indie hacker scene has totally lost it. A product takes time. ”Painkillerideas.com” doesn’t sounds like a product - and this was his biggest win

alt227 1y ago
If you look directly under that you will see that replyguy was his biggest win at a 6 figure sale.

3stripe 1y ago

The author states "Virality is rare and nearly impossible to predict" and yet one of his products aims to automate the creation of "viral LinkedIn posts"! Much irony.

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago

I am actually a little intrigued in the inner workings of replyguy.com (the app OP sold for 6 figures) It just sounds like it relies on scraping reddit/twitter/some basic google/brave search api shenanigans... Seriously, all the posts on replyguy.com seems to particularly target reddit and I am pretty sure that they might be scraping since eating reddit's api cost might be hard. The autogenerate reply feature might be really easy to build (I think) I mean, I don't condone scraping since it might be a little grey area but apify has reddit scraping too with the ability to search for keyword. I mean, they are also raking as in as much if not more dollars per month than replyguy.com while being an api.. Now, we don't know if they are scraping or using api but I have assumed that they are scraping and so I may be wrong, I usually am but I am kinda impressed by how reddit scraping can lead to 6 figures.

OldfieldFund 1y ago
6 figures is not that much to a company that wants that specific product and it's well-built. It also has a user base with somewhat decent monthly visits.

bberenberg 1y ago

I build random things in the “indie hacker” way but it’s always more about doing stuff for me than others. I find it enjoyable and fun, and that’s what drives it. If I get some traction, then great, but if not, I also get the tool I wanted and the fun experience and learning of building it. While I wish this didn’t come at the expense of reading less, I am happy it means my TV backlog is growing.

tnolet 1y ago

Why, in all that this holy, won't anyone focus on one thing and stick with it until it stops making sense. Building a business takes time. - Stop diluting your attention. - Iterate, iterate, iterate. - Stick around for long enough so people have a chance to know you exist.

jokoon 1y ago

It felt good to hear what Gabe Newell had to say about startups. I don't mean to criticize how capitalism can turn sour, but the startup system can easily turns into some sort of pyramid scheme or snake oil, where some actors benefit, like online advertisers. Startuping feels like it comes from a libertarian, Reaganian beliefs of how capitalism works.

ErikAugust 1y ago

I don’t get how anyone thinks that spending 100s of hours over and over again on projects that make $0 is a good idea. “Definition of insanity” and all that. You are in denial that you are unemployed, you might as well do something more interesting or enjoyable.

NilMostChill 1y ago
There is an argument to be made that it's good training, like coding kata's just with the end to end. If you're looking to make a living off of it, the training argument only works if you then go on to used the trained skills though. In this instance, if the numbers provided are to be believed they made bank. i'm seeing a six figure sale on a five figure investment, among others. Though i suspect, like is usually it, that the provided cost numbers are much higher in reality when factoring in time and opportunity cost etc.

YoCurryOuthouse 1y ago

[flagged]

tomcam 1y ago

My instinct normally is to bat for a single or a double, not a home run. But we have different needs than most people. For us, owning our real estate outright and making mid 6 figures or below pretax in a HCOL area is the target. Any higher income and you spend too much time on business trips, emergencies, hiring people, HR issues, etc. Too old for that. Inflation and property taxes are running much hotter than we'd like but we assumed years ago it would happen at some point. It hasn't affected us at all on a day-to-day basis. So when my wife and I evaluate business ideas, it never crosses our mind to assume it will be picked up by a VC and hit the front page of HN. We try to project the worst, best, and most likely scenarios. We project these same terms a few years out to understand where problems might arise. Our businesses are always medium- to long-term plays that we can run with minimal to no staffing. We have about a 50% success rate, about 30% higher than we normally bet.

pbrum 1y ago

This stuff is hard. Today was the first time my little startup started sending out little videos of demo features to the group of about 20+ people (all friends/family/close colleagues) I'd interviewed in round 1 of customer work. How did it go? Ok, but not great. The disappointment in there is not from any negative reactions, but rather to the large amount of non-reactions (simple things like "oh cool" and nothing else from someone who knows full well how important this is to me). But that's ok! I know maybe they'll have more time later. If not, I will nudge them. And I have other people to ping and later will move on to cold pitching anyway. And I've read in countless founder books, testimonials, etc about how hard and laborious this is. Keep a firm mindset, be systematic about going through all the steps, never skip a day of work, meet your own deadlines, have a bulletproof work ethic. Rome wasn't built in a day!

Invictus0 1y ago

The indie hacker community builds worthless, visionless widgets and then fails to market them. Could you imagine Steve jobs talking about building 37 products in 5 years? Instead, talk to a customer. Build something that solves just one person's problem really well. Grow from there.

ozim 1y ago
Steve Jobs comparison is not great. You don’t have to be Jobs or have grand vision to make decent product that will make you money. „indie hacker community builds worthless, visionless widgets „ - I totally agree with this sentence. Those 37 „products” feel like huge waste of time even ones he sold.
comechao 1y ago
> Virality is rare and nearly impossible to predict People see viral products and early hackers who spent years building their reputation, and think that's not too hard, and maybe you need to try as many as possible... Nope, you need to build a business too! Low-hanging fruit saas can be built so fast nowadays that knowing how to build software is not a huge advantage. We know that building businesses takes time and a huge effort. Most businesses will not be Lovable like.
oc1 1y ago
I suspect the 2020's indie hacker community is now a byproduct of the "get rich" enshittification of social media and their role models are tiktok and instagram influencers who teach you how to "build" because with ai no tech skills needed anymore.
askafriend 1y ago
Exactly this. It's inherent in the process and way of thinking. It's a dangerous path to pursue for entrepreneurs. How can the results be anything but disposable and frivolous when the process treats them as such.
fxtentacle 1y ago
But how do you find that first customer who's willing to pay for a solution? In a way, that's the same problem as getting a job, which seems to be harsh for recent college graduates.

LargeWu 1y ago

Is making ~8 products a year for 5 years perceived as a viable way to be successful?

dlcarrier 1y ago
I worked for a company where I designed hardware products at that rate, although not for as long. Someone in management discovered that each time you release a new product you get a huge sales bump from distributors filling inventory. We already had a crowded and confusing product line, so the distributors eventually started sending the old unsold products back and asking for a refund, and that stopped that release cadence. It did limit the complexity of products, which could be good or bad, but the products were pipelined, so having one employee designing them in ~300 man-hours per design, spread out over six months or so, was totally doable. This included the whole gambit, from conceiving the design to component selection, schematic, layout, design for manufacturing, test fixtures and procedures to documentation and ad copy. I do feel like it's quicker with hardware than software, because hardware follows something like the theoretical "waterfall" method that software has never used, so everything is clearly documented. For example, I pulled up the cheapest transistor from a common supplier, and it has five pages of documentation plus an index: https://www.formosams.com/upload/product/Mosfets/FMSBSS138-Q1_REV_A.pdf https://www.formosams.com/upload/product/Mosfets/FMSBSS138-Q... Everything is always easy to look up, with consistent formatting from every supplier, and you're never dealing with APIs that don't do what you'd expect them to do. You also don't need to continuously fix older releases, because they worked when you shipped them. On top of that, if a component is commonly used, it'll stick around for a lifetime, even as newer products come out, so you don't need to update your product unless it's worth the cost savings.
- KurSix 1y ago
  Yep, chasing short-term signals (like launch bumps) can backfire if it's not grounded in sustainable demand
tiffanyh 1y ago
A lot of people want to replicate Pieter Levels success https://x.com/levelsio https://x.com/levelsio https://x.com/levelsio/status/1457315274466594817 https://x.com/levelsio/status/1457315274466594817

lccerina 1y ago

The growing product is something that bolts in the worst of current internet (affiliation links). Hopefully it will fail too

moondowner 1y ago
Affiliate links have been here for three decades; (AutoWeb.com doing it since 1995)
- olyjohn 1y ago
  That doesn't mean anything. It's still a huge reason for all the junk and bullshit that's ruined the internet.

forgotmypw17 1y ago

>Did you find success by focusing on one project and giving it time, or by making lots of new bets? Mostly focusing on one project at a time on most days, but running several projects in parallel, and cross-pollinating the knowledge I gain from one to the others. >Has "slow growth" ever paid off for you? My arguably most successful project (in terms of impact and popularity) went “almost nowhere” for the first 2-3 years. But I wasn’t really trying to make it go anywhere, it was just for the enjoyment of me and my friends. >If you had to start over, would you pick patience or a high volume of launches? Both. Be patient, let projects grow slowly, and grow multiple projects at a time while you wait.

nunodonato 1y ago
Slow and consistent. I truly believe this is the key to growth. Unfortunately, I also suck at it. If I don't see interesting growth after a few weeks ,I'm inclined to give up too quickly.
- veidelis 1y ago
  Can you tell more, please? I'm interested to know what did you build that had an interesting growth to you. Could you please expand on one project of yours? Thank you!
- forgotmypw17 1y ago
  What has helped me with this is committing to doing one small thing, a very small task, an outrageously small task per day. This might be one minute of meditation; one commit to my project, no matter how small; one pushup. I can then stop, or I can keep going, depending on how I feel. But there's basically no excuse for me not to do that one thing, which keeps me primed and there mentally. The other thing that has helped me is changing how I talk about myself and my struggles. Diligently and attentively remove negative talk (e.g. "I suck at x") and replace it with positive talk (e.g. I'm learning to get better at x").

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

rorylaitila 1y ago

Let's call this shotgun capitalism. It's all the rage over at indie X. It used to be that one had a unique interest, profession or capability. This uniqueness causes them to see a gap in the market that could be filled by a new business. They work on filling out that gap, going as far as the customers and their capabilities will take them. But that's too limiting. Because their interests and their customers might not lead to infinite growth! So instead you need to burn your life looking for that ONE business that will take off. So shoot at everything. Burn your business, burn your time, burn your customers (this I detest the most), burn your intellect. Maybe get a shot at joining some club that no one cares about, except the other shooters. The correct path is neither a shotgun blast on all available ideas, or a march to the death on your pet idea. It's a coherent expansion of effort based on feedback, capabilities, risk and likely return. Otherwise known as being in business.

fxtentacle 1y ago
The problem is that feedback is difficult to get without customers. Plus in many cases, the feedback of what people intend to do is not really helpful at predicting what they will do. I'll go with an example from my past: We built a SaaS for freelance photographers to organize and distribute their images. People loved it. We listened for feedback and people loved the new features. But churn was always a bit too high to make this a truly great business. We asked for feedback and got various reasons, none of which turned out to be correct. Most of our churn was photographers getting frustrated with the freelancer life and either signing up for an agency or changing jobs. That's how I learned the hard way that you cannot succeed in a bad market. But from the outside, it wasn't obvious that this market segment would be bad. You need to "test drive" the market with a product to learn if it can sustain a business or not. And that's what many of those indie builders are trying to do: feel out an acceptable market.
- hermitcrab 1y ago
  This is my experience as well - it is very difficult to know what a market is really like without actually trying to sell a product into it. What people say and what they do are very loosely coupled. The only really good validation of a product idea is people giving you $.

nikolayasdf123 1y ago

> Did you find success by focusing on one project and giving it time, or by making lots of new bets? lots of new bets are technically impossible. unless you doing something super trivial, you will hit roadblocks that require effort and time (e.g. Apple App Store reviews are notoriously slow and can take a month for a single new app).

karel-3d 1y ago

I see one of the products and I already hate the OP. Thanks https://replyguy.com/ https://replyguy.com/

egypturnash 1y ago
same, that behavior's an insta-block.
tsimionescu 1y ago
Wow, they're actually proud of a marketing spam post that convinced a depressed person struggling with debt that they're being listened to and understood, while possibly convincing them to try some predatory lending service (I assume, since that "debt freedom now" site is telling me how much debt "Americans in București" are erasing right now!). Having this as a success story you brag about is sociopathic.
- karel-3d 1y ago
  The website doesn't work anymore. But yeah it sucks
phito 1y ago
Gross. I would be ashamed to make such software.
tuesdaynight 1y ago
It makes me sad that I cannot trust comments that talk about products or services anymore. Now I understand why people are using TikTok for search. Seeing the person can helps with the trust, even if the problem is the same (they can be paid as well).
- satvikpendem 1y ago
  There are lots of ads on TikTok too, even more insidious than on forums.
hahn-kev 1y ago

TimPC 1y ago

A product with $6000 in revenue selling for only $12,500 seems crazy to me. Why were you so eager to get rid of it?

prawn 1y ago
Might only take months for traffic/attention/fad to completely die off, or a rival to supplant it.
Arainach 1y ago
Revenue isn't profit.
fxtentacle 1y ago
Most likely, they booked some advertisements to push revenue but didn't honestly account for the ad expenses. I've seen that way too many times with Indie products that they brag about large revenue numbers and "forget" to mention that profit margins are negative. I remember once hearing about a start-up that resold baby diapers at a loss. Obviously, they were easily able to scale up customers and revenue ...
- fxtentacle 1y ago
  found it: "Critically, he did not understand margin. At the end of December when things were getting truly desperate, he said to me “Phil, just bring me a forecast that shows how much we need to sell to break even.” He did not understand, after three years of negative margin, that increased sales resulted in increased losses." from Ecomom Post Mortem by Philip Prentiss
  - AndrewOMartin 1y ago
    "We lose money on every sale, but make it up on volume" > https://barrypopik.com/blog/we_lose_money_on_every_sale_but_make_it_up_on_volume https://barrypopik.com/blog/we_lose_money_on_every_sale_but_...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

farceSpherule 1y ago

Everyone is trying to "copy" Pieter Levels "success" which as of now is "brand effect." The guy started his thing over a decade ago and people look at it now and think they can replicate it. The stuff the guy codes is garbage and what he does is far from solving any problems. And, I do not believe his revenue numbers. At all. But people on the Internet see some shit posted, believe it, and then compare themselves to it. Gleaning anything from his "1 in a million success" is falling prey to survivorship bias.

nikolayasdf123 1y ago
same. his websites are indeed garbage.
WA 1y ago
I think Pieter is actually legit, even though his bad takes on things started to increase in the last few years. But his products? - Nomadlist solved a problem, especially back then: a social network for digital nomads. Nothing wrong with it. - Remoteok is a job board, but niched down, which is completely ok - photoai / interiorai: it pains me that an AI slop generator is obviously a viable business model, but apparently many people are willing to pay for this The rest is indeed brand effect. That shitty flight simulator wouldn't have gotten any traction if it wasn't for being part of "a community". But, and this is the most important thing I like about Pieter: he doesn't sell shovels in a gold rush. His products solve problems for quite different groups of people and X isn't necessarily the primary marketing platform for his stuff. There are others in the indie hacker scene that are way more shady, because they make their money from products that sell that lifestyle first and foremost.
jf22 1y ago
How are you defining garbage?
- nikolayasdf123 1y ago
  like his flying simulator.
- nikolayasdf123 1y ago

nzach 1y ago

I just want to share my recent personal experience. Recently I've finally decided to try creating something new that people would find useful hoping that some day I would be able to turn a profit from that. So I vibe coded a pretty bare-bones (but fully functional) version of my idea and started to talk about it in several platforms, including IndieHackers. And the main "advice" I've got after talking with a few people was "You are putting too much effort in your product, your focus should be on finding the right market fit for your idea". And after reading the logs in my server I found out nobody bothered to actually try what I built(and no, you don't need to create an account to use), which is fine. But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing? So, after a brief encounter with this community(people that are trying to build products) I can see how one could be tricked into the idea that success mainly comes from a good idea and not a good execution. I get that many people are in this space only to make money and that finding the "magic idea" is probably a good advice if you don't care about what you will build and you need to make money fast. But I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas.

raincole 1y ago
> But why would you give this generic advice without even looking at the thing? Honestly most communities on the internet feel like that. That's one of the reasons why people migrated to discord servers. (This very comment of mine is generic af too and has as little insight as an LLM predicting how a random HN users would comment here.) Anyway, unless you made a tool for other devs (an IDE etc.), there is very little reason to ask what other devs think about your product. They're not your target audience. In the best case they're random people, in the worse case they're your competitors.
bruce511 1y ago
>> But I think we should also encourage people to build interesting things, even if it's not clear how one could make money from these ideas. I agree. As long as you make it explicit in your encouragement that they should do this as a hobby with no expectation of income. If their goal is to work on an interesting problem then discussing marketing is irrelevant. If however their goal is to get paid, then the nature of the code is irrelevant. If you want to get paid then marketing (finding a customer base, discussing their pain, solving that need at a price they can afford etc) is more important. Unfortunately in a lot of postings this context is not made clear. So the replier has to assume one or other context. Equally Unfortunately they often don't post which context they assumed. Incidentally marketing might be the most important part of commercial success, but it is not the only important part. It is the most difficult part though so it makes sense to start there. Execution still matters, good execution makes sales easier. But the best execution ever does not mean anything if marketing is missing.

jasonthorsness 1y ago

I've wondered about low-sum acquisitions commonly celebrated on indiehackers/build in public... I thought they were often likely scammers in some way, like using domains with traffic for then nefarious purposes? But maybe not, maybe this is just a way to avoid the dozens of $0 projects on OP's list, and the buyers sincerely want to grow. Navigated to a few OP sold and they still seem to be what they were.

prawn 1y ago
For many people, building out these projects feels impossible to avoid. Selling them on for almost anything at all gives them: some amount of cash, the positive signal of achieving a sale, and also clears headspace otherwise occupied with "I really should do some work on idea #3487."

deadbabe 1y ago

Looking over his list of products, it is clear the author is the quintessential late stage capitalist.

dlcarrier 1y ago
He hasn't bribed the government to make any of them mandatory, so they're all effectively worthless. It's just regular capitalism. He'll either randomly hit on something that's actually useful, or leave the low-effort software sector, or get a regular job writing low-effort software at one of the big conglomerates that already bribes the government to make their products mandatory.
alchemyzach 1y ago
"I cranked out 37 unoriginal, shitty products that have countless existing competitors and zero moat... and none of them made me rich :( "
- GianFabien 1y ago
  Best TLDR;

danjl 1y ago

The biggest problem I have, is that, even though I know from experience that I should talk to customers to understand their problems and build a solution that provides them value, and spend time talking to them to understand the value proposition, how to communicate it, and how it fits into their workflow, I don't enjoy those bits, and I prefer to just code things I want to build. I prefer to willfully delude myself into thinking that the thing I want to build is something other people will want to pay for. Oh, wait, and I prefer not to charge people and not to sell ads. So there's that too. Am I doing this right?

m0llusk 1y ago
Sounds like you could use some input from someone experienced with product marketing. They are all about this kind of communication, both expressing ideas to potential customers and hearing their feedback from initial exposure.
larrik 1y ago
Probably if not you are trying to build a business. But! That's just one reason to code anything, and you are probably "doing this" well enough for the other reasons (education, experience, job hunting, and the best one: fun).

alchemyzach 1y ago

"You failed because you had the wrong dream." - Diego Delgado

bob1029 1y ago

37 is one of those numbers that keeps popping up in certain places. Whenever I see it in a headline, I go in feeling like I'm about to be bullshitted by the author.

satvikpendem 1y ago
You might be interested in this video by Veritasium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6iQrh2TK98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6iQrh2TK98
- Torwald 1y ago
  I think that Jason Fried knew about that.
DanielVZ 1y ago
It’s because it’s what people think of when trying to come up with a random number. So when people use it it’s generally not because they naturally encountered it but they needed a relatively high random number to make a bullshit point.

amadeuspagel 1y ago

Many of these tools seem to be targeted at other indie hackers.

Luke25 1y ago

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