I’m very happy for Tony, it’s a great achievement indeed.
Having said that, as an aspiring solopreneur myself, this article misses a very big part.
Engineers like to talk about how they build products, but we rarely talk about how to market them.
I quit my job 5 months ago, launched my first SaaS 3 months ago, and got zero users. I then started to tweet, write in LinkedIn, and focus on my newsletter. But I barely get any followers. So building is the easy part.
I refuse to participate in algorithm games, and try to be authentic. But maybe that’s not what people like.
A fellow solopreneur here, I've been doing it for several years now.
I browsed through your profile, website, Twitter account, and I'm still not sure what your product is and what it does. Is it consulting? Coaching? Book?
You don't have a lot of followers (me neither), so tweeting won't get you far as you're talking into a void. Instead, join existing discussions where people already are. Also, don't use too many hashtags - it looks spammy.
Not trying to put you down, just offering a different perspective you might not hear otherwise. I hope you succeed.
>> I refuse to participate in algorithm games, and try to be authentic. But maybe that’s not what people like.
This is a mistake. It’s great to authentic when you tweet, post on LinkedIn or write in your newsletter - but if you have zero followers you’re just shouting into the void. You need to play “the algorithm game” so people see your messaging.
Left my job in 2020 to do the same. Nowhere near as profitable as OP, but now make enough to cover rent + basic expenses in New York. Crucially: I didn't want to do hypeman social media content that (a) sold the dream of solopreneur as a marketing tactic, or (b) added excessive noise into the ether.
I'm not saying Tony did either -- I haven't followed along -- but certainly a lot of people do. I can't fully blame the people who do, though.
Anyway. The project I've built [1] is still going, and I feel proud of it on merits of software: that it pushes the bounds, however slightly; that it feels good to exist in the world; and that I genuinely care for the people using it.
All that's to say: I think there's a software solopreneur path that doesn't involve excessive hype, gross self-promotion (some degree of self-branding is necessary though), while allowing you to work by principles and also explore interesting software problems.
Feel free to DM me [2] if you have questions, or are interested in bootstrapping your own project. Especially consumer-facing. I do have some writing online [3] that covers this too.
Thank you. Unfortunately, my experience is the same: it's hard to promote a software project on today's Internet without investing a lot of money or spending 4 hours/day on social media like the original poster did. There are many interesting projects like yours that remain invisible to their potential users.
It’s very hard to build a following without a system and without copying content
For LinkedIn, ideally you should be posting at least 5 times a week, reposting your best performing content, re-phrasing or straight up copying viral content, and adding as many people to your contacts as possible every day (there’s a weekly limit, and there’s also a 20k total limit, so you also need to figure out what type of contacts you want to be adding, the more focus, the better your content will perform). Additionally, on LinkedIn, commenting and liking posts related to your audience can go a long way
Definitely use ChatGPT for drafts and to help you iterate, but don’t just post whatever it gives you on the first try. Also lean heavily on scheduling tools
It takes a couple of months to get going, but if you can keep a consistent pace, you will definitely figure it out
Follow (on LinkedIn) the creators of https://www.shieldapp.ai/ their whole thing is helping people build their personal brands on that platform
Finally, make sure to build a newsletter and own your list, that’s one of the biggest moats you can build
Not to be offensive, but you sound like the guy who I don’t want to be.
Sitting there, figuring out the perfect number of posts to share at the perfect time. I don’t want to do that.
I post a lot. On all platforms. But I don’t want to play games. Maybe I’m stupid, but I believe there is more than one way to succeed.
Edit: I also feel like this entire industry is based on survivorship bias. You post into the void, than the algorithm picks up one of your tweets. And you are like “oh yeah! Now I know”. And then you come up with a bunch of random number such as “post 5 times a week”, “no more than 4 hashtags”, and “must have a cat picture”.
Edit 2: I found mastodon, which does not have any algorithm games, to be far more authentic and helpful to me. I share pretty much the same content there and on Twitter, and my content performs better on Mastodon.
There are thousands of HN users now who have read your comment and not one of them knows what you're saas is, how to find it, or even what it's called, but we know you think marketing is hard...
One of the moves in the game that I refuse to play, is shoving your product down the throat of everyone.
I’ve seen it live on LinkedIn when one of my followers started to post generic comments, under my posts, such as: “totally agree with you! Subscribe to my newsletter”.
I find it disgusting.
This might be a surprise for you, but sometimes I just want to engage in authentic discussion.
I promote my stuff via Show HN or when it has relevance to the post/comment. But I’m not going to be the “Great story Tony. Subscribe to my newsletter <link here>”, guy.
If success is posting stupid click bait questions on twitter, then yes, I refuse to do that.
I’m not a clown or an entertainer. I share my journey and provide value to people. The people who are drawn to click bait content, are not the people I want to interact with.
You can also post about things that are genuinely interesting to you, and achievements that you are proud of. See my post history on HN. I would never have thought that people care about that stuff so I was pleasantly surprised by the warm reception.
I do something similar on social media. I share little updates mixed with factoids about my job. Even if it brought zero new visitors, it feels good to share what I’m working on.
building is great but most developers don't understand the value of marketing till they ask people to pay for their projects like SaaS etc... I've made some good money in writing in the last 3 years but without marketing it was highly impossible that's why I always encourage to people to start writing be it a tweet, LinkedIn or newsletter etc... and it's again a huge task along with building your products that's why it looks easy from outside but needs more work inside. but before going I've learned from Daniel a lot of things about marketing. Maybe this is useful. Take a look.
A 12 step marketing crash course for non-marketers:
1. If you're trying to sell something, everything you do is marketing.
2. The technical term for trying to sell something is a go-to-market (GTM) strategy.
3. Building a product is part of your GTM strategy.
4. Your combination of skills, knowledge, experience, reputation, assets, connections, etc, create opportunities for you in the market.
5. Once you find an opportunity you'd like to pursue, you should set a payoff expectation. Example: you plan to bring a particular project to market with the expectation of making $100K within 12mo.
6. You should have a viable hypothesis of how that expectation can be realized. Example: to make $100K selling a $100 product, you need 1,000 customers. To get 1,000 customers at 1% conversion you need 100K visits on your landing page. To get 100K visits you need to spend X on ads. And so on.
7. If you can't convince yourself you have a viable and profitable hypothesis, you need to adjust your payoff expectation, or pick another opportunity. You don't have an obligation to pursue every opportunity you encounter.
8. If your payoff expectation is too small for the time and money you're investing to bring your project to market, you should abandon it.
9. If the worst case scenario of your GTM strategy has a chance to put you out of business (by running out of time, money, motivation, etc), you should abandon it. Take risks, but never put yourself at risk.
10. Once you have a project on the market, you have the option (but not the obligation) to improve that project by repeating steps 5-9 on the same project. Every new feature is a new thing you're brining to market.
11. A business with no attention is a business that doesn't exist. You can have the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, it's like multiplying by zero — a recipe for failure.
12. Remember: there is no distinction between building and marketing. You build whatever you need to build to realize your payoff expectation. Everything is marketing.
I paid for & use one of Tony's products (Xnapper for screenshots). It's good, but I reported a cropping bug, along with a replication bullet list and .gif screencast of me replicating the bug.
I got a response from a support person telling me to increase border padding beyond any reasonable aesthetic level. Aesthetics is the purpose of buying the product, otherwise non-aesthetic screenshots are built into macOS.
The support person asked if this error happens regularly... well replicate it for yourself using my screencast and that's your answer.
There was no bug fix. No point version update in the works. The last software update was 9 months ago on 15 Jan, 2023.
I feel like Tony's able to be a profitable solopreneur because he outsources all support to people who don't really care about the quality of the output.
> I feel like Tony's able to be a profitable solopreneur because he outsources all support to people who don't really care about the quality of the output.
Replace Tony with the name of almost any company these days and the statement would still be true, unfortunately. This isn't a solopreneur issue at all.
Seems like a cyclical systemic failure where confidence in the system makes people buying even though there's no real desire for high quality and it just coasts until it fails.
Hi, it's Tony here. Sorry about the experience with support.
I remember this issue, it's about making the screenshot background transparent without getting the drop shadow getting cut off, right?
The app is not designed well for using with transparent background. So if you prefer transparent background, it's best to make the shadow smaller, or remove the shadow completely, or… increase the padding.
I considered to supporting this but in the end I removed the ticket out of the backlog because I didn't want to turn Xnapper into a photo editor, sorry!
If this isn't about the transparent background, can you send me another email to support? I’ll take a look, thanks for using Xnapper! :)
It's not related to transparent backgrounds or drop shadows.
After taking a rectangular screenshot that is longer in width but shorter in height (such as the dimensions of this HN comment input box on desktop)... then adding an annotation arrow, Xnapper suddenly cuts off the top n pixels, cutting off its own generated backdrop, and the arrow is placed not where the user selected, but n pixels below that point.
I've given up on trying to resolve it and for shorter screenshots I now use the built-in macOS option again instead of Xnapper.
Reminds me of a very similar "support" experience I had just yesterday, with a well funded and relatively popular SaaS.
They have a problem with their css media queries that causes necessary navigation items to completely disappear as certain screen sizes, making the software unusable. Their answer, when I reported this, was to resize the browser window. The answer, I suspect, was from a low pay support worker.
Outsourcing support isn't easy, even if you do care about quality, and have a decent budget.
Have you tried clearing your web browser cache and resetting your cookies? Please log out and then back in again.
That should resolve the issue in at least 1 case out of 50, but if it does not please contact us again and resubmit your issue from scratch with a different agent working a different shift.
You got an unsatisfactory reply to a support ticket.
What's the realistic alternative with other software vendors of $20-50 products? IMO, the most common is not "a satisfactory reply" but rather "no [edit to add: human-generated] reply".
I sell a $10 app on the App Store and it sells quite well. My co-founder and I personally block time every evening to reply to support emails and interact with our users on discord. We could easily hire someone to handle support, but we derive a lot of pleasure and satisfaction from being able to deal with our users ourselves. Our users seem to like it too. And we couldn't care less about building in public. We build for ourselves and our users.
Responses like yours are always so strange to me. Perhaps I misunderstood your response but it feels very much like a defense of the status quo. As if the PC was expecting too much to get support for software they paid for and that their raising of the issue in the comment was unwarranted.
How do things ever get better if everyone just accepts everything that ever happens without complaint?
I was able to get prompt and effective support from VoIP.ms, a company I pay something like $1.50/month. I once contacted Aruba support regarding hardware I bought secondhand and they replaced it for me. That many software companies choose to (and for some reason are permitted to) operate at scale beyond which they can meaningfully support their products doesn't mean that it's fundamentally impossible to receive support without paying a lot.
> IMO, the most common is not "a satisfactory reply" but rather "no reply".
what point are you trying to make here? that he should shut up and be a good consumer? how dare he expect support from a product he paid for, from a guy making 500k a year, am I right?
The solution to receiving an unsatisfactory reply on a support ticket is not "lower your expectations", regardless of how that business may be structured.
If we lower our expectations of software, we'll get exactly that, shitty software.
see, i just don't get this. one of my SaaS products is essentially 100% hands off (aside from occasional package upgrading, random refunds or upgrade issues every few weeks) but i still absolutely LOVE adding new features or fixing bug requests that customers bring into my view. it gives me the classic feeling of really helping someone, even if it is just a single individual out there.
then the bug reports start to get further and further apart... now i have had one in months :)
I run such a product, I try to create an expectation that I read every email (I do), but I may not able to answer it, and I much prefer spending time fixing the actual bug or updating the UI or docs (which scales) to responding (which doesn't scale).
“People are rewarded in public for what they practice for years in private.” — Tony Robbins
Whenever I heard about a success story, especially, when the hero is an indie hacker, the above quote hits my brain.
I would assume that nobody here would disagree that zero to $45K/mo in 2 years is a jaw-dropping number but once you read the full story with all behind-the-scenes challenges, blood, sweet and tears you quickly realize that this is a lot of work multiplied by some coefficient of uncertainty.
I’ve discovered and been following Tony for about a year now on Twitter and on IndieHackers and must say I was inspired by him.
If ONLY he posted this on HN himself and was here for an AMA
I see that you already submitted this story yourself but, unfortunately, didn't get much traction like this one. This is one of the weirdest parts of Hacker News, where a submission may go totally unnoticed but could go viral and even hit #1 after being resubmitted a few hours later.
I always enjoy reading success stories of developers of small apps.
At the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re seeing only a cherry picked part of the picture. There is no mention of advertising spend or customer acquisition costs. The trend among indie hackers is to talk about MRR without mentioning a single expense, then to interleave it all with “follow me on Twitter” so you’re inspired to join their audience. This is a bit cynical, but I’ve been following accounts like this for a decade and it’s depressing to watch how many of them pivot into trying to sell me courses and/or private community access based on their success.
Audience building (which he readily talks about in the article) becomes a conflict of interest for real information because it incentivizes big numbers while hiding costs. Maybe his apps are growing entirely organically and it’s pure profit. Or maybe he’s spent huge amounts of money on ads or marketing to get more installs to grow his user base as fast as possible. He mentions spending 16 hour days between coding the app and promoting it.
The thing is, we don’t know how he got the users, and he won’t tell us because admitting anything other than MRR would only detract from his story. And as any small business operator knows, getting the customers is the hardest part.
I wish him the best and enjoy following these success stories, but having seen enough of these I always take the isolated MRR numbers with a grain of salt. It’s not the full picture. This isn’t unique to this developer. It’s the trend among social media “indie hackers”: They know people are hungry for success stories and want to learn the secrets of how to build a successful indie company, so they build narratives to make themselves look like the person who will share those secrets. But then the more you read and the more you follow, the more you start seeing how they’re leaving out all of the actual secrets and keys to success, such as how they’re marketing their apps and getting downloads.
Reading between the lines, building his Twitter and newsletter audience was key to growing these ‘businesses’. The real product he’s selling is hope to all the wantrepreneurs who yearn to escape their own corporate grind and find success selling their own useless nick-nacks. This is no different than real-estate investing, or drop-shipping, or any other get rich quick scheme from time immemorial.
Right! Did you notice the phrase “at the moment”? A snapshot in time that makes the narrative sound optimal.
No mention of how it reached that point. No mention of what advertising routes were tried in the past.
Another trick I’ve seen is for solopreneurs to create a “HoldCo” that holds their individual businesses, then to find creative ways to spend marketing dollars out of the parent company so they can keep it off the books of their individual businesses. You have to look for this when someone has a large personal brand presence that markets the app. For example, how much is he spending to grow his Twitter and newsletter following, which isn’t counted as an expense out of the individual businesses but is a huge (perhaps the largest?) driver of leads for them.
From evaluating potential small business acquisitions I quickly learned that operators are very good at juicing their profitability numbers as they prepare for a potential sale, for example. You’d often see great stories of customer growth and high profit numbers, only to discover that the profitability was a recent change after they turned off the growth tools. You might also discover that their customer acquisition costs were hidden away in one of the owner’s other ventures. For example, a roofing company that looks great until you realize their entire customer base comes from “referrals” from the owner’s other company which installs solar panels on people’s roofs.
Again, it’s possible that this is pure, organic, word-of-mouth growth all the way to $45K MRR, but I’ve seen enough of these stories to know that word of mouth and a moderate Twitter following generally isn’t enough to do it.
All I’m saying is to keep an eye open for what you’re not being told in these stories. When someone is part indie hacker and part social media influencer, everything they write is designed to consider you a potential customer, potential follower, or potential acquirer of their business (as with his previous sale). That doesn’t mean that their information is unhelpful, it just means that you’re getting a partial sales pitch with everything you read. Keep that in mind.
The smoking gun is the fact that this story could absolutely kill his golden goose, which is easily replicable. In the next few weeks there will be 10 new competitors for ChatGPT wrappers, all armed with paid marketing budgets to try and get a piece of this high margin business.
The only reason he would risk committing business suicide like this is because building the personal brand is more important to him than keeping this business afloat. If he really wanted to grow the business, there seems to be enough margin in it to support very aggressive paid marketing
There already are tons of ChatGPT wrappers already, both now and when Tony started initially, but Tony still succeeded in building one of the top ones. This is because marketing matters more than product, which you've ironically not caught as the true message of this article.
I think there is a lot of money to be made in building "human accessible" frontends to AI tools, so I'm not surprised that his ChatGPT wrapper product does well.
Setting up Midjourney, for example, is such a convoluted mess, where you have to create an account on another service (Discord) before creating a Midjourney account, then understand the different chat channels and figure out where the best place to use the app is (private DM with Midjourney bot.) And that's all before even generating an image! Even their website looks like someone's art project, not a cutting-edge image generation service: https://www.midjourney.com/
Leonardo.ai is much better in this regard. I hated midjourney, and if they don’t change this ridiculous way of interacting with the app they will fail.
Meh, I still am not convinced that the blank chat box is a good UI. You still need to know what to say and how to say it. Too much implicit knowledge is required.
Good on you Tony. $45k monthly revenue is nothing to shake a stick at, and it seems you're quite happy with the lifestyle it's afforded you. An inspiration.
Amazingly done for one time payments as well. People like them.
Forever licenses are maybe more tolerable as well for self host and client side local applications. Could be good money combined with b2b pricing on top of it
Business advice is often just someone handing you their winning lottery ticket. It worked perfectly for them but will probably be totally useless and not repeatable for you.
One thing to keep in mind is survivorship bias…not saying that Tony’s experience is not one to glean some things from, but be very careful about what those things are and how you implement them in your journey.
I mute a lot of these accounts that try to farm me as their audience. I used to engage some, they just don't care to reply at all. And they are annoying real fast. Imaging you have 10 posts of garbage a day / influencer
Readit News
Having said that, as an aspiring solopreneur myself, this article misses a very big part.
Engineers like to talk about how they build products, but we rarely talk about how to market them.
I quit my job 5 months ago, launched my first SaaS 3 months ago, and got zero users. I then started to tweet, write in LinkedIn, and focus on my newsletter. But I barely get any followers. So building is the easy part.
I refuse to participate in algorithm games, and try to be authentic. But maybe that’s not what people like.
Anyway, great read. Thanks for sharing!
I browsed through your profile, website, Twitter account, and I'm still not sure what your product is and what it does. Is it consulting? Coaching? Book?
You don't have a lot of followers (me neither), so tweeting won't get you far as you're talking into a void. Instead, join existing discussions where people already are. Also, don't use too many hashtags - it looks spammy.
Not trying to put you down, just offering a different perspective you might not hear otherwise. I hope you succeed.
I do offer multiple services, including coaching/consulting and my book. I’m also working on. SaaS that is in progress.
This is a mistake. It’s great to authentic when you tweet, post on LinkedIn or write in your newsletter - but if you have zero followers you’re just shouting into the void. You need to play “the algorithm game” so people see your messaging.
I'm not saying Tony did either -- I haven't followed along -- but certainly a lot of people do. I can't fully blame the people who do, though.
Anyway. The project I've built [1] is still going, and I feel proud of it on merits of software: that it pushes the bounds, however slightly; that it feels good to exist in the world; and that I genuinely care for the people using it.
All that's to say: I think there's a software solopreneur path that doesn't involve excessive hype, gross self-promotion (some degree of self-branding is necessary though), while allowing you to work by principles and also explore interesting software problems.
Feel free to DM me [2] if you have questions, or are interested in bootstrapping your own project. Especially consumer-facing. I do have some writing online [3] that covers this too.
---
[1] https://mmm.page
[2] https://twitter.com/xhfloz
[3] https://woolgather.sh
For LinkedIn, ideally you should be posting at least 5 times a week, reposting your best performing content, re-phrasing or straight up copying viral content, and adding as many people to your contacts as possible every day (there’s a weekly limit, and there’s also a 20k total limit, so you also need to figure out what type of contacts you want to be adding, the more focus, the better your content will perform). Additionally, on LinkedIn, commenting and liking posts related to your audience can go a long way
Definitely use ChatGPT for drafts and to help you iterate, but don’t just post whatever it gives you on the first try. Also lean heavily on scheduling tools
It takes a couple of months to get going, but if you can keep a consistent pace, you will definitely figure it out
Follow (on LinkedIn) the creators of https://www.shieldapp.ai/ their whole thing is helping people build their personal brands on that platform
Finally, make sure to build a newsletter and own your list, that’s one of the biggest moats you can build
Sitting there, figuring out the perfect number of posts to share at the perfect time. I don’t want to do that.
I post a lot. On all platforms. But I don’t want to play games. Maybe I’m stupid, but I believe there is more than one way to succeed.
Edit: I also feel like this entire industry is based on survivorship bias. You post into the void, than the algorithm picks up one of your tweets. And you are like “oh yeah! Now I know”. And then you come up with a bunch of random number such as “post 5 times a week”, “no more than 4 hashtags”, and “must have a cat picture”.
Edit 2: I found mastodon, which does not have any algorithm games, to be far more authentic and helpful to me. I share pretty much the same content there and on Twitter, and my content performs better on Mastodon.
As a society we need to find a way to stop rewarding slyness and trickery (aka marketing)
I’ve seen it live on LinkedIn when one of my followers started to post generic comments, under my posts, such as: “totally agree with you! Subscribe to my newsletter”.
I find it disgusting.
This might be a surprise for you, but sometimes I just want to engage in authentic discussion.
I promote my stuff via Show HN or when it has relevance to the post/comment. But I’m not going to be the “Great story Tony. Subscribe to my newsletter <link here>”, guy.
To each their own, I guess?
I’m not a clown or an entertainer. I share my journey and provide value to people. The people who are drawn to click bait content, are not the people I want to interact with.
I do something similar on social media. I share little updates mixed with factoids about my job. Even if it brought zero new visitors, it feels good to share what I’m working on.
I’m also working on getting some consulting/freelance. And sadly, and with big regret, I started to look for a job.
A 12 step marketing crash course for non-marketers:
1. If you're trying to sell something, everything you do is marketing.
2. The technical term for trying to sell something is a go-to-market (GTM) strategy.
3. Building a product is part of your GTM strategy.
4. Your combination of skills, knowledge, experience, reputation, assets, connections, etc, create opportunities for you in the market.
5. Once you find an opportunity you'd like to pursue, you should set a payoff expectation. Example: you plan to bring a particular project to market with the expectation of making $100K within 12mo.
6. You should have a viable hypothesis of how that expectation can be realized. Example: to make $100K selling a $100 product, you need 1,000 customers. To get 1,000 customers at 1% conversion you need 100K visits on your landing page. To get 100K visits you need to spend X on ads. And so on.
7. If you can't convince yourself you have a viable and profitable hypothesis, you need to adjust your payoff expectation, or pick another opportunity. You don't have an obligation to pursue every opportunity you encounter.
8. If your payoff expectation is too small for the time and money you're investing to bring your project to market, you should abandon it.
9. If the worst case scenario of your GTM strategy has a chance to put you out of business (by running out of time, money, motivation, etc), you should abandon it. Take risks, but never put yourself at risk.
10. Once you have a project on the market, you have the option (but not the obligation) to improve that project by repeating steps 5-9 on the same project. Every new feature is a new thing you're brining to market.
11. A business with no attention is a business that doesn't exist. You can have the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, it's like multiplying by zero — a recipe for failure.
12. Remember: there is no distinction between building and marketing. You build whatever you need to build to realize your payoff expectation. Everything is marketing.
I got a response from a support person telling me to increase border padding beyond any reasonable aesthetic level. Aesthetics is the purpose of buying the product, otherwise non-aesthetic screenshots are built into macOS.
The support person asked if this error happens regularly... well replicate it for yourself using my screencast and that's your answer.
There was no bug fix. No point version update in the works. The last software update was 9 months ago on 15 Jan, 2023.
I feel like Tony's able to be a profitable solopreneur because he outsources all support to people who don't really care about the quality of the output.
Replace Tony with the name of almost any company these days and the statement would still be true, unfortunately. This isn't a solopreneur issue at all.
I remember this issue, it's about making the screenshot background transparent without getting the drop shadow getting cut off, right?
The app is not designed well for using with transparent background. So if you prefer transparent background, it's best to make the shadow smaller, or remove the shadow completely, or… increase the padding.
I considered to supporting this but in the end I removed the ticket out of the backlog because I didn't want to turn Xnapper into a photo editor, sorry!
If this isn't about the transparent background, can you send me another email to support? I’ll take a look, thanks for using Xnapper! :)
After taking a rectangular screenshot that is longer in width but shorter in height (such as the dimensions of this HN comment input box on desktop)... then adding an annotation arrow, Xnapper suddenly cuts off the top n pixels, cutting off its own generated backdrop, and the arrow is placed not where the user selected, but n pixels below that point.
I've given up on trying to resolve it and for shorter screenshots I now use the built-in macOS option again instead of Xnapper.
Dead Comment
They have a problem with their css media queries that causes necessary navigation items to completely disappear as certain screen sizes, making the software unusable. Their answer, when I reported this, was to resize the browser window. The answer, I suspect, was from a low pay support worker.
Outsourcing support isn't easy, even if you do care about quality, and have a decent budget.
That should resolve the issue in at least 1 case out of 50, but if it does not please contact us again and resubmit your issue from scratch with a different agent working a different shift.
What's the realistic alternative with other software vendors of $20-50 products? IMO, the most common is not "a satisfactory reply" but rather "no [edit to add: human-generated] reply".
How do things ever get better if everyone just accepts everything that ever happens without complaint?
what point are you trying to make here? that he should shut up and be a good consumer? how dare he expect support from a product he paid for, from a guy making 500k a year, am I right?
If we lower our expectations of software, we'll get exactly that, shitty software.
No it isn't?
then the bug reports start to get further and further apart... now i have had one in months :)
Deleted Comment
Whenever I heard about a success story, especially, when the hero is an indie hacker, the above quote hits my brain.
I would assume that nobody here would disagree that zero to $45K/mo in 2 years is a jaw-dropping number but once you read the full story with all behind-the-scenes challenges, blood, sweet and tears you quickly realize that this is a lot of work multiplied by some coefficient of uncertainty.
I’ve discovered and been following Tony for about a year now on Twitter and on IndieHackers and must say I was inspired by him.
If ONLY he posted this on HN himself and was here for an AMA
Best of luck..
I see that you already submitted this story yourself but, unfortunately, didn't get much traction like this one. This is one of the weirdest parts of Hacker News, where a submission may go totally unnoticed but could go viral and even hit #1 after being resubmitted a few hours later.
At the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re seeing only a cherry picked part of the picture. There is no mention of advertising spend or customer acquisition costs. The trend among indie hackers is to talk about MRR without mentioning a single expense, then to interleave it all with “follow me on Twitter” so you’re inspired to join their audience. This is a bit cynical, but I’ve been following accounts like this for a decade and it’s depressing to watch how many of them pivot into trying to sell me courses and/or private community access based on their success.
Audience building (which he readily talks about in the article) becomes a conflict of interest for real information because it incentivizes big numbers while hiding costs. Maybe his apps are growing entirely organically and it’s pure profit. Or maybe he’s spent huge amounts of money on ads or marketing to get more installs to grow his user base as fast as possible. He mentions spending 16 hour days between coding the app and promoting it.
The thing is, we don’t know how he got the users, and he won’t tell us because admitting anything other than MRR would only detract from his story. And as any small business operator knows, getting the customers is the hardest part.
I wish him the best and enjoy following these success stories, but having seen enough of these I always take the isolated MRR numbers with a grain of salt. It’s not the full picture. This isn’t unique to this developer. It’s the trend among social media “indie hackers”: They know people are hungry for success stories and want to learn the secrets of how to build a successful indie company, so they build narratives to make themselves look like the person who will share those secrets. But then the more you read and the more you follow, the more you start seeing how they’re leaving out all of the actual secrets and keys to success, such as how they’re marketing their apps and getting downloads.
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In the first paragraph:
At the moment, my total revenue across all products is about $45K/month at ~90% profit.
No mention of how it reached that point. No mention of what advertising routes were tried in the past.
Another trick I’ve seen is for solopreneurs to create a “HoldCo” that holds their individual businesses, then to find creative ways to spend marketing dollars out of the parent company so they can keep it off the books of their individual businesses. You have to look for this when someone has a large personal brand presence that markets the app. For example, how much is he spending to grow his Twitter and newsletter following, which isn’t counted as an expense out of the individual businesses but is a huge (perhaps the largest?) driver of leads for them.
From evaluating potential small business acquisitions I quickly learned that operators are very good at juicing their profitability numbers as they prepare for a potential sale, for example. You’d often see great stories of customer growth and high profit numbers, only to discover that the profitability was a recent change after they turned off the growth tools. You might also discover that their customer acquisition costs were hidden away in one of the owner’s other ventures. For example, a roofing company that looks great until you realize their entire customer base comes from “referrals” from the owner’s other company which installs solar panels on people’s roofs.
Again, it’s possible that this is pure, organic, word-of-mouth growth all the way to $45K MRR, but I’ve seen enough of these stories to know that word of mouth and a moderate Twitter following generally isn’t enough to do it.
All I’m saying is to keep an eye open for what you’re not being told in these stories. When someone is part indie hacker and part social media influencer, everything they write is designed to consider you a potential customer, potential follower, or potential acquirer of their business (as with his previous sale). That doesn’t mean that their information is unhelpful, it just means that you’re getting a partial sales pitch with everything you read. Keep that in mind.
The only reason he would risk committing business suicide like this is because building the personal brand is more important to him than keeping this business afloat. If he really wanted to grow the business, there seems to be enough margin in it to support very aggressive paid marketing
The article does appear to give a general indication of expenses:
> At the moment, my total revenue across all products is about $45K/month at ~90% profit.
I'm content knowing one of my apps (only one) is a success out of unrepeatable sheer luck.
Setting up Midjourney, for example, is such a convoluted mess, where you have to create an account on another service (Discord) before creating a Midjourney account, then understand the different chat channels and figure out where the best place to use the app is (private DM with Midjourney bot.) And that's all before even generating an image! Even their website looks like someone's art project, not a cutting-edge image generation service: https://www.midjourney.com/
Forever licenses are maybe more tolerable as well for self host and client side local applications. Could be good money combined with b2b pricing on top of it