An arrow indicator for a twitter profile pic, a screen cap tool, and a wrapper around ChatGPT.
I kinda want to shoot myself. Largely useless products that made someone rich that rely on two other ecosystems. That’s the way I guess? I’m so not an entrepreneur.
Edit: apologies for using a suicide metaphor. I was being sarcastic. I’m in my 50s, really like my job, and am on a path to a good retirement. It just amazes me that there are so many opportunities for “pet rocks” in this era. Go get some if you know how! It I think it is safer to do things the old fashioned way and not rely on extreme luck and social media. But again, I’m old.
There are two ways of approach entrepreneurship, and the conflict between each is why there's some dissonance here:
1) Do it to escape the grind, as one commenter here mentioned. In this way, it doesn't matter what product you make, or how you make it. The goal is self sufficiency, to find a niche that you can fill, etc.
2) Do it because you're trying to effect some specific change in the world. Something doesn't exist yet, so you will go out and make it happen.
"2" is much harder, and more rare. And, if you believe 2 is the way, then it makes sense to NOT start a company & instead join an existing effort, if there are already people working on pressing problems & you have the skills to help them out.
For "1", it almost always makes sense to start a company if you can. Because that life & amenities is itself the goal.
It's an illusion that 2 can happen without 1. Unless you have financial and entrepreneurial freedom, you will never change anything anywhere.
Whatever social structure you imagine you might navigate, be it business, politics, public opinion, a charitable organization, the world of art, literature or academia; you will always find a pre-existing, entrenched power structure of people calling the shots, controlling key decisions and very unwilling to cut you in, because they either have their own vision to put in practice, or... they simply like the power, status and nice amenities that come with them.
The business of changing the world is the business of power. You either have capital, name recognition, the largest lab, a huge social network of other powerful people in your debt, a massive amount of luck and/or first mover advantage etc. Otherwise, the powerful people of the world, often particularly apprehensive to world changing plans, will just crush you and move on.
Sure, but how does that help you chose an effective strategy? For example, winning lottery players absolutely dominate when it comes to risk vs reward. But that doesn't mean playing the lottery is the way to achieving your financial goals.
Without an understanding of the underlying odds of success, isolated success stories are just random noise. And you have to ask: are they really success stories? Did Linus set out to create a world known free kernel, or was ìt just serendipty, he was just a random bloke who filled a role that needed to be filled at that particular historic time, so in fact had no control over the story and did not, in fact, change the world, he just gave a name of the rough thing that was to appear at that rough time.
Effective strategy, you are right. It's not. For the thing that was to appear, we can't know if something else would have filled that functional void. The world might have been much more proprietary without Linux.
For this particular example, I think there were worthy contenders in the era, like Minix, GNU Hurd, BSD etc. So it was rather a sum of unpredictable contingencies (in the philosophical sense) that made Linux the thing that was to be, rather than any substantial merit of its inventors; much like Facebook won the social network race by simply being lucky to launch in a cool, selective and influential community.
But in the general case, I do not claim that the world works according to a pre-written script, on the contrary, if you act with a sufficient magnitude of power, I think you can alter it deterministically. Rather, I point out the immense inertia and active opposition by the powerful to you world-altering attempts, to the point where any low power action is more like playing the lottery. You might be lucky to get the that one in a million chance, but you likely won't.
If you organize your attack carefully, amass capital, workforce, hearts and minds, etc., you drastically improve your chances of success, up to the point when your reach Elon mode: you simply wish a product or thing was real, and an entire army of people shows up ready to implement it.
One the flipside here, you can argue that, every time you get another "1", this is great for the economy. You now have someone who's making their own money, leaving a salaried job spot open for another person.
A lot of these indie hacking ventures probably wouldn't exist at all if the person making them decided not to. If that is, or for the subset of indie hacking companies for which it is true, it means this is growing the economy.
In economic terms where money isn't circulating, yes. Now, many open source projects are used by other companies that are commercial, so that does grow the economy however.
This is the endgame of rent-seeking and an abundance of (concentrated) capital, in a country that is largely comfortable letting everyone fend for themselves. Who needs to build cars when you can tickle Sam Altman's Markov chain generator for $45,000 a month? I mean, I don't blame anyone, and I need money as much as the next husk of a man, but I really wish hustle culture would stop permeating every last open space of our lives. I'm depressed about it, too, and I don't see it getting better any time soon.
Which country are you referring to? You will find a lot of hope if you study a little history and see how this has always been the case. I would guess that in terms of rent seeking and of hustle and useless products things are improving and much better than they used to be. It’s too easy to forget the vast array of useless and even harmful crap people have been selling for centuries if you didn’t live through it and/or don’t know about it. How many civilizations in history had despotic kings that controlled all housing and income, and nobody was allowed to earn their own money? The existence of someone making a decent living on products you don’t appreciate isn’t evidence of rent seeking, it’s evidence that we have more freedom than ever before, and that people have a wide range of tastes and the ability to spend a few bucks on little things they enjoy or save them small amounts of time, no?
What a weird take, as if someone building cars is prevented by them also selling supposed pet rocks online. Lots of people, Musk included, made enough money from throwaway startups to then work on the bigger problems, as they're actually financially secure to do so at that point, the Maslow's hiararchy of needs in action. If you don't like someone's product, don't buy it, but if other people find them useful, good for them and good for the creator.
I have two arguments to counter this that contradict each other :)
One one hand, our entire economy is built on useless products. Chances are high that our good comfortable jobs involve making and marketing stuff people don’t really need at a larger scale than Tony’s solo projects. Large and so-called legitimate companies make billions and billions on things we don’t need. Coca-cola? Flavored sugar water that’s not good for you, you don’t need, and can make at home in seconds for a fraction of the price pulled in 44 billion last year for Coke. PepsiCo revenue was $86B. Starbucks: $32B, InBev: $58B. Does the global beverage industry top $1T? (Google says yes, many times over.) What about games and movies, fashion, apps, car accessories, music and sports equipment that’s unnecessarily high end and/or never gets used… the list is endless.
On the other hand, it’s not accurate or fair to call Tony’s products useless, because people paid for them. It’s reductive and low effort to frame them as simple, since he added a lot of features that don’t fit your summary. But if they save someone time, or someone likes the way they feel or look, and they pay for it, then it was useful for them. Don’t make the mistake of conflating the value you get, or your idea of what you pay for, for annyone else’s idea of usefulness.
> it’s not accurate or fair to call Tony’s products useless
I'll cede that point. Having an arrow on your Twitter profile is of some use to someone, and just because I've never had a problem with iPhone screen capture "press two buttons" doesn't mean some people need to click through an app, a nd the teletype style of GPT3 doesn't bother me but I guess some people need faster response.
I know snark is against the rules. Technically they aren't "useless" but they are single-task gadgets like you'd find for your kitchen drawer on QVC at night. The people that make the "banana slicer" probably made a ton of money and by your definition a "banana slicer" isn't useless because someone bought it.
> Obviously having an arrow on your Twitter profile is of some use to someone
One of the reasons your upper comment isn’t fair is because the story was about how he pivoted the product away from just showing the arrow & circle progress bar, and moved toward something more complex that does analytics reporting, and that’s when he actually started making money on it.
> I guess by your definition a “banana slicer” isn’t useless because someone bought it.
That was half of my definition. The other half, I think, probably agreed with yours, and points out that banana slicers are useless and we have an economy that is built on banana slicers. So, anyway, what is your definition of useful?
That's a good question. The naive definition would be something that someone uses to fulfill a purpose. I don't think a Bratz Doll on a Keychain in the store is useful, but my 5 year old niece will get a solid week of entertainment out of it. Sure that is useful, but do we want to compare it to a SawStop or iPhone? All of them are useful, but to different degrees, different people, and across varying lifespans.
You can argue that anything is useful if it is "used", but let's not pretend there isn't a spectrum here.
I think what a lot of would-be entrepreneurs don’t get is the sheer scale of the global market. There are many, many billions of dollars trading hands every single day. You only have to dip the very tip of your pinky finger into that economic stream and you can make more money than you imagined. If you ever think of a product and then talk yourself out of it with “no one will buy this”, just remember that there are 8.1 billion people out there. If you create a product for $10/month, you only have to convince 0.0001% of them of the value of your product to make $1M per year.
Also, I completely disagree that OP’s product is useless or due to luck. He intentionally created something people want, and it’s actually a pretty cool product IMO.
You are only angry because you too want to escape and are externalising the frustration of not finding a similar path. At least thats what i learned about myself when i had a similar reaction seeing such success stories. Then it struck me - this is it. This is the way for indie success. Build stuff that makes sense to a niche market. To me the product is irrelevant. But the fact that the author escaped is absolute bliss.
Also arent most products just useless things relying on other ecosystems?
While it's true that niches work, the actual money maker is to create your own niche by forking an existing one. While 45k / month is impressive, the ones who are making 6 figures and above per month, are doing it in niches which aren't "built in public".
Yep, I know people in the "boring" industries, making software or running the marketing for plumbers, electricians, med spas, etc. They're at 6 or more figures a month doing that, and they're in industries most software engineers won't dare look.
Custom mobile apps for different companies in the industry is sooo under utilized that you can easily reach 10 million a year with 70-80% margins by just doing that.
Can you elaborate on this? You mean being good at creating basic IOS/Android apps and then selling them white label slightly modified to various companies?
This is the kind of stuff i want to know more about. I wish it was promoted more on HN. Those people are what I like to call hackers and painters. Nothing hacky about getting VC money or winning the lottery. Building a small thing that works in the 6 figures is.
> Entrepreneurship embodies this romanticized vision of Shark Tank and Tech Crunch and newness and innovation when in reality most people need to simplify the way they think. I judged a pitch competition at UGA a few months ago, and all I could think of with every pitch was the need to simplify. People want to complicate things, do something revolutionary, and chase glory and the lure of entrepreneurship, but that doesn’t mean they have a real shot at being successful.
> When you take away the sex appeal and fun, you come into a more rational and less saturated market. There’s a shortage of people doing things that aren’t fun, that’s why plumbers make more than most people with liberal arts degrees.
> With sweaty businesses, all you need to do is answer the phone and do what you say you’re going to do and you can make a lot of money. Innovation is sexy and fun, but the way people make real money is by copying others. My first business was just a Frankenstein take on the current offerings and competitors I saw around me.
> The businesses I love aren’t fun. People are told to chase their passion, but the entrepreneurs that make money are chasing customers. The market doesn’t care about your passion, you need to provide real value in something that customers want.
IndieHackers has more on this, they have a forum but their podcasts especially are the real value [0]. But most people on there are tech people, not marketers, so you'll still get a skewed version of reality.
I've found great insight through following actual marketers though, such as Jordan Platten on YouTube who builds a social media marketing agency from scratch via cold calls [1]. Now this is, in my opinion, what programmers should be doing, not learning the latest new Javascript framework to make their MVP just right.
On Reddit, there is similarly /r/sweatystartup [2] which also has a website with more podcasts and articles [3]. But the gist is that it's more about boring industries like lawn care, plumbing etc than shiny tech businesses. One of the best things you can do is to take a look at [2] and call 100 local businesses in a niche you pick (lawn care, etc), ask them about their problems then either start a competing service or start creating software for that niche. Nick Huber, the guy who started the subreddit and site, did both and has a ~$25 million business now.
The above is basically what I'm doing, I'm looking into making software for the boring industry of social media marketing.
While this is true and I agree partially, I think there is a big elephant in the room. Today's hackers are simply copycats. Now this is not their fault. In the 90s and early 2000s when I grew up, the web was just getting established which means we had to learn stuff to do interesting things.
Nowadays, people start learning React and useEffect hooks as their "first programming" experience. That is simply insane to me.
What this causes, is a fundamental inability to understand what a computer is actually capable of. Which in turn means a lot of hackers are actually not innovating on technology and using tech in new ways to solve problems in the real world. "What can technology unlock" is a powerful question. One that is not asked nearly enough in my opinion and that's where the riches lie in tech.
Our contribution to the world is not marketing, and while we still need to do some of it, there is still a lot of money to be made by unlocking things for people by using technology in novel ways and for that one needs to actually step out of the herd mentality once in a while.
So instead of Jordan Platten I would recommend Andreas Kling [0] instead. Imagine if you could build a custom OS for an industry which needs to use only certain programs and use low powered devices? That is how you can make tremendous wealth both in the financial sense but also in the actual "value creation" sense.
There is a difference between indie hackers and the hackers of the 90s, even though the words are the same. You seem to be referring to the 90s ones, who are technological nerds, basically. Andreas Kling, building his own OS, falls into this camp. But indie hackers are first and foremost those who are trying to make money where the technology is only incidental to their success (as it should be, technology is simply a tool for humans, there is no point to making technology that has no use, except for the sense of accomplishment that a craftsperson might similarly have over making some sort of well-built but useless piece of furniture).
So, no I would not recommend Andreas, gifted as he is, to anyone who is an indie hacker. His work is almost purely an intellectual exploration of the problem space of operating systems, something which has next to no business value these days when Windows, macOS and Linux exists. The riches (if you mean material riches and not intellectual riches) in tech exist by selling and marketing the product, not by the technological decisions of building the product itself. There is a reason YC tells you to create an MVP quickly with whatever technologies you know and to iterate on it after customer feedback.
For many indie hackers, who are not the next Elon building rockets in some novel way and who just want to make $10k a month, copying and improving on an existing product is good enough.
The question is how do you create a niche? And the reason i ask this on hackernews is because there must be more interesting stuff happening than spammy newsletters and cheesy “self help” books.
You create a niche by looking at layers of a niche. What appears like one niche is actually a rubble pile of loose rocks held together by some gravity. You can pick off some larger rocks and create your own niche around that.
Basically niches are a bit like Mandelbrot sets. If you study then you will see more creases and patterns at the edges.
But why let it frustrate people when one can start taking notes? Literarily when i started looking into these types of successful independent makers in all industries i discovered there are _loads_ of them and each make a little thing here and there. It’s fascinating, and i cant stop reading about them. And the more i read the more i realise that hey… it’s actually doable! But one need to stop overcomplicating things.
Because there are no notes to take on this. It's survivorship bias of a product that exists in 1000 other forms. It's not visibly doing anything better that other screen cap tools or chatGPT wrappers aren't doing.
The main note is that you may not know what people want, and I've been around long enough to know people that advertise themselves as knowing what people want are usually full of shit.
tbf to TFA, it is exactly about how one could be one of those survivors if one did those totally not simple things. It is a crash course survival guide for a build-in-public solopreneur, if you will.
It wasn't an arrow indicator that brought him success. That was a trivial toy. But having gotten started, he was now able to identify the next step amd the next step that lead to Black Magic being a twitter analytics tool. He would never have planned to build the end product from sitting on his couch back in the beginning. It was only after taking the first step, then a few more, and gaining the perspective of a new vantage point that he was able to make such good progress.
Get off the couch and get started is the first key. The second is to keep going and not to stop. That's it, that's the whole secret to getting rich.
Not really. The key was to find a niche that worked. He “Got Started” with tools he wanted to build and it didn’t work out. It wasn’t until he pivoted to identifying trends, building an audience, and building tools for them which he could market to his audience that he found success.
I would argue that that's what arcbyte is arguing.
He's saying to just get started, and you will figure it out. So when you're arguing that "trends", "audience", etc. is what lead to his success, yes, that's what it means to:
1. Get started (just start, and improve)
2. Become better and learn (whether that's finding trends, building audience whatever)
Many paths to success, so the lesson isn't specific in many cases imo. Hence, why arcbyte's comment is really good imo.
> An arrow indicator for a twitter profile pic, a screen cap tool, and a wrapper around ChatGPT
I’ve followed the “indie hacker” scene for about a decade, and this sounds about right.
Notice how he started out with developer tools that scratched his own itch, but didn’t have much success. Could have been great tools, but developers are difficult to please and notoriously opposed to spending money on helpful tools.
So he pivoted to social media and trend following. Instead of making tools for people who are good at technology and make things themselves, he now makes tools for people who don’t know how to accomplish simple tasks like putting an arrow on a profile picture. They just want that arrow on their picture and they’ll spend (or, often, expense) a couple dollars to make it happen.
He took it a step further and built an audience around indie hacking. Now he’s selling shovels in a gold rush. Arrows on profile pictures were a hot trend for a minute among influencers. Building nice screenshots of things is key for making courses and marketing materials. ChatGPT is the hot topic among people who think it will build a business for them, so $40 is a drop in the bucket.
Spent 2+ years building my developer tool extension SnipCSS as a side project and I still only make $1K MRR.
You want to write 100k lines of code and make $1k / month? Sell a developer tool. You want $45k / mon, and travel the world? Sell shovels to influencers that exploit some trend.
I doubt the people engaging in this behavior have stopped to consider the commons and the tragedies thereof that this kind of aggregate behavior might induce. Just because it works, doesn't mean it's not stupid.
> Largely useless products that made someone rich that rely on two other ecosystems. That’s the way I guess? I’m so not an entrepreneur.
Consider the fact that OP is perhaps an outlier [0]. They probably are super comfortable and super good at selling or marketing their product themselves and building way many number of experiments (bets) than most would / could. Consumer software (and usually product-led b2b2c software) is all about marketing, while b2b is mostly sales. You just can't know those are do-able by every eng on their own.
> An arrow indicator for a twitter profile pic, a screen cap tool, and a wrapper around ChatGPT.
But really, software has been lucrative, and Internet made it doubly so. Unlike most goods / services in the world, for software the distribution costs are non-existent, and manufacturing costs are subsidized heavily as number of users increase. Building a sustainable software business (as opposed to repeatedly building tools and services for the flavour of the day, which is AI right now) however is not easy. New comers (or call them copy cats) challenge incumbents like no tomorrow since the only investment required in light of new technological advancements is... time (assuming you've got the skill already).
People voluntarily pay to smoke products that give them cancer which is probably more "actively harmful" than "largely useless". Which is to say that the value proposition is largely subjective so the OP is entirely within their right to wonder why on earth people pay for those things!
I think the better takeaway should be that other people have very different problems to you, don't always act rationally about things and waving something shiny at them is a good way to get them to spend.
I get it, with the right positioning, you can convince people to buy bottled water for $30 or more, Tony built or found really good positions, you can do the same.
Amazon and apple are making trillions on the backs of small indie folks. Google too. The apple app store is monetised by nearly a million people, google makes money largely from small businesses, amazon’s filled with small independent sellers.
Any time someone’s success reaches the bubble of corporate workers the workers that cant fathom there’s success out there and freedom claim “survivorship bias”. Couldnt be further from the truth.
How many single entrepreneurs reach that income level?
10%, 1%, less than 1%?
There are very few with really great ideas and only some of them have success and there are some with success with average ideas but the large mass aren't that lucky. The lucky ones post their stories but they aren't reproducible.
They can't be. Otherwise the lucky ones wouldn't have succeeded in the first place.
If attention gets evenly split it approaches zero for the single individual.
BTW why mentioning Google and Apple?
Yes the make millions of indie developers, but the developers don't nake nearly as much.
They just hope to be the next lucky winner with app gone viral to generate enough revenue.
Yes, you would only create products you really believe in and find useful to society. But you then would need to compete with the Tonys of the world, who try selling ice to eskimos or simply ads, malware and online casinos.
An entrepreneur sees a niche and acts. If his products satisfy the demand then good for him. He just makes some customers happy and receives money in return.
You're right - you're so not an entrepreneur & you're clueless about customer-led development or new age problem solving.
For context, I'm a TypingMind user (the ChatGPT wrapper) & it's so much better than ChatGPT that some of us bought the license & started paying for API, even to use the free GPT 3.5.
Since then, it has evolved to support custom models & today, I could train a custom model on a bunch of research papers or product documentation & chat with them, something that takes a lot of effort to develop for non devs.
Developers are not the primary market - non devs are & we are very happy with the product.
BlackMagic again, is a revolutionary product - afaik, nothing like it existed when it came out & a ton of us happily jumped on it, realizing how much it helped with Twitter growth.
I get the frustration of seeing someone else succeed through seemingly frivolous means. That said, you state that you're not willing to take the risk that he did, not to mention the hard work and stress that comes with it.
By the numbers, he's created $45k/mo of usefulness.
Keep in mind this money is very cyclical. It’s not a $45k a month salary until retirement. If he doesn’t find some other idea that hits pay dirt he can make $0 a month. I hope Tony is investing the money wisely.
For almost everyone, the wise strategy is to invest in unmanaged index funds.
Please read Daniel Kahneman on the illusion of skill in investing:
> Most of the buyers and sellers know that they have the same information; they exchange the stocks primarily because they have different opinions. The buyers think the price is too low and likely to rise, while the sellers think the price is high and likely to drop. The puzzle is why buyers and sellers alike think that the current price is wrong. What makes them believe they know more about what the price should be than the market does? For most of them, that belief is an illusion.
How is a screen capture tool largely useless? Have you not ever taken screenshots yourself or at least read documentation that relies on screenshots? What a ridiculous take.
I wouldn’t mind escaping the grind if I can crack the next fruit cutting or a bird flapping or a site or an app that does something like, I don’t know, add random words to people’s names (?) and people can use it and I can just show ads and retire or so. Fuck yeah! Yeah I am evil.
From reading the article, you probably skimmed it too fast, 1st is actually a "growth tools for Twitter", the arrow was only pointing to the first feature, and it grew to be more than that.
I mean, you want to shoot yourself because someone is making 45k$ doing something useless? If you think about facebook making billions actively damaging humanity?
> it should be encouraging that you can escape from the grind so easily nowadays!
And this exactly the false fallacy. This is a perfect example of survivorship bias. For everywhere successful solopreneur/indie maker/whatever, there are a hundred failed attempts that didn't fail for a lack of trying hard.
A common denominator between many successful solopreneurs is a strong social media presence, so this image isn't surprising.
That being said, giving it a try yourself is fairly accessible as opposed to starting a startup with external funding. So if you can afford to, give it a try. But do not expect it to be easy
I kinda want to shoot myself. Largely useless products that made someone rich that rely on two other ecosystems. That’s the way I guess? I’m so not an entrepreneur.
Edit: apologies for using a suicide metaphor. I was being sarcastic. I’m in my 50s, really like my job, and am on a path to a good retirement. It just amazes me that there are so many opportunities for “pet rocks” in this era. Go get some if you know how! It I think it is safer to do things the old fashioned way and not rely on extreme luck and social media. But again, I’m old.