As a fellow indie hacker (I quit my job 18 months ago to build and sell my own apps), I am super jealous. I don't have the success of this guy (only getting close to $1k/mo these days), but I can understand the success.
This guy knows how to market and ship product. I've seen him pop up a few times on indiehackers.com and social media. His "brand" is super simple to understand, which helps gain followers. He knows marketing.
A lot of people who try to go from being a dev to entrepreneur focus entirely too much on the engineering side (I'm guilty of that) and think that what matters most is the product and how well it's made. We focus way too much on tools, processes, and forget that at the end of the day, we're trying to exchange useful products for money. Getting your product(s) out the door and telling people about it (and iterating) are way more important than what stack you use.
I'm a little disappointed by all the negativity here, but I suspect most of us are just jealous.
All our lives we're told that skills matter. Society will reward those who are most skilled.
Inevitably groups form around a skill, programmers hang around programmers and so on. Since programmers "create" all the value we believe we should get paid the most etc.
Alas schools emphasise "hard" skills (programming, math, doctors, lawyers etc) and those are all good jobs that make decent money. They ignore "soft" skills like selling, marketing, and so on.
In truth sales and marketing are orders of magnitude more valuable, and their pay reflects that. There are a lot of pharma reps, realtors, insurance salesman that earn mega bucks.
This is not something the average hacker wants to hear. I expect to get down-voted for saying it. But if you're reading this, and you're thinking of starting out on your own, then I recommend you consider;
Who will you sell to?
How will you reach them?
What can they afford?
> Inevitably groups form around a skill, programmers hang around programmers and so on. Since programmers "create" all the value we believe we should get paid the most etc.
Programmers do get paid a lot, relatively speaking.
The disconnect is that programming and creating a business are different skills.
There are occasional examples of someone programming a thing so useful that it sells itself, but they are extremely rare. Most of these success stories come with major marketing attached, although it’s often hidden. In this case the person was marketing through Twitter, including promoted Tweets. It’s not mentioned in the article, but the business is more about cultivating a social media presence and getting a fractional percentage of them to convert into sales.
There’s nothing wrong with this, of course! However, the marketing and personal brand angle are often overlooked by indie hackers who think they’re going to make a great business that people will just discover randomly and pay them for.
One of the best examples would be the indie hacker who first got a lot of attention for his job board business. There have been hundreds of indie hacker job boards popping up ever since, but none of them get the same traction as the person who built it as a Twitter sensation. The Twitter presence and ensuing brand recognition was a key part of the business, but it gets overlooked by people who are just wowed by the MRR numbers.
>In truth sales and marketing are orders of magnitude more valuable
As someone who's been on both sides of the fence, this isn't true either.
Both engineering and sales are important, and there are probably as many entrepreneurs who have failed by spending all their time marketing and selling a shit product as there are those who get bogged down in technical minutiae.
When people become very skilled at programming they have the urge to scratch their own itch, either writing tools to solve software development problems or creating something with a technology that they want to use. They are uninterested in mundane, boring, vertical applications, but that's often where the money is.
The guy in the article did some development tools but some other things too. At the end of the day, imagining a market is no substitute for finding one.
x4, but I'd put an asterisk that tech choice matters in as much as how fast it allows you to go - something like PHP or Rails or Phoenix app with batteries included and deployed by hand on a single Linode instance, beats a fancy new TypeScript GraphQL Kubernetes stack on time-to-market any time of the day.
Honestly all the "fancy new" stuff only gives you benefits at galactic scale compared to what most solo folks will build. You already start well behind the curve being a solo dev, so you lose out on a lot of benefits of orchestration, rapid microservice deployments, etc. That stuff is built for teams, not one person hacking away in their home office on nights and weekends. You get all the bad parts, because they can't be avoided, and none of the good, because you don't have the throughput to take advantage.
My current job has 80 or 90 devs and we have both on-prem k8s, on-prem monolith, and plenty of "cloud-native" AWS stuff. Everything TS, GraphQL, messaging queues, exactly what you'd expect from an organization that size.
My side projects are all .NET MVC apps. Full-page reloads, manual deployments out of Visual Studio, etc. The only excuse for me to go the TS etc. route would be if that was the only thing I knew how to do, and honestly with as much as I've heard from folks like Tony and Pieter, if I was green now and only knew TS, I'd probably be learning PHP and Laravel.
I'm not even sure solo is at a disadvantage here - on the contrary, regular companies are bogged down by a massive tech pit, because of which they can't move fast, and only keep adding to that according to Conway's law.
Imho 90% of 90-developer companies out there could be replaced by 1-2 devs working same hours but more efficiently with a more efficient stack. I'm not even joking!
I think the initial reaction of many (myself included) is pretty negative just based on the niche these products fall into. Something about a Twitter Influencer selling various products to other Twitter Influencers to manage their own business hyping is a bit off putting.
After some reflection I don't think this is better or worse than any other niche you might market towards.
That's fair. My initial reaction on just seeing the headline was "Oh, I wonder what indie dev-focused tool this guy made." It's definitely a cliche now to see someone going into the solo SaaS business and then pivoting to being an influencer or someone selling "tools" to help other solopreneurs.
> This guy knows how to market and ship product. I've seen him pop up a few times on indiehackers.com and social media. His "brand" is super simple to understand, which helps gain followers. He knows marketing.
I think it boils down to one thing. He built a tool specifically to market on Twitter, it worked well, it got traction because of how well it worked. His main trick was to show up every day and show what he was working on. Which works well for indie hackers on Twitter.
Alot of his marketing efforts is look at how well I'm doing, he's seen that this has worked and has repeated it repeatedly. Can't blame the guy. The only big story from him that wasn't a success story was him writing about how the twitter API pricing really cost him big time.
>I think it boils down to one thing. He built a tool specifically to market on Twitter, it worked well, it got traction because of how well it worked.
I remember about 6 years ago seeing an small indie studio talking about how, when they were starting their next project, they posted 10 second gameplay gifs of games that didn't exist yet every week on twitter. They'd track the reactions they got from the gif, then try one or two more of the same game to see if it's consistent. They ended up with the most traffic towards some kind of airship management game, and it ended up doing extremely well for them once released. But the youtube comments where he was explaining his process post-release were LIVID. They were furious that it was such a cold, calculated commercialized process - but hey that's business.
Many would blame people for constantly bragging. Bragging is generally looked down upon. He isn't really sharing any tips or tricks. He's literally just saying "Look at how well I'm doing" in any other scenario there wouldn't be so much acceptance to it.
If you don't know how to sell, There's no point in worrying/focusing too much on the engineering side. While the engineering side is Important, People have to buy the product first for you to be able to earn anything.
There are two kinds of jealousy, the motivating kind and the demotivating kind. For example, most folks here are probably somewhat jealous of how rich Linus Torvald is, but this kind of jealousy motivates one to perfect one's craft and pursue ambitious projects. The story posted here tends to generate the kind of jealousy that demotivates. I think that's where the negativity comes from.
> A lot of people who try to go from being a dev to entrepreneur focus entirely too much on the engineering side (I'm guilty of that) and think that what matters most is the product and how well it's made.
This is important, at least for me. Some people can be confident without backing or just fake confidence, some people can't. It is a natural process to take a long time building the right abstractions and just then get into marketing mode, when you have a solid platform to back your confidence.
>> at the end of the day, we're trying to exchange useful products for money
> If you're just trying to make money, then you shouldn't call yourself a hacker.
I hate gatekeeping like this.
For anyone who needs to hear it: you don't need to be a starving artist. You are not a sell-out for wanting to exchange useful products for money. You can call yourself a hacker.
> If you're just trying to make money, then you shouldn't call yourself a hacker.
jart is one of my heroes but strong disagree here. Not sure why we can call ourselves progressive or trans or feminist whether or not we are trying to scrape by. But hacker? Heaven forfend.
This guy knows how to market and ship product. I've seen him pop up a few times on indiehackers.com and social media. His "brand" is super simple to understand, which helps gain followers. He knows marketing.
A lot of people who try to go from being a dev to entrepreneur focus entirely too much on the engineering side (I'm guilty of that) and think that what matters most is the product and how well it's made. We focus way too much on tools, processes, and forget that at the end of the day, we're trying to exchange useful products for money. Getting your product(s) out the door and telling people about it (and iterating) are way more important than what stack you use.
I'm a little disappointed by all the negativity here, but I suspect most of us are just jealous.