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

• 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.
• 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.
  • 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.
    • ambicapter 1y ago
      It's complicated, but you have to talk to real human beings in your surroundings and learn about their lives.
      • fxtentacle 1y ago
        Please elaborate. I think I can talk to people pretty well. But I've yet to hear anyone accidentally mentioning a valid business opportunity. How do you pre-filter which event to go to and who to talk to? How do you introduce the topic of potential business ideas? How do you confirm that they would actually pay for it if you would build it? Also, has this ever worked for you?
        • danjl 1y ago
          You learn where your customers hang out, and then you hang out there and authentically become part of the social group. You spend weeks/months/years learning what they like, their workflows, and their problems. Or, better, you've already spent years working with your customers so you have some experience in these matters. Then you spend more time setting up face-to-face discussions, at conferences, online, or wherever they hang out, *not* trying to shill, but honestly and authentically trying to learn what they need. It may take dozens or hundreds of attempts, and then you find a small group, maybe a half dozen or so, that are early adopters, willing to live with your experiments and provide feedback. Work with them to hone the value proposition, and learn how to communicate it effectively. Tweak or pivot the product to fit their needs, often for many more months. There is no simple solution that involves making a few social media posts, or paying for advertisements, or spamming people with email. Everything that actually works takes lots of personal time and energy.
          • 1y ago
  • danjl 1y ago
    Or a dozen. Or, better, a few dozen. Read "The Mom Test" to learn how to get useful information from your face to face discussions.
    • dfex 1y ago
      So much this! The Mom Test is a rare gem in a sea of startup advice books, but it's the only one I've come across that cuts through all the BS and focusses on the only important thing - finding a market for people who want your product. Spoiler alert - you can't always do it sitting at home in your office chair.
  • poulpy123 1y ago
    From what I perceive of his personality through the media, I totally believe that a 24 years old Steve Jobs in 2025 would do that.
    • satvikpendem 1y ago
      Jobs was a perfectionist and would not have done that, given what I read from Isaacson's biography.
      • BizarroLand 1y ago
        He would have started a group of people and got them to each do that, and then connected with the winners of the hundreds or thousands of attempts and then taken credit for it.
        • Invictus0 1y ago
          Jobs literally did get a group of people together and did not do that. He built a company where all the products contributed to the vision of personal computing; either personal computers or personal computer accessories.
          • askafriend 1y ago
            The thing people seem to forget about Jobs is that he really was that good, that obsessive/dedicated and that visionary. It's that simple. His process resulted in some of the most transformative products humanity has ever known.
            • disgruntledphd2 1y ago
              True, but lots of people who were less talented failed with this approach. It's always a bad idea to look for advice from outliers.
  • hshshshshsh 1y ago
    Do you think Steve Jobs give a shit about what customers thought?
  • 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.
• LargeWu 1y ago
  Is making ~8 products a year for 5 years perceived as a viable way to be successful?
  • 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
    • fxtentacle 1y ago
      In that list, "startupretreats" jumped out at me because surfoffice.com has been doing well for at least 10 years by now... So maybe he also lost some opportunities by giving up too early.
  • apples_oranges 1y ago
    I guess it's go wide or go deep
  • 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.
• 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.
    • rorylaitila 1y ago
      Yeah I agree there. The challenge is the order of the test drive. The ideal validation goes like this in my mind: 1) Will anyone buy it at all? 2) Will they buy it greater than its costs to produce at reasonable margin? 3) Are there enough assessible marketing channels at that margin? 4) Is the overall size of the business viable for my goals? What the indie builders are often doing is starting backwards. Starting with something that should ostensibly be a large market (4) or seemingly timely. Then they find that the marketing channels are hard (3) so they work on that. Then they lower their margin or increase marketing spend (2) hoping that fixes conversions. Then maybe they learn that no one actually wants their product at all (1). It definitely is not easy, especially novel ideas. Existing markets you can largely skip #1 and #2 as proven.
• 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/
  • sunaookami 1y ago
    Hm not sure if you are a legit commenter or if this is just rage marketing ;)
    • karel-3d 1y ago
      He doesn't even own it anymore and, according to the recent reviews of the service (by marketers), it basically stopped working since he sold it (and when I google there are many more like it that works better, this seems to be using 2024 LLMs). So I am not selling it at all. I just really hate the idea.
      • libraryatnight 1y ago
        I hate it too, but I hate it even more knowing it broke after he sold it. Not even bringing any integrity to the evil. lol
        • dlcarrier 1y ago
          To top it off, the responses demoed on the web page include testimonials. The product is designed to lie.
        • eddythompson80 1y ago
          “If it’s not worth doing, it’s not worth doing well”
        • ryandrake 1y ago
          Weird to expect integrity from someone who developed a forum spam-bot.
  • n4r9 1y ago
    I've looked at several and they're mostly aimed at helping to market software. It feels kind of meta. Perhaps this is a particularly tough niche?
• 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?
  • 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 ...
    • beAbU 1y ago
      It's the whole "we're selling $1 bills for 50c, but we're not worried, we'll make up for it by scaling up."
      • pinkmuffinere 1y ago
        Imo the pithier version is “we lose money on every sale, but we’ll make it up on volume!”
        • disgruntledphd2 1y ago
          It's profoundly depressing that this is basically the model for almost all startups in the last twenty plus years. :shrug:
    • 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
• 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.
  • jf22 1y ago
    How are you defining garbage?
    • satvikpendem 1y ago
      Probably because Levels says he codes each product in a single PHP file. But then again, there's a reason he's successful and the parent is not (at least to that same level, pun intended). Technologists think code is an end unto itself while true entrepreneurs that it's just a means to an end, and that the end itself is money (otherwise, why are you running a business? If you don't make money, it's simply a hobby).
      • hermitcrab 1y ago
        >it's just a means to an end, and that the end itself is money The end is also to create something useful for your customers. Hopefully.
    • nikolayasdf123 1y ago
      like his flying simulator.
    • nikolayasdf123 1y ago
      single file 30,000 of PHP code.
      • 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.
  • LVB 1y ago
    Yes, and it is very tiresome advice to see continually, especially when given to newcomers whose first instinct is to build a solid, useful app or service, and they're being steered away from that. The number of times I've read that one should put up landing pages, spend time socializing them, and only if there are enough signups to actually build something is rather depressing. These folks are obviously playing a different game than I'm used to. But in my ~30 years at it, I can confidently say that taking the time to build what I feel are good apps, well-crafted, has provided immense satisfaction (I can at least look at a collection of apps, not landing pages), and has always developed or honed my skills, which has opened many doors. The marketing-first approach just sounds painful for someone who, like me, wants to be building things.
    • fxtentacle 1y ago
      "I can confidently say that taking the time to build what I feel are good apps, well-crafted, has provided immense satisfaction" ... but has it provided more revenue that what it would have cost for someone to hire you to build this at an acceptable hourly rate? Because if not, you're comparing your hobby against their business in the sense that you can accept less profitable results which wouldn't work for them.
• 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.
  • 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;
  • 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.
• 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?
  • 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).
  • 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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?
• 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!
• amadeuspagel 1y ago
  Many of these tools seem to be targeted at other indie hackers.
• Luke25 1y ago
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