Solo founder of a successful self-funded business here. A market niche is in my opinion the best place to be. A niche will be enough for a small business, but might be too small for the crazed GROWTH GROWTH GROWTH mindset of most companies. That's good! It means that you won't be competing with companies burning through VC money and selling at below cost (as in $19/month B2B SaaS) just to get GROWTH.
As to the main point of the article — pretty much all advice I was given turned out to be wrong. And nearly everything you read on HN (especially comments) is wrong. Or, more precisely, it's advice given by people who are not in your situation, have never experienced your situation, and likely never will. This applies to business strategy, but also to technology: your choices will be influenced by very different factors than those of people commenting here. You won't care about "industry-standard practices", fashions, trends, or "will it help my career" factors. You will care about line count, total cost of ownership, pace of changes (things that change quickly are expensive to use), reliability, and the ability to fix things when something breaks.
So, my advice would be to make your own choices and take all advice with a very critical mindset. Including this advice, obviously :-)
P.S. I also agree that when you hear stories of venture-backed startups trying similar product ideas but then needing to pivot due to insufficient growth, that should often be music to the ears of a solo bootstrapper ;)
I suppose the more precise word for this is a "lifestyle business", but not as many people are familiar with that term, and it can have a bit of a different connotation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestyle_business
To acquaintances, I'll often just say "I'm building an app". Small business is a decent alternative, but a lot of the time when I use that term I'll feel pressure to clarify that it's not like.. a lawn mowing business or something. (nothing against those though!)
Women were mostly enamored because they thought it was like a Youtuber thing, or lifestyle in the fashion sense, or a Youtuber telling people about lifestyle fashion of some sort.
Very different from "any line of business, implied as passively w/ recurring revenue, that happens to supports your lifestyle"
(I pivoted away from that, I found other truthful things that hit pretty well.)
it just gets you press, but if there isn't really a larger TAM then you can personally wind up making less money than just keeping full ownership of the company.
thinly held companies can be conduits for really decent sums of money completely privately.
You can use fuzzy numbers to get varied output, and if you want to do MC you can use the API into your model to call it with whatever distributions you want and aggregate the output. But no, our UI doesn’t natively support doing a MC sim because the demand is frankly less than you’d expect. :)
The new kid on the block I like is cubesoftware.com . It’s priced rather affordably for a small business but maybe not a solo sized one
If I can't find something that works, this might be something I'm considering to build myself.
Sometimes, intentionally going after a market niche can be a good thing; you don't always have to set your sights on being the next unicorn. Especially if you're starting out as a solo dev, building the best product out there for a very specific audience can be a good strategy that leaves you with enough breathing room to continue to innovate and grow incrementally.
That's the general approach I've been taking with ProjectionLab.com (the personal finance simulator I've been building on the side for a year now) and thus far, it's been a fun and modestly fruitful journey.