I'm under no illusions that my success has a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time, a lot of luck, and a lot of hard work.
Maybe people are getting tired of 90% of social media content being about "building an audience". Everyone is trying to sell us something, all the time.
The rest of us have to place a dire importance on it, lest we end up destitute, unemployable, homeless, and so on.
Though if you would like to write something up about "I made enough, and now I enrich my soul with leisure and nature walks," that would go further to disillusion some of the need to keep getting more and more money. But publicly decrying greed (and fear in greed's skin) will not achieve anything of lasting value.
This article is literally about a person quitting his job to do this, so it seems he's not part of "the rest of us".
I'm with you – we all need to be materially conscious to stay alive. We can't just throw our finances to the wind. As an entrepreneur, money is a particularly critical part of the equation.
Similarly, we can't afford to be so enamored by strangers making money on the internet that we fail to see 1) the pitfalls, errors, and missed opportunities in their efforts 2) their actual method (MRR charts are not a method) 3) the gifts and opportunities of our unique situations.
This sounds great until the bills arrive or you realize you need to save extra for retirement or home buying because your business’s income is unpredictable.
There's a lot of merit for entrepreneurs sharing their journey, like a lot of the other comments here I just wished it was less about being "successful" or making money.
Survivorship bias makes me say "I want to see the stories of all the solopreneurs who failed."
HN-- Please share more failure stories. I want to balance the optimistic fun hype with pragmatic realism.
I say this as a nascent "solopreneur" (I don't like that word) who is getting his agency & first product off the ground at the moment.
If something becomes so straightforwards that it can be replicated straightforwards, the value of it becomes a product of skills + time. So if I want to open a business mowing lawns, this is a very commodotized and high-competition industry, so I will earn a profit that is pretty much correlated to the unpleasantness of the job and the time it takes. Very little opportunity to earn a premium, and the only tactic is hacking around how quickly I can complete each job.
If I want to create a brand new product from scratch (one that is not glorified consulting), then it will by its definition be totally unique and the journey unlike all others, including my previous journeys. The best I can do is take all information I can and try and make the best decisions and take the best actions.
Greed? You want to lecture about greed, when 95% of tech companies are _driven_ by profits, by driving the share price up by any means necessary, including exploiting their users and employees, being the reason for new consumer protection laws to come into place and then skirting around them, tax avoidance, and a million other shady tricks, all with the goal of becoming a "unicorn", to go public or be acquired, and to get to do it all over again.
This very forum is built by, around and for serial entrepreneurs in this rat race, so it's a bit... rich to lecture about greed on here, of all places.
And yet you criticize when a solo developer, without any venture capital as a safety net, manages to have the success entrepreneurs dream of, measured by the same measuring stick. It all reads like sour grapes to me.
Good on OP for having the courage, persistence and skill to pull this off. Why shouldn't they talk about the steps they took, and the results they're seeing? We can call it survivorship bias, growth hacking, luck, etc. all we want, but it's encouraging to know that these stories _do_ happen.
Achieving financial independence by building something people want to pay for, instead of relying on the usual advertising and VC get-rich-quick schemes, should be applauded.
> The great entrepreneurs of our world are hardly motivated by money
Yeah come on like Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates, Hoffman etc aren't motivated by money lol.
For a forum created by an accelerator, it is weirdly anti-success.
It's not anti-success. HN applauds anyone making millions by doing real hard work that benefits everybody. What's frowned upon are these look-I-did-nothing-but-still-made-it-big stories.
Seven years of acquiring skills in different domains, and two years of applying those skills, learning more along the way, grinding, failing, trying again, and building several successful products people are willing to pay for is "doing nothing"? What a ridiculous take.
People get rich nowadays by manipulating virtual numbers on screens, based on speculation and pure luck, which is much closer to "doing nothing", and we enthusiastically celebrate their success, yet someone uses their skills to build and sell products to people that enjoy using them, and we label them as lucky, lazy and show-offs. #smh
This person did a lot of work, including drudge work like support, building a Twitter following, building a newsletter audience, etc.
And no one cares what you are doing. Posts like this are about getting recognition. Making $42k a month doesn’t actually get you any recognition by itself. Maybe buying champagne in a club from it does, but a lot of people don’t like that kind of attention.
People on HN are just so resentful and want to see the bad in posts like this it’s really sad.
Of the 3 you listed only Jobs qualifies.
He built the place in the ruins of a falling apart 16th century barn, had to support his initial work with clown shows, manual labor, then scaled it to the point where the place was regularly frequented by world class jazz performers.
He trained actors, provided work to people in the area. But he never scaled the business to the point where he’d have to compromise his work or relationships with people/fans.
We all play the cards we’re given and he managed to do it so much better than the brain parasites we tend to worship here.
Build a sustainable business that is a net positive contribution to the society, focus on value above growth, and stay true to your beliefs. Then keep it going for three decades. That’s entrepreneurship.
Bear in mind that although he’s a writer/playwright, I’d say that 3/4 of his work was managing the business like any other, juggling marketing, sales, admin.
(Apologies for any typos, writing this from my phone while in a rush)
PS IIRC in its peak the little village had more theatres per capita than Broadway (3 theatres!)
Sustainable profitable businesses that make a healthy profit and give back to their communities are the lifeblood of economies
He has a point.. HN is full of greed (or lack of appreciation for the privilege most of us have) and criticizing a solo bootstrapped entrepreneur for greed feels completely misplaced.
To a certain extent, yes, let’s defend and embrace greed when the outcome is a solo entrepreneur doing cool things and sharing the experience publicly.
No, let's not do this. That's literally the root of inequity that is rotting western culture.
This is just ludicrous, and needs to be corrected. The people I know starting companies (and succeeding) are hardly driven by money.
This is a success story we should all celebrate in this community, and it pains me to see this type of response at the top of the comment section.
There is such a thing as toxic productivity advice, the internet is full of it. It's easy to spot for me now, because I've noticed a few common threads. 1- The writing typically focuses on how much money the person makes 2- how little they have to work now or how little they had to work to get it and 3- How little time it took.
In my career, business, etc. I've learned the exact opposite. I would give the exact opposite advice for people looking to be successful in their lives and careers: 1- Don't focus on how much money you make, but how much value you add to the world and those around you. As you keep investing in your community, it will pay you back dividends right when you need it most. 2- Work hard, even when mo one is watching. Work hard for yourself, no one else. 3- Don't rush things, sometimes taking an extra month to build your business infrastructure properly could save you millions in the future.
In one sentence: It's not helpful for me personally for this guy to boast about how much he makes, how little he works, and how quickly he did it. What would be helpful is for him to remove all the concrete numbers ($45k/month, etc.) and boasting which only serves to put up my defenses and force me to start off in a position of comparison. Then he could just have simple prose about things he thinks are helpful that he learned along the way, simple information like a technical paper, not ad copy.
This, and other content like it, serves them, not me. I've found that limiting or even completely restricting my consumption of this kind of content for the latter, is better for me.
I agree, and I never said so.
I get the perspective of being jaded by vapid success stories of "here's how I got rich, buy my book/merch/MLM and you can get rich too", but this is far from being the case here.
If you read the article, the author clearly states they were lucky several times, and towards the end:
> There is no formula to guarantee success.
This is not someone boasting of their success, or saying there's a quick and foolproof way to reach it, but sharing their journey with others and hoping it inspires people, in the same way they were inspired by similar stories.
> how little they have to work now or how little they had to work to get it
This was a 2 year journey, where at some point they were working 12 and 16 hours a day, and they said it took a toll on their personal and social life, so this is hardly working little, and having no sacrifices. If they now get to enjoy working 4 hours a day, and taking many days off, then that's a notable reward they get to enjoy from their previous hard work.
We should all be thankful that we live in an age where such a work/life balance is even possible. Our ancestors had to plow fields for 18 hours a day, or work a dead-end office job for their entire lives enriching someone else just so they could earn the right to a meager existence when they retire. Yet we live in a time when computers enable us to not think about our finances, and to do work we actually enjoy doing, rather than because we have to in order to subsist.
_This_ is the future technology promised us, where everyone gets to work less and enjoy life more, yet most of us are still stuck in industries with the same grind mentality from 100 years ago. Let's not criticize being able to work less.
> How little time it took.
They invested 7 years into their career, and did hard work for 2 years, with several failures along the way, so this is not an insignificant amount of time. It's certainly impressive what they've accomplished in 2 years, but this is not an overnight success story. How long would they have to have done "hard" work for their story to hold water?
> In one sentence: It's not helpful for me personally for this guy to boast about how much he makes, how little he works, and how quickly he did it.
I mean, that's your preference, sure. But companies are measured by their finances, and it's difficult to talk about growth towards financial independence without mentioning numbers. If they were discussing their fitness journey, they would need to mention their weight and exercise statistics, so I don't see how this is any different.
> This, and other content like it, serves them, not me.
Again, it's your opinion, and that's fine, but myself and many others find it very interesting to hear about someone else's road to "success". We don't need to be so cynical about their intentions just because it fits some preconceived notions about this type of content.
This is exactly what I'm trying to highlight. While this kind of behavior seems normal or common in this community its not really in the greater world.
My plumber has done real well for himself, has dozens of people working for him, successful. He does not have articles on his website about how much he makes in a month, and how many hours he works when. He does have articles about the big name job he just landed, local building code committees he's on, and the little league baseball team he sponsors. Oh, and some plumbing tips and tricks.
My proctologist is similar. His website talks mostly about proctology. I bet he makes a lot, but he doesn't really talk publicly about it. That would be tacky.
In this community for some reason it's popular to say "look at how much money I make, look at all the bridges I've burned along the way, look at how I was way out of balance one way then the other, etc.". I get it, this was their journey. I'm not trying to say anything about them or there journey.
I think for every successful person like this there is another who did it a more "in balance" way. Those voices don't seem to come through so clearly, that's all I'm saying. I think it would benefit those in that second bucket to hear more stories about people like them being successful.
I'm sure that if your plumber or proctologist shared their journeys this openly that others would find it helpful as well. Mentioning incomes can be tacky, and I too scowl whenever someone boasts about theirs, but this article didn't strike me as such at all. Which is why I think the negative tone here is unwarranted.
Definitely see more greed on the VC side and in more mature companies, especially when PE or acquisitions come into play.
They are obliged to, by definition. Unlike non-profit or public-benefit companies, commercial companies must maximize profits for shareholders, otherwise they might be prosecuted by law.
Nice humblebragging. So you just read one blog post from the author and concluded that the most interesting part of their story is money? I bet they enjoy a lot of things and this is only a small piece of their life, as their blog post is specifically about being an entrepreneur, not about their hobbies.
He's literally made probably under $500k in revenue. And he's Vietnamese -- so that's really a fortune there.
I don't see anything except a reason to be happy for him.
MRR is not a weak signal.
If anything, I’d love to see more stories like this and less stories from popular media like NPR, Gizmodo, and NY Times (all 3 on the front page right now).
Sure, someone can make up their MRR, just like anyone sharing any personal story of theirs can make anything up.
But in a world full of wantrepreneurs and pseudo-intellectuals, revenue/profits is the best “objective” measure of a business’ progress
Wanting money also does not necessarily correlate to greed, it can also correlate to desiring freedom in a world with bills and expenses
This article articulates pretty well everything i’ve read in all the wantreprenarial / bootstrap articles i’ve read, which is summed up as “build a following, ride rising trends, iterate fast”.(and dump things that slow you down / have peaked) This article is in line with the build a following, and shows which rising trend he’s riding.
The part about the money irking you seems to come from a place of incredible privilege. He earned his independence and is selling a non-essential product on the free market, before B2B powerhouses move in. He shares what he’s done and experienced with the community and also hired employees.
He escaped the 9-5 and says he’s only working part time, which allows him to do the non work things you mentioned though he prefers surfing travelling and gaming to your rock climbing and nature walk.
The article is not even behind a paywall or part of a bootstrap course, so again where is the greed?
More power to him.
and it resonated with me how difficult this is to do as an employee, I’ve played around with running the numbers on overemployment and it is still not the same amount
I’ve done many more projects than this person and just couldn't be compelled to build an audience on twitter religiously, or stick to one persona! many of my ideas have incompatible crowds
its great for me to see examples of launching multiple projects
another thing that stood out is what he considers a failed project has probably changed
he wrote off two later in the story as a footnote, but they are probably viable ideas, just don't make enough, for him, anymore
it is fulfilling for me to have lifestyle flexibility and capital, I’ve had it and it is objectively better. I can relate to how this author filled in his time doing other fulfilling things
If this was written in the beginning, the whole thing would make much more sense as you are clearly jealous.
You sure don't sound like it..
Classic take from somebody that most probably could spend their entire time just fiddling with ideas, with zero worries about money. Everything else was taken care of. Not everyone has this luxury pal.
The author is plain, simple sharing his story. Can you replicate his success? Who knows. But I respect him for sharing this candid blog post documenting his steps.
I know a handful of these at my current employer.
Generally my formula is about cultivating a healthy value set, becoming increasingly clear minded, and trying to do things that are worthwhile. I know that's vague, but those are the abstract principles that work in different circumstances. I've led many different lives within my life – rock climbing full time, building software – and those are the guiding themes that have most consistently offered the greatest results.
(Write to me directly if you'd like me to flush out in more concrete detail, including how money and service factor in, how to avoid traps, what I currently struggle with, etc.)
I simply don't understand the "why is it all about money" take, at all. The author isn't saying he wants to but a Rolls and lots of gold chains. He simply want to make enough to be able to be independent (which he succeeded), and to indulge in relatively minor enjoyments, like travel.
"Why is it all about money?" Because some of us like both independence and not starving.
Frankly, I think you’re being incredibly rude to assume that because someone shared their story on a topic, then it must be their entire identity. It’s just so presumptuous to assume that the author or authors of these pieces have nothing else in their lives of value, because they decided to share this piece of their life.
There’s a lot in your comment I agree with, but this note struck me as just… extremely uncharitable, presumptuous, and rude.
And that's fine, no one should be ashamed of their success. But it is also OK to point out what's going on and that's what the OP is doing.
He said he took risks because he was unencumbered, he wanted till the ideal time to strike and did and it has more success than his employment offered financially and fulfillment wise
Who cares that his blogging is intrinsically tied to his growth hacking
This same standard is not levied on every Stanford dropout that sold shares of a pre-revenue idea to their VC neighbors for $20 million dollars
What are you all even bickering about
There’s plenty to criticize in the post, but I think making things up about the author is just not a kind thing to do.
Respectfully, it doesn’t, I don’t think you’re being fair, and I think saying it does is rude and presumptuous.
It pretty strongly implies “what they chose to write a blog post about”.
If, in the blog post they described focusing on nothing else but money, I’d agree with you. But they don’t.
> I still want to get more revenue, but I realized that this is a moving goalpost, and it will never stop. $10K, then $20K, then $50K. I knew I would never satisfied.
> It’s much better to work and play at the same time.
> So I traveled. I went for a trip around Vietnam.
> My average working hours during this period was about 4 hours/day. I still tweet a lot
Clearly there’s more to this person than doing nothing but focusing on money. Just because they chose to write this blog post, doesn’t mean it’s their entire identity.
I'd think that someone with the ability to live and walk around in nature would not be so critical of others.
As someone who, over the last two years, has created a more modest 5 figure MRR business, I can assure you, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
It takes a lot of skill and understanding of the market and market forces to be this successful. Being able to do the same thing again and get the same results is exactly what these people are not trying to do.
There seems to be some disconnect between what you think would make a successful business and what people who are making successful businesses do.
If I was to start again today and do the same thing, I would fail. If I wrote down what I did and someone else tried it, they would fail. The market has moved on since then and so every day when I get out of bed, I need to get my work done, manage my team and plan for tomorrow.
And after all this, my little MRR is an important metric because it shows success and because it’s something that I’ve worked the hardest in my life for.
Best of luck for your nature walks, people get to chose what they do in life.
It would probably take me 30+ seconds of boring conversation to get to the point. Humans optimize and now you have $xx / month. It’s easy to understand exactly where I am in my journey, how much “stuff” goes on in the day to day and the types of problems I have.
I like talking to people that are doing six figures a month, it gives me insight into the problems that I hope to one day have. Like a child looking up to their bigger brother. But also, they’re often very direct and insightful with the problems that I’m dealing with.
Not like they have the cake recipe I’m trying to make, but they can adapt their advice to my experience and tell me what temperature I should set my oven.
That there's no lessons to learn, because doing the same thing again wouldn't work. And if even the person who succeeded first hand would fail to reproduce their own success a second time, then those who are just reading about it have even less of a chance to be successful with that advice.
I think that's interesting to explore. I do wonder if it's true or not. There does exist some serial entrepreneurs that did manage to bootstrap many successful business after all.
Also I think the OP is more annoyed at the constant publication about "how I achieved financial success", because it kinds of gives out this illusion to others that they can as well, or that this is the ultimate achievement in life.
Why do you think this is unachievable for others?
Also, I believe, mathematically, since money is a finite resource, having an outsize amount of it, compared to the average, implies that not everyone can be in that situation. Which would mean most people cannot achieve it. This assumes financial success is defined as having above average money.
not saying they dont want to hack still, but as they said, there’s no end to the limit, and ramen profitability wasnt enough
What people that want a guide to money (aka reading self help "how to make a million dollars in 100 days" books) don't understand is that the lessons aren't a formula. My feeling for the commenter I originally replied to is therein lies a source of misunderstanding and frustration.
Being an entrepreneur is a skill. There are some very good serial entrepreneurs but they've all had 10x as many failures as their handful of successes.
Reading someone else's story isn't to be taken as a lesson of what to do to get to any MRR. It's a series of data points to be mused over.
Enough data points, along with time in the game (persistence, market viability, base level competence and work ethic) and you will start to have larger and larger successes.
I’ve been running a small successful software business for 10 years and we’ve posted here, Twitter, everywhere over the years, and nothing I write about attracts as much interest as when I open the kimono and share real numbers.
Partly it generates feedback like yours which is cat nip for social feed algorithms, but I think mainly people just really like personal details about others lives and businesses.
My advice would be to just not read these if they bother you.
There's someone on twitter (I think it's The Gas Station Guy) who talked about having to fire sale a business that was worth close to $1M for $60,000 to a competitor because he was out of cash and desperate. How you get to that stage and how you recovered from it is far more interesting to me than these "0 to $XXX in 18 months" stories.
I think your ingrained views around money and greed are preventing you from presenting a fair perspective. The author has something like 4 successful products, so the problem around reproducibility is... irrelevant.
And the idea of great entrepreneurs not being motivated by money... I mean, ok, maybe give some evidence. I think you'll find many people have 2 reasons for doing something, the nice "non-greedy" one they tell everyone and some seem to take a face value, and the underlying one.
Is often a post rationalization.
Not everyone has to be, or has to seek to be a great entrepreneur. A lot of people, myself included, want to just go by and have a happy life. A new business doesn't have to ambition being a game changer, and I actually quite like the approach of building several small marginally successful products. True, this is not a recipe, and there's always a luck factor, but at least the author is sharing his story, whatever their own design behind this was.
This is incredible story for me. I am not sure i can achieve same thing as he achieved. It is inspiring. Moreover his main business failed after twitters api policy changed so it is even more incredible that he was able to recover from that setback and managend to create a new business which is now surpassing his older biz. And he did it without taking any outside funding. In my eyes he is equal or greater than your so called great entreprenuers!
Finally, the "sheer obsession with money" is not at all what comes across in the post. A lot of it is about lifestyle topics, making news friends, etc.
Honestly, I find your comment completely out of touch with the article.
You'd think they need it to live or something
:)
Care to share?
The "great" entrepreneurs of our world have always been obsessed with money because it is literally the fuel and lifeblood of their endeavors. Only people with a lot of money can afford to pretend not to care about it while working strenuously their entire life to obtain it.
>But money is not the only solution
Money is literally the only solution its the only way to buy food medicine and live indoors.
> There's a term for this – greed
Greed is a natural response to a world so constructed that if you stop swimming you drown. It's as natural for people to be greedy as for a coyote to be hungry.
This is a website about software entrepreneurship and you don’t like articles about going solo and making it? Maybe find a different website.
Good for you, little man. How did you manage to find a moment to write this spiteful comment with such an interesting life?
You're deluded if you think anyone (other than your mom) is interested in your walking, climbing or reading.
MMR updates are superficial. Weak signal. I'm confident most are absent of critical info and some are entirely made up. I don't disbelieve anyone in particular, but when a mechanism of virality proliferates, it often gets deployed without the backing substance.
"How I XYZ" around money is similarly misleading. Most entrepreneurs I know cannot recreate their own success – when they set out on a new venture, they need to look with fresh eyes, invent some new techniques, and discard a lot of methods that previously worked. If entrepreneurs aren't even able to reuse their own "how I xyz," then how will a stranger with even less nuance be able to learn or apply much from the blog post? Again, some of these stories have great lessons, but as a category I believe they are more noise than signal.
Finally, the sheer obsession with money saddens me. The great entrepreneurs of our world are hardly motivated by money – to them, money is a tool that they factor in as they work to realize a vision, not an end goal. How ethically/morally impoverished is this technical class to be so obsessed with money? There's a term for this – greed. I know that a lot of jobs suck, a lot of stuff in life is expensive, we need money to do a lot of basic things, etcetera. But money is not the only solution, and more money is not an even better solution. I don't think this incessant messaging around money is virtuous – I think it is both a product of greed and a means of harnessing the greed in others. (And where are the entrepreneurs bragging about impact?)
(For the record, I am not jealous – I make my money doing literally whatever I want, on projects that I find much more exciting, with ample time left over for nature walks, rock climbing, reading, and more. Unlike these authors, the money I make is not the most interesting part of my story.)