8 years to an overnight success!

It only took Usain Bolt 9.6 seconds.

I never understood why north Americans really don't like being called lucky. I'd rather be lucky any time, anywhere, in any context because you can become a hard worker but can't become lucky

Because it's embedded in their culture that hard work = success and success comes from hard work and staying hungry. They have to believe this because it's essential to feeling good about the sky-high inequality in various countries where this is worshipped (and more importantly - to feel justified in maintaining the unequal status quo).

The twitterb poster lll linked to is Vietnamese though

The people trying to insult him by saying his success is "just luck" probably include plenty of Americans. I think usually success needs both luck and hard work, so being lucky is not an insult but a given.

He's not American, hell he's not even from a western country.

It's not just a North American thing. Any entrepreneurial journey can feel very sisyphean, and if you worked hard on something for years, probably consciously making many sacrifices along the way, and then finally get rewarded for it, only to see the comments on social media diminishing your success as "just luck"... I can imagine they feel disrespected.

It's used by envious people to discredit other's success, and to justify why, conversely, they themselves haven't succeeded. It's very closely associated with having a "fixed mindset" and believing that people are merely a product of their environment/circumstances versus actually doing something about their own predicament.

I think it depends on what people mean by lucky. I doubt he would have gotten to 45k/month if lives in North Korea (or many other terrible dictatorships) even if he did just as much hard work. Or maybe just have bad luck/genes and be born with a severe mental disability.

Maybe we should have said he wasn’t unlucky instead?

Basically just getting to live in a western/first world democracy already makes you luckier then most people on the planet.

According to his homepage he is from Vietnam: tonydinh.com

Vietnam isn’t that bad these days (it could be way better). Nobody is blocking you from moving away or starting your own business. And while it isn’t a democracy there is some freedom to do what you want (outside of openly criticising the government, journalism, etc)

Like there are billionaires in Vietnam who made their money while living there and still live there. There is no such thing in North Korea for example. There is also enough law/policing to make running a business possible (some random thug with an AK won’t show up tomorrow to take your business as their own)

edit: Also note that I said living not born in a democratic/western country. The moment you get into such a country (with a visa that allows you to work or a citizenship) the amount of opportunities available for you skyrockets no matter what country you were from originally. Having those opportunities available for you is what makes one "lucky". Though you still have to work hard to get any benefit out of them.

But if he is still living in Vietnam then he probably did work harder on it then someone who did the same in the west.

Basically luck alone won't get you much (outside of winning the lottery) but neither will only hard work. You need both.

Throwaway because I fear for my personal safety and life.

> Having those opportunities available for you is what makes one "lucky".

Only a small percentage of people make $45k/month even in the United States.

> like there are billionaires in Vietnam who made their money while living there and still live there. There is no such thing in North Korea for example

There are billionaires in hundreds of country. It’s disingenuous to cherry-pick North Korea and argue on the semantics of “lucky”.

I looked up Vietnam’s billionaires list. Half of them have ties to Moscow. It’s pretty obvious they have political ties. It’s not relevant to comparing the meritocracy in those echelons with a bootstrapped indie hacker

> some random thug with an AK won’t show up tomorrow to take your business as their own

Yes, because the socialist party has a monopoly on violence and guns. Nonetheless, I’ve seen some street thugs chase each other on motorcycle with machetes in this decade. I’ve also seen the cops come to a small shop my uncle owned to collect protection money. They told him that their daughter's cellphone was broken and gave him an address to another cellphone shop, even though he was running a cellphone shop himself. If you don’t pay, they’ll take your customers for a ride around the block.

My family is well connected in Vietnam, and I don't think you know what you're talking about. You're either a traveler who spent a few months in Southeast Asia, or someone living in Vietnam brainwashed by the government. I am familiar with how things work for the elite in Vietnam, and it's not relevant to discuss billionaires versus social mobility for most of the populace here. At one point, the richest family in Vietnam at the time was our next door neighbor. My siblings and I are legally barred from holding any executive position or government positions for political reasons. My cousins, however, are fine, and one them owns a zoo with a bear. My family is also well connected politically. I’m talking the people who run the largest city. Last week I was considering a trip to Vietnam, and realized I had to apply for a visa. My mom told me she just needs to make a call and they’ll escort me right through. The management at the airport will probably have my latte prepared for me, too. There are completely different set of rules for everyone else.

The point is that Vietnam is no where close to this free and fair country you’re making it out to be. 95%+ of university grads won’t have spare income to be able to afford a trip to the United States in the next decade of working. Just because it's not Somalia doesn't mean the author was "lucky". His success from Vietnam can only be attributed to creating something people pay for, and not because they have to.

Remember Flappy Bird? Even people in the West was impressed by how lucrative the ad revenue us. Ever wonder why the developed decided to delete in overnight? The answer is obvious for people who actually live in Vietnam, but you're not going to find anything about in the Vietnamese press, and the Western press didn't know enough to speculate.

Why do you think the developer chose to delete it?

Wikipedia provides some theories.

Developer claims it was because it was addictive and not good for people. The Media, which of course is state-ran, claims is was because of intellectual property legal reasons. "Lawyers in Vietnam" denied that it was related to internet censorship.

He was making $50k a revenue a day and like most businesses in China and Vietnam, not formally paying taxes. Even in Japan, most small businesses are not correctly paying taxes.

The fact that the game itself is a rip-off makes it unlikely that the developer has the highest standard of ethics. Regarding intellectual property, even the government was found to be using bootlegged versions of Windows. Before companies like Adobe realized they needed to move to a SaaS model, there were entire streets selling cracked version of software like Photoshop for 50 cents a pop. Same with Playstation games. Nintendo used hardware medium to make the economics of bootlegging harder, but it was much easier to burn CDs. You simply couldn't buy authentic versions of Playstation games if you wanted to.

I don't think the government had any clue on how to regulate, control, and tax digital services. Regardless, it is guaranteed that government officials paid the developer a visit that day and brought him back to the police office in a police truck. Somebody there would have hassled him for money. Whether he paid or not, there will just be more vultures coming and will just leave him the leftovers. He probably just rage quit instead of having them have most of the pie. This shouldn't be a surprising for a communist regime that a generation ago seized tens of thousands of landlord's land [1], made their children bury them alive, while declaring how they've stolen from the people. Some of the older party members there right now who are eating with Salt Bae [2] were probably there torturing [3] the 80,000 missing American POWs

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2756362

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/asia/southeast-asia/vietnam-ja...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rufnWLVQcKg

What this guy is doing takes a lot of skill: effective marketing, brand building, the online audience, his initial sales, his product instinct, his tech skills. Overall, this guy is super talented and it's obvious he knows how to put in the grind. And he probably has that advantage some humans have where he enjoys doing that.

You can do all that and fail. It's true. That's how it works. But about the most pathetic thing to see is someone unsuccessful put down another person's success as just luck. You just know the guy saying it's luck is the excuse maker, the guy who would have succeeded if not for someone, the unaccepted genius misunderstood despite his mastery of comments about how Google always kills projects.

And the worst part of it all is that if you read this guy's blog post, you don't get a feeling of "Wow, he really just cracked it!". I got a feeling of "Bloody hell, mate! That's an absolutely tremendous amount of work." Not only did it not seem easy or lucky, but it felt like something I could never do myself. It's so hard, I originally shared it with a friend to show him how hard it is.

I do have to credit him with turning this into another content marketing journey, though. Clever ;)

I don’t think anyone’s knocking the work but there is a tendency to see the success of that as inevitable in hindsight. After all the probability of success now is 1. But at the beginning of each venture the probability of success definitely doesn’t feel like it would be certain. When people say luck is involved it’s remembering that feeling because there are a whole bunch of external factors you can’t control for involved in the success of any venture.

I also think this kind of content marketing is effective largely because it is designed to rile people up.

It's the 'I could have done that' vibe. Yes, you might have been physically able to. But you didn't. That you actually did not do it is a pretty good indicator that it is not, in fact, easy.

It's rarely luck alone, off course, someone has to have the guts to play, to risk losing something, and often must put in the work too. But out of everyone who does, luck can often make the winners.

That said, in his case, there's a few repeat accomplishments. More than once he thought of a product, built it, and seem to have gotten traction with consumers.

This is different from say Jeff Bezos, and how he famously said he doesn't think he could make it again, because he was kind of at the right time, right place. And he wouldn't know what in the current time and place would be the next Amazon.

But in OPs case, he seem to be able to replicate these small-ish but still successful products. So at the very least he's got a knack for good ideas, identifying products that don't have a good offering, and building them quickly to a point that people will pay for them. That takes some talent, and hard work to accomplish.

I think the larger level of success requires larger amount of luck. To he mega successful like Jeff Bezos, the amount of luck required is so huge that probably none of us could achieve in 100 life time.

But for smaller successes, like building a profitable lifestyle business, I’d argue it requires much less luck (still needed regardless).

Also there are 4 kinds of luck:

- Pure luck: out of our control. This is where most people referring to

- Luck from motion: hustling, grinding, increase luck surface area. This is where most founders find their “luck” comes from

- Luck from preparation

- Luck from uniqueness

Thiên Thời, địa Lợi, Nhân Hòa, or 天时地利人和 in Chinese.

Thiên Thời = being in the right time, right place, right era. As Warren Buffett said, his skills in resource allocation would have been irrelevant if he was born during the Hunter-Gatherer period. Who knows what us code monkeys would be doing just a few decades ago when trading was done on the trading pits of Wall Street rather then electronic trading.

địa Lợi = Position and having an edge

Nhân Hòa = being in harmony (with other people)

The people aspiring for non-Mega success can at least cultivate the last two.

Whatever happened to people recognizing luck had a part to play? This ugly "personal narrative" thing that everyone has to do?

How is this not seen as the height of cringe?

HN has a strange spectrum of salaries, where some people will casually mention earning 250K for not doing anything special. These are rare cases, but they're such interesting paths that they get upvoted a lot and breed a sense of "the money's just there"-ism, that seems to be ubiquitous on this site.

Capitalism is best modeled with luck, so I think it is fair to say that luck must be involved with any venture.

Luck plays a role in pretty much everything. The key is being happy/successful with the amount of luck you end up getting. Looking at luck as sort of normally distributed, chances are you will have some amount of it and, if you're well positioned, that little luck could propel your life forward.

Most people should be thinking about that random day where you'll meet someone who works at your dream company, or an investor, at a party. It will happen once or twice in your life. If it happens tomorrow, are you going to be able to make the best of it?

If I made 45k in MRR, I would not tell anyone. Why attract competition?

Not just competition but also grifters, some of whom will come from your own family.

Many of those that flex their MRR on Twitter and participate in the "build in public" trend are also digital nomads who regularly travel to countries with a low cost of living. In some of these countries it's not uncommon for flight manifests to be illicitly sold so that would-be kidnappers can search the passenger list for potential ransom targets. I worry that it's only a matter of time before we hear about one of these makers being abducted.

Why does this forum care so much about this one person? Don't get it.