A go-nowhere article with a lofty click-bait title aimed at promoting the site it sits on using survivorship bias examples to prove what he's promoting works. I guess that's one way to grow, but still.
It's just called being an entrepreneur and starting a business without getting funding. You get to choose how big or small you want to get it and you realize that you don't have to make it big, you can live a comfortable lifestyle if you want to.
The little problems are learning how to entrepreneur successfully, have the money and energy to do so, and getting lucky enough to find the right idea, right market, right timing with the right messaging.
It all seems so easy when you see someone making a boring, bland, basic ass tool collecting $1MM ARR, but you can't just easily do the same. It's possible, but good luck.
You also learn that you don't have to sell a recurring service or even software at all, you can just sell "stuff" and people will buy it if there is a desire.
I'll take the counterpoint; I loved it. The article was by no means a HOWTO but rather an inspiration to what can be done by solo devs or very small teams without institutional money. There is far worse so-called click bait our there.
Re: "survivorship bias" fair point, but all winning businesses and the end state returns of VC funds are all survivorship driven - losing entities drop out of history and fund returns, and in ugly cases the public stock markets too. The twitter feeds of many of the companies listed are very much building in the open and the ones that fail are in that sample set.
It was interesting to me the types of businesses that are making money (in this list)--several Twitter audience growth tools, a few tools related to social media content, etc. Very marketing tool heavy list, but a few B2B plays in there too.
This article is meant to fool coders into believing they can just start their own mini-company and focus on what they like best, coding, to build recurring services for some imaginary audience they haven't found, vetted or understand yet, and live a dream life.
It'll get them excited enough to want to read more on the primary site about how to do it, how to be an indiehacker and "micro-founder", more exotic and exciting words for "entrepreneur" that have less slog associated with them. They'll sign up for the email list and get entered into a drip campaign that'll feed them more fantasy without the slog. After email 5 they'll download a PDF cheatsheet, after email 11 they'll sign up for a time-limited pre-order of the new $129 book on for $39, but only if they sign up now. They'll read the book and then sign up for the exclusive paid forum access. A few months later they'll be signed up for the $1200 video course that is a 1:1.02 rehash of the book they already bought. They'll have started subscribing to all these podcasts and going to all the sites, they'll be excited, they'll get ready to quit their job, but they still won't really know anything about how to vet and build a business, how to deal with everything themselves now that they are self-employed, or how not to spend all of their innovation chips building their new microsaas on the newest, sexiest platform on the top of HN today. After awhile you realize the person running the blog's only success was selling this dream to you and enough others like you that they can now live their dream.
It's fine if you want to start your own business and anything is possible, but this article isn't doing anyone any favours, it's just hollow, self-serving temptation pointed at a lucrative audience.
If anything, picking generic successes that seem even more easy or understandable makes it worse, because those are the hardest to successfully do. Giving very niche examples would have been more benefit, but those people generally fly under the radar.
Indeed, its a lot of work. Which the article didnt delve into at all and just glanced over. Its like claiming you own the best burger place and giving your customer a bun to prove it.
And let me add, I've never heard of a bootstrapped startup taking less than 7 years to reach $1MM ARR, with many years of dirt poor earnings. You're likely to get to a million faster with a FAANG job with stock options if you're good at interviews.
> I've never heard of a bootstrapped startup taking less than 7 years to reach $1MM ARR
Mine took about 2 years, from 2000-2002. I finally sold it last year so I won’t mention the name, but I’ve been doing the four hour work week since 2001. I sold an eBay-related service during the bottom of the first dot com crash. No one else was willing to charge for access to a web service at that time except maybe Wall Street Journal.
It's just called being an entrepreneur and starting a business without getting funding. You get to choose how big or small you want to get it and you realize that you don't have to make it big, you can live a comfortable lifestyle if you want to.
The little problems are learning how to entrepreneur successfully, have the money and energy to do so, and getting lucky enough to find the right idea, right market, right timing with the right messaging.
It all seems so easy when you see someone making a boring, bland, basic ass tool collecting $1MM ARR, but you can't just easily do the same. It's possible, but good luck.
You also learn that you don't have to sell a recurring service or even software at all, you can just sell "stuff" and people will buy it if there is a desire.