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.
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.