IPO when?

Too early for that. OP needs to show a yearly net loss of at least a few million before doing that.

Is that $9.99 or $9 million?

Literally $9.99. This isn't really a success story. I'd actually say it's a little... embarrassing?

EDIT: Clearly a joke, I took it literally at first.

Did you max out your credit cards and have an VC walk out in the middle of a smoothie lunch? Because that's apparently the secret to success based on the AirBnBs of the world...

But still very laudable!

That sounds like a giant corporation compared to my many side gigs over the years. I love the development phase because it is something I control. Once the product is developed it also hits it's grave at the same time. Because I don't have the skills to get initial users.

Go to the Atlassian Marketplace, build a Forge app, publish it in March. Atlassian brings the customers. Enterprise customers. I’m perhaps being too optimistic, but at least you won’t have to do the customer part.

Why March?

Are your projects still up? Can I take a look at what you've built?

If you were a really successful startup, you'd be at $-100M MRR. Step up your game.

What is it they're selling, a domain name reselling service?

Honestly, I get that HN and startup culture glorifies one-hit-wonders and survivorship-biased unicorns, but articles like this just feel like pointless cynicism. It's not even that funny.

There are plenty of people out there that make a comfortable living with one-person online startups. The weird idea that only the "super-privileged" can do this is just flat-out wrong. In fact, the internet has allowed many people outside of typical Coastal/SV/yuppie bubbles to make much more than their immediate circumstances allow.

Instead of ragging on Slack, or AirBnB, or YC/pg for being proud of them -- yeah, yeah, with a lot of hyperbole and rosy hindsight -- just close your browser, open that terminal, and build something. Isn't that the whole point?

The weird idea that only the "super-privileged" can do this is just flat-out wrong.

It's not that YOU HAVE TO BE super-privileged to be able to quit your job and take a whack at the start-up lyfe, it's just that you are much more likely than the average person to be super-privileged.

That's how stereotypes work.

You don’t need to quit your job to start a online business. I make 30K a year from a website that takes me about 10 hours a year and took about 1000 hours to build during which I learned a lot and had a lot of fun.

URL?

There’s a reason that when people have a good thing like this going they never tell anyone else about it. Don’t want competitors.

Having a job doesn't disqualify a person from forming a separate, revenue generating business.

There are plenty of people out there that make a comfortable living with one-person online startups. The weird idea that only the "super-privileged" can do this is just flat-out wrong. In fact, the internet has allowed many people outside of typical Coastal/SV/yuppie bubbles to make much more than their immediate circumstances allow.

Outside of anecdotes is there any data to really back up this claim?

https://www.indiehackers.com/products?founderCount=1&minReve...

And where's the list of everyone who spent hundreds/thousands of hours building an online business .... and in the end, got nothing?

I’m not really sure what you are trying to argue. It’s a qualitative argument about the nature of starting online businesses.

I think the argument that it's anymore viable a reality than founding a Slack or an Airbnb relies on some statistics showing that profitable one-man-bands aren't just as rare.

I mean, maybe the takeaway from your comment is that being enough of a generalist that you can create a useful product and successfully market that makes you rare, but surely you don't think the amount of small teams making money off of services is even within 2 orders of magnitude of the amount of billion dollar IPOs...

$9.99 so far. Next month, if all goes well, it's looking like I'll have $19.98 in my bank account.

I know he's been sarcastic but it's actually how we started at serpapi.com. Even less. First month was $9.97, second month was $19.94. (Double the revenue!) And now, we are a real business, profitable, with a 8-9 strong team.

This is off-topic, but I really liked being able to purchase packs of credits on serpapi for my one-off projects. When you folks switched to monthly packages only, that's when I had to walk away.

I recognize that's the best way for you to get to MRR of course.

This is sad to me. This guy seems to have written a genuine post about growing his business to $400 MRR [1], but it leads with self deprecation, and then he follows it with this take down of... himself?

Louis, I don't know you, I've not come across Cloakist before, but you've done something solid here, and MRR is truly a long slope of soul crushing growth and you're playing the game fine. Keep it up. Five months in on Cronitor we were at $410 MRR.

[1] https://cloak.ist/blog/how-we-got-to-400-mrr-in-5-months/

Personally I think this is a really funny post. Kinda surprised how many comments seem to be taking it seriously.

After laughing and upvoting this brilliant satire, coming to the comments was like a second meta-joke.

Well, now everyone can see the massive network of "bot" accounts that HN has. It's a growing trend on posts; you'll see them interacting with each other; they like to work in nodes to boost the comment count and therefore somehow increase the chances of making front page.

Even if they don't hit front page, the comment itself adds to the longer term plan of these accounts. I don't doubt for a second that someone has, or is currently manipulating a lot of the traffic and comments for certain posts.

This is easily established via networks of rotating residentials; or better yet, real humans in Ukraine [1]: something that cannot be defeated unless you start nodal map chaining.

High likelihood that these troll farm/serious commenters algos are not equipped to deal with such complexities such as human satire yet, which is a reasonable conclusion as to why there are so many "serious" posts

[1] https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/inside-a-ukrainian-t...

[2] https://snap.stanford.edu/data/ego-Twitter.html

This comment would be really funny if it was a joke.. but I just can't tell what's real anymore.

[redacted]

That's an example of a ring that was trying (rather hamfistedly) to manipulate HN, which was caught by our systems and neutralized long before the thread you're linking to ever happened. As I said at the time, if anyone can find an example of a story from those accounts making the HN front page, I'd like to hear about it at hn@ycombinator.com; examples of cases we missed are hugely helpful in plugging holes. But certainly the vast majority of their efforts went nowhere.

People try every day to plant stuff on HN's front page, and every day our anti-abuse systems catch such efforts and apply different types of counter-action depending on the case. I'm not saying no one gets away with it (obviously we can't know that) but I can say for sure that anyone getting away with it would have to be way smarter than that group.

In case anyone's interested, it happens that I've been working for the last few weeks on a new type of anti-abuse system, which is designed to more tightly enforce this site guideline: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.".

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thank you for all you do and the thorough explanations.

Please provide evidence of this "massive network of bot accounts". I'm sure there are some but to this outside observer there doesn't seem to be any obvious large scale bot behavior.

[redacted]

Please don't post insinuations like this unless you have specific evidence. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. We have this rule because internet users are too quick to imagine they're seeing these patterns when really they're just reading them into what they're looking at, much like a Rohrschach diagram.

It's not that it never happens for real, of course. Both things happen: real manipulation and imaginary accusations of manipulation. Both are bad, and we need some sort of evidence or data or $objective-thing to look at in order to have a hope of distinguishing the one from the other. We put a ton of effort into protecting HN from manipulation and have many years of experience with this. I can't say we're not being pwned but we certainly catch many attempts to game the system here.

There's plenty of past explanation here if anyone wants more: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

[redacted]

I was happy to make $3-$4 in MRR from a 4 minute YouTube video. It took some months to hit 10k views to enable monetization, but monetization for that amount of work was great.

Then Youtube said fuck you. Your 1-video account doesn’t have 1000 subscribers, no more monetization for you!

No offense pal but you can’t claim to have MRR after one month. Come back when the 9.99 is actually recurring!

Satire man, satire.

What do you think my comment was?

Reading intent is hard, and I didn’t detect levity in your comment. Many of the comments here play along, acknowledging the satire (“when’s the IPO!?”). Your comment, to me, seemed to be taking the post seriously by saying op has not reached MRR yet, but that is part of the joke.

Insert link to Poe’s Law.

This is not a valid Show HN. Please read the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. Note how blog posts are specifically excluded. Otherwise every submission might as well say "Show HN".

I've taken that out of the title now.

Ah, this is my bad. Sorry. I thought I saw a Show HN the other day that linked to a blog post. And I also did it because the ‘How’ got removed from the title when I tried it originally, which I guess is house style. Is this why the post has been taken down from front page? If so, is that fair given it was an honest mistake?

It got more upvotes because of the errant Show HN than it would have otherwise. More significantly though, this doesn't feel very on topic for HN—more like a joke riff on a cliché category of article. Am I missing something?

It got more upvotes because of the errant Show HN than it would have otherwise.

I'll trust you on that and reiterate my apologies. I have never thought that Show HNs get more votes by default (look at the Show HNs in my history, you'll see they got absolutely nowhere), and was not trying to game the system.

More significantly though, this doesn't feel very on topic for HN

I thought that this was mostly determined by whether or not the HN community upvotes a link. I personally do think there's a role for (perhaps infrequent) satire about certain quite cringe-inducing types of articles you get here. I saw a similar piece the other day - can't recall the link though.

Managing ontopicness is more complicated than just upvotes. It's a complex interaction between community input (upvotes and flags), software, and human moderation. Upvotes alone would produce a front page consisting of sensationalism and the same few hot stories repeated over and over.

Upvotes are great, because the entire point of HN is to be interesting to the community. But moderators and software are needed too. If the site were determined only by upvotes, ironically it would soon cease to be interesting to the community.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

By the way, this isn't primarily because moderators are smarter or more competent than community members. It's because we're in a position to give HN our full attention and think about the global optimum. Users are giving much less attention to the site (at least I hope they are) and reacting quickly to the specific things they run across. I wrote about that here if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22863209.

Is the front page of HN really anti-sensationalist? If so why do articles like “Elon Musk moves to Texas” get to stay? They add very little to the discourse and primarily serve as flamewar topics which are actually against the rules of HN while this seemingly is not.