My solopreneur story
I always enjoy reading success stories of developers of small apps.<p>At the same time, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re seeing only a cherry picked part of the picture. There is no mention of advertising spend or customer acquisition costs. The trend among indie hackers is to talk about MRR without mentioning a single expense, then to interleave it all with “follow me on Twitter” so you’re inspired to join their audience. This is a bit cynical, but I’ve been following accounts like this for a decade and it’s depressing to watch how many of them pivot into trying to sell me courses and&#x2F;or private community access based on their success.<p>Audience building (which he readily talks about in the article) becomes a conflict of interest for real information because it incentivizes big numbers while hiding costs. Maybe his apps are growing entirely organically and it’s pure profit. Or maybe he’s spent huge amounts of money on ads or marketing to get more installs to grow his user base as fast as possible. He mentions spending 16 hour days between coding the app and promoting it.<p>The thing is, we don’t know how he got the users, and he won’t tell us because admitting anything other than MRR would only detract from his story. And as any small business operator knows, getting the customers is the hardest part.<p>I wish him the best and enjoy following these success stories, but having seen enough of these I always take the isolated MRR numbers with a grain of salt. It’s not the full picture. This isn’t unique to this developer. It’s <i>the</i> trend among social media “indie hackers”: They know people are hungry for success stories and want to learn the secrets of how to build a successful indie company, so they build narratives to make themselves look like the person who will share those secrets. But then the more you read and the more you follow, the more you start seeing how they’re leaving out all of the actual secrets and keys to success, such as how they’re marketing their apps and getting downloads.