I'm also trying not to be too defensive, but I strongly disagree with your interpretation of this interview. Most of the IH audience will read this, care very little about the "secrets" behind the trading strategy, and instead focus on what you call "trite lessons".
In this particular case, the amount of time and effort an 18 year old put into researching and educating himself about a difficult field is quite inspiring. As is his dedication to doing some non-trivial programming work and actually launching. That might not be inspiring to you or to professional traders on HN, but I can assure you that most IH readers will not care if/when his trading bot ultimately fails.
> What, exactly is the point of the interview then? You could just as well cover random sites that have launched with 0 profit or revenue. Heck, if you're in that business, I've got a ton of side projects I'd love to share.
I've featured lots of very small projects. My minimum cutoff nowadays is $100/mo, but in the past I've done interviews where the revenue was $0 or not shared. Although it's fun celebrating big revenue wins, that's not the point of the site. (If you don't believe me, I can point to numerous places where people have actually asked me to feature $0 failure stories on the site.) The point is motivation, inspiration, and education for getting around the most common obstacles that stand in the way of creating an online business.
> I believe there's a big advantage to this "micro-bet" approach of launching many tiny businesses
These aren’t businesses. These are websites. Most people on HN can build a website. It takes some coding and some tech knowledge. Not everyone can build a business. That involves marketing, advertising, customer acquisition, cash flow management, legal, on and on.
While what the author did was neat and fun for him, let’s not pretend this is the path to a successful web business. I’d bet there’s few “micro-bets” that are generating any meaningful amount of money.
> ... on HN -- an endless series of aspirational stories of unending success and riches, then segued into pitching a book or web product/startup.
I've wasted many hours on HN and recall zero stories here of unending riches that segued into pitching a book. Perhaps you could enlighten me with one example?
>In the minds of many of those who didn’t know me that night I became “The guy who wanted to invest $1000 in the stock market when he was 18”, which is an easier label to remember than “The guy who wants to democratize the financial system”
I think your self-diagnoses is not quite right. The wrong conclusion is to think "$1000 at 18" is more memorable because it's a biographical detail. The bigger issue is that "democratize the financial system" was too abstract and vague.[1] A clear and concise description of your product is still better than a founder's biography. You just happen to pick a nebulous product description and that distorted the weighting towards your personal story.
To me, the landing page of http://hardbacon.ca was more effective than your live pitch to describe the product. (The youtube video didn't show your slides so maybe the live audience received your messaging better.)
From that page, I would substitute "democratize financial system" with something like:
- "We're like LendingTree for small investors. Instead of presenting a list of banks offering loans, we present a list of brokers including human brokers and automatic robot brokers."
- "We're like Expedia/Orbitz/Hipmunk for choosing an investment broker. We let non-professional investors compare brokers and advisers."
[1] "democratize the financial system" is so generalized that it could apply to PayPal, Ameritrade, Charles Schwab, Square, Stripe, Kickstarter, Bitcoin, etc.
"Let me tell you how you to build a $1B business. I've never done it, but take my word that I know how to do it better than someone who sold a half a billion dollar business."
Like really, if your advice is useful, why hasn't the author built a $1B business? It seems like they missed the point that Trello became giant for what is essentially networked sticky-notes, were they even trying to become a $1B Business?
Next week: Why Trello Failed To Be the First Company On The Moon (spoiler alert, they weren't trying to do that).
I understand and partially agree with you. But imagine a wannabe entrepreneur that is attracted by the title and go on to read the interview on how to do it. He/she will actually have a very clear expectation on how to "bootstrap a business into $18k monthly".
Indiehackers, in my opinion, provides a very valuable service of providing a reality check for those dreaming with "easy" revenue from digital products. "Oh, this guy actually built an audience for years before launching the business", "Oh, this other guy actually had a successful business to work as launchpad of his business", "Oh, thi guy actually started from scratch, but his revenue is in the hundreds per month for now and I have doubts if even that is sustainable".
If someone is planning to launch a bootstrapping business and stumble upon Indiehackers I have no doubt he/she will be better prepared to do it after reading these interviews.
> I feel like HN should have a special flag called "survivorship bias" that we can use to tag posts like this
Pointing out the possibility of survivorship bias doesn't add anything to the conversation on articles like this. The author never claimed that everyone who works consistently will have a successful startup. The article is barely about startups at all.
We get it - Startup success isn't guaranteed and following someone else's actions isn't a guarantee that you'll get the exact same results. Startups fail and advice isn't one size fits all. I really don't want warnings that "results may vary" appended to every article about someone's success when we all already know that success is variable.
It's also missing the point of the article. The founded startup was just an example of something that was accomplished by consistent daily effort, but it's obviously not the only thing that can be accomplished with consistent daily effort.
The core idea of doing a little bit of work every day adding up into something bigger over time applies to more than just building startups, survivorship bias or not.
The only valuable insights are the ones that people have used in real life. There is almost no value in listening to the blatherings of someone who makes sweeping generalizations, speaks in vague terms, and doesn't back up their assertions with any kind of data. It's the worst kind of truthiness, and HN would be much better off avoiding this kind of opinion piece.
"Personally I don’t know anything about Nick, but I do know that $30 million is a sh*tload of money to pay for a 17-year-old as an acqui-hire."
If you don't know anything, then STFU.
If you're going to criticize something as broad as "the lean startup movement" and you want to achieve anything more than FUD, then be prepared to be careful with your arguments. Have examples. Have data. Honestly, I don't know much about this "movement" but if this article is the best criticism people can muster, then I suspect it's actually quite good.
Thanks. I did not insist too much on the high returns on the article. For me this is the kind or overrated stuff around startup. It's similar to changing the world or working 80 hours a week.
I might be missing something, but this seems so obvious it's almost tautological.
He's limiting his discussion to startups in the "consumer internet" arena and speaking from the perspective of a VC.
So you need hype, quick movement and you don't expect the company to be around in a few years (unless it's acquired by another company, probably not run by 25 year olds).
Young people are going to be more in touch with what's fashionable or about to be fashionable in order to get hype. They're inexperienced so they'll work crazy hours for no money for the promise of a lottery ticket.
This market is not really dependent on quality engineering, since the code won't be around very long to be maintained and downtime or data loss is accepted by most users (who probably aren't paying for the service anyway).
And I'm not trying to bad mouth the sector either, it's a great proving ground for new ideas and we've gotten fantastic stuff out of it.
So the point is that in a business sector where it's in the investors best interest for the founders to be young, most of the founders are young?
In the financial industry this would be phrased differently: "The consumer internet market is highly tolerant of all the faults of young, inexperienced and easily exploited workers while also being easily influenced by the least expensive marketing on the planet"
I don't think that way of framing the exact same point would make it on techcrunch though.
On some level, I hate articles like this because of all the unanswered questions:
[1] What did you spend that initial $100 on? (Even the cheapest overseas programmer can't do jack for $100)
[2]You mention $400 million in revenue, but how much of that is profit?
[3] What exactly does Trace3 do (if it was so great, I would have heard of it on my own, or you would have explained it in the article, without me having to Google research it)
[4] If things are going so great, why are you writing articles for websites like entrepreneur.com? (oh yeah, you have another thing called POP you're promoting)
[5] You mentioned a "bold" client's advice. How did yo know this was advice worth listening to vs advice to be ignored?
I'll probably get voted down into oblivion, but IMO these kinds of articles say a lot and nothing at all.
FWIW, the title really puts me off. Similar titles that put me off:
"How I built a startup in N hours"
"How I built a business with just $N"
where N is designed to be small to increase click through.
In society we're all looking for too many short cuts. Too many easy fixes. Fat? Nah - don't exercise and eat healthily, get a diet pill!
Also the whole rags to riches story is a really tiresome angle to take on things IMHO. I'd say that most startups are built by people without any money :/
(Having said that I do really like the interviews you do. Very interesting).
"First of all no matter what you launch, if you hope that you simply put your submission out there, and it will end up in the top 5 of the day, most certainly this is not going to happen. If you wanna get there, you have to come up with a plan to promote your listing and get the upvotes." - so, it looks like that was (at least partially) wrong.
Why would you think that it's not possible to launch it more or less organically? It's definitely possible here on HN, why would PH should be very different?
At the very end - don't focus on promoting that much, especially artificially, build the product people love and you get your front page.
It is fairly an honest title. The guy talk only about that feature, use original content, talk about something available for free which he most likely does not have an immediate interest.
There is a little bit of exaggeration in the title to attract people. That's how you drive traffic to your site. And let's be honest, if the guy was driving traffic that way to the startup he founded, people would have much recommendation about much less honest strategies.
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?
"I approached the project under the assumption that it's either going to be adopted and spread throughout some niche quickly, or never catch on."
This is a silly and immature approach, in my opinion. Such an approach is only suitable if you either have loads of time and money to throw at projects just for fun or you have a pet project that requires extremely minimal resources and effort to get off the ground.
The de facto approach to just about any web business should be to imagine it like a mom and pop store or restaurant. You'll spend a lot of hard work on it, it'll take years to get into the swing of things properly, and if you're really lucky you'll just barely do a bit better than keeping yourself employed at a reasonable level of pay.
>I know that the HN "founders" crowd is going to hate me for saying that, but I think that we should really stop glamorizing revenue.
Understand your perspective but what's happening is that many programmers -- including non-founders -- on HN are drawn to factoids of devs making money without "working for the man".
So instead of characterizing it as "glamorizing revenue" ... think of it more like... "if that programmer found a way to make money outside of a corporate job, maybe I can too."
So Ivan Kutskir being able to get significant revenue while just being a 1-man operation will naturally be an interesting case study for programmers who dream of a little financial freedom.
Pretty good article, and it's hard to argue with any of his advice... but it seems a bit prescriptive and I would have liked if he had included some examples, lessons learned, etc.
Otherwise, and with absolutely zero gratuitous negativity intended, I get the impression that he wrote this piece to pitch Canny.io as opposed to genuinely wanting to help other entrepreneurs.
So I'm going to reply here because I think this is a good one (of the replies I've gotten) to express my thoughts a little bit more clearly:
1) I was wrong about what was going on in that thread. I sort of scanned it at first and saw that snarky "this is why I build companies and you do contracts" post and it rubbed me the wrong way.
2) The $50k (or €50k, im not sure which it is now) number is a lot, but given the way I originally interpreted the thread my initial reaction was more of one like "who does this guy think he is?"
3) I later went back over the thread and saw that people were being needlessly critical of a tiny webapp.
All that being said, I do agree with the replies that are being critical of my thinking here -- I just can't go back and edit it on HN!
In this particular case, the amount of time and effort an 18 year old put into researching and educating himself about a difficult field is quite inspiring. As is his dedication to doing some non-trivial programming work and actually launching. That might not be inspiring to you or to professional traders on HN, but I can assure you that most IH readers will not care if/when his trading bot ultimately fails.
> What, exactly is the point of the interview then? You could just as well cover random sites that have launched with 0 profit or revenue. Heck, if you're in that business, I've got a ton of side projects I'd love to share.
I've featured lots of very small projects. My minimum cutoff nowadays is $100/mo, but in the past I've done interviews where the revenue was $0 or not shared. Although it's fun celebrating big revenue wins, that's not the point of the site. (If you don't believe me, I can point to numerous places where people have actually asked me to feature $0 failure stories on the site.) The point is motivation, inspiration, and education for getting around the most common obstacles that stand in the way of creating an online business.
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