Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible?

bigfatkitten

If you’re an expert in a particular niche and people just bring you work, then being a solo operator works fine. You choose which engagements to take on based on your own capacity, and you’re not burning cycles on business development etc.

daemin

I too am in a similar situation, where I am building a niche product - partly for my own benefit, partly for learning, but mostly with the idea of selling it as a commercial product. I have plenty of worries about it - will the product sell at all, is the product too niche so I'll have sales but not enough to make it full time, am I barking up the wrong tree and there is already an open source free alternative that I've somehow missed, what if nobody likes it? All sorts of stuff, some warranted, and some just the usual fear of making something and putting it out there. With that being said I do consider a big portion of success being luck, as any one lucky event could catapult you to riches, and any unlucky event could ruin any chance of that happening, but in the end you have to take a risk and put yourself out there for the lucky events to happen. But as with all risky things you have to be prepared for it all to go to shit, and then have enough of a support network which will help you get back onto your feet. I genuinely hope that other people have some more concrete advice here or even war stories to tell.

anovikov

I know one guy who actually succeeded. He ran a hard-mode outsourcing shop for like, 15 years, for many years making 100-150K/month net in his pocket, but with AI, it went to zero by about end of 2024, so he was left with no income and lost all his (rather large) team. He started experimenting with products and after about 3-4 failed tries, landed a successful one which nearly replicates his old income, it is a mixed (live women and AI) porn webcam app. Took more than $2M sunk into dev and marketing costs before he hit PMF. He still spends almost everything he makes on research into new niches - fintech, trading, various scam niches, and more porn, but so far nothing else sticks. Yet, he is delighted to not have to run outsourcing shop anymore, and make same income with much smaller team and much more ethical line of business than outsourcing.

jgbmlg

7 years, or rather, more time than you expected is correct. Generally, success happens slowly. To succeed, just don't fail. If you keep your job, muddle along with your side business, avoiding debt, keeping your fixed costs low, and most importantly, survive, your customer base will grow and your competitors will melt away. If you are not luckier or earlier than others, you will still succeed by being more patient than others.

lyfeninja

Hang in there. It does take longer than you think and it's a marathon with a lot of peaks and valleys. You do need a market, not just a product. You also need to network to get input, partners, and build a BD pipeline. You don't necessarily need revenue at first, you need to prove external interest, whether that's a beta, pilot, or collaboration/partnership. All these things will add to your momentum.

nacozarina

People were sold on the lie that solo was the way to go. Solo, not one time in all of human history, has ever been the way to go. Of all the lies you could chose to believe in life, this one is the worst.

late_night_fix

I feel like it's not luck vs strategy.May be it's just time+ exposure.The more you build and put things out there,the higher you chances something clicks.

fiftyacorn

The issue is that building is the easy bit, but most devs lack sales and marketing Its like a builder cpuld build a doctor surgery but it doesnt make them a doctor

remyp

I'm attempting to solve this cold start problem by pooling money with other operators to buy an existing business. We're currently closing on our first acquisition and plan to do more if the experiment goes well[0]. Please feel free to reach out (contact in profile) if you're curious about the approach, I'm happy to answer any questions. [0] https://www.notion.so/notventurescale/Wild-Built-Incubator-2...

dzonga

go to the Harvard MBA for Bootstrappers i.e https://longform.asmartbear.com one of the recommended posts: https://longform.asmartbear.com/problem/ which goes to the heart of what you're experiencing. play in large markets, very large in absolute numbers i.e B2B but small enough not to attract major VC companies - again play in large markets - don't listen to indie-hacker influencers that are making stuff for other indie hackers. luckily everyone is running into A.I now - so there's plenty of things to be solved. not sexy, you've to look hard, screen hard (cz some opportunities look credible till you do the math i.e is there a large number of people, what is the willingness of those people to pay) most of your work will be in marketing (marketing not selling) i.e researching to find out which problem will people actually pay for - what are the market dynamics - then only will you code a product. tip: for a solo business - you've to be in an ecosystem kinda place.

aristofun

> This leads me to believe that most people either get lucky and then apply a framework in retrospect to justify their luck Yes, congratulations on finding the truth. This is the pattern 95% of business, psychology and other pseudoscience is built upon. The 2 main system reasons behind it: 1) any complex system cannot be really calculated farther in the future than a very short timeframe 2) natural human brain tendency to organize the observed universe into patterns. The good news is that if you keep buying lottery tickets your chances of winning at least once also grow.

fduran

There is def some luck involved, as in you don't know beforehand what's going to be successful. "You find a problem in a niche, say accounting for plumbers, and build for that, then you just go and market to these people". It's way better to work on something you are familiar with and you like.

adzicg

It's not impossible, it's just difficult :) Luck plays part like in anything, but consistency and persistence also makes it possible for luck to happen. I'd recommend scratching your itch first and then finding people in a similar situation. You know enough about your own problem to be able to design a solution around it, and you likely know some other people around that as well. Slice that segment into something worth attacking first. Bill Aulet defined the first group of people worth solving for as a "beachhead market". This is his test for that first segment: - the customers within the market should all buy similar products - the customers within the market should have a similar sales cycle and expect products to provide value in similar ways - the customers within the market talk to each other, and there is a high probability of word-of-mouth referrals, where customers can serve as a “compelling and high-value references for one another in making purchases”. The third one is for me the key to open doors as a solo founder. You probably don't have the marketing budget to compete with large companies, so word of mouth and happy customers will be your first best marketing strategy. SEO is black magic, and from my experience takes a long time to actually start working - happy customers doing word of mouth and writing/recommending you also helps significantly with that. Once this segment opens the doors, things will likely change for something else, then you follow the trail.

massi24

It's hard but not impossible, imo you should stop it instead of building. Nowadays people like us (swe) are stuck in the building process, but we should take the majority of the time thinking to solve real problems and to find them we should just take our time off the coding.

rozumem

I fell into the same trap of "build, and they will come" multiple times. Reading The Mom Test changed my perspective on things. I cannot recommend that book enough. Good luck. It's possible. I started my SaaS 8 yrs ago and it more than pays for my lifestyle.

borzi

Personal story time: for me it was falling for the indie hacker stuff near covid and realizing the same stuff. The best solo business is to pretend you are successful i.e. "I'm sitting on the beach sipping my drink while Claude is coding my app that's raking in 20k MRR, just use my {SEO|Social Media|Referral} tool and that will be you!". Hope to get enough people suckered in to become a "voice in the bootstrapper community" i.e. your posts filled with generic tropes get shared around X. But ultimately the product is the (fake) lifestyle. Most of the products in that eco system are not used by anyone in the productive economy, it's a pyramid ponzi of users believing they are getting valuable advice. That said, I do still build stuff "Solo", because I enjoy the process of making and I can take the time time to meet my own quality standards (classic trope in that community even before AI was "you just gotta build you MVP in 3 days, ship quickly!" and it ends up causing you to churn out soulless software that obviously nobody will use unless they are your bootstrapping internet buddy). Lot of people I know from those days are still trying to make it and wasted a lot of time/money! Not all bad for me personally though - I learned a lot about entrepeneurship, spotting fakes, etc. and was much more naive and younger then.

setnone

Obvious thought: don't go solo?

brador

Make things people want and are willing to pay for. Verify that. Done. The coding is the easy part in 2026.

Bikram2112

I used to think the same few months back about the process. But then I learnt that 80% of sales is marketing efforts and that too educational.

maxaw

It is “simple” Find out what people want Make it Sell it to them Unfortunately, engineer brain loves to skip step 1 Ive recently become friends with a younger person who makes a lot of money off vibe coded mini saas. He is fanatical about step 1. If he can’t find n people begging him to make it he will go validate the next idea. He’s ruthless with this aspect and will drop an idea instantly if people dont care. It really woke me up to the reality of it all. Made me realise how much i delude myself into making things people dont want because i enjoy the making process. I will at best half ass step 1 and the proceed to spend a few months hand crafting some software no one wants. Meanwhile he spends two months validating and one month vibe coding something that people would be embarrassed to post on HN and then sell 100usd/month subscriptions to it. Its crazy