Just keep that in mind.
You're not alone.
It's a grind and most times it ends up in a u-turn, z-flip or shut-down.
It's good to celebrate other people's wins but it can also be demotivating when you don't see your hard work take off.
The biggest mistakes I see people do when they announce they're shutting down after months/years of trying to turn a dollar profit are listed below:
- No product market fit
- Can't find acquisition channel that works for your audience/niche
- Too focused on the tech, no skills in sales (or doing it badly causing you to burn yourself with potential customers)
- Burning out by overworking on things that don't matter because you didn't talk to your potential customers
- Inability to throw a landing page together that sells the product for you
- Focusing on vanity metrics (like twitter followers, blog posts shares, etc) instead of your "north star metric"
- Losing passion for your own product
This shit is actually hard, you need skills, balance and a ton of luck too.
Anything else I missed? let me know in the comments!
The biggest mistake I see is trying to solve a problem no one has. Or building a "solution in search for a problem". I feel like it's much easier to keep going if I deeply care about the problem I try to solve and the people I serve.
To be fair, a lot of us don't share all our numbers here. I have four different friends who have products earning over 1k/month and have posted here. Only one of them shared the revenue for those products.
Also sometimes we can't. I did over 1k in sales from a book last month but it's on Gumroad and the only revenue verification on IH is Stripe.
You can add self-reported revenue on IH as well.
This. If you want to add the revenue that isn't verified, that's probably because you either are too "lazy" to update it constantly or you didn't know about the feature
I can but it's specifically labeled as self-reported. It has no more credibility, and probably less, than my blog post or twitter thread on it would.
Where the point in lying? We are but a small community of makers, if anything you will just hurt your brand image
What an odd and offensive comment to make in this context.
I have zero interest in lying to you or anyone here. I see lying as something that falls on the spectrum of violence. I don't even want to be adjacent to something that can be construed as deceptive.
It should go without saying that someone who hesitates to post their revenue here unless it can be verified is not interested in lying to this "small community of makers" about it. Verification would make such lying impossible.
@alchemist, I didn't say YOU were lying, I'm talking generally. If anyone would fake their revenue here on IH, they only got their rep to lose.
Funny how in English YOU can be used for both YOU the person and YOU the crowd...guess I should have used the word "they". Woops!
Ah, gotcha. I tend to agree, though for people selling info products about how to make money online, there's an incentive to inflate their own online earnings.
finding channels can be easy sometimes, but the problem is how to use these channels! It's hard to find a proper way to put your product in front of other people, and if you do, you'll get banned a lot.
Marketing is hard, it's the biggest problem for every founder.
Founders should start thinking seriously about marketing before building any product.
This. It took me 6 or 7 months to find a channel that worked. And that's just one channel.
It's a valid post and you have listed all the major reasons why people may fail. But the way I look at those success posts is that they help keep the faith.
When you see others, even a couple of folks a day, posting about their success, it inspires them to succeed. We learn from their successes and want to repeat in our own businesses.
I don't think anyone on IH is under the illusion that failures are inevitable on the path to success. But they still want to grind it out. That's the beauty of a forum like IH - to keep the fire going as a group.
It's also taxing on the mental health of those who keep grinding, it's not always the thing that proves to be the right thing to do.
It's the middle class of the creator economy. That's why underdogs inspire me.
we hit $1k mrr here but it's still a grind, hustle, daily questioning. I was reading this interview of Upstart's co-founder who just got introduced in Nasdaq and in his words, even at his stage, he's still questioning everything and unsure of a lot of things happening
This post is spot on - all of the bullet points. I can relate to a couple of them and the post reminded me once again to finally get my shit together and tackle those weak spots. Thanks for that.
Yep it's hard, especially when you are alone!
This is very accurate. I think it's especially hard for those who are also juggling a full time job with side projects, pouring all their free time in their side projects with hopes of them taking off, but in reality there is low chance of succeeding even if you did everything in the right way.
The biggest lever of growth is actually the idea itself.
Many people don't realize that the idea dictates the market.
If you're solving a valuable problem, the MRR comes very naturally.
We're mostly quite adept at execution, so execution is rarely the limiting factor.
It's idea + distribution that's mostly limiting growth.
True. I hate that saying that idea is worth $1. We all love to say execution is everything but actually it’s easier to execute if the idea is good (on different levels). That’s especially true for us, people working on stuff on the side.
Very true, I would also add at the top -
• Not solving any real problem, building something because you can and expecting others will want it too.
But what if in reality for every 1,000 sucessful people, there is only 1 failing? ;)
Are you suggesting successful people are less likely to voice their success?
";)" at the end suggests it was a humorous comment!
You hit the bull's eye @orliesaurus!
Thanks, I am just trying to remind everyone that we're mostly all running the same marathon, very few of us are already celebrating!
Just a few years ago I had the chance to chat with a billionaire while washing his windows on his 5 multi- million dollar lake houses lol.
The one thing he told me was he was at the right place, right time and got lucky. I was a little upset that he wouldn't give me any other advice than that. But I've found the same with my business. I work hard, but I have to attribute any success to luck as well haha.
Always, with hard work comes the needs of great luck
I 100% agree. I have created a bunch of Alexa skills and gotten very lucky with organic traffic and no marketing. You can't get too far without a bit of luck :)
A lot of posers and those throwing spaghetti at the wall every few weeks it seems. I call it "playing startup". The dangerous thing is they want you to get all amped up and involved in their ongoing stream of hairbrained ideas. Got to be real careful or else you will waste a ton of time chasing someone else's bad dream.
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.