I'm Quitting Indie Hacking & Here's Why
In 2023, everyone is a millionaire.
Every single Twitter post shares how this person started a million-dollar business, such as making $10K in a day selling buttons or how a 17-year-old made $50K selling a card game.
Or better yet, how I made $30,000 in a single weekend dropshipping backpacks.
However, what you don't hear are the people with multiple failed businesses struggling daily.
You don't hear about people like me who have started various businesses, from reselling and Instagram theme pages to packing groceries for people (yes, I did this), creating a clothing brand, a dating app, selling water bottles, podcasting, newsletters, eBay flipping, curb painting, and offering SAT prep services.
These failed ventures don't catch headlines, and I assure you, I have so many ideas and cool stories to share, but they'll never see the light of day.
These stories fail to consider survivor's bias and the numerous failed software, grand ideas, TikTok brands, and startups that you'll never see.
The richest ideas are the ones that failed due to one reason or another.
Most of the success stories had luck, opportunities, or advantages that can't be explained in a Twitter thread.
I truly believe the greatest ideas that failed are more relatable than the "multi-millionaire who sold a sponge or a comfortable blanket."
Most of us who have failed have nowhere here to share our stories, and neither do most people on the internet.
Imagine the stories, ideas, or interesting components of the guy who tried to start a virtual restaurant, sold funny shirts, had celebrity promotions but never got it off the ground.
Where are they?
The little guy never gets to share their upbringing because all these people get their dopamine from big stories/headlines from exceptional outliers.
I started a twitter where people share their interesting business stories that failed. We'd learn much more from that.
Follow me on twitter for stories/lessons on failed startups-https://twitter.com/bizflops
I would go in different direction. If you pick something, then you have to work on this for some time, I'm talking here about few years. Miracles happens when you persevere, lot's of unknown door's open, you dive deep into problems and try to solve it. Jumping from project to project means that you solve only problems on the surface, which basically everyone does, so competition is big here. I've been there and failed few times. There is saying that what separates successful people from non successful is pure perseverance. Maybe there is a catch? I'm working on a project for 4 years now. Is it successful? Not really, but I'm seeing more and more competitors abandon the project from various of reasons. Yes, new guys are coming, but they have a lot to learn until they compete for real with you. So I would choose to stick to a project and try to figure out what works. You can go little bit wider with the decisions, and maybe functionality of the project, but we should all stay with one eye open and try to seek for opportunities.
Weakness: dopamine
There are so many situations where people don't take survivor bias into account. And bootstrapped startups is probably one of the most extreme. But there's no good way to determine how much of a factor it is, though it'd be interesting to try to construct some kind of experiment where would-be founders signed up, then were followed up with periodically. Tons of the startups would fail, but more interesting would be seeing what percentage are like you: tried lots of things and none of them took off.
Having said all that, people who have built a successful business, and especially those who've built them several times, certainly have something to teach us about what you have to do. They may have an overinflated view of how likely success is or how much of a factor luck and connections and so on helped their own businesses, but they still had to tackle and solve a lot of challenges to succeed.