What styles of businesses are really hard to make money from?

Selling to selling to public school systems is a no go for me.

They basically combine the worst traits of B2C and enterprise B2B. Large enterprises have long, unpredictable sales processes but huge amounts of money to spend. Consumers are price-sensitive, but don't require high-touch sales processes and often buy things very impulsively.

Public school systems tend to have crazy winding, slow sales cycles and they're extremely frugal. To make matters even worse, there's an additional level of political concerns that make it possible to make a product that students, parents, teachers and administrators all love but still fail.

It's a huge market, but I really don't recommend it for indiehackers.

Gotta say B2C marketplaces.

I've been running one since almost two years now. For a SaaS, my stats would look amazing: 3k registered users, 80 paying customers at an average price of $100/mo.

As a marketplace, you only get to keep a slim percentage of that. You also rarely are able to do something about churn, refunds and chargebacks because it's usually the supplier messing up (which obviously falls back to you who needs to train them, but not always).

It's a hard business with twice the effort for half the yield.

Travel businesses. Usage doesn't happen enough so they don't become a habit, and most are trying to travel as cheaply as possible.

The canonical example is a two-sided marketplace. When you have to create the buyer and seller pool, this can effectively double your cost.
Example: Uber for delivering supplies to contractors. Not only do you have to find the people willing to do the deliveries, you also have to create the demand for them with the contractors.

Music is pretty tricky. A lot of the streaming services have restrictions on how to monetize if you use their api. If you don't use their API you'll likely get sued by somebody if you grow large enough.

Source: I built JQBX (https://www.jqbx.fm) a couple years back. I'm happy w/ the community we built but along the way I brainstormed a bunch of different ways to monetize and came up short.

I think if your costs are low enough you can make money almost with any BS, if you are able to sell it 😃
So I guess keeping it simple is the way

I think a very common one you see on sites like this is - selling stuff to entrepreneurs and early stage startups.

People do it because it's what they know best, but most of the time they're just picking the market segment with the lowest budget, least amount of focus and time and least clear/fastest changing requirements.

Do you ever see indie hackers working on things you just know will be so hard to make any money from?

Yes - I'd say >80% of founders I see (on IH and elsewhere) are working on things that will be super hard to make any profit from.

This normally boils down to one main reason...

Founders working on a product where customer acquisition will cost more than the customer will pay them.

IMO this stems from a mix of wishful thinking, fundamental misunderstanding of how expensive/difficult marketing can be, and bad advice from 'the bootstrapper community.'

I talk a bit about it in this short Twitter thread, which I'm slowly turning into a blog post.

B2C and dev tools.

I'll also add that I don't think most people here are working on hard things or even hard businesses. I'm just not convinced that most really understand product/market fit, marketing & sales.

Anything outside of your core domain.
Anything you really freaking hate.

I would stay away from B2C mobile apps that try to charge their users using in app purchases. It's hard enough to convince a user to fork up even $1, and Apple takes a 30% cut. Imagine spending thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours just to make $0.70 per sale.