1
My solopreneur story
Today is exactly 2 years since I quit my job and become a full-time indie hacker.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 83 posts.
2
Going full time on my SaaS after 13 years
In January 2010 I soft-launched launched Preceden, a web-based timeline maker tool, followed a few weeks later by a larger launch on HackerNews: Today – almost 13 years to the day since the i…
3
Don't Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company
Why VC funding can hurt startups: selling equity for cash, chasing traction over profitability, and why bootstrapping may be safer for founders.
4
We raised a bunch of money
Documentation and guides from the team at Fly.io.
5
Why you shouldn't join Y Combinator
Or why YC is good for the economy but bad for your economy
6
Changes at YC
In recent years, we have also done some late stage investing. But late stage investing turned out to be so different from early stage that we found it to be a distraction from our core mission. So we’re going to decrease the amount of late stage investing we do.
7
8
9
Your small imprecise ask is a big waste of their time
When managers and leaders don't specify the expected time investment of an ask, the time that is invested is almost never what was intended.
10
11
It's okay to make something nobody wants
产品看起来是给用户用的，但我觉得这可能是一种假象，它实际上更像是一种自我表达。 许多表达被不同的人创造出来，经历了自然选择后，存活下来的那一个，是用户喜欢的那个。 我的意思是，这个过程是这么发生的：你做一个东西，不是“我觉得他们可能需要这个”而做，而是“我觉得这个有点意思”而做。然后，别人在使用你的产品时，感受到了与你相同的那种感受，这时他说：“我觉得这个有点意思”。 从这个角度来说，产品就像一种情绪的存储器，作者存进去，复制一千份，用户从产品中取出来。 你不能自己不含任何情感，却期望用户使用后带有情感。 我觉得即使做了个没人想要的东西，也没关系。你唯一需要做的是确保你已经完整呈现了你的情感。…
12
Beeper – Moving Forward
Each time that Beeper Mini goes ‘down’ or is made to be unreliable due to interference by Apple, Beeper’s credibility takes a hit. It’s unsustainable. As much as we want to fight for what we believ…
13
We ran a phone check at a Y Combinator event in SF
*the full story is now on the official clearspace blog
14
Kagi raises $670k
Kagi has successfully raised $670K in a SAFE note investment round, marking our first external fundraise to date. This was made possible with the participation of 42 accredited investors, most of whom are actual Kagi users....
15
Why to start a startup in a bad economy (2008)
October 2008 The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. When Microsoft and Apple were founded. As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup. I'm not claiming it's a particularly good time either…
16
Stocketa – An app I designed, built and never launched
A dive into the app I designed, built and never launched. Stocketa was a personal project developed to serve as a simple stock portfolio tracker for casual investors. The app was built using Swift and SwiftUl and offered a custom UI, comprehensive transaction tracking, and a variety of features.
17
Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
The Leteyski family — Ruslan & Tihomira. Links, profiles and more.
18
I bought back my acquihired startup
I wrote about my language learning startup, Readlang , back in 2014 , and then again in 2016 , both times attracting attention on Hacker News, where my story of a struggling one-man startup seemed to resonate. Well, it’s now 7 years later, and a bunch has happened since, so it’s time for an update…
19
11 years of hosting a SaaS
Lots of mistakes, some uptime too.
20
Docker 2.0 went from $11M to $135M in 2 years
Just 2 years after laying off 80% of their team and being left for dead, we estimate Docker is now at $135M+ ARR growing roughly 150% YoY—and rebuilding Docker 2.0 as a bottom-up, developer-first company. For more on Docker’s future, check out our interview with Docker CEO Scott Johnston along with our Docker profile…
21
Welcome to Datasette Cloud
Datasette Cloud is the new SaaS hosting platform for the Datasette open source project. It enables teams to create a private collaboration space, upload and share data securely with each other, and then selectively publish that data to the world.
22
23
Revenue is easy, profit is harder
The fundamentals needed to run a business in the next economic cycle.
24
25
MK-1
AMD acquires MK1, welcoming their world-class team and marking another key milestone in our strategy to advance AI performance and efficiency.
26
Part II: The failure points from $5M to $100M in ARR
I had the privilege of leading PlanGrid to $100M in ARR before I stepped down as CEO and passed the baton to Autodesk Construction. I’ve had years to dissect the mistakes I have made in my first...
27
How long it took different companies to find product-market fit
Part five of my seven-part series on kickstarting and scaling a B2B business
28
29
I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again
For almost two years now, the vast majority of our backend code was written in Rust (aside from a little bit of Python). I love Rust, it’s by far my favorite language. I find myself missing match in pretty much every other language I go to. However, if I was doing it over, I wouldn’t choose Rust. This advice is…
30
Things I learned after getting users
last month, i posted about my website basement community on hacker news and it sorta blew up. you can view the post here. it blew up so much, i was totally u...