[csallen]

> Some of it may seem simple. Don’t be fooled. There is complexity in simple things.

I've interviewed 80+ founders (mostly bootstrapped) for https://IndieHackers.com, and people sometimes come away from reading an interview thinking, "Well that person had it easy." We tend to underestimate the importance of the things we don't -- the part of the iceberg that's beneath the surface. In truth, the amount of work people are doing behind the scenes is often of staggering importance.

For example, Jason Grishkoff ran his popular music blog Indie Shuffle for 7 years before spinning off a successful SaaS app: SubmitHub. It's easy to look at that and conclude that he had it easy because of his blog. But Jason spent a grueling 4 months sending 1000 hand-crafted emails to his target customers in order to get SubmitHub off the ground. That's neither an easy nor an obvious path to take.

I see lots of people quit after a few weeks/months of not finding a magic bullet, so it's important to realize that there is no magic bullet for most companies.

[pryelluw]

Exactly. Its hard work. Really hard work. It usually fails. You have to begin from square one. People think the path the magic bullet exists. It doesn't. What exists is hard and educated work. The secret being that there is no secret. Just don't tell that to wannabes. They will talk about the magic of being an entrepreneur. Which is bullshit.

[realstuff]

How ironic of you showing in the particular post. He's precisely referring to people like you and your illegitimate interviewees at IndieHackers who all claim to be overnight successes.

[equalarrow]

"How ironic of you showing in the particular post. He's precisely referring to people like you and your illegitimate interviewees at IndieHackers who all claim to be overnight successes."

This is a complete bullshit statement.

I've read every interview and Csallen has made on IH - it's a solid site with great interviews. I haven't read anywhere where he or any of the interviewees has claimed overnight success. Quite the opposite really. He's done a lot of hard work.

I don't think he's misrepresented anything and he built a great site. I wish him all the best!

[csallen]

Nobody on Indie Hackers has ever claimed to be an overnight success, and every interview is transparent about the details so that readers can see exactly how long it took.

[matrix]

To be fair, he has a point. The indyhackers Submit hub article is sub-titled:

"Jason Grishkoff built a $55,000/mo SaaS business helping musicians promote their music, and he did it in under a year. Here's how."

[csallen]

Well, he started his business in November 2015, started charging in February 2016, and hit $55k/mo by November 2016. I don't see any hyperbole/dishonesty in saying he built his business in under a year given that he actually did so. Sometimes rapid growth happens!

Of course him being able to accomplish this feat stems from skills/knowledge he acquired earlier (his blog, music industry experience, learning to code, learning to design, etc), but that's true of any business. Nobody starts from scratch, and the interviews cover people's histories pretty thoroughly.

[wheelerwj]

No he started his original blog years earlier, he pivoted/made a new product and sold it to the same audience. That's like saying google built the macbook pro 16 in under a year.

[csallen]

This is misinformed on a number of points, unfortunately.

First, Jason didn't "pivot" from Indie Shuffle. It's a separate standalone business that he never shut down, and in fact continues to spend many hours running even today.

Second, SubmitHub's user base consists of hundreds of other blogs and labels, whom he spent a painstaking 4 months sending 1000+ personalized emails to trying to convince them to sign up. They're responsible for the vast majority of his revenue. He did not simply keep "the same audience".

This is exactly what I was talking about when I said that people read these stories and conclude that everything was easy.

[realstuff]

Right, like the story from the other day where you claimed the logo site was making huge sum a year... Based on one or two weeks of sales!!!

[csallen]

There was no claim about yearly revenue. The figure given was $15k/mo based on $7k of sales in one week. Even so, that was a singular oversight on my part[1], not some sort of formula for all the interviews on the site.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13072326

[brianwawok]

Keep writing it's good stuff :)