Ask HN: Building a solo business is impossible

The "build it and they will come" trap is real, I fell into it too. Been building a P2P marketplace solo for ~2 years and spent way too long on features nobody asked for.

What changed for me was accepting that the code is the easy part. I can ship endpoints all day with Claude Code but that doesn't mean anyone cares. The hard part is the stuff that doesn't feel like "real work" to an engineer -- talking to potential users, figuring out distribution, writing landing page copy that actually communicates the value.

I don't think most people who succeeded are liars but I do think they massively understate how much of their success was finding the right niche before writing a single line of code. The "build something you need" advice only works if you're representative of a paying market. I needed my own tool once and built it. Turns out I was the only person who needed it that way.

The vibe coding push makes it worse imo because it makes the building part feel even more trivial, which tricks you into thinking you're closer to a business than you are. You're not. You have an artifact. A business needs distribution and that's a completely different skill that most of us never learned.

No silver bullet from me either, still figuring it out myself. But at least I stopped building features and started talking to people.

It’s not impossible, but it takes way longer than people expect. Building is easy the real challenge is finding customers and distribution that actually works.

It's not impossible, it's just difficult :) Luck plays part like in anything, but consistency and persistence also makes it possible for luck to happen.

I'd recommend scratching your itch first and then finding people in a similar situation. You know enough about your own problem to be able to design a solution around it, and you likely know some other people around that as well. Slice that segment into something worth attacking first. Bill Aulet defined the first group of people worth solving for as a "beachhead market". This is his test for that first segment:

- the customers within the market should all buy similar products

- the customers within the market should have a similar sales cycle and expect products to provide value in similar ways

- the customers within the market talk to each other, and there is a high probability of word-of-mouth referrals, where customers can serve as a “compelling and high-value references for one another in making purchases”.

The third one is for me the key to open doors as a solo founder. You probably don't have the marketing budget to compete with large companies, so word of mouth and happy customers will be your first best marketing strategy. SEO is black magic, and from my experience takes a long time to actually start working - happy customers doing word of mouth and writing/recommending you also helps significantly with that.

Once this segment opens the doors, things will likely change for something else, then you follow the trail.

Do some freelancing to see what problems people will pay you to solve, then figure out if it is a good problem to solve at scale.

It is very difficult, especially if you need it to be an instant success (i.e. replace your salary before you are homeless).

I have a project (a new kind of general-purpose data management system) that I have worked on for over 10 years. In the beginning, I hoped it would 'take off' and replace my salary. I was never able to quit my day job because it was so lucrative.

Now I am retired. I still work on it in bursts (spend many hours for a week to get something working, then don't touch it for a month); but I treat it like a hobby.

Maybe it will catch on (it does some amazing things with large data sets), but maybe it won't. I try to spread the word on forums or in my blog, but I am not a big marketing guy and there is so much noise out there that everything gets lost.

Good luck. You will probably need it.

I don't think it's impossible, but absolutely incredibly difficult. I tried everything.

Shopify stores, blogs (even owned a #1 tech blog), local job boards, global job boards, dating sites (which were shut down due to payment providers refusing to service these types of sites), various SaaS sites, etc.

Nothing made any real money. I don't know if it's just me - perhaps I'm just not meant to succeed here - but I'm still trying. Still building.

I think the biggest downer was when I built the coolest SaaS for martial arts academies. I thought it was guaranteed success, as I am involved in these communities, know a ton of owners. I reached out to all of them. Offered a free setup/trial. None of them cared, or even attempted to use it.

Likewise, I just built the coolest browser extension for chess players (in my opinion). I run a local chess club. Thought everyone would want to at least try it out. Maybe 2 users installed it. Lol.

I just stopped caring, and I look at it in a new way. Yeah, I may not have paying customers for projects, but I am expanding my portfolio. These are real assets that I own. The process is fun. Abandon the idea of making money, and it becomes more enjoyable.

There is def some luck involved, as in you don't know beforehand what's going to be successful.

"You find a problem in a niche, say accounting for plumbers, and build for that, then you just go and market to these people". It's way better to work on something you are familiar with and you like.

Hang in there. It does take longer than you think and it's a marathon with a lot of peaks and valleys.

You do need a market, not just a product. You also need to network to get input, partners, and build a BD pipeline. You don't necessarily need revenue at first, you need to prove external interest, whether that's a beta, pilot, or collaboration/partnership. All these things will add to your momentum.

7 years, or rather, more time than you expected is correct. Generally, success happens slowly. To succeed, just don't fail. If you keep your job, muddle along with your side business, avoiding debt, keeping your fixed costs low, and most importantly, survive, your customer base will grow and your competitors will melt away. If you are not luckier or earlier than others, you will still succeed by being more patient than others.

I am in same boat as well. What I learned from my experience and others' experience after talking to them is that

1. You need to focus on the problems that really do exist and for which people might willing to pay for.

2. Marketing and Distribution skills are more Important than your Engineering skills.

3. Good Things take time, if your product is useful and good as well, then it is just a matter of time and marketing. Eventually it will gain traction, so don't loose hope.

There is a saying that it takes 10 years to be an overnight success.

It is “simple” Find out what people want Make it Sell it to them Unfortunately, engineer brain loves to skip step 1

Ive recently become friends with a younger person who makes a lot of money off vibe coded mini saas. He is fanatical about step 1. If he can’t find n people begging him to make it he will go validate the next idea. He’s ruthless with this aspect and will drop an idea instantly if people dont care. It really woke me up to the reality of it all. Made me realise how much i delude myself into making things people dont want because i enjoy the making process. I will at best half ass step 1 and the proceed to spend a few months hand crafting some software no one wants. Meanwhile he spends two months validating and one month vibe coding something that people would be embarrassed to post on HN and then sell 100usd/month subscriptions to it. Its crazy

I too am in a similar situation, where I am building a niche product - partly for my own benefit, partly for learning, but mostly with the idea of selling it as a commercial product.

I have plenty of worries about it - will the product sell at all, is the product too niche so I'll have sales but not enough to make it full time, am I barking up the wrong tree and there is already an open source free alternative that I've somehow missed, what if nobody likes it? All sorts of stuff, some warranted, and some just the usual fear of making something and putting it out there.

With that being said I do consider a big portion of success being luck, as any one lucky event could catapult you to riches, and any unlucky event could ruin any chance of that happening, but in the end you have to take a risk and put yourself out there for the lucky events to happen.

But as with all risky things you have to be prepared for it all to go to shit, and then have enough of a support network which will help you get back onto your feet.

I genuinely hope that other people have some more concrete advice here or even war stories to tell.

I'm attempting to solve this cold start problem by pooling money with other operators to buy an existing business. We're currently closing on our first acquisition and plan to do more if the experiment goes well[0].

Please feel free to reach out (contact in profile) if you're curious about the approach, I'm happy to answer any questions.

[0] https://www.notion.so/notventurescale/Wild-Built-Incubator-2...

It's hard but not impossible, imo you should stop it instead of building. Nowadays people like us (swe) are stuck in the building process, but we should take the majority of the time thinking to solve real problems and to find them we should just take our time off the coding.

go to the Harvard MBA for Bootstrappers i.e https://longform.asmartbear.com

one of the recommended posts: https://longform.asmartbear.com/problem/ which goes to the heart of what you're experiencing.

play in large markets, very large in absolute numbers i.e B2B but small enough not to attract major VC companies - again play in large markets - don't listen to indie-hacker influencers that are making stuff for other indie hackers.

luckily everyone is running into A.I now - so there's plenty of things to be solved. not sexy, you've to look hard, screen hard (cz some opportunities look credible till you do the math i.e is there a large number of people, what is the willingness of those people to pay)

most of your work will be in marketing (marketing not selling) i.e researching to find out which problem will people actually pay for - what are the market dynamics - then only will you code a product.

tip: for a solo business - you've to be in an ecosystem kinda place.

I've been working in software dilligence for 7 years now and have worked with 100+ companies getting purchased or raising late-stage investement as an assessor, so I've had the rare privilege of seeing the insides of a whole bunch of companies that are doing well (PE doesn't buy companies that aren't doing well). And if there's one conclusion I can draw from this its...

Your idea bloody well does matter.

The myth that "your idea doesn't matter, it's all about execution" is complete nonsense. Successful businesses are built by people who understand a problem domain well enough to see how to solve a problem that people will pay more for than it costs to solve the problem, where "costs to solve the problem" encompasses everything, especially all the non-functional requirements.

The world is full of failed software companies where no one thought through all the cost ramifications of getting and serving a customer and figured out whether their idea will fly as a long-term profitable business. And it's also full of complete crap software (or software that started out as crap and then improved) that makes founders lots of cash because the idea was actually something people want to pay for.

I will also say, yes it takes years for most of these companies.

I used to think the same few months back about the process. But then I learnt that 80% of sales is marketing efforts and that too educational.

Personal story time: for me it was falling for the indie hacker stuff near covid and realizing the same stuff.

The best solo business is to pretend you are successful i.e. "I'm sitting on the beach sipping my drink while Claude is coding my app that's raking in 20k MRR, just use my {SEO|Social Media|Referral} tool and that will be you!". Hope to get enough people suckered in to become a "voice in the bootstrapper community" i.e. your posts filled with generic tropes get shared around X. But ultimately the product is the (fake) lifestyle. Most of the products in that eco system are not used by anyone in the productive economy, it's a pyramid ponzi of users believing they are getting valuable advice.

That said, I do still build stuff "Solo", because I enjoy the process of making and I can take the time time to meet my own quality standards (classic trope in that community even before AI was "you just gotta build you MVP in 3 days, ship quickly!" and it ends up causing you to churn out soulless software that obviously nobody will use unless they are your bootstrapping internet buddy).

Lot of people I know from those days are still trying to make it and wasted a lot of time/money! Not all bad for me personally though - I learned a lot about entrepeneurship, spotting fakes, etc. and was much more naive and younger then.

I feel like it's not luck vs strategy.May be it's just time+ exposure.The more you build and put things out there,the higher you chances something clicks.

The issue is that building is the easy bit, but most devs lack sales and marketing

Its like a builder cpuld build a doctor surgery but it doesnt make them a doctor

If you’re an expert in a particular niche and people just bring you work, then being a solo operator works fine.

You choose which engagements to take on based on your own capacity, and you’re not burning cycles on business development etc.

Obvious thought: don't go solo?

People were sold on the lie that solo was the way to go.

Solo, not one time in all of human history, has ever been the way to go.

Of all the lies you could chose to believe in life, this one is the worst.

> This leads me to believe that most people either get lucky and then apply a framework in retrospect to justify their luck

Yes, congratulations on finding the truth.

This is the pattern 95% of business, psychology and other pseudoscience is built upon.

The 2 main system reasons behind it: 1) any complex system cannot be really calculated farther in the future than a very short timeframe 2) natural human brain tendency to organize the observed universe into patterns.

The good news is that if you keep buying lottery tickets your chances of winning at least once also grow.

I fell into the same trap of "build, and they will come" multiple times. Reading The Mom Test changed my perspective on things. I cannot recommend that book enough. Good luck. It's possible. I started my SaaS 8 yrs ago and it more than pays for my lifestyle.

Yes, first you have to accept that it doesn't take 7 months but rather years. It is really really really hard to build a business with real revenue (did I stress on the word really?). It is even harder to build it solo.

Most of the solo success story you hear either had expertise in their fields OR built something to truly solve their own problem first and then expanded to others and it usually takes 18-24 months or higher to hit some sort of escape velocity. Most people think that magic will happen in 2-3 months and then give up after that and you have to go longer than that. The risk is high but that is what it takes.

Now with AI and vibe coding, more products will be built but the hard part remains: how to find customers, sustainably support them and keep growing. There is no shortcut to it.

My suggestion:

1. Pick a very niche problem that you have some familiarity or can relate to. You don't need to be an expert in it but you have to feel that you truly want to work on it to make a sustainably living.

2. Build an MVP in 30 days max. With AI, this shouldn't be an issue. If going beyond 30 days, you are doing too much coding.

3. You have to find where your potential customers are and you have to do it MANUALLY. no automation bs. no ads (you don't have money and unsure if you know your target audience yet). So right now, you are trying to figure out who your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) may be. You don't know yet. This can take months or even a couple of years (the scary part). But you have to do this manually. Go on Linkedin or use services like builtwith etc to figure out who may be using a similar product or a potential competitor. Then you have to email/call them directly.

4. You must have a social media profile. Look at the successful solo ones. they talk about EVERYGTHING online, I mean EVERYTHING. That helps build a personal brand which helps as a solo business owner.

5. Content Marketing. Sorry you are the marketer for your company. You cannot hire someone else to do that for you. YOU have to write the blog posts, YOU have to post the social media posts, YOU have to make those videos. And you gotta do it all if you want any chance of succeeding in 2026.

6. You have to go hard and specific for at least 12-18 months. This is the hardest part. Most people want quick results and if they don't see anything in 3-4 months, they give up. The goal is to see if you got at least 1 customer in say first 3 months. If you did, keep going and get the 2nd then 3rd. Note that your first few customers MAY NOT be your ICP but they will teach you what you need to know to build a successful product.

7. One tip: Being completely solo is overrated. I am not talking about co-founders. I am not talking about being solo founder but with a small team. That gives you a lot more mileage than just being by yourself. Yes it is hard to build a small team especially early on with no money but don't overthink the solo stuff and find 2-3 google people to work with if you can. Not necessarily as founders but freelancers/employees who can work in a small setup.

Source: Even though I am not solo by myself, I am a solo bootstrapped founder with a very small team that built a reasonably successful B2B SAAS business doing single digit million ARR. Not impressive by an VC standard but has given me everything for 10+ years and I love it.

I know one guy who actually succeeded. He ran a hard-mode outsourcing shop for like, 15 years, for many years making 100-150K/month net in his pocket, but with AI, it went to zero by about end of 2024, so he was left with no income and lost all his (rather large) team. He started experimenting with products and after about 3-4 failed tries, landed a successful one which nearly replicates his old income, it is a mixed (live women and AI) porn webcam app. Took more than $2M sunk into dev and marketing costs before he hit PMF. He still spends almost everything he makes on research into new niches - fintech, trading, various scam niches, and more porn, but so far nothing else sticks.

Yet, he is delighted to not have to run outsourcing shop anymore, and make same income with much smaller team and much more ethical line of business than outsourcing.

Make things people want and are willing to pay for.

Verify that.

Done.

The coding is the easy part in 2026.