He basically gets a spot in the family business which he uses as a launchpad to creating a SaaS product. Come on, this title is so far off from reality. No problem with what he did and it sounds like he does a great job, but let's at least keep the titles from indiehackers somewhat accurate. It gives a lot of people thinking about starting their own company really unrealistic expectations.
I understand and partially agree with you. But imagine a wannabe entrepreneur that is attracted by the title and go on to read the interview on how to do it. He/she will actually have a very clear expectation on how to "bootstrap a business into $18k monthly".
Indiehackers, in my opinion, provides a very valuable service of providing a reality check for those dreaming with "easy" revenue from digital products. "Oh, this guy actually built an audience for years before launching the business", "Oh, this other guy actually had a successful business to work as launchpad of his business", "Oh, thi guy actually started from scratch, but his revenue is in the hundreds per month for now and I have doubts if even that is sustainable".
If someone is planning to launch a bootstrapping business and stumble upon Indiehackers I have no doubt he/she will be better prepared to do it after reading these interviews.
As someone who has known Elliot from the Chicago scene for the last ~10 years, I have to push back on this.
Elliot hustled his ass off doing his own thing, working recruiting for Groupon, working as one of the founding employees of DevBootcamp Chicago to get graduates gigs (and doing so with great success), and then back to his own recruiting before launching Human Predictions based on feedback from his clients and experiences.
He became, at least in my circles, the most trusted recruiter amongst developers. Many thought of him as more of an "agent" than a recruiter. Someone you could grab coffee with every six months who'd keep you in mind if the perfect gig came up. I referred friends to him all the time without concern that he'd spam them, hard-sell them, put them in whatever spot that was open just to reap the commission. He's always had the developer's interest in mind first and foremost.
I understand the sentiment that these stories can sometimes over-simplify the journey. Yes, he had the privilege of learning the family business at a young age. But it's not as if "having a dad that does X" makes it a trivial effort to launch a SaaS that does X. In Elliot's case, there was at least ten years of self-motivated hustle in-between.
Absolutely agree with you and my apologies if my comment made it out to sound like I felt like he did not work for what he has accomplished.
> No problem with what he did and it sounds like he does a great job
My comment was about the indiehackers title and link. It seems to be a pretty common occurrence for that site to greatly exaggerate the 0 to $X and this article is unfortunately no exception. Much respect to Elliot for all he has accomplished.
IH founder here. Why do you think the title is exaggerated? He did start his business less than one year ago.
Of course, any business depends on the skillset and knowledge that its founders started to build previous to its founding, but how do you put a start date on that? To build a company, you need business skills, a network, money, programming knowledge... for that you probably need professional experience... for that you need the ability to read and write... etc. Where do you draw the line? Everything always depends on what came before it. People get this. They aren't naive enough to believe that founders are born on day 1 of their companies with no previous life experience or knowledge of the world.
I agree it's dishonest to refer to a 5-year-old business as "an overnight success" as often happens, but how exactly is it misleading to call a 1-year old-business a 1-year-old business?
Here is a link to the HN discussion to the article I assume you are thinking about. The wording was a bit different, which may have been why you didn't find it.
The underlying assumption seems to be that everyone uses LinkedIn/Facebook/Twitter. While it would be largely true, not everyone uses those. What would your tool say about them?
Unfortunately because we are just looking at public data online (including Github, StackOverflow, and Meetup) if people don't use those services (or contribute to open source) we won't discover them or be able to a make a prediction about their likeliness to leave.
One of the things about a small, bootstrapped operation like this is that you have to pick and choose your battles. The answer may very well be "we require data from X, Y and Z". Sure, this cuts out a lot of the market, but you don't need a ton to do ok with a small business like that.
Just started using UTM query params a few days ago, so I'll have more data when I write my monthly review for November! But in October, direct links from HN accounted for around half of my total traffic. More details here: https://goo.gl/FMxdpc.
I'm curious if you've received feedback from software developers on what the experience is like being recruiting with your tool.
The agency spam approach you mention is irritating, but I would imagine that if you're correctly predicting when someone is looking to jump that would be less of a problem.
We actually do have a significantly better response from developers both because they're being reached out to at the right time, but also because a lot of our users are CTO's and Engineering managers who by the fact that they are technical can have a much better conversation with prospects.
Cool, that makes sense. I think a big part of the spam problem is mass template emails, so if your customers are emailing people directly it would be much better.
Great story and many great lessons. Being "intentional about the people you work with" is a great piece of advice and one that we usually like to stress too when talking to aspiring entrepreneurs. We wrote about some of this too in a previous HN thread https://betterthansure.com/answer-hn-growing-a-side-project-....
This is really cool idea, I like how it uses data to predict behavior.
I have few recruiters that always hit me around the time when I get a little more free. They don't have this tool, just their spidey sense, but I bet they would like something like this.
Well, if people use twitter, github etc, they will be findable and their trace can be used to predict if they are 'jumping ship'. It is common to start blogging around the time you are looking to change work for example.
Sounds like very similar to my start up NetIn[1] We also look at public profile updates and other signals to tell if a candidate is on the move. We also got to HN frontpage last night for our candidate job portal[2]. If there are people who would like to talk about what we've accomplished so far feel free to reach me at s@netin.co
For discussion's purposes, it's worth pointing out that there is a venture-funded company that is doing the same thing (but with a big data science team): https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/entelo
Now just let me come up with a product I can sell to developers that camouflages them to this product by simulating activity on these sites...
I wonder what their next line of business is at this company...selling this data to current employers to see when their employee is about to jump ship?
I wrote a similar tool for recruiters (only analyzes LinkedIn profiles that you are viewing). Mine is significantly cheaper at $9 per month: https://recap.work
Your redirect seems broken (301 from https to http?), you have a number of really ugly grammatical errors, and there is nothing weaker than hijacking another thread to promote your own product.
