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> The more someone is making at their solo business, the less they want to blab about it and attract competitors.

Exactly! And this is why every time I see someone selling a course while bragging about making a lot of money, I know for sure they are _not_ making money.

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Well you never know, maybe selling the course is the profitable part?
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I have always felt that online courses selling on how to sell online courses are underserved market... You do not hear too much about those, not that I have looked.
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There are a lot of people out there hawking a lot of different schemes that they say will get you where you want to go. “Build relationships,” they’ll say, or “work smarter, not harder,” or “first, decide what it is you really want.” And it sort of seems like they must know what they’re talking about, because aren’t they successful themselves? Don’t they have trophy spouses and expensive haircuts and mansions on the coast? Surely they’re in possession of some secret system for achieving one’s dreams!

Well, yeah, they’ve got a system. Their system is selling hope to schmucks like you. Their seminars, their self-help books, their crazy diets and exercise plans? That stuff doesn’t help you. It helps them.

This text can currently be found in the blurb for a shirt at https://shirt.woot.com/offers/steamworks-operatica .

It's possible that's where I found it originally, but my memory suggests to me that I found it somewhere else, on a blog, and that the continuation was different.

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So true. The latest rage on IG is "this guy built a trading system on OpenClaw and is now making 10k, comment MONEY and i'll DM you the recipe."

No indy hedgefund algotrader gives away their golden goose, that would crowed out the trade.

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> I host meetups for indie founders, and several attendees earn their living through solo businesses. When I go to conferences like Microconf, I meet lots more.

Isn't this also sampling bias?

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It for sure is but it's being ised to refute an affirmative assertion, not make it's own assertion.
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> successful founders are busier

I thought it was supposed to be "passive".

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They are busy sipping martinis on the beach, not working.
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I note neither your post or the one you replied to contain any quantitative data about how many profitable solo businesses there are.
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I know over a dozen 1-2 person SaaS, not including my own. Some of them have hired some help now but they are still more on the "lifestyle business" side. They are in many different spaces, and founders from around the world. I am not a big networker, but this is my niche and it's big enough that I just know a slice.
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I don't know any. I know a couple of people who had ideas that became bigger startups, but only 1 who was a friend rather than via networking. And I know a few people who did try the small saas or other small software based business but they all failed and now have jobs.
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This is such a middlebrow dismissal. Like yeah, people are speculating based personal experience and knowledge, so what? If you have a different viewpoint or something specific you'd like to see data on call it out and engage in the discussion. Don't just be the "data or GTFO" guy because that's a super bland and pointless take.
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"Oh yeah, you think you know something about entrepreneurs? Name every business."
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