Comment by volkercraig
13 hours ago
I publish into an open sea and hear nothing in reply. The constant reassurance from every platform that i use that i am merely "one more post" away from all my wildest dreams has to be true eventually, right?
13 hours ago
I publish into an open sea and hear nothing in reply. The constant reassurance from every platform that i use that i am merely "one more post" away from all my wildest dreams has to be true eventually, right?
I am going through interviews with founders on https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ and it is indeed what happens.
It is not straightforward, however. One guy did only product-led marketing and it took him 3 years for his SaaS to make good numbers. And he's probably an outlier, since he's featured on the show.
And then you have another guy, who blogged for 5 years about Ruby and only after those 5 years using the audience from that, he built an OSS project with monetisation on top of that. But he could do that because he talked to his audience about ideas.
Listening to those interviews, I get the impression that if you know what you're doing, you can make a profitable SaaS in 2 or 3 years. But to get to a state, where you know what you're doing, you need at least another 3 years or more of actually putting in the reps in an honest way.
And I think that's where the "increase your luck" comes in. I think it's kind of shallow non-sense in the vein of motivational speaking but lots of people like this kind of content and like to be aspirational. Lots of the books sold by internet hustlers, like Rob Walling or Aaron Francis, don't get read, only bought.
"Becoming known" (the definition of which I leave as an exercise for the reader) isn't an automatic meal ticket but it does, as I allude to in another comment, lead to connections that you can sometimes take advantage of in various ways.
Whether that's open source code, writing, various consulting, speaking at conferences, etc. will vary with the person. And the more you can do on a company's dime the better.
When we become ghost content producers for LLMs, you are not supposed to hear something in reply to your post, book, or other work. Most of the time, your work will be ingested by a handful of companies as training data; the readers benefitting from your work will pay these companies, and in return these companies will thoroughly shield and insulate you from being thanked by the people you helped. These companies will do their best to ensure you are motivated to continue producing honest content that can keep their LLMs from choking on their own output.
The exceptions to this are closed (or semi-closed) communities and forums where you directly interact with humans, either by inertia due to a large established human user base or (for newer, smaller communities) via personal vetting of participants.
The best is when a random throwaway post blows up for some unexpected and unknown reason and everything you think is good is met with silence!
But did you record a complementary TikTok dance, though?
Hello fellow human!
You may want to be more goal oriented. If you're just publishing into a void and hoping for things to happen, I mean I'm not an influencer, but the successful ones I do know have specific goals that they're driving towards are not screaming into the void and hoping for the best.
Not looking for you to answer these questions for me here, but ask yourself, what are those dreams specifically? What are the concrete steps you've taken to get there, and how are you going to accomplish them? How long is it going to take you? What are success criteria? What are the risks? What are the failure modes?