The Weird Rise Of Anti-Startups
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 ต.ค. 2024
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enricotartarot...
Exclusive videos every week about tech, behind the scenes of how I make videos and building stuff on the internet
All we hear about today is big tech companies worth trillions of dollars that make big moves and change the world, so much so that many people that is what tech is. But there's a whole other side of tech companies that most people don't even know about, with unique stories that break the mold of the traditional Silicon Valley model, and they are changing the way new tech companies are built. From Midjourney's and David Holz's crazy wild ride, to the new wave of indie hackers
🖖 Hey! I'm Enrico and on this channel I go behind the scenes of the design, psychology and stories behind tech and making stuff on the internet. I'm a tech Product Manager, builder of digital stuff, TH-cam aficionado (and overall meme connoisseur). I am also a rare Italian who doesn’t know how to cook.
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being an indiehacker was best decision i have ever made. no bullshit no fluff. just solid ideas and hard working which pays in full freedom. companies need us, we don't need them.
What is indie hacker? You do hacking?
And if it doesn't work, it is what it is.
@@jaideepshekhar4621 The word hacker has lost all meaning just imagine it means "ingenious" now I guess.
@@w花bthats life baby
@@jaideepshekhar4621 Did you actually watched the video? That was explained there ;-)
This is how startups are supposed to be run. Shocker.
0% MBA, 100% useful people
Try building Stripe this way, you won't get far. Sometimes taking investment is the right strategy.
Building useful profitable products that provide services that don't scam your customers (in order to increase the share price 1000x) is actually successful?
It's astonishing that the MBA elite don't understand this.
startups aren't "supposed" to run in a particular way. You do want you want to do and then just wait for the consequences. There are multiple correct ways to handle a company, each has its own advantages and disadvantages
@@bobalot2 From the pov of big tech stealing user data to feed some ai systems was beneficial for all
These are called small and medium businesses and in the case of indie hacking, sole proprietorships. If you drive down the street you'll see all kinds of businesses doing the same things.
Isn't this just starting a business the regular way?
Yep. Silicon Valley / Wall Street completely f*cked people's perceptions of what it means to start a business
Yea lol. The way it should be.
Who the fuck needs investor capital to run a website. Seriously.
Iv seen Minecraft servers funded on less but serve more.
The start is the same but they don't pursue infinite growth
The tech world always needs to invent new words for the same things to feed their addiction to hype
not particularly, a startup isn't a conventional corner shop. a startup is by definition a kind of business that can scale exponentially without having to invest in prerequisites for this growth. e.g: a restaurant will have to double everything, space, staff, material, etc to be able to accommodate 2x customers. tech-based startups can handle 1 million times users at a fraction of the cost.
The perfect anti-startup would be a bunch of retired women starting a non-profit organization without any technology involved
A Women's Bible study group?
Sounds like the average Amish business, which are oddly successful to the point they are studied in business schools.
@@freddiechipres First Timothy, Two Eleven
Basically a woman SHG 👍🏻
@@AvianYueneasy to be successful when you use unpaid labor
The “less than” symbol is ‘ 40 people’
yep was going to point this one out too lol.
This video came up on my feed just now and this is the first thing I noticed too....
The crocodile eats the bigger number! Come ON, we all learned this!
@@Daniel-fz6iz yes we did, in America but I bet the person who did the captions for this video is from India, probably hired on Upwork
Product managers dont care about such details, come on bro 😂
The weird rise of starting a normal business
My company is like the one featured in this video. There are three of us. Revenue just passed $500k per month. Anyway, I will stop giving Enrico a hard time about his follow-up Google video. I like his content a LOT and he’s right when he says the landscape changed right after that video came out. I have no idea if you’ll see this or not, Enrico, but thanks for another great video.
What's name of your company...?😊
What's name of your company......? 😊
A gambling website?@@kshitijpatil8857
that's awesome
uh huh... easy to say that on the internet. lmao
Nice to see Indie Hackers are happily chugging along while Sam Bankman Fried is sitting in prison
lol
This is the most obvious model but we're so used to this “BLITZCALING" culture and when we see people going against this path it sounds revolutionary. Hope to see more of it and with the decrease of funding it must be the way to go by necessity!!
Blitz-scaling is only a functional business model in a lax regulatory environment since its business model requires reaching a point where it can leverage its monopoly status once it dominates the sector. The increased scrutiny on tech mergers over the last couple years have made the business model infeasible like it was prior to the deregulation boom of the last few decades.
Here's the obligatory comment to boost you on the TH-cam algorithm.
Worked
just realized he is not yet at 1 million - I found him yesterday :)
You would have helped more if you wrote something more meaningful, so people can have a discussion and comment even more lol
Yeah
Never thought of doing it this way!
There’s nothing weird in not being a startup but successfull at the same time. A lot of companies are doing right that. What you didn’t mention in your - really interesting - video is what a startup is: A company founded with the purpose of growing fast using other peoples’ money, being public listed and then sold. On the other hand, there are bootstrapped companies (that’s what you call “anti-startup”). Companies where the founders take their own money, grow slowly and that’s it. For an less obvious example in tech see Aha!
Great definition!!!
he calls them bootstrapped companies in the video, "anti startup" it's just a way to get clicks and explain the concept
Moral of the story: being beholden to investors means your company can go bust even if it’s successful and profitable.
remember:
for every successful company shown in this video, there are at least 100 similar who failed to make it anywhere near big enough
Yep, that's the most important comment here.
I'm someone who started 7 different ideas, got any income from just 3, and none became anything bigger than a small business.
@@udishomer5852 The more I'm impressed with people who openly share on their startup shortcomings and failures (also mentioned in the video). First there is as much, if not more, to learn from these cases plus constantly only talking about success causes a terrible bias. It's similar to investment companies bragging about 3% of their portfolio that is the most successful on their home page - a distorted and dishonest vision of reality (even if other folks don't do it knowingly). Wrt not taking investors money- lets face it, it takes balls - one to refuse and second to work on near-zero resource while being late with rent running on pure hope as fuel wrt a project you know is more likely to fail than succeed (dopamine to rescue :) ). I can imagine Indie Hackers / Digital nomads going through some very tough times in the beginning and having to early let go of their beloved projects when it does not work (a fantastic entrepreneurial but counter-to-evolutionary trait). There's a fantastic testimony on that from Pieter Levels in a Lex Fridman podcast: lexfridman.com/pieter-levels/
As a motion designer I really appreciate an amount of work Enrico (or his team) put into graphics. I see a lot of elements people will not notice (for example frame transition at 00:25 which not easy to make, no an one click solution at least). And all this apart of a really engaging and interesting content. Well done. Kudo to the author and the team (if he has one).
Funny. Im a full stack dev and I noticed that too, with the same appreciation.
I should learn more about motion design in frontend.
Agreed. Gave them a like at 0:30. 😂
I could probably do a very bad recreation in a day with simple vectors in layers but yeah.. As a graphic designer, i think motion designers are superheroes
12 startups in 12 months is such stupid waste of time and effort.
How so?
Not really if you just have many solid ideas and can just reuse codes.
@@anguswetty You unlikely to be able to create enough value to build a sustainable business in 1 month and even if you find something worth pursuing more in month 7 do you drop it and move on to the next shiny thing in month 8? Really stupid concept. It's part of the hustle culture bs / nonsense. To build good businesses you need time and effort and not jump around like an idiot from idea to idea.
@@ablamill8357 i think you misunderstand the point of it. or at least i think the idea behind building a startup in 1 month is to see if it is viable, there is market for it, etc., and iterate quickly on different ideas. if something does not seem to get any traction then its pointless to keep building it, so you can just go ahead and try something else, a completely different business idea. that is also why @levelsio and the other successful indie hackers have a LOT of failed "startups".
@@ablamill8357to add onto this. Why not just make a regular company that works on the banger ideas you pull out? Sounds like a better idea than opening a FUCKING COMPANY EVERYTIME YOU WANT TO BITCH OUT AND WANT SOMETHING DIFFERENT ALL OVER AGAIN.
I agree with this one, everyone is just copying each others idea and just improving it or adding a feature to it. It's better to keep a project secret than publicly showing how you do it. It gives more focus to the developer and they can have a vision for it if it will be a game changer or a market disruptor.
imagine being 40 years old and not knowing the proper sign for "lesser than" ...
Speaking of Craig's List keeping it simple: the story I heard is that they made/make their money primarily by advertising the world's oldest profession.
I think they discontinued overtly sexual anything. Yeah it used to be a digital sweat camp / San Francisco Bath House / Hollywood Boulevard Service bureau. Now they make their money from Cars and Rentals. 99% automated.
Correct. The world's richest pimp is a nerd who lives alone in San Francisco.
My favorite is the Google Chrome extension multimillionaire guy 😂
Who is this?
The Indian?
@@simbarashekunedzimwe1372 Yes, Amit Agarwal.
It has a lot to do with the fact that modern web development is much easier in general, at least if you're an experienced developer. There are abstractions for almost everything these days that just 10 years ago you would have had to code yourself. Also there is much more accessible data everywhere, often through api's, that simply didn't exist in the past.
I'm currently building an innovative meta search engine completely on my own (no AI) and I had this idea forever, but the tech simply wasn't available. Now that the tech is available I can finally build it, without needing years and huge investments. I simply need a few months to launch the mvp. For example the last missing piece of tech that I needed, was fast accessible data of a specific branch and there was an API launched a few months back which gives me this data, exactly as I need it.
What kind of meta data is that?
can you share examples of things you mention
abstractions
more accessible data
ISTG and pray more people understand craigslist style where having profit IS ENOUGHT and there is no need for the extra bells and whistles and CHASING ENDLESS BILLIONS at the cost of others and the economy.
True. CS field needs to understand that they dont need 9 billion few frameworks every month
I really liked the storytelling and how well structured and explained it was.
Midjourney: not paying for scraped images, no server costs= profit.
"no server costs" it's not accurate, since they need servers to generate the images (?!)
@@igrschmidtyou are right
@@igrschmidtweren't they subsedized for servers?
bruh i resonate with this so soo much. i used to be a design freelancer in college but i just never wanted to scale it, just get some decent money without the extra headache.
your storytelling is amazing!! i love how you put these ideas together, i have never been so engaged on a yt video ❤
Loved your conclusion segment. Great advice and the song in the background was amazing 👌🏾🔥
Great video, very inspiring. I've been wanting to start something like that for years, but i never knew that so many people were having success with it. It's really motivating to see!
Getting investments can be a good strategic decision in some cases
If you have a bakery, selling cookies and people waiting hours in the line to buy it; getting external investment and having an extra oven would improve the business
But the way I see the current climate is every bakery get investment to buy the shiniest equipment before even seeing the demand. It just become a must
PS: I think Andrew Wilkinson gave this bakery example and it stuck in my mind.
I 100% agree, you not always need big team of specialist to get your idea running, what important to say in some countries it makes huge difference if you doing business alone or as team , there some even tax benefits, nobody should forget about that.
Such high quality summary of the tech startup space. Subbed!
Banger channel man, as a product manager i really appreciate the content
Great video, 👍. Being a solo developer and running a very local educational app with 1.5 million+ active users. Never thought of marketing or doing anything big or getting funding just having good time solving some of the real world problems in education.
Cool, how much did it take you to mature the app?
@@shazzz_land marketing cost almost zero, time about 2 years.
comments look botted ngl
heh heh
Nah it's just dead internet theory kicking in
You gotta do something about your audio. Just about every sentence goes from ear-explodingly loud to literally inaudible
He's italian. Love or leave.
Ikr!!
An audio limiter would work
A very interesting video and thanks so much for mentioning Indie Hackers. So much good content on their site, wow!
Hi Enrico you definitely deserve more subscribers. Loving your content on TH-cam - keep it up!
instead of investors you setup an employee-owned company. The employees themselves can decide to put in some money or not. You can also use crowd funding for individual products. Then you have a motivated team that produces a lot. No more stock market drama, and no more lazy investors who dont want to work.
Problem is employees want an income. They arent going to give you money to work for you. I get what youre saying but its just not feasible to set this up. It also only works for the founding employees. New staff coming in will either cause drama when it comes to profit sharing or be cut out of the deal.
@@rumble1925 90% of companies fail with the current way of investing then betting on which company full of wage slaves will succeed. It's like betting on a snail race.
@@rumble1925 you could start with software and work from a cheap place like thailand. Doesnt have to be a big company from the start. The crowdfunding can come from kickstarter.
@@rumble1925Employee-owned enterprises and cooperatives exist and run like this everyday.
They're actually more effective than traditional companies in terms of surviving recessions or workplace satisfaction.
The disadvantage is that they hire selectively and with a long probation period (because a new employee gets an equal share of the business and vote in affairs). But once hired, they retain employees for far longer than usual.
@@MechaOrangeStudios yeah i know about it and it was something i considered when i set up my company. The reality is that its not as simple as it sounds. And good luck finding employees willing to share any of the risk, they want a salary. Youre basically hunting for business partners, those are usually people you know and trust, not someone you find from a job ad.
It's happened in my current work, i have the mostly same group, before we have investor, now we go alone. The investor before is just not working. Our creative idea is always classing, their demand kinda unrealistic etc., and yes we always in the red before, and we are now pretty decent.
As someone starting this week a SD bachelor, hearing that is so exciting. Thanks!
Inventors (no matter in which realm) became rich, not because they wanted to get rich. Instead they solved problems amd got rich because a lot of people profit from their solutions provided. Sooo, I hope we're getting back to this...
Venture capital was about a handful of people with prophet syndrome dictating what was allowed to happen. We are all better off without them.
Nnnnope.
Investors got rich because they made a lot of money. You can make money by creating problems too. But they did it by having a lot to invest in the first place (from rich daddy, most of the time).
Amazon makes money by increasing the number of people peeing in bottles and dieing of exhaustion. Bezos' parents gave him money to start it.
Tesla makes money of selling "carbon credits" to other car manufacturers, which is essentially a "pollution pass" which allows Musk to advertise Solarcity to wash his image. Elon's father gave him money to start (his first revolutionary product was - yellow pages, but online. No one uses it, but it made him a fortune).
Microsoft earned it's money by monopolising the early OS scene, which allows them to still control it with very inferior products. Bill Gates also stole the idea from HP.
Etc etc.
The people who are solving problems (and working honestly) aren't rich - they are doctors, scientists, handymen, plumbers, cleaners, people in the service sector, etc. They solve problems, but they don't get rich. Because actual work cannot make you rich.
inventors weren't always rich. It's the internet and globalization that made current entrepreneurs rich.
Amazing insights and production. Loved it!
Craigslist gave me awesome deals never consider anything so smooth and easy to use.
Those indie hackers they rarely ever provide any proof that they are actually making that money.
venture capital is just the biggest exit scheme.
Very much needed a video about this. And it seems that you capture trends before they even become a thing; good for you
There is one important lesson. Guess what it is.
Who needs investors.
There is no such thing called startup , anybody can start a business, but the great ideas that turn into a real business.
Great video, amazing insight! I love your videos, they are fun and give a new view on the tech development process.
I have to point out a typo at 0:41, both inequality signs are reversed. Keep on the good work!
Was looking for this comment :)
Thanks for creating this video, it was informative. I didn't know about the story of Midjourney or Gumroad. I know them as products but not as anti-startups.
Nice title too!
Great video. I've often wondered if there's a good book that compiles stories of bootstrapped software companies. Does anyone have good recs?
Forgot to mention how mid journey made his money outta stealing other people’s work
The terrible trend of venture capital has been driven by the insane growth of wealth inequality. There are a ton of people who have way too much money, and that money is trying to find returns, which leads to big bets/risk. When people have limited resources, they limit risk and bootstrap. In other words, talent and hard work build companies. With VC, capital is trying to build companies.
Learnt new stuff today. Thanks for the info
I only know python. I'm already monetizing my idea. Basically, using AI to write content with reference/citations. Really useful for the academic community. I know a lot of other people building similar business, but I have my own customers and a lot are based on referrals.
I started with auto respond email service. Now I've upgraded to using gradio app to let people use it. Very rudimentary setup. Even payment is collected manually. Not scalable at all.
I'm intimidated by the complexity of building a proper webapp, especially the UI. Don't know where to start. Maybe learning react, nodejs might help. But I still need to balance with my day job.
Idk if you can contact me, but if you need help, lmk. I can probably build an app for free if you're desperate
I love these stories so much more. Thank u m8😊
Sick video bro, informative and inspiring. Wish you well.
This is awesome, thank you!
Title: anti startups
Video: startups
Finalmente ho capito perché Midjourney è su Discord 😂
Amazing video Enrico!
The only problem with indie hacking is the client's type of startup, who, _surprise_ , pays out
Great video. Love your editing
Thanks for sharing these great stories and ideas!
Really fun video, very informative as well!
Hi Enrico, I need permission to Share this Over my Facebook Page with Credit back to this video.
Great video thank you
This is great work, thank you for making this video!
It’s the future. Also why the hell would anybody want to make 12 startups in 12 months. Just do 12 different products or service offerings, Jesus.
I also predict that indie movie creation will soon become the standard. The hardware has become so accessible and the desire for real stories is stronger than ever. The thirst for homemade authenticity is real across all industries, not just food and clothing (the historical extents of it).
I'm product manager working in thec..
That's where I left this video.
Shall I send a jira reminder to finish watching it?
Amazing story - really enjoyed it - gonna watch it again right now.
yep, I heard of David before he is truly a genius
Amazing video. Love the content & editing style 💯👌🏼
This is mind opening. And I see the future of tech is indies
This was an awesome video. First time I've ever been exposed to this trend to "anti startup"
Somehow this video show up in my recomended list. And it is 👍👍
lil bro doesn’t know what a less than symbol looks like😂
You should articulate more. It's not a matter of accent, you just don't articulate enough and it's hard to understand sometimes. Brazilians have the same problem.
Just pure awesomeness, you got urself a new fan
Your videos aee always so easy to understand and digest. Love your content
Fantastic video, thank you brother!
Thsi what makes me scared of the economy.
The fact most peoples jobs are useless, and that the actual amount of people you need to keep sites running, is minimal.
Twitter firing 70% of its bloatforce and running like a regular startup again, is what cemented it for most people.
twitter is running like shit, partially because they fired a lot of "bloatforce". Just because a job isn't necessary for the success of society doesn't mean it's unnecessary for the success of a company
I wouldn't say that considering Twitter as a service has downgraded so much
@@MangoMotors How so? Twitter works fine for me. Haven't noticed a difference. What twitter services that you use have gotten worse?
Twitter is the worst example you could've picked lol
@@TerriTerriHotSaucemore bots, more site crashes, less features.
0:40 less than 3 years "3years".
as in the time taken as t3.
Interesinting indeed
COMON SENSE finally making it back on track x)
Wow, I really liked this video!!
Thanks for the story!
Randomly stumbled across this video. I think i understood what was said, but it just doesn't resonate with me in the slightest.
I'm excruciatingly bad at business because i just, for the life of me, can't understand who the fuck would pay and use an "AI Assistant for writing stuff, lists etc" or generic image generator, or "AI Interior house design" and all these things.
I cannot comprehend paying for these things, and if i understand it correctly, it's a "service" == subscription == recurring payment.
All of these are things for the western world, where they have money to throw on garbage and do on a daily basis without a second thought, where people budget 50% of their revenue on services. Born and lived in the old block for my entire life, my mindset is far too rigid for thinking of these things and people in these parts would laugh in your face if you ask them to pay for these.
those numbers in bio seemed fishy to me too. those ai "services" only blowed up after chatgpt released, as if there is no ai existed before it. there is no possibility in world such interior design ai (another chatgpt frontend) can make that money, there is simply not much small customers for that, and big customers rather pay actual people with actual designing knowledge.
this can be new "learn coding and make six figures a year using our bootcamp" thingy. "make your own chatgpt frontend, call it ai service and make five figures a month" seems marketable enough
enlighten me please what you mean by „the old block“
@@balazsborbelyderoff9405 he probably means old soviet-style block apartment building.
its almost like not doing what successful tech companies do leads to being sucessful, being innovative
Great video, but the audio level fluctuations made it challenging to understand sometimes.
Lovely video. Enrico’s channel is a hidden jewel on TH-cam.
So true. He isn’t recommended much so had to subscribe
subscribed, bros videos are acc fire
great video, always happy to see new post from this channel.
The Indie Hacker stuff reminds of Tim Ferris's Four Hour Work Week where he talks about making money for yourself by doing business online similar to India Hacking
great points. As for midjourney, I cancelled because they're still stuck in Discord. It's a terrible, slow, and manual user experience.
Cancelling my Midjourney subscription was a journey in and of itself. I made no friends along the way, either. 😂
What an amazing video! Thank you!
Tech VCs look for explosive growth because they know at least 9/10 of their investments will fail and be a total loss. If they had 9 losses, and one "winner" with only slow, modest growth, then the VC would go bankrupt. It's not because VCs are crazy or maniacally greedy. It's just a novel, and relatively new investment strategy that dramatically increases the overall amount of "breakthrough" companies and ideas to emerge, where they wouldn't under more traditional investment strategies.
Congrats, you've repeated what was said in the video
@@flytrapYTP where did he say that?
I love your content bro! It's helping me a lot navigating through this AI world.
You sir just changed my life. ❤thank you.
That was unexpected video.. thanks for the inspiration
super interesting analysis, as always 🤘