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Comment by eruci | Hacker News Reader

I'm amazed at the number of startups about startups.

obligatory HN comment about selling shovels in a gold rush

No but this is such a pattern in human history. Don't fight war, sell the weapons. Don't mine bitcoin, sell the cards. Don't start a startup, start a meta-startup (startup about startups). Easy $$$! Basically be the parasitic side-liner supplying to the often-fruitless follies of mankind.

It's not too bad as long as you're making something genuinely good. I'm not likely to ever make it big as a musician, but that doesn't mean Ableton or the company behind Reaper are being shady by selling me software.

Of course, I was talking about being suppliers to rushes/"fads", i.e. the industries/sectors that appear out of nowhere for fordubious reasons and with ill-thought, i.e. wars, cali gold rush, 2002 internet companies, bitcoin, MOOCs, Javascript frameworks. All these are bandwagons that arose and quickly develop/devoloped to have many suppliers that exploit the confusion and hysteria.

Take a look at GPU company stock prices over the past 2-3 years for me will ye' ;)

So basically be Gary V.

This is what gets me about Indie Hackers. So much of it is people selling stuff to other people selling stuff to them.

It makes sense. Selling to other businesses (as opposed to consumers) is arguably the most reasonable market to go after. And if you have a very early-stage product, you'll be looking for early adopters and visionaries who are capable of and willing to take a risk on unproven technology to get a leg up.

It should be similarly unsurprising that companies like Apple, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, Microsoft, Stripe, Salesforce, Google, SAP, Amazon, etc. could also be described as "selling stuff to other people selling stuff to them."

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