Channing Allen

Vibe coding will cause lots of heartbreak for non-technical “idea” people. And honestly I can't wait lol. They've been on the sidelines swearing up and down that: “If I could only build my brilliant idea™️, I'd be making millions in no time.” But now that building is easy, they're going to speedrun the process of having that delusional worldview shattered. Which is great! Best way to learn is through trial and error. The first lesson they'll learn is their product won't take off just because they've shipped it and shared it. The second lesson: adding new features and making it “better” or “cheaper” than competitors won't help with traction either. Eventually, enlightenment will come: A PRODUCT is not a BUSINESS. A business fits FOUR pieces together, not just one: The RIGHT product with the RIGHT people via the RIGHT promotional channels for the RIGHT price.

@DishwasherTag @OpenAIDevs I know you're looking for ChatGPT (instead of a competitive app) to ship these features, but I doubt they will any time soon. If you're open to an alternative that you can try for free, shoot me a DM! My team has built one, and we're looking for early testers.

@OpenAIDevs While the current iteration of apps within ChatGPT helps improve outputs, there's still a major gap in helping users with the input process. We also need apps/addons that assist users in managing notes/files, structuring context, keeping versions, and not losing the thread.

📣Calling all app developers! Starting today, you can submit your ChatGPT app for review. Approved apps will be listed in the app directory, a new surface for users to search for apps directly in ChatGPT. openai.com/index/develope…

@kixxauth Yes I'll shoot you a DM soon

@ChanningAllen Sic! Is there a way I can try it out? btw, so happy for you man. I've been following you guys shortly after indiehackers started, and your journey has been really inspiring.

Man. 15 years ago I was selling copy machines in downtown SF. Lots of cold calling. A receptionist chucked a rubber band ball at me. Hated it but I was great at it! Now I get to sell my own AI product. That I built. That I use every day and actually believe in. Life is good.

@gamifyKaran @neuranne's Tiny Experiments is one of the best books on my shelf… and not just because I'm in it! 👌

@ChanningAllen Now someone is reading about the indie hackers story in a book suggested by a founder on X.

@levelsio If you block AI reply spammers you'll be blocking most of the comments on most posts these days. Sounds pretty zen tbh

If I didn't have AI in my bio I'd say you can block 99% of accounts with AI in their bio for being AI reply spammers on here

@pmarca To your credit, any other position would suggest you'd been introspecting

It is 100% true that great men and women of the past were not sitting around moaning about their feelings. I regret nothing.

@davidsenra @pmarca "I act, therefore I earn." —René Descartes

Great men of history had little to no introspection. The personality that builds empires is not the same personality that sits around quietly questioning itself. @pmarca and I discuss what we both noticed but no one talks about: David: You don't have any levels of introspection? Marc: Yes, zero. As little as possible. David: Why? Marc: Move forward. Go! I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's a real problem and it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home. David: So I've read 400 biographies of history’s greatest entrepreneurs and someone asked me what the most surprising thing I’ve learned from this was [and I answered] they have little or zero introspection. Sam Walton didn't wake up thinking about his internal self. He just woke up and was like: I like building Walmart. I'm going to keep building Walmart. I'm going to make more Walmarts. And he just kept doing it over and over again. Marc: If you go back 400 years ago it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective. All of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy, and all the things that kind of result from that are, a kind of a manufacture of the 1910s, 1920s. Great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff. The individual runs and does all these things and builds things and builds empires and builds companies and builds technology. And then this kind of this kind of guilt based whammy kind of showed up from Europe. A lot of it from Vienna in 1910, 1920s, Freud and all that entire movement. And kind of turned all that inward and basically said, okay, now we need to basically second guess the individual. We need to criticize the individual. The individual needs to self criticize. The individual needs to feel guilt, needs to look backwards, needs to dwell in the past. It never resonated with me.

@oliverjones_x @hnshah I'm building an app like this that fixes the context-switching problem. DM me if you want to use it for free! (Still in beta, hence not linking to it here)

@hnshah The context switching between tabs kills productivity flow

I think ChatGPT needs docs built-in.

@arvidkahl This is a great tweet

Devs are acting like they didn’t write slop code before AI.

@mapnotterritory @Aella_Girl @Tekeee Completely depends on your income. Cities offer higher-quality opportunities (professional, dating, etc.) and higher costs of living. Sorry if this feels like a non-answer but it's the truest one I can give.

@ChanningAllen @Aella_Girl @Tekeee Is it easier to change the housing market or the signals?

Rent for one bedroom is $1,700. That means you need over $4,600 a month just to qualify. Show me the 24 year old making $71,000 a year for a starter apartment. I’ll wait

@karomancer @Aella_Girl @Tekeee Yeah I probably should've placed the number closer to 30, but I've also lived in SF (6 years) and NYC (10 years) and all I can say is that the advice certainly applies to men.

@ChanningAllen @Aella_Girl @Tekeee I think it highly depends on where you live. I lived in SF and NYC and if you didn't have roommates at 25, you were either seen as rich, antisocial, or extremely lucky.

@jamespotter Sadly true. I largely stopped being active here once the bots started taking over.

It's no longer interesting to read the replies to other people's posts on this site anymore. 95% AI slop. Some of it cleverly disguised but still fundamentally slop. Sad. Hacker News comments are still mostly unclankered.

@businessbarista I'd call it more a "tolerance" than an "appetite" but agreed ;)

A founder's appetite for eating shit, embracing unsexy work, using their ears more than their mouth, cutting losses quickly, and maintaining a tight emotional range will always be the algorithm for success.

@Aella_Girl @Tekeee For most single monogamous people, roommates signal immaturity and/or financial problems. Meaningfully lowers your dating prospects. Especially for men. And especially at ages 25+.

@Tekeee idk why people act like having roommates is the end of the world

@tferriss Come for the cover image, stay for the content

NEW blog post is up! The Self-Help Trap: What 20+ Years of “Optimizing” Has Taught Me The older I get, the more I think that self-help can be a trap. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. I say this after ~20 years of writing self-help and a lifetime of consuming it. Spend enough time in the world of “improvement,” and you’ll notice something strange: The people most obsessed with self-help are often the least helped by it. Behind the smiles and motivational quotes, behind closed doors and after a drink or two, the truth is that they’re not able to outsmart their worries. On one hand, perhaps this unhappiness is precisely what lands one in self-development in the first place, right? I long assumed this about myself, and it’s partially true. On the other hand, what if self-help itself is actually creating or amplifying unhappiness? Modern self-help contains an in-built flaw: To continually improve yourself, you must continually locate the ways you are broken. Fortunately, there are a few perspective shifts that make all the difference. It took me embarrassingly long to figure them out. To get started, let’s take a fresh look at an old concept. See the link below to the full blog post 👇

@thesamparr Insane milestone. Good work. You can only have that kind of staying power for something you love.

My First Million - we just released our 800th episode.

@DruRly Congratulations!

10-year dream come true ✅ Book Published

@FlorinPop17 I suspect a high percentage are. Courtland and I gamed a lot growing up, along with probably half the high profile indie hackers we've interviewed.

How many indie hackers are also passionate gamers?

@levelsio looks like an experiment of the X algo?

how to build a bootstrapped startup without funding: 1. pick a problem you personally have. if you don't use your own product daily, quit now 2. skip the pitch deck. open your code editor. ship something ugly in a weekend 3. charge money from day 1. free users give you nothing but support tickets 4. use boring tech. PHP, SQLite, vanilla JS. frameworks are a trap that mass waste your time 5. host on cheap VPS ($5-20/mo). not AWS. you don't need kubernetes for 1,000 users 6. do customer support yourself. it's the fastest product feedback loop that exists 7. automate everything you do more than twice. cron jobs > employees. 8. grow on Twitter/X by building in public. your journey IS the marketing 9. keep your burn rate near zero so you never need to raise. ramen profitable > series A 10. say no to investors, cofounders, and "advisors" who want equity for intros i've been doing this for 10+ years now. no employees, no funding, no board meetings the entire VC game is designed to make you think you need permission to start you don't

@louisnicholls_ GF is planning to eventually move there. Curious what sold you on moving to Portugal (from Switzerland, right?). Entrepreneurship? Landscape? The cities? Food?

My monthly cost of living in Lisbon 🇵🇹 🏚️ €2'000 for rent 🏋️ €60 for gym membership 🥮 €200 for pasteis de nata 🚕 €17 for Uber (I use it 2x every day) 👟 €3'491 for new sneakers (nobody here picks up after their dogs for some reason) Total: €5'923