It’s literally just building absolutely fucking anything and then…
…
Marketing it?
Learning from failures??
Listening and ACTUALLY FOLLOWING the advice of more successful people???
It legitimately isn’t about luck. At least at my little 10k MRR stage it isn’t luck.
Most successful indie makers don't think they're special. They don't believe they have a unique talent that made them successful.
They'll tell you with a straight face that anybody can do it, and that they just had to learn X Y Z.
I think it comes from two things:
1- we are told from a young age to not think of ourselves as superior to other people, otherwise they'll think we're assholes
2- unconsciously, the more you make other people believe that you're just a normal guy, the more they will believe they can achieve it too, and end up supporting you and buying your stuff. Therefore you don't have an incentive to question that belief.
So we end up having generational top 0.001% talent saying "dude i'm not special, you can do it too, here's my book / course / tool / whatever".
And I don't think there's any malicious intent. They genuinely believe this. After years of struggle and grind, it seems to make sense that it wasn't talent after all. And most genuinely want to help.
But though it's true that anybody can reach a decent level if they put in the effort, and that learning the skills is crucial... I've met too many entrepreneurs who put that same effort and went through the same grind, and still have poor results after 5 or 10 years.
And sadly, some of them just don't have that special talent or vibe that's compatible with the times. And it will be harder for them. Not impossible, just harder.
So my take is that to succeed at the highest level, you do indeed need to be a bit special. For example, to be highly successful on social media, you need specific traits or a personality that's highly compatible with it.
Most people don't have it, and it can't be easily learned either. It mostly comes from deep personality baked in childhood + luck of being compatible with 2026 algorithms (like being provocative is good right now).
Anyway not sure where I was going with this.
Just if you see someone super successful tell you that it's not rocket science and they're not special and you can do it too... well they're def special, they just don't want to think of themselves that way, and it's also not good for their business to tell you they're better than you and out of reach.
So take it with a grain of salt. You can still learn some things from them, and improve yourself on the way.