It is really just luck. For every OP with 6 figures in profit for their icon pack, there are a thousand more who dream of making $17 and will never see it. The reality of the world is that there are far more hardworking and talented people than there are successful people, and blindly toiling holding out hope of getting lucky might not be the best use of ones efforts. Imagine if OP never got the plug from the influencer. Would it be worth it to take time away from, say, working a full time job to make a grand total of $17 for all your efforts? Absolutely not, that is realizing a loss. Instead, people should be strategic about their efforts, and direct them toward whatever opportunities are available in your life that offer a return for little risk. Not busting ass and hoping luck will one day come in to pay you for all the labor you put in.

>people should be strategic about their efforts, and direct them toward whatever opportunities are available in your life that offer a return for little risk.

I believe you summed up what he did to achieve his "luck."

He said he made $6k before the influencer came along. Seems pretty good for a start.

And because he has made strategic, low-risk efforts in the past, this opportunity actually became possible. The influencer never would have gotten a whiff of this otherwise.

So you, I, all the HN commenters, and the author, all had the same probability of making $100,000 from iOS icons last week? Was it just a random roll of the dice? I guess we were just unlucky then. Fingers crossed for next week.

To say "it is really just luck" is honestly just ridiculous. Our probability was 0%. His probability was significantly higher, due to the previous work and decisions he has made. That's not "just luck".

There is no such thing as a deterministic, risk-free business strategy. You can only make bets, try to maximise your odds, and repeat. That's what the author is doing. I knew nothing about him before today, but I can see his business ethos. He's doing a good job, and the market is validating that with their wallets.

It sounds like you did not make six figures from your icon pack. Do you have a link to it so that I can buy it? I'm dying to try it out.

The problem is that the article does not describe a repeatable process. Maybe the author's experience is repeatable, but that is not part of the content. The most critical component was the marketing, i.e. "going viral" on Twitter. Some marketing firms specialize in doing so and seem to have skill, yet I see no indication of where the author intentionally took steps to achieve that effect. Therefore, yes, it does seem like the author "got lucky".

It may not be a perfectly repeatable recipe (that doesn't exist), but there's solid, actionable advice here. Particularly "act immediately". Things only go viral when the moment is right, and that moment is usually very fleeing.

One supporting data point: back when the game 2048 went viral I happened to be on a break with nothing to do, so I coded up an AI for it in one night [1]. The next day it blew up on Twitter and elsewhere. There have since been many other, better AIs, but since mine was first and came out when the game was on everyone's mind, it was the only one that got so much attention.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7379821

Since when is “repeatable process” a requirement for not being qualified as “lucky”? Maybe the OP is just a talented and dedicated person who delivers high quality work, and because of their dedication, was at a place where they were ready-to-go and seize the opportunity when iOS 14 arrived.

Someone much wiser than me once said, “dedicated people can force luck to happen”, implying that it’s only a small part of the equation.

Is that a problem, though? A major component of success is in fact luck. Doing the right thing at just the right time, with enough prior planning and skill to be able to follow through if it takes off. If making a bunch of money somehow with few hurdles was reliably repeatable, everyone would start doing it. Until the market is saturated and then it stops being repeatable.

First mover advantage ties into this here, as does discussions on the free market, and other interesting economic theory.

I have to disagree that a major component of success in business is luck, generally speaking. A successful business relies on having repeatable processes that generate profit. If one wants to talk about becoming a billionaire or growing a social media company to the level of IPO, then I concede that an above-average degree of luck is involved.

Alternatively, it seems like many successes are built off the back of virality.

> A successful business relies on having repeatable processes that generate profit

It can take luck to get the business off the ground though.

Some do, yes. I think this is especially true for independent content creators, as one example.

"The harder I practice, the luckier I get' - Gary Player, a legendary South African golfer.

This is basically the origin of the saying "you create your own luck".

Luck is absolutely, 100% a factor here, but you won't get lucky without putting the effort in first.

"Victory awaits him who has everything in order — luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck."

-- Roald Amundsen

Opportunity is where preparation meets luck

I've heard it said as "luck favors the well prepared"

Exactly luck can connect to a certain point but if efforts are not there, its no use

It's not just luck because it's talent plus savviness plus the ability to spin your story. Sure, luck factors in but as anyone with a success story will tell you, it's never just luck unless you're talking about the lottery.