Engineer | Entrepren...ย โขย 2m
It starts with a CD and a stamp. Not a pitch deck. Not a visionary memo. Just a car ride, a rant about Blockbuster late fees, and a weird little test: mail a CD in an envelope, see if it survives. Thatโs how Netflix got startedโbefore the red envelopes, before streaming, before anyone believed renting DVDs by mail could even work. Marc Randolph tells the story in That Will Never Work, and at its heart, itโs not a tech fairy tale. Itโs an indie hacking story. Small bets. Endless experiments. Pure persistence. Start With the Question, Not the Answer Randolph and Reed Hastings didnโt set out to build Netflix. They tried shampoo subscriptions, custom dog food, personalized baseball gear. Most of it flopped. But they kept asking, what if? Then testing. Not in theoryโin the real world. Thatโs the indie edge. Not chasing the โrightโ idea. Just shipping something tiny, fast, and seeing if reality flinches. Thatโs what the CD test was. Not a big bet. Just enough signal to keep going. And thatโs often all you need. Youโre Not Marrying the Idea Netflixโs first version was unrecognizable from what it became. No subscriptions. No queue. Just one-off rentals. A website with little polish. But they launched. Learned. Pivoted. They didnโt fall in love with the first draft. They fell in love with the problem: making movies easier to rent. The solution? That changed a hundred times. Thatโs the real lesson. Hold your ideas loosely. Obsess over the problem. Be willing to kill what doesnโt workโeven if you built it. The World Will Laugh. Keep Building Anyway. Netflix tried to sell to Blockbuster for $50 million. They were laughed out of the room. They pushed through server crashes. Customer confusion. Internal doubt. They even borrowed money from their own families to keep the lights on. The only way forward was to keep shipping. To keep solving the next bottleneck. Thatโs how most great indie projects survive. Not through grand plans. Through stubborn motion. Through tweaking whatโs broken. Through justโฆ showing up again on Monday. Culture Isnโt a Poster. Itโs What You Ship Together. Randolphโs team didnโt win because they were geniuses. They won because they tested constantly, stayed curious, and treated failure as signal. There was no solo founder myth here. It was messy, collective, in-the-trenches work. Try. Break. Adjust. Repeat. Thatโs the culture. Not words on a wall. Just habits, built one release at a time. Small teams, especially indie ones, thrive on that energy. If something breaks, nobody hides. Everyoneโs hands go on the problem. And thatโs how you growโtogether. Know When to Let Go Eventually, Randolph stepped down. Netflix grew past the early chaos and needed a different kind of leadership. He didnโt fight it. He knew the goal wasnโt to cling to control. It was to help something bigger than him get built. Thatโs a hard truth for indie hackers: sometimes your role changes. Sometimes your MVP becomes a community project. Sometimes what you built moves beyond you. And thatโs okay. If itโs real, it belongs to the people now. The Indie Litmus Test When youโre lost in the weeds of your own idea, step back and ask: Am I testing a real-world behavior, or just guessing from the sidelines? Am I willing to throw out my best idea if users say no? Am I building this with the right peopleโusers, collaborators, believers? Am I treating every โthat wonโt workโ as a nudge to test again? Because most good stories start where logic ends. In half-formed ideas. In odd little hacks. In mailing a CD just to see. What matters is what you do next. So: test it. Ship it. Learn from the silence. Build anyway. Thatโs how Netflix started. Thatโs how anything real does.
18 || enterpreneurย โขย 2m
how many of you want to enter a entertainment industry or want to have your story into a movie. so if there was a netflix but for indie creator would you go there to watch the shows and movies of indie creators or be the one to create it and moneti
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Medialย โขย 10m
NETFLIX : FROM DVDS TO STREAMING EMPIRE !! Founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph, Netflix began as a DVD rental service. When Hastings envisioned streaming content online, the company transitioned in 2007, betting on the future of on
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Netflix๐ฐ ltโs 2000, and Netflix co-founders Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph offer to sell their fledgling DVD rental business to Blockbuster for $50 million. Blockbuster laughs them out of the room. Fast forward to 2025, Netflix boasts over 238 mil
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In 2001, Netflix begged Blockbuster to buy them for $50 million. But Blockbuster laughed at them. Today, Netflix is worth over $350 billionโand no one remembers Blockbuster. Hereโs how that rejection ignited one of the greatest business comebacks
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