Why do you need investment? If you can build it on your own and there is a real niche with people willing to pay money for what you build then you can make a lot of money as an individual.
Suppose that I have an idea for a widget which market research indicates could sell for $20/, but probably not $50/.
I can hit the $50/ target with small contract runs, which would cost about as much as a down payment on a house.
Or I can make it in volume for less than $10/, but I need a large minimum order, space, equipment, logistics. Now we're looking at 7-8 figures.
If you aren't independently wealthy, neither option is really feasible, and the former option will almost certainly end in tears if you try to stretch and bootstrap with your own money.
> I can hit the $50/ target with small contract runs, which would cost about as much as a down payment on a house.
I wasn't thinking of this from the perspective of a hardware startup but a software startup which doesn't require either of those things. I should qualify my original post with that. You don't need to be independently wealthy to launch a software business on your own provided you have the ability to build it yourself.
Kind reminder that starting a software business still requires you to, you know, live and stuff :)
Even if you can build it all by yourself, for most people runway is limited by savings. And that means that with a few exceptions, it's hard to stretch beyond a couple of months (or maybe one-two years) before you need to think about shutting down.
If you can get to profit before that, awesome, your business might be a good idea. (You'll still have depleted a good chunk of your savings, and it's not like the world comes with profit guarantees)
Investment buys runway, opex, and scale. Some businesses need that, some don't. Software work reduces the opex load (for many attempts), but scale and runway might still be necessary.
You can often found it as you go from a primary job and or a spouse's job. I have a friend who drops about 100K into his startup a year hoping for a big exit. Pretty much all startups or small businesses involve risk. Your other putting in time or money or both. The Only Exception is if you find deep pocket feces that are willing to pay you a good salary to work on your own project, which is especially rare
Sure, but that's still usually limited runway compared to getting funding. Yes, there are cases of spouses supporting a decade of work to get something off the ground. Yes, some people make enough to afford dumping it all into a startup (and a good chunk into a lawyer making sure they don't violate constraints from the existing job). But all these are several std.devs outside the normal "start a business" crowd.
Either way, the risk you can take without VC is limited by your wealth. Large bets without VC require independent wealth. We can quibble about what amount constitutes "independent wealth", but the fact doesn't change - VC allows you to dream bigger. (And I say that as a fierce critic of VC culture, but that is the upside of it)
That depends on what you mean by "having it to drop" . That's less than a median income in San Francisco. If you put 100% of your income into a startup, are you out of touch or do you just have skin in the game?
I don't think it's particularly in touch to dismiss someone who works 50 hours a week to make an income and then Works another 50 hours a week on a startup that spends that income
> That's less than a median income in San Francisco. If you put 100% of your income into a startup, are you out of touch or do you just have skin in the game?
If your trust fund pays for rent and living expenses in San Francisco, and you don't even think of it as abnormal that your ENTIRE INCOME can be allocated to business bets, then yes -- you are indeed wildly out of touch.
If you put 100% of income—remaining after paying life costs (how much is that? I hope you do not rent!)—into work, it means you: do not travel, do not go to any events that cost money, do not dine out much, do not have any other hobbies that cost money (sports? music? photography? LEGO? DIY?), do not date, do not need to support a family, do not have emergencies for which you pay out of pocket, etc.
Are there people who just do not need any of those things? Maybe, but I would question it. (Too often what you think you need could be different from what you actually need.) Personally, even as someone who enjoys software engineering and would do it as a hobby, I think I would be quite miserable.
Here is what I think is reasonable: Someone would have an idea that is attractive for YC et al., raise money, and be able to comfortably afford all those things while working on a company. That is, I think, the promise of the leading quote in TFA. Unfortunately, the quote is phrased as if they are out there to help people start companies, while in reality it is about starting businesses with specific potential for explosive growth that are attractive to VC.
I agree that there is a market for both, your do or die founder and your comfort focused founder with a good idea. the markets are just different and unequal.
They are out there to help people start companies, just not all people and ideas in equal measure.
> Are there people who just do not need any of those things?
Yes. That would have described me very well at one point in my life. Coincidentally, it was at the time I was running my first (unsuccessful) business.
Did you at least still participated in social media and such, or it was literally just work?
If it was just work, do you now think it was a good idea to ignore everything in life except work?
I.e., you thought you didn’t need those things and you actually didn’t need those things, vs. you needed them but you thought you didn’t and it caught up with you eventually.
Video Games industry survivor here, chuckling at the low number ;)
Yes, people do. It carries potentially huge personal costs, but if people are passionate enough, they absolutely will risk that. (Mind, I'm not saying this is a good idea, at all, but merely that it happens)
At least in the cases I did, it was usually a 9 month gruelling sprint at the end of a ~2.5-3.5 year project. Followed by people lollygagging about for ~3 months before they could do any reasonable work again. We sure got a lot of Age of Empires in during that time, though ;)
Which is maybe acceptable if it is your main job, but a bigger problem if you burn out from a side project and then can’t do much on your day job for some mysterious (to management) reason…
I agree it's not very sustainable, at least for your typical person in Western Society, but it's not unheard of either.
I've worked hundred hour weeks and also supervised crews of Hispanic Americans that will work 100 hour weeks.
On the other end of the spectrum, I've known m&a lawyers that do the same to close deals at the end of the fiscal year.
100 hour week is roughly 14 hour days with no weekend break. 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. is pretty common for agricultural work during harvest season for big cash crops. You start while it's dark and you end while it's dark.
It is not sustained/sustainable. I worked 100 hour weeks too, but then it took like a month to recover and during that time I could not properly work even 50 hours on my main job.
Agriculture is historically seasonal: you work a lot during some times, but the rest of the time you do completely nothing on the agriculture front. Not a luxury at most modern workplaces.
I do not know what you mean. What I described with regards to agriculture is how it worked historically with communities growing stuff for themselves or to sell at a local market. I encountered leftovers of that personally growing up. People could work hard in planting/harvest times during summer and in winter do mostly nothing except maintenance and such. I am not talking about commercial industries which may well be working people to the bone unsustainably (and illegally, if it was a developed country) with 12+ hour shifts. Barely a worthy example.
It's not all rare for certain workers to to spend 14+ hour days, 7 days a week, for multiple weeks straight, without any breaks. And they do this every year, year after year. And they can still live to their 80s.
The claim that a long period of rest is always necessary in-between 100 hour work weeks is simply not true.
I've met at least 1 person capable of doing 'creative innovative mental work' on a similar basis. Making categorical claims over billions of adults is simply incorrect.
If you're really sure, you do that first run and lose money, then show a bank/investor the explosive popularity and get money for manufacturing at scale. Relatively speaking it's close to the easiest type of funding you can get.
I can’t because I need money to survive, and this will not provide that money for months until the thing is written, deployed, and has an established enough paying user base… And good luck me not getting seriously ill or get affected by whatever calamity in meantime!
If it will be a matter of mere months until this thing is making enough money to pay for you to live, then it shouldn't take you too long to save up to start? Maybe a bank would even lend you the money? Maybe even a credit card would be enough?
Yes, saving is the way to go, but with my salary and life costs to save enough to last even 6 months will take me about 1 year without much other spending. Like probably with most people, my job and this project are not the only things I care about, I have other hobbies and interests too. I want to buy a camera and travel a bit in meantime for example.
Fwiw my web app costs like $80/mo in hosting fees, and could be done for even less. I forget how much we paid to register our company but it wasn't much. The startup costs aren't that much, it's mostly time.
I wouldn't be so optimistic on a few months to start generating cash tho unless it's a simple yet novel idea.
I could spare that much, but the idea in question is a bit different. Without going into too much detail, each upload consumes some compute, equivalent of like 10 seconds on a M1 MBP with 16GB RAM when nothing else is heavy is running. So I think my costs will be a bit higher and I would need to start billing customers early on.
You should never found a business. If you are already thinking about becoming ill, then it's just not the path for you. A business founder has to be prepared and eager to sacrifice his personal well being for the business.
What you are describing seems like hustling and/or privilege. If your goal is to create value long term, the worst way to go about it is to not take care of yourself. For people who were not born into strong safety nets it is usually harder and includes finances.
Becoming ill is a sure way to be unproductive and make bad decisions, going broke and struggling to make ends meet is not going to help you focus on getting things done, dying early is not compatible with seeing your idea to success.
> For people who were not born into strong safety nets
"Hustling" as you call it is pretty much the only way to start a successful business exactly for the people not born into "strong safety nets" and "privilege" as you call it. If you have those you can start your business and coast.
I don't know any business owner - including myself - who didn't have to make sacrifices to his or her well being to push through. That's the thing with having a business, there will be times were you just can't relax or take a day off. You are in fierce competition with the world, and as a founder you should work at a minimum twice as hard as somebody who is hired. It can and it will lead to partial or complete burn out, but one thing that I've noticed among myself and every other business owner is that they push through and simply don't get sick when they can't be sick. After it's over and they've pushed through a project or a season, they will get sick as dogs and disappear for a couple of weeks to lay on the sofa. The overload cannot be constant, you need to have some time to recover in the foreseeable future.
The human mind has an incredible force to resist becoming ill and for those who cannot channel this, starting a business is a bad idea. Being ill is mainly the body's reaction to fight the sickness, so it's somewhat under our control.
Having a business puts incredible pressure from all sides on a person, and you can't be a person who thinks about "tapping out" as an option. Especially in situations when other people's salaries depend on you.
First you have moved the goalposts from complete disregard for oneself (ignoring the possibility of becoming ill) to “making some sacrifices”.
Then you claimed “the human mind has an incredible force to resist becoming ill”. Tell your mind that while lying in a ditch with a few broken bones after an SUV crashed into you as you were walking half asleep after working for 18 hours straight and realizing you have no insurance or even a bank account because you failed to get or hold a job in pursuit of a moonshot startup idea.
The notion that starting a business automatically requires disregarding your life and people close to you is frankly some cool-aid fueled SV fever dream that doesn’t represent reality. Those startup founders with thousands to millions of YC funding, who pay themselves enough to live comfortably (with all the healthcare, dental care, good apartment and other things that many people struggle with) in one of the world’s most expensive places, are the prime example of the opposite!
People in my situation shouldn’t go all in on some new venture unless that venture can interest the likes of YC who can provide the required safety net. Not because we are mentally unfit to do it for the wild reasons you described, but just because the circumstances aren’t right.
Running even a small business is a great way to create more value for the world, but yes, it requires some sacrifices—and if you don’t have the leeway to make those sacrifices, ruining yourself is probably the worst way to go about it.
If you have the ability to program you can find time around your day job to make a little progress each day until you have something ready to market. Because it just sounds like you're lazy and are throwing up random excuses.
Do you also have no time in the evenings or weekends? Spend the hours that you normally watch TV or browse social media/Hacker News working on your project.
But the fact that you're posting on here while complaining that you don't have time tells me you just don't want to do it enough for it to ever be worthwhile.
No time means no time in which I can do productive work.
I still have time to, say, occasionally exercise or have a walk or deal with life chores or get out with friends once in a while, but if I stop doing those things that would hurt my health/life and therefore my ability to work even further, as I know from experience.
As to HN, I read it mostly when I can’t sleep or in public transport.
Sell it first, build it after. Helps with this conundrum - but more importantly it forces you to focus on the customer and their problem, finding what people are willing to pay for. And that is what successful business is made of.
If your goal isn't to build a kind of empire or to shoot for unimaginable riches, but instead to start a solid small business that lets you do the sort of work you enjoy and provides enough income to live in your preferred style, then it's never been easier than it is today.
All you really need is to find a niche that has a small market. How small is OK depends a lot on the specifics of a business, but if we're talking a one-person software shop, you can probably live decently with a customer base of a handful of thousands. Even less if your niche supports very high profit margins.
And, as an old mentor pointed out, if you're fishing in the pool of the entire world (which the internet allows at low cost), then you can just nail two boards together and find a thousand or two who are willing to buy it.
