7 ms·

Five years in, no salary, and not enough earnings to pay for basic living expenses? That sheds a pretty poor light on venturing out on one's own. The author s

by moorg 4y ago

Five years in, no salary, and not enough earnings to pay for basic living expenses? That sheds a pretty poor light on venturing out on one's own. The author seems like a pretty bright person, and the About Me page lists an ivy league education and some prior work experience. What prospects, then, would someone from a more humble background have? Or is the point of the "bootstrapped experiment" not to earn a basic living? The media paints entrepreneuship as a high calling and "founders" are seen as stars of the show, but is the reality much bleaker?

qup 4y ago
> Or is the point of the "bootstrapped experiment" not to earn a basic living? With no offense to the methods of this founder, no, I don't think that's the point of his (yet?). Maybe an eventual goal, but he clearly has no need for immediate profits, he'd rather do a good job with the product.
atentaten 4y ago
It's true that most people can't afford to to not have enough earnings to pay for basic living expenses while pursuing the entrepreneurship path. The middle ground would be to keep a day job as you go along that path.
- toyg 4y ago
  moonlighting is very hard, and typically means your business will not get the best of your focus and energy. It also fosters an unhealthy and antisocial attitude; people need downtime to avoid burnout.
testmasterflex 4y ago
If you are going to bootstrap a hardware company then this is the reality. And most companies never even get this far.
danielmarkbruce 4y ago
Domain expertise matters. Solving a problem for businesses with software is what most successful tech companies are doing - but it's very difficult if you don't have some insight into the process and problems of some group of businesses. Observations as a regular human worked in the late 90's and around 2010 because there was lots of obvious stuff stuff to do when the web was taking off and mobile taking off. Outside those windows...domain expertise.
- moneywoes 4y ago
  As an outsider is there an effective format for attaining domain expertise via interviews in the sales process?
  - danielmarkbruce 4y ago
    People seem to do it. I'm sure it's a lot of hard work but there are concrete examples. Stripe, Blend off the top of my head.
    - throw_away1525 4y ago
      I spent 9 years building domain expertise in a traditional engineering field and have many ideas for startups that would 100% be successful if I had the time/capital/grit/etc... not just me, anyone with my experience would be able to do it. It is incredible how absolutely awful most engineering software is. Meaning software for mechanical, civil, chemical engineers, etc... The business logic backends are basically all ancient codebases written in C++ or Fortran. CI/CD? Testing? Clean code? Yeah, no. You're having spaghetti code for dinner. And the greybeard who wrote that line of code 25 years ago and is still hanging out in a back office is reverting your changes if you touch "his" code. Imagine what someone could do using a language like Julia or Python/Numpy with modern software engineering practices could build. You would be able to iterate and add new features so quickly, none of the current players who all basically built their stuff in the 90s would be able to compete. I applied for a job at one of these companies and they earnestly asked me if I knew how to code in Delphi... um, no, have you guys heard of React or Electron?
      - danielmarkbruce 4y ago
        Are you saying the software products used by (for example) chemical engineers are no good? What are they using the products for? On what dimensions could the products be made better? Ie, faster, easier to use? Something else?
        4y ago
phphphphp 4y ago
Success is a means to an end: success enables you to do the things you want to do that you couldn’t do otherwise. If the things you can do don’t require financial success, why does financial success matter? The author is apparently having a great time living his life and building his company, who cares if he could make more money back at Google? Entrepreneurship is about making your own path, not about maximising money.
aranchelk 4y ago
Typically the media reports on startups with significant investment by venture capital firms. This startup is bootstrapped, (i.e. self-funded) that makes the process significantly more difficult.
f0e4c2f7 4y ago
It depends on the media. HBO's Silicon Valley for example depicts being a founder as being mostly stress and existential dread punctuated by occasional moments of great excitement. I find this to be pretty accurate. Startups are pretty hard compared to a lot of things. Even if you have funding from the most prestigious seed fund, most startups will fail before they get to the stage mentioned in the blog post. The nature of the game is that 95% of the time you fail and the rest of the time you get rich. This is why it's so important to execute quickly and keep trying things until you find something that works. How bleak this reality is depends on your perspective. If you expect it to be like most things in life where you follow a prescribed path and get a reliable result then it's quite bleak indeed. If on the other hand you want to go out and have adventures it's pretty cool.
mtlynch 4y ago
Thanks for reading! One subtle point about the profit is that because I'm selling a physical product, there are still a lot of unrealized gains in inventory. I estimate that if stopped purchasing new material and just liquidated my existing stock, there'd be about $350k in profit at the end. That said, I don't think hardware is a good path for a bootstrapped business. I went into this thinking I'd mainly be focusing on selling the software to people who already had the hardware, and then it turned out that there was much more demand for pre-made hardware. There are many of other tech business paths that are friendlier to bootstrappers, like content businesses, SaaS tools, and educational products. I know of several founders making a comfortable living in those domains, so I wouldn't generalize based on my experience.
- LudwigNagasena 4y ago
  Maybe I misunderstand something, but inventory is not an expense until it's sold; it shouldn't influence profit in any way. It seems that what you call profit is actually free cash flow (profit after taxes minus investments into operating capital).
  - fragmede 4y ago
    Most (but not all) inventory gets old as time goes on, and the 2022 model isn't as cool as the 2023 version. Which is to say, having a bunch of 2023 stuff on hand is a liability until it is sold. Imagine a car dealership right as Covid shuts things down in 2020.
    - eande 4y ago
      Generally true, but with the continuous saga of component shortage and that market dynamic has shifted over time from a broad shortage to specific segments particular newer, high end ICs type you can't reliably get your hands-on having inventory and liability on the books is still a better way to go for now. My current large corp employer is making hardware products and I can not tell you how much more even in 2023 time and effort is spent by teams procuring material to keep production up, including pushing hard on our suppliers.
metadat 4y ago
It turns out.. striking out on your own as a solo tech founder is truly challenging for most. I learned this the hard way myself through first hand experience. Ultimately I failed, though arguably in the long term the lessons I learned were more valuable than the few hundred thousand dollars of my own money I spent. The reality is that it takes a certain skillset to do all the research, product development work, business development, sales, and marketing by oneself. Much less procuring VC funding (in my case) or for a physical product, creating the end-to-end supply chain and manufacturing pipeline. If I needed a KVM I'd definitely consider a TinyPilot, because it actually looks useful and @mtlynch has demonstrated an unrelenting high degree of dedication.and commitment to this idea for years. Edit: After writing this I checked out a review [0], was surprised how tiny it was. After reading about the Chinese vs. American metal enclosure debacle [1,2], I somehow expected it to be larger despite it having tiny in the name. To be fair, in the pics it does look similar to a PSU enclosure and my brain has heavy PC-parts bias :). [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=o9-1yjGWoOA https://youtube.com/watch?v=o9-1yjGWoOA [1] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2022/11/#with-metal-cases-manufacturing-quality-makes-a-huge-difference https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2022/11/#with-metal-cases-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34740537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34740537 (related comment in this thread)
71a54xd 4y ago
So unfortunately, this is called delusion. This is worse than working five years on a failing crypto project with funding for five years. I tend to measure progress as a function of financial / skill gain over time spent. What a lot of solo founders fail to realize (regardless of education) is that time is the real risk in startups. Sure, you could wait five years for a $2M exit, but how much of your own time / investor time did you burn? At some point, you have to ask whether a "business" is really more of a side-project and whether you're being honest with yourself about how much you value your time. For context, someone with a high school degree and a poor understanding of social media marketing could make more money with zero employees power-washing driveways. I don't mean to be harsh - but time is valuable. The value of life lived is different for each individual, but slowly bleeding out what could've been a prosperous education and career for someone who might just be bad at managing a business is a travesty. I have friends who do this, they're misguided but they also have huge sums of family money paying their rent etc... alas another form of delusion and a detached form of reality. I've literally made more revenue paying a college kid to farm black soldier flies with waste from a vegan coffee shop. I'm literally not kidding.
KeithBrink 4y ago
One overlooked factor in these numbers is that the founder now has more levers to pull. For example, they are paying $206k in payroll, and in an emergency situation, could let some staff go and take over those functions themselves. I've experienced the same thing with my bootstrapped startup; I'm not paying myself any more money than I did 3 years ago, but if I need money, I can double or triple my own salary within a month or two. The reason the founder isn't doing that now is likely exactly the same reason Uber or other VC startups consistently lose money; they are optimizing for growth, not profit/salary.
- password11 4y ago
  > The reason the founder isn't doing that now is likely exactly the same reason Uber or other VC startups consistently lose money; they are optimizing for growth, not profit/salary. Optimizing for growth is very risky and makes sense to VCs. VCs diversify into dozens of companies. The odds that one company will be a moonshot are pretty good. But as an individual founder you're 100% exposed to the growth/collapse of your one company.
georgeecollins 4y ago
>> is the reality much bleaker? Of course, because the media suffers from survivor bias. No one gets article written about them for failing. But lets give the OP some credit- if the company becomes more profitable it could be worth many years salary in equity. And someone who can start a company can usually start another company, which is kind of security I think a lot of people don't have. Look, if you are getting a large salary from a FAANG type gig, every study shows for your wealth you should stick with it. If you don't want to, or you don't have that choice: lets help that person learn to hunt and kill for themselves.
ericmcer 4y ago
The reality is super bleak. Listen to the Indiehackers podcast and you will see that most of the 'crazy success' stories involve someone getting lucky and ending up with $10k/mo, that is a low junior dev salary at a FAANG. The most recent episode featured a guy who was an expert at building and selling Shopify apps. He built 10 different apps, but 97% of his revenue was coming from 1 of them. Even in his own special niche he had a 10% success rate. It was something like the 4th product he had launched also, so it wasn't the product of lessons learned. I don't want to make it sound bleak because everyone should experience building something from scratch (I have tried and still dabble) but it is really a tough game.
- l2silver 4y ago
  Just went and listened, and sure enough the first episode was on point. Justin Welsh. Smart guy, but he does attribute a lot of his success to being one of the first people to create posts specifically for linkedin, which allowed him to acquire an audience of about 20k very quickly.
  - ericmcer 4y ago
    Yeah he is actually doing pretty well. The people who do the best seem to be the ones who do newsletters and courses on... how to build SaaS companies lol.
    - throwaway2037 4y ago
      LOL. Totally agree. In the gold rush, sell shovels. I also like it when people who are really good bloggers or technical writers do some navel gazing and write a post about how their most valuable skill is writing and it should be yours also. I have a good laugh when I see those.
- bdcravens 4y ago
  Every person's situation is unique, but less money can be equivalent given the tangible costs (transportation, food, clothing, etc) and intangible (stresses of any particular jobs like meetings, hours, etc)
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
The most conspicuous examples of so-called entrepreneurs and founders are really just class bullshitters [1]. This class of solopreneur as portrayed by "the media" typically comes from a well-off family, so basic living expenses are already covered behind the scenes. Another frivolous example is the boutique kombucha company founder living a posh Manhattan lifestyle, with frequent updates to their instagram about their life and "success". The hip status of being a founder/entrepreneur is their ultimate goal, not financial success, as finances are not a concern for this class of individual. [1] Class Bullshitters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30556312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30556312
camhart 4y ago
You're making a lot of assumptions about what leads to entrepreneurial success. My gut feeling is working at a big business and attending an ivy league school isn't going to offer better preparation for bootstrapping a business than the hustler who learned to code on the side. In fact, it may actually harm your chances. Entrepreneurship is something very special, if you can pull it off. It's not something that being spoon fed knowledge through typical education prepares you for. It's incredibly difficult and fraught with risk. But the rewards exists, so it's worth it to take a shot if you think you have what it takes and the opportunity seems worth it. For what its worth, I'm a bootstrapped founder, and I do make a living off of it.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  The ivy leagues spoon feed knowledge like the NFL spoon feeds intense football to the players. These are the students who only make it look easy.
- testmasterflex 4y ago
  What’s your startup?
julianeon 4y ago
You raise good questions, especially for someone considering striking out on their own. Personally I'm laser focused on this question: "How do I match what I could earn in salary as a software engineer?" Beyond that - I can figure it out on my own. Until then - I'm burning savings and need to figure it out. As far as I can tell, the safest fastest way to get from A (unemployed and without income) to B ("engineer salary") is as follows, assuming "engineer salary" is 150k/year. 1. Have enough savings to live for 1 year with $0 income and another year with reduced income - say, 50k/year. Having 40k on top of that in savings: half of that to get you started, half to buy businesses in the future and/or to buy services to do that then. 2. Buy an ad supported online business on Flippa. Budget: 20k. This can be for one or multiple businesses, though multiple is probably better for quicker growth & profit potential. (It doesn't have to be Flippa btw, but that's 'good enough' for our purposes). 3. Assume no income in year 1. In this year you add pages to your site(s) and continuously improve them, using Google search analytics to confirm what you're doing is working. Your traffic should be increasing. 4. Assume 50k/year income in year 2. This is either through ad revenue or selling one of those sites you bought (probably the latter). Continue doing what you did in year 1, but better. 5. By year 3 you've hit your goal. By year 4 you've exceeded it. Every year after that, you can expect your income to substantially grow, for at least the following 3 years.
- krisroadruck 4y ago
  Until a google algo update wipes you out and you are screwed. If you are going to go down this path it's better to sell the pick axes than go mining for gold. Learn how to mint the sites yourself and sell them on flippa to guys who think they can buy retirement $20K at a time with no sweat equity.
  - julianeon 4y ago
    I read some of your comment history and I’m impressed: you’re an SEO expert. I’ll take your advice seriously. What do you think about using AI to create a lot of niche websites - carefully, crafting a few dozen pages around search intent, w a real tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs - and then releasing them on the world, letting Google penalize some but making it up on volume? To me it seems like it could work.
yieldcrv 4y ago
It actually highlights the survivorship bias in startups TinyPilot is an okay venture, if they raise outside capital or do a big exit they will look like an overnight success Everyone else will have tried the single venture five iterations ago, gone in debt and had to get a job for the next 10 years before hoping their life, family and health let them try again Richer people just iterate faster, are flexible enough to upskill if they chose to apply themselves in this way
mjwhansen 4y ago
I hope this doesn’t discourage you! There’s a thriving community of indie founders who are earning a good living from their own companies, many of whom are developers who struck out on their own. Most don’t have fancy degrees or companies on their resumes, though a few do. Many don’t have a college degree at all. It’s definitely possible to build a profitable small tech business. We’ve been running our own company full-time for over 6 years now, and make a better living than we did as employees. It did take 3 years of patience as it grew from a side project (so we’re in year 9 now, all told). FWIW self-funding a hardware company, especially when outside expertise is required, is definitely bootstrapping on hard mode. (Though I do know someone who bootstrapped a rocket company!) Most of us do software. I encourage you to check out a MicroConf Local if you’re interested in learning more about the indie founder world.
jbenjoseph 4y ago
As an employee, you are essentially a business owner with one customer. Your customer can cut you off at any time with a 3 AM e-mail, even if you pour your heart into your work. You lose access to it too. You own nothing, any thing you do, your customer owns 100%. There is no intellectual property of yours it's all theirs. Owning a business is super hard and you won't make as much money until you sell, if you are lucky to sell. But, being an employee is even more crazy.
Fuzzwah 4y ago
The 46k website redesign was also a huge thing.... https://mtlynch.io/tinypilot-redesign/ https://mtlynch.io/tinypilot-redesign/
PM_me_your_math 4y ago
I find it remarkable that someone would go into business for themselves to NOT pay for their living standards. In a start-crunch sure, but if you got revenue, pay yourself. The whole point of going into business for yourself is to pay yourself. I think some people get wrapped up in the emotional aspects, and fail to see the pragmatic aspects.

by moorg 4y ago

qup 4y ago

> Or is the point of the "bootstrapped experiment" not to earn a basic living? With no offense to the methods of this founder, no, I don't think that's the point of his (yet?). Maybe an eventual goal, but he clearly has no need for immediate profits, he'd rather do a good job with the product.

atentaten 4y ago

It's true that most people can't afford to to not have enough earnings to pay for basic living expenses while pursuing the entrepreneurship path. The middle ground would be to keep a day job as you go along that path.

toyg 4y ago
moonlighting is very hard, and typically means your business will not get the best of your focus and energy. It also fosters an unhealthy and antisocial attitude; people need downtime to avoid burnout.

testmasterflex 4y ago

If you are going to bootstrap a hardware company then this is the reality. And most companies never even get this far.

danielmarkbruce 4y ago

Domain expertise matters. Solving a problem for businesses with software is what most successful tech companies are doing - but it's very difficult if you don't have some insight into the process and problems of some group of businesses. Observations as a regular human worked in the late 90's and around 2010 because there was lots of obvious stuff stuff to do when the web was taking off and mobile taking off. Outside those windows...domain expertise.

moneywoes 4y ago
As an outsider is there an effective format for attaining domain expertise via interviews in the sales process?
- danielmarkbruce 4y ago
  People seem to do it. I'm sure it's a lot of hard work but there are concrete examples. Stripe, Blend off the top of my head.
  - throw_away1525 4y ago
    I spent 9 years building domain expertise in a traditional engineering field and have many ideas for startups that would 100% be successful if I had the time/capital/grit/etc... not just me, anyone with my experience would be able to do it. It is incredible how absolutely awful most engineering software is. Meaning software for mechanical, civil, chemical engineers, etc... The business logic backends are basically all ancient codebases written in C++ or Fortran. CI/CD? Testing? Clean code? Yeah, no. You're having spaghetti code for dinner. And the greybeard who wrote that line of code 25 years ago and is still hanging out in a back office is reverting your changes if you touch "his" code. Imagine what someone could do using a language like Julia or Python/Numpy with modern software engineering practices could build. You would be able to iterate and add new features so quickly, none of the current players who all basically built their stuff in the 90s would be able to compete. I applied for a job at one of these companies and they earnestly asked me if I knew how to code in Delphi... um, no, have you guys heard of React or Electron?
    - danielmarkbruce 4y ago
      Are you saying the software products used by (for example) chemical engineers are no good? What are they using the products for? On what dimensions could the products be made better? Ie, faster, easier to use? Something else?
      - 4y ago

phphphphp 4y ago

Success is a means to an end: success enables you to do the things you want to do that you couldn’t do otherwise. If the things you can do don’t require financial success, why does financial success matter? The author is apparently having a great time living his life and building his company, who cares if he could make more money back at Google? Entrepreneurship is about making your own path, not about maximising money.

aranchelk 4y ago

Typically the media reports on startups with significant investment by venture capital firms. This startup is bootstrapped, (i.e. self-funded) that makes the process significantly more difficult.

f0e4c2f7 4y ago

It depends on the media. HBO's Silicon Valley for example depicts being a founder as being mostly stress and existential dread punctuated by occasional moments of great excitement. I find this to be pretty accurate. Startups are pretty hard compared to a lot of things. Even if you have funding from the most prestigious seed fund, most startups will fail before they get to the stage mentioned in the blog post. The nature of the game is that 95% of the time you fail and the rest of the time you get rich. This is why it's so important to execute quickly and keep trying things until you find something that works. How bleak this reality is depends on your perspective. If you expect it to be like most things in life where you follow a prescribed path and get a reliable result then it's quite bleak indeed. If on the other hand you want to go out and have adventures it's pretty cool.

mtlynch 4y ago

Thanks for reading! One subtle point about the profit is that because I'm selling a physical product, there are still a lot of unrealized gains in inventory. I estimate that if stopped purchasing new material and just liquidated my existing stock, there'd be about $350k in profit at the end. That said, I don't think hardware is a good path for a bootstrapped business. I went into this thinking I'd mainly be focusing on selling the software to people who already had the hardware, and then it turned out that there was much more demand for pre-made hardware. There are many of other tech business paths that are friendlier to bootstrappers, like content businesses, SaaS tools, and educational products. I know of several founders making a comfortable living in those domains, so I wouldn't generalize based on my experience.

LudwigNagasena 4y ago
Maybe I misunderstand something, but inventory is not an expense until it's sold; it shouldn't influence profit in any way. It seems that what you call profit is actually free cash flow (profit after taxes minus investments into operating capital).
- fragmede 4y ago
  Most (but not all) inventory gets old as time goes on, and the 2022 model isn't as cool as the 2023 version. Which is to say, having a bunch of 2023 stuff on hand is a liability until it is sold. Imagine a car dealership right as Covid shuts things down in 2020.
  - eande 4y ago
    Generally true, but with the continuous saga of component shortage and that market dynamic has shifted over time from a broad shortage to specific segments particular newer, high end ICs type you can't reliably get your hands-on having inventory and liability on the books is still a better way to go for now. My current large corp employer is making hardware products and I can not tell you how much more even in 2023 time and effort is spent by teams procuring material to keep production up, including pushing hard on our suppliers.

metadat 4y ago

It turns out.. striking out on your own as a solo tech founder is truly challenging for most. I learned this the hard way myself through first hand experience. Ultimately I failed, though arguably in the long term the lessons I learned were more valuable than the few hundred thousand dollars of my own money I spent. The reality is that it takes a certain skillset to do all the research, product development work, business development, sales, and marketing by oneself. Much less procuring VC funding (in my case) or for a physical product, creating the end-to-end supply chain and manufacturing pipeline. If I needed a KVM I'd definitely consider a TinyPilot, because it actually looks useful and @mtlynch has demonstrated an unrelenting high degree of dedication.and commitment to this idea for years. Edit: After writing this I checked out a review [0], was surprised how tiny it was. After reading about the Chinese vs. American metal enclosure debacle [1,2], I somehow expected it to be larger despite it having tiny in the name. To be fair, in the pics it does look similar to a PSU enclosure and my brain has heavy PC-parts bias :). [0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=o9-1yjGWoOA https://youtube.com/watch?v=o9-1yjGWoOA [1] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2022/11/#with-metal-cases-manufacturing-quality-makes-a-huge-difference https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2022/11/#with-metal-cases-... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34740537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34740537 (related comment in this thread)

71a54xd 4y ago

So unfortunately, this is called delusion. This is worse than working five years on a failing crypto project with funding for five years. I tend to measure progress as a function of financial / skill gain over time spent. What a lot of solo founders fail to realize (regardless of education) is that time is the real risk in startups. Sure, you could wait five years for a $2M exit, but how much of your own time / investor time did you burn? At some point, you have to ask whether a "business" is really more of a side-project and whether you're being honest with yourself about how much you value your time. For context, someone with a high school degree and a poor understanding of social media marketing could make more money with zero employees power-washing driveways. I don't mean to be harsh - but time is valuable. The value of life lived is different for each individual, but slowly bleeding out what could've been a prosperous education and career for someone who might just be bad at managing a business is a travesty. I have friends who do this, they're misguided but they also have huge sums of family money paying their rent etc... alas another form of delusion and a detached form of reality. I've literally made more revenue paying a college kid to farm black soldier flies with waste from a vegan coffee shop. I'm literally not kidding.

KeithBrink 4y ago

One overlooked factor in these numbers is that the founder now has more levers to pull. For example, they are paying $206k in payroll, and in an emergency situation, could let some staff go and take over those functions themselves. I've experienced the same thing with my bootstrapped startup; I'm not paying myself any more money than I did 3 years ago, but if I need money, I can double or triple my own salary within a month or two. The reason the founder isn't doing that now is likely exactly the same reason Uber or other VC startups consistently lose money; they are optimizing for growth, not profit/salary.

password11 4y ago
> The reason the founder isn't doing that now is likely exactly the same reason Uber or other VC startups consistently lose money; they are optimizing for growth, not profit/salary. Optimizing for growth is very risky and makes sense to VCs. VCs diversify into dozens of companies. The odds that one company will be a moonshot are pretty good. But as an individual founder you're 100% exposed to the growth/collapse of your one company.

georgeecollins 4y ago

>> is the reality much bleaker? Of course, because the media suffers from survivor bias. No one gets article written about them for failing. But lets give the OP some credit- if the company becomes more profitable it could be worth many years salary in equity. And someone who can start a company can usually start another company, which is kind of security I think a lot of people don't have. Look, if you are getting a large salary from a FAANG type gig, every study shows for your wealth you should stick with it. If you don't want to, or you don't have that choice: lets help that person learn to hunt and kill for themselves.

ericmcer 4y ago

The reality is super bleak. Listen to the Indiehackers podcast and you will see that most of the 'crazy success' stories involve someone getting lucky and ending up with $10k/mo, that is a low junior dev salary at a FAANG. The most recent episode featured a guy who was an expert at building and selling Shopify apps. He built 10 different apps, but 97% of his revenue was coming from 1 of them. Even in his own special niche he had a 10% success rate. It was something like the 4th product he had launched also, so it wasn't the product of lessons learned. I don't want to make it sound bleak because everyone should experience building something from scratch (I have tried and still dabble) but it is really a tough game.

l2silver 4y ago
Just went and listened, and sure enough the first episode was on point. Justin Welsh. Smart guy, but he does attribute a lot of his success to being one of the first people to create posts specifically for linkedin, which allowed him to acquire an audience of about 20k very quickly.
- ericmcer 4y ago
  Yeah he is actually doing pretty well. The people who do the best seem to be the ones who do newsletters and courses on... how to build SaaS companies lol.
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    LOL. Totally agree. In the gold rush, sell shovels. I also like it when people who are really good bloggers or technical writers do some navel gazing and write a post about how their most valuable skill is writing and it should be yours also. I have a good laugh when I see those.
bdcravens 4y ago
Every person's situation is unique, but less money can be equivalent given the tangible costs (transportation, food, clothing, etc) and intangible (stresses of any particular jobs like meetings, hours, etc)

VoodooJuJu 4y ago

The most conspicuous examples of so-called entrepreneurs and founders are really just class bullshitters [1]. This class of solopreneur as portrayed by "the media" typically comes from a well-off family, so basic living expenses are already covered behind the scenes. Another frivolous example is the boutique kombucha company founder living a posh Manhattan lifestyle, with frequent updates to their instagram about their life and "success". The hip status of being a founder/entrepreneur is their ultimate goal, not financial success, as finances are not a concern for this class of individual. [1] Class Bullshitters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30556312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30556312

camhart 4y ago

You're making a lot of assumptions about what leads to entrepreneurial success. My gut feeling is working at a big business and attending an ivy league school isn't going to offer better preparation for bootstrapping a business than the hustler who learned to code on the side. In fact, it may actually harm your chances. Entrepreneurship is something very special, if you can pull it off. It's not something that being spoon fed knowledge through typical education prepares you for. It's incredibly difficult and fraught with risk. But the rewards exists, so it's worth it to take a shot if you think you have what it takes and the opportunity seems worth it. For what its worth, I'm a bootstrapped founder, and I do make a living off of it.

fsckboy 4y ago
The ivy leagues spoon feed knowledge like the NFL spoon feeds intense football to the players. These are the students who only make it look easy.
testmasterflex 4y ago
What’s your startup?

julianeon 4y ago

You raise good questions, especially for someone considering striking out on their own. Personally I'm laser focused on this question: "How do I match what I could earn in salary as a software engineer?" Beyond that - I can figure it out on my own. Until then - I'm burning savings and need to figure it out. As far as I can tell, the safest fastest way to get from A (unemployed and without income) to B ("engineer salary") is as follows, assuming "engineer salary" is 150k/year. 1. Have enough savings to live for 1 year with $0 income and another year with reduced income - say, 50k/year. Having 40k on top of that in savings: half of that to get you started, half to buy businesses in the future and/or to buy services to do that then. 2. Buy an ad supported online business on Flippa. Budget: 20k. This can be for one or multiple businesses, though multiple is probably better for quicker growth & profit potential. (It doesn't have to be Flippa btw, but that's 'good enough' for our purposes). 3. Assume no income in year 1. In this year you add pages to your site(s) and continuously improve them, using Google search analytics to confirm what you're doing is working. Your traffic should be increasing. 4. Assume 50k/year income in year 2. This is either through ad revenue or selling one of those sites you bought (probably the latter). Continue doing what you did in year 1, but better. 5. By year 3 you've hit your goal. By year 4 you've exceeded it. Every year after that, you can expect your income to substantially grow, for at least the following 3 years.

krisroadruck 4y ago
Until a google algo update wipes you out and you are screwed. If you are going to go down this path it's better to sell the pick axes than go mining for gold. Learn how to mint the sites yourself and sell them on flippa to guys who think they can buy retirement $20K at a time with no sweat equity.
- julianeon 4y ago
  I read some of your comment history and I’m impressed: you’re an SEO expert. I’ll take your advice seriously. What do you think about using AI to create a lot of niche websites - carefully, crafting a few dozen pages around search intent, w a real tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs - and then releasing them on the world, letting Google penalize some but making it up on volume? To me it seems like it could work.

yieldcrv 4y ago

It actually highlights the survivorship bias in startups TinyPilot is an okay venture, if they raise outside capital or do a big exit they will look like an overnight success Everyone else will have tried the single venture five iterations ago, gone in debt and had to get a job for the next 10 years before hoping their life, family and health let them try again Richer people just iterate faster, are flexible enough to upskill if they chose to apply themselves in this way

mjwhansen 4y ago

I hope this doesn’t discourage you! There’s a thriving community of indie founders who are earning a good living from their own companies, many of whom are developers who struck out on their own. Most don’t have fancy degrees or companies on their resumes, though a few do. Many don’t have a college degree at all. It’s definitely possible to build a profitable small tech business. We’ve been running our own company full-time for over 6 years now, and make a better living than we did as employees. It did take 3 years of patience as it grew from a side project (so we’re in year 9 now, all told). FWIW self-funding a hardware company, especially when outside expertise is required, is definitely bootstrapping on hard mode. (Though I do know someone who bootstrapped a rocket company!) Most of us do software. I encourage you to check out a MicroConf Local if you’re interested in learning more about the indie founder world.

jbenjoseph 4y ago

As an employee, you are essentially a business owner with one customer. Your customer can cut you off at any time with a 3 AM e-mail, even if you pour your heart into your work. You lose access to it too. You own nothing, any thing you do, your customer owns 100%. There is no intellectual property of yours it's all theirs. Owning a business is super hard and you won't make as much money until you sell, if you are lucky to sell. But, being an employee is even more crazy.

Fuzzwah 4y ago

The 46k website redesign was also a huge thing.... https://mtlynch.io/tinypilot-redesign/ https://mtlynch.io/tinypilot-redesign/

PM_me_your_math 4y ago

I find it remarkable that someone would go into business for themselves to NOT pay for their living standards. In a start-crunch sure, but if you got revenue, pay yourself. The whole point of going into business for yourself is to pay yourself. I think some people get wrapped up in the emotional aspects, and fail to see the pragmatic aspects.