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> I'm not going to be the next Zuckerberg What does that mean? If I'm not getting rich, what the hell is the point? I can work half as hard doing bullshit fo

by s2g 8y ago

> I'm not going to be the next Zuckerberg What does that mean? If I'm not getting rich, what the hell is the point? I can work half as hard doing bullshit for some big tech company.

rubicon33 8y ago
"Getting rich" is a relative term. Am I going to significantly increase my earnings by owning this business? Yes. Am I going to be buying a penthouse on 5th Ave. and driving a Ferrari to the office? No. I'll add this additional insight into why I have always wanted to a build a business: A business is a machine. Built correctly, you can step away from this machine and it will continue to run, and create wealth for you. Even if that wealth is modest, it is wealth that can be provided to you at no cost of TIME. This gives you back your TIME, to either work a 9-5 or create another machine. Er, business. (Obviously building the machine can take a lot of time. Not an insignificant point).
- ryandrake 8y ago
  What do you mean by “no cost of time”. I’ve always thought if you own a business, you need to be dedicating your time to keeping it going or it’s going to fail. Where are these mystical businesses that you just own and collect checks every week? EDIT: I don’t doubt you, but i just can’t think of an example!
  - rubicon33 8y ago
    So to cover the obvious case first - If your business is successful enough, you hire a CEO, employees, etc, and hand off daily operations to them. Of course, you as the owner are involved in the company still, but the majority of your time should be free to tackle other issues. Elon Musk is a good example of someone who has done this. He has multiple companies, working on different issues. Of course each company you start takes a significant up-front cost of your time. But the more successful the company comes, the more likely you are to be able to onboard employees who can give you back your time. Clearly, this is only possible once you have "made it big", and it's not really the type of business I am speaking about. The other type of "autonomous" business is a SAAS business. The idea here is that you build a software service that generates revenue. This revenue should come in the form of monthly subscriptions to your service. If you can keep your costs down (i.e. do the work yourself, and don't hire full time employees), then once your system is stable, it should be able to generate income with relatively minor investments to your time. Obviously again with this case, a significant UPFRONT effort must be made to develop a system that provides enough value to customers, that they will pay for it. I've been working on my business now for over 2 years. It's been a side project that has consumed a healthy majority of my spare time outside of my 9-5. I'm on track to break-even in revenue/costs in 3-4 months. Around that time frame, I also expect to be "feature complete" with version 1.0. This should sustain at least a year, if not longer, of minimal time investment. Sure, I might need to fix a bug here or there, or investigate a connectivity issue or something that I simply can't 100% protect against... But the system has been developed from the ground up for long term stability, and reliability. It's been running now for 2 years, and I've had basically no issues that I've needed to fix. It's been all feature development. By the end of this year I can pretty much guarantee I will be hands free, spending less than 3 hours a week, making more money than I spend. That is the goal. Build something that can run (mostly) by itself, that generates more income than it costs to run. p.s. Knowing myself, because I love what I do, I'll continue to work on it just for fun. But there's immense peace of mind knowing I don't have to.
    - ryandrake 8y ago
      Thank you for your detailed example. I’d still characterize your investment in it as very active rather than passive. If you’re willing to share, I’m curious about how much effort you think you’d have to put into it, for how long, before this SAAS business is able to totally replace whatever your main source of income is, and you can, as your primary job, sit back and watch your bank account grow.
      - rubicon33 8y ago
        It's absolutely a very active investment from when I started it, to now. But very soon I will be stepping away, and letting it run for potentially a year, if not longer, generating income and clients without any (minimal, 3h/week) effort. I have worked on this business for the last 2.5 years, as a side project. In that time I have switched jobs (9-5) and learned 2 new programming languages, in completely different domains. It's meant a lot of evenings, and weekends, that I would have otherwise been doing something else, I ended up working on this business. So no, it didn't just magically create itself and start generating income. There was a very real time investment that has had to happen. All in all, it's hard to put a total hourly estimate on it. I think the easiest way to think about it is like this: If I could work on this full time, I would estimate it would take me 8 months of solid, full time work (50 hour weeks) to get where I am now (to a point where it's generating a healthy income, and I can step away from it because it's feature rich enough to support the client base). Possibly faster since, all the context switching I've been doing with my day job really does slow me down. I am NOT saying that the income is enough to survive on. I'm saying after roughly 8 months of solid 50 hour weeks is how long it would take to create a product that has enough value that it can generate an income that matches it's recurring costs (hosting costs mostly). That's the "break even" point past which everything else is just profit. I'm sure there are people on HN who have built something much faster, and made much more. This is just my experience. By no means does it mean I will be making enough this year to quit my day job. My hope is that by the end of the year, I should be generating about $300-500 a month in pure, after expense, profit. I'll take that, and put it in an index fund.

by s2g 8y ago

> I'm not going to be the next Zuckerberg What does that mean? If I'm not getting rich, what the hell is the point? I can work half as hard doing bullshit for some big tech company.

rubicon33 8y ago

"Getting rich" is a relative term. Am I going to significantly increase my earnings by owning this business? Yes. Am I going to be buying a penthouse on 5th Ave. and driving a Ferrari to the office? No. I'll add this additional insight into why I have always wanted to a build a business: A business is a machine. Built correctly, you can step away from this machine and it will continue to run, and create wealth for you. Even if that wealth is modest, it is wealth that can be provided to you at no cost of TIME. This gives you back your TIME, to either work a 9-5 or create another machine. Er, business. (Obviously building the machine can take a lot of time. Not an insignificant point).

ryandrake 8y ago
What do you mean by “no cost of time”. I’ve always thought if you own a business, you need to be dedicating your time to keeping it going or it’s going to fail. Where are these mystical businesses that you just own and collect checks every week? EDIT: I don’t doubt you, but i just can’t think of an example!
- rubicon33 8y ago
  So to cover the obvious case first - If your business is successful enough, you hire a CEO, employees, etc, and hand off daily operations to them. Of course, you as the owner are involved in the company still, but the majority of your time should be free to tackle other issues. Elon Musk is a good example of someone who has done this. He has multiple companies, working on different issues. Of course each company you start takes a significant up-front cost of your time. But the more successful the company comes, the more likely you are to be able to onboard employees who can give you back your time. Clearly, this is only possible once you have "made it big", and it's not really the type of business I am speaking about. The other type of "autonomous" business is a SAAS business. The idea here is that you build a software service that generates revenue. This revenue should come in the form of monthly subscriptions to your service. If you can keep your costs down (i.e. do the work yourself, and don't hire full time employees), then once your system is stable, it should be able to generate income with relatively minor investments to your time. Obviously again with this case, a significant UPFRONT effort must be made to develop a system that provides enough value to customers, that they will pay for it. I've been working on my business now for over 2 years. It's been a side project that has consumed a healthy majority of my spare time outside of my 9-5. I'm on track to break-even in revenue/costs in 3-4 months. Around that time frame, I also expect to be "feature complete" with version 1.0. This should sustain at least a year, if not longer, of minimal time investment. Sure, I might need to fix a bug here or there, or investigate a connectivity issue or something that I simply can't 100% protect against... But the system has been developed from the ground up for long term stability, and reliability. It's been running now for 2 years, and I've had basically no issues that I've needed to fix. It's been all feature development. By the end of this year I can pretty much guarantee I will be hands free, spending less than 3 hours a week, making more money than I spend. That is the goal. Build something that can run (mostly) by itself, that generates more income than it costs to run. p.s. Knowing myself, because I love what I do, I'll continue to work on it just for fun. But there's immense peace of mind knowing I don't have to.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    Thank you for your detailed example. I’d still characterize your investment in it as very active rather than passive. If you’re willing to share, I’m curious about how much effort you think you’d have to put into it, for how long, before this SAAS business is able to totally replace whatever your main source of income is, and you can, as your primary job, sit back and watch your bank account grow.
    - rubicon33 8y ago
      It's absolutely a very active investment from when I started it, to now. But very soon I will be stepping away, and letting it run for potentially a year, if not longer, generating income and clients without any (minimal, 3h/week) effort. I have worked on this business for the last 2.5 years, as a side project. In that time I have switched jobs (9-5) and learned 2 new programming languages, in completely different domains. It's meant a lot of evenings, and weekends, that I would have otherwise been doing something else, I ended up working on this business. So no, it didn't just magically create itself and start generating income. There was a very real time investment that has had to happen. All in all, it's hard to put a total hourly estimate on it. I think the easiest way to think about it is like this: If I could work on this full time, I would estimate it would take me 8 months of solid, full time work (50 hour weeks) to get where I am now (to a point where it's generating a healthy income, and I can step away from it because it's feature rich enough to support the client base). Possibly faster since, all the context switching I've been doing with my day job really does slow me down. I am NOT saying that the income is enough to survive on. I'm saying after roughly 8 months of solid 50 hour weeks is how long it would take to create a product that has enough value that it can generate an income that matches it's recurring costs (hosting costs mostly). That's the "break even" point past which everything else is just profit. I'm sure there are people on HN who have built something much faster, and made much more. This is just my experience. By no means does it mean I will be making enough this year to quit my day job. My hope is that by the end of the year, I should be generating about $300-500 a month in pure, after expense, profit. I'll take that, and put it in an index fund.