8 ms·

I just have to stop and say that this was an immensely fun and exciting post to read. So much of the business stuff we read now is bullshit. It is stupid peopl

I just have to stop and say that this was an immensely fun and exciting post to read. So much of the business stuff we read now is bullshit. It is stupid people getting lucky and riding on VC money while making more stupid decisions but ultimately dumping enough investor money into it that it works enough to get sold. At which point, that founder then goes around and tells the same stereotypical story of dropping out of college, running out of money and getting investment on the day they were planning on giving up, etc. We have all heard the bullshit before. So I was genuinely grateful to read a real business story. The owner saw an opportunity, took it when other people probably wouldn't have, and just genuinely worked hard to get where he is. This is inspiring because anyone here could do it too if they wanted to. I don't mean selling onions specifically, but I mean they could just go out there find a product, work hard towards selling it, team up with manufacturers/producers, etc and make the dream come to life.

blantonl 8y ago
Not to mention he's actually having a lot of fun doing this, and he specifically throws shade at what you've described above (and what we typically read about here on Hacker News) Them: We leverage automated machine learning to enhance your existing BI visualizations with more proactive insights Me: I sell onions on the internet So good.
noxToken 8y ago
Yes! This was an odd read (in a good way), and I definitely enjoyed. No cruft. No BS. No "one weird trick" hooks. Just a person stumbling into a business opportunity and taking a shot in the dark. Kudos.
duxup 8y ago
This doesn't seem unlike super cool hip startups where the key to success is clearly hip company onion culture that could be better expressed with professional photos of the onions working in various locations / having a good time.
- vram22 8y ago
  Or like the startup team page where they have, say, Vidalia (an onion, in a cool red-and-white gown of sheaths) instead of the obligatory human-named dog :)
newaccoutnas 8y ago
Getting the story on HN can't do any harm to the sales too
ignoramous 8y ago
pg wrote about this in a rather uncharacteristically short essay titled Schelp Blindness [0] where he specifically says that hackers ignore obvious problems [1] because they are... erm... blind. Excerpts: > No one likes schleps, but hackers especially dislike them. Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watching the money roll in—without ever having to talk to users, or negotiate with other companies, or deal with other people's broken code. Maybe that's possible, but I haven't seen it. > How do you overcome schlep blindness? Frankly, the most valuable antidote to schlep blindness is probably ignorance. Most successful founders would probably say that if they'd known when they were starting their company about the obstacles they'd have to overcome, they might never have started it. Maybe that's one reason the most successful startups of all so often have young founders. > Ignorance can't solve everything though. Some ideas so obviously entail alarming schleps that anyone can see them. How do you see ideas like that? The trick I recommend is to take yourself out of the picture. Instead of asking "what problem should I solve?" ask "what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?" If someone who had to process payments before Stripe had tried asking that, Stripe would have been one of the first things they wished for. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html [1] http://paulgraham.com/growth.html http://paulgraham.com/growth.html
- hopler 8y ago
  Even before Paul Graham and Viaweb, the stats were that about 90% of new businesses fail and a big predictor of success (but still at low odds) was ignorance of those odds.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    Our new business just "failed" after 15 years (it was designed to support our family, which unexpectedly grew). But, regardless, when I checked the failure rate reported in gov stats in UK was far lower than the common wisdom held; which surprised me somewhat. Do you have a source of solid figures to back up that 90%?
    - 8y ago
munificent 8y ago
> So much of the business stuff we read now is bullshit. It is stupid people getting lucky and riding on VC money while making more stupid decisions but ultimately dumping enough investor money into it that it works enough to get sold. My impression (from way outside, I'm not an entrepreneur at all) is that so much business is VC-funded, which effectively means driven by finance people. Everyone who isn't a VC is still chasing a VC, so VC culture ends up defining business culture. People, especially left-brained ones like programmers and finance nerds have this really bad tendency to see problems in terms of their preferred solutions. The old "if all you have is a hammer..." thing. So finance people like to turn everything into a money problem that they can solve using spreadsheets and Jupyter notebooks or whatever else it is they use. Their ideal state is that "business" is just some board game where the money is all on the board already and you're just playing the rules to move it onto your square. ...which is of course completely antithetical to any kind of business that actually matters to real humans. If you want to actually solve a human problem, make peoples' lives better and maybe make a little money in the process, Silicon Valley business culture is increasingly useless to you.
- ignoramous 8y ago
  > ...which is of course completely antithetical to any kind of business that actually matters to real humans. If you want to actually solve a human problem, make peoples' lives better... Who are we kidding? Every startup is about making human lives better. /s http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyons/ http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyo...
- vram22 8y ago
  >Their ideal state is that "business" is just some board game where the money is all on the board already and you're just playing the rules to move it onto your square. Right. Terms used like "gameplan", "playing to win", etc., confirm it. In fact, although cliches definitely have their place, overuse of terms like that can be considered a "biz smell" (term I just coined - see what I did there? :), analogous to a "code smell" in programming.
- rossenberg79 8y ago
  If you want to understand how to make people’s lives better, first you have to go out and actually live. Scrappy college kids making a startup don’t know how to live, they’ve just barely lived. And a lot of professionals in tech have no lives outside of work and tech: Wake up and go work in tech. Go home and go read about tech. Attend a party and talk about tech. How can we expect these Silicon Valley people to create anything that makes life better? All they can do is make cheap permutations of the same tired ideas that have passed through the lips of wanna-be gonna-be entrepreneurs for decades. Ask them: This product makes my life better? Better for what exactly? Here’s a man who understood that life is a bit better when you can bite into a tasty and juicy Vidalia Onion. This is something you can only know if you stop and take some time to live.
eightturn 8y ago
thank you jacurtis (Peter here, author).. your comments mean a lot. many thanks.
- jacurtis 8y ago
  You're welcome. So now a more "technical" question for you. I grew up in Washington where we are home to the "walla walla onion" which is also a sweet onion. I am not a farmer, nor do I claim any level of expertise here. But I just am curious if you could explain the differences/similarities between a Vidalia Onion and a Walla Walla onion.
  - eightturn 8y ago
    The taste is very subjective. Most folks simply say that the Vidalia is the sweetest/mildest of them all. The Walla Walla, Texas 1015, the Peru, the Maui sweet are all legit sweet onions, and are all quite good (I now buy & taste onions cause I'm curious).. Some sweet onions might have a slight bite on the front end, others might have a little burn on the back end. Then some are smooth the entire time you chew.. I'd say Vidalias tend to be mild the entire time you chew. That being said, Mother Nature is mother nature, and she's gonna do what she wants to do, taste wise.
  - daotoad 8y ago
    Walla Wallas are better, IMHO. But I grew up in the Walla Walla Valley, so my tastes were probably influenced a bit. Here's an article that attempts to answer your question, and goes into great detail: https://www.oregonlive.com/foodday/2012/07/which_sweet_onion_rules.html https://www.oregonlive.com/foodday/2012/07/which_sweet_onion... TLDR: Vidalia is milder. Walla Walla has a more complex flavor profile.
  - computerfriend 8y ago
    I sense a business opportunity in wallawallaonions.com.
- jtreminio 8y ago
  Would you mind telling us what went wrong with the box order?
woah 8y ago
I don't understand this sort of attitude that there is some kind of moral superiority to non-VC funded businesses. In this case, the onion guy used a ton of VC funded businesses like Google and Shopify to make his business possible in the first place. How can you call them "stupid" while holding him up as some kind of good ol' honest salt of the earth online onion man?
mattlondon 8y ago
+1 to this. It was a pleasingly refreshing reminder of the old days of the dotcom boom ... a web site for pets! a web site for hotels! a web site for buying onions! anything was possible in those days. Pleasant memories. Turns out that a website for buying onions was a missed-trick back in those days! (...or was it?) Great to hear about these business opportunities sprouting up and getting acted on in an honest and decent way. Good read. Thanks :)
betolink 8y ago
best comment on HN this year so far.
devmunchies 8y ago
>This is inspiring because anyone here could do it too if they wanted to. I don't mean selling onions specifically, but I mean they could just go out there find a product, work hard towards selling it, team up with manufacturers/producers, etc and make the dream come to life. Sounds like my story, where i teamed up with a baker who makes really good cookies. I did all the design and development on nights and weekends. Its only been running for a few months but we've processed almost 1,200 orders delivering cookies. https://cravecookie.co https://cravecookie.co I love to learn more about this stuff from other engineers. Really inspiring like you said.
- teachtyler 8y ago
  I really connected to this story because he looks at domain names the same way I do, just not as effective of turning them over into working businesses. I picked up a bunch of domains like weknow.services, weknow.technology, ...systems because they were on sale, and so they just sat there... At the start of the year, the idea of creating a forum for professionals kept clawing at me, but I couldn't think of a good domain name that wasn't taken. I wanted a .com but I looked at the ones I owned and just went with it weknow.services. A month ago Upwork announced they'd start charging freelancers for "Connects" to send proposals to clients. I started ramping up the campaign as many were asking "Where else can I look" and quickly replied to someone saying I'd been working on this thing, however I was banned from /r/freelance for even citing it. I'm not banking on the fact that it'll work, but I sincerely hope it does, for my sake and others. It's something that would help me as a freelancer, and I have future plans if things pan out and users find it useful. If anything it's made me realize how hard marketing is.
- kbenson 8y ago
  > DEETS > Wanna see behind the scenes? This sent me through a gamut of emotions. First, was some revulsion at how informal it was. Then I chastised myself because it doesn't matter. Then I figured people younger than me (maybe even just at heart...) probably don't mind. And now I just feel like an old curmudgeon. :/ Good job on the site and business though, and good luck.
muse900 8y ago
Agree with you. And everyone out there is about becoming a billion $ or more company... What happened to normal ideas, ideas that can literally feed a few families and make you have a good life as well... Person behind the article seems to enjoy himself and also seems to be feeding a few farms as well that provide him with onions. Amazing work!
- maehwasu 8y ago
  There are tens of thousands of those companies out there, they get less attention (on a per company basis) than the billion $ ones for obvious reasons, and occasionally stories about them are posted on HN, where they not infrequently rise to the top.
wisty 8y ago
Stories are often modified to make them more compelling, often to follow a 3 act play - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-act_structure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-act_structure A founder's story (when it's told for PR reasons) will rarely be so messy it's hard to follow, or so clean it lacks drama. The central conflict will usually be foreshadowed in the introduction, rear its ugly head half-way through, then come to a climax at the end of the narrative leaving just enough space for a sales pitch.
dang 8y ago
I saw this comment yesterday but didn't read beyond its first sentence, which is great. But looking it it now again, I'm sad to see that the discussion it evoked was more in response to the indignation in it ("bullshit", "stupid people", "bullshit") than to the inspiration in it. Unfortunately, this is predictable. Indignation activates generic responses and, above all, attracts upvotes. It feels great in the short term but leads HN to duller, more obvious places. This pattern is dismayingly reliable. A large part of what we do as HN moderators is to try to counteract it. HN can't live by upvotes alone. If I compare the relatively low quality of this subthread to the more modest and far more interesting responses that people had to the specific details of the article, the contrast is striking. I don't mean to pick on you personally! We are all subject to this phenomenon and few of us are very conscious of it in ourselves. There was another example even in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19729322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19729322. These kinds of subthread grow like weeds. They crowd out the quieter kinds that don't fire up the generic anger that exists in all of us. This effect is collective, not individual; it's a co-creation, and the upvotes probably do more harm than the comments. I am sure you had no intention of feeding it. Unfortunately it happens anyway. p.s. Perhaps I should add that there's nothing wrong with a critique of VC on HN. HN has hosted countless such critiques. Possibly more have appeared here than anywhere else. The HN community is overwhelmingly (90+%) outside of Silicon Valley, and the majority of it strongly identifies against the VC system (while often feeling itself to be the minority, as if HN overall were of the opposite view). Rather, the problem is that this was a less interesting direction for the discussion to go, when the actual topic—an onion business!—was much rarer and more curious. What fuels generic tangents is not intellectual curiosity, but a quite different cocktail of emotions. As I said, a large part of moderating HN consists of trying to tease those apart. Trying and mostly failing.

blantonl 8y ago

Not to mention he's actually having a lot of fun doing this, and he specifically throws shade at what you've described above (and what we typically read about here on Hacker News) Them: We leverage automated machine learning to enhance your existing BI visualizations with more proactive insights Me: I sell onions on the internet So good.

noxToken 8y ago

Yes! This was an odd read (in a good way), and I definitely enjoyed. No cruft. No BS. No "one weird trick" hooks. Just a person stumbling into a business opportunity and taking a shot in the dark. Kudos.

duxup 8y ago

This doesn't seem unlike super cool hip startups where the key to success is clearly hip company onion culture that could be better expressed with professional photos of the onions working in various locations / having a good time.

vram22 8y ago
Or like the startup team page where they have, say, Vidalia (an onion, in a cool red-and-white gown of sheaths) instead of the obligatory human-named dog :)

newaccoutnas 8y ago

Getting the story on HN can't do any harm to the sales too

ignoramous 8y ago

pg wrote about this in a rather uncharacteristically short essay titled Schelp Blindness [0] where he specifically says that hackers ignore obvious problems [1] because they are... erm... blind. Excerpts: > No one likes schleps, but hackers especially dislike them. Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watching the money roll in—without ever having to talk to users, or negotiate with other companies, or deal with other people's broken code. Maybe that's possible, but I haven't seen it. > How do you overcome schlep blindness? Frankly, the most valuable antidote to schlep blindness is probably ignorance. Most successful founders would probably say that if they'd known when they were starting their company about the obstacles they'd have to overcome, they might never have started it. Maybe that's one reason the most successful startups of all so often have young founders. > Ignorance can't solve everything though. Some ideas so obviously entail alarming schleps that anyone can see them. How do you see ideas like that? The trick I recommend is to take yourself out of the picture. Instead of asking "what problem should I solve?" ask "what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?" If someone who had to process payments before Stripe had tried asking that, Stripe would have been one of the first things they wished for. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html [1] http://paulgraham.com/growth.html http://paulgraham.com/growth.html

hopler 8y ago
Even before Paul Graham and Viaweb, the stats were that about 90% of new businesses fail and a big predictor of success (but still at low odds) was ignorance of those odds.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Our new business just "failed" after 15 years (it was designed to support our family, which unexpectedly grew). But, regardless, when I checked the failure rate reported in gov stats in UK was far lower than the common wisdom held; which surprised me somewhat. Do you have a source of solid figures to back up that 90%?
  - 8y ago

munificent 8y ago

> So much of the business stuff we read now is bullshit. It is stupid people getting lucky and riding on VC money while making more stupid decisions but ultimately dumping enough investor money into it that it works enough to get sold. My impression (from way outside, I'm not an entrepreneur at all) is that so much business is VC-funded, which effectively means driven by finance people. Everyone who isn't a VC is still chasing a VC, so VC culture ends up defining business culture. People, especially left-brained ones like programmers and finance nerds have this really bad tendency to see problems in terms of their preferred solutions. The old "if all you have is a hammer..." thing. So finance people like to turn everything into a money problem that they can solve using spreadsheets and Jupyter notebooks or whatever else it is they use. Their ideal state is that "business" is just some board game where the money is all on the board already and you're just playing the rules to move it onto your square. ...which is of course completely antithetical to any kind of business that actually matters to real humans. If you want to actually solve a human problem, make peoples' lives better and maybe make a little money in the process, Silicon Valley business culture is increasingly useless to you.

ignoramous 8y ago
> ...which is of course completely antithetical to any kind of business that actually matters to real humans. If you want to actually solve a human problem, make peoples' lives better... Who are we kidding? Every startup is about making human lives better. /s http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyons/ http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyo...
vram22 8y ago
>Their ideal state is that "business" is just some board game where the money is all on the board already and you're just playing the rules to move it onto your square. Right. Terms used like "gameplan", "playing to win", etc., confirm it. In fact, although cliches definitely have their place, overuse of terms like that can be considered a "biz smell" (term I just coined - see what I did there? :), analogous to a "code smell" in programming.
rossenberg79 8y ago
If you want to understand how to make people’s lives better, first you have to go out and actually live. Scrappy college kids making a startup don’t know how to live, they’ve just barely lived. And a lot of professionals in tech have no lives outside of work and tech: Wake up and go work in tech. Go home and go read about tech. Attend a party and talk about tech. How can we expect these Silicon Valley people to create anything that makes life better? All they can do is make cheap permutations of the same tired ideas that have passed through the lips of wanna-be gonna-be entrepreneurs for decades. Ask them: This product makes my life better? Better for what exactly? Here’s a man who understood that life is a bit better when you can bite into a tasty and juicy Vidalia Onion. This is something you can only know if you stop and take some time to live.

eightturn 8y ago

thank you jacurtis (Peter here, author).. your comments mean a lot. many thanks.

jacurtis 8y ago
You're welcome. So now a more "technical" question for you. I grew up in Washington where we are home to the "walla walla onion" which is also a sweet onion. I am not a farmer, nor do I claim any level of expertise here. But I just am curious if you could explain the differences/similarities between a Vidalia Onion and a Walla Walla onion.
- eightturn 8y ago
  The taste is very subjective. Most folks simply say that the Vidalia is the sweetest/mildest of them all. The Walla Walla, Texas 1015, the Peru, the Maui sweet are all legit sweet onions, and are all quite good (I now buy & taste onions cause I'm curious).. Some sweet onions might have a slight bite on the front end, others might have a little burn on the back end. Then some are smooth the entire time you chew.. I'd say Vidalias tend to be mild the entire time you chew. That being said, Mother Nature is mother nature, and she's gonna do what she wants to do, taste wise.
- daotoad 8y ago
  Walla Wallas are better, IMHO. But I grew up in the Walla Walla Valley, so my tastes were probably influenced a bit. Here's an article that attempts to answer your question, and goes into great detail: https://www.oregonlive.com/foodday/2012/07/which_sweet_onion_rules.html https://www.oregonlive.com/foodday/2012/07/which_sweet_onion... TLDR: Vidalia is milder. Walla Walla has a more complex flavor profile.
- computerfriend 8y ago
  I sense a business opportunity in wallawallaonions.com.
jtreminio 8y ago
Would you mind telling us what went wrong with the box order?

woah 8y ago

I don't understand this sort of attitude that there is some kind of moral superiority to non-VC funded businesses. In this case, the onion guy used a ton of VC funded businesses like Google and Shopify to make his business possible in the first place. How can you call them "stupid" while holding him up as some kind of good ol' honest salt of the earth online onion man?

mattlondon 8y ago

+1 to this. It was a pleasingly refreshing reminder of the old days of the dotcom boom ... a web site for pets! a web site for hotels! a web site for buying onions! anything was possible in those days. Pleasant memories. Turns out that a website for buying onions was a missed-trick back in those days! (...or was it?) Great to hear about these business opportunities sprouting up and getting acted on in an honest and decent way. Good read. Thanks :)

betolink 8y ago

best comment on HN this year so far.

devmunchies 8y ago

>This is inspiring because anyone here could do it too if they wanted to. I don't mean selling onions specifically, but I mean they could just go out there find a product, work hard towards selling it, team up with manufacturers/producers, etc and make the dream come to life. Sounds like my story, where i teamed up with a baker who makes really good cookies. I did all the design and development on nights and weekends. Its only been running for a few months but we've processed almost 1,200 orders delivering cookies. https://cravecookie.co https://cravecookie.co I love to learn more about this stuff from other engineers. Really inspiring like you said.

teachtyler 8y ago
I really connected to this story because he looks at domain names the same way I do, just not as effective of turning them over into working businesses. I picked up a bunch of domains like weknow.services, weknow.technology, ...systems because they were on sale, and so they just sat there... At the start of the year, the idea of creating a forum for professionals kept clawing at me, but I couldn't think of a good domain name that wasn't taken. I wanted a .com but I looked at the ones I owned and just went with it weknow.services. A month ago Upwork announced they'd start charging freelancers for "Connects" to send proposals to clients. I started ramping up the campaign as many were asking "Where else can I look" and quickly replied to someone saying I'd been working on this thing, however I was banned from /r/freelance for even citing it. I'm not banking on the fact that it'll work, but I sincerely hope it does, for my sake and others. It's something that would help me as a freelancer, and I have future plans if things pan out and users find it useful. If anything it's made me realize how hard marketing is.
kbenson 8y ago
> DEETS > Wanna see behind the scenes? This sent me through a gamut of emotions. First, was some revulsion at how informal it was. Then I chastised myself because it doesn't matter. Then I figured people younger than me (maybe even just at heart...) probably don't mind. And now I just feel like an old curmudgeon. :/ Good job on the site and business though, and good luck.

muse900 8y ago

Agree with you. And everyone out there is about becoming a billion $ or more company... What happened to normal ideas, ideas that can literally feed a few families and make you have a good life as well... Person behind the article seems to enjoy himself and also seems to be feeding a few farms as well that provide him with onions. Amazing work!

maehwasu 8y ago
There are tens of thousands of those companies out there, they get less attention (on a per company basis) than the billion $ ones for obvious reasons, and occasionally stories about them are posted on HN, where they not infrequently rise to the top.

wisty 8y ago

Stories are often modified to make them more compelling, often to follow a 3 act play - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-act_structure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-act_structure A founder's story (when it's told for PR reasons) will rarely be so messy it's hard to follow, or so clean it lacks drama. The central conflict will usually be foreshadowed in the introduction, rear its ugly head half-way through, then come to a climax at the end of the narrative leaving just enough space for a sales pitch.

dang 8y ago

I saw this comment yesterday but didn't read beyond its first sentence, which is great. But looking it it now again, I'm sad to see that the discussion it evoked was more in response to the indignation in it ("bullshit", "stupid people", "bullshit") than to the inspiration in it. Unfortunately, this is predictable. Indignation activates generic responses and, above all, attracts upvotes. It feels great in the short term but leads HN to duller, more obvious places. This pattern is dismayingly reliable. A large part of what we do as HN moderators is to try to counteract it. HN can't live by upvotes alone. If I compare the relatively low quality of this subthread to the more modest and far more interesting responses that people had to the specific details of the article, the contrast is striking. I don't mean to pick on you personally! We are all subject to this phenomenon and few of us are very conscious of it in ourselves. There was another example even in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19729322 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19729322. These kinds of subthread grow like weeds. They crowd out the quieter kinds that don't fire up the generic anger that exists in all of us. This effect is collective, not individual; it's a co-creation, and the upvotes probably do more harm than the comments. I am sure you had no intention of feeding it. Unfortunately it happens anyway. p.s. Perhaps I should add that there's nothing wrong with a critique of VC on HN. HN has hosted countless such critiques. Possibly more have appeared here than anywhere else. The HN community is overwhelmingly (90+%) outside of Silicon Valley, and the majority of it strongly identifies against the VC system (while often feeling itself to be the minority, as if HN overall were of the opposite view). Rather, the problem is that this was a less interesting direction for the discussion to go, when the actual topic—an onion business!—was much rarer and more curious. What fuels generic tangents is not intellectual curiosity, but a quite different cocktail of emotions. As I said, a large part of moderating HN consists of trying to tease those apart. Trying and mostly failing.