23 ms·

Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

quickthrower2 6y ago
Yes I agree with this, but it's not that surprising. I never thought that Σ(companies mentioned in TechCrunch articles) = whole software economy, or even 1% of it.
bob33212 6y ago
"Thousands of people are making millions in software and they do not work for any of the tech companies you have heard about in the news" may be a better title.
ivalm 6y ago
This is somewhat true. However, unlike a regional coffee/fruit cutting business software still has fewer geographic barriers. This means winners will take (relatively) more of the market compared to more traditional businesses (and thus small software business is somewhat less stable).
meddlepal 6y ago
This does not just apply to software..., tons of small and medium sized businesses and opportunities out there. For engineers you will most likely never notice them if you're caught up in the Silicon Valley / VC thing. Of course it requires getting out of your comfort zone... a lot of dev's just want to exchange labor for cash and grind out code because it is comfortable and cozy (right now). There are tons of small towns and cities with their own economies. And a lot of these places it means a lot if the people purchasing your product or service can get on a phone and talk with someone 20 or 30 minutes away max.
- Pmop 6y ago
  That might be just the entry point for me, since I'm having a hard time at landing my 1st job as junior. I feel like I'll have a good time and lots of fun anyways. Any advice on how to approach clients? (I can do (full-stack) web development and solve problems/ optimize solutions with algorithms and meta-heuristics.)
  - CyberDildonics 6y ago
    If you can't land a job as a junior programmer, you don't want to go around to businesses and end up responsible for promises you can't keep.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      What a lot of these businesses need is very simple stuff. Plenty of small businesses would have use for what would consider “toy” programs. A friend of mine built a text message to email system for this rural delivery guy for the purpose of letting his office assistant manage invoices, but also allowing him to fulfill orders on the go without talking on the phone as his customers can just text him. Charges him $500 a month for that. That kind of thing is trivial to do, but can still have a lot of value. Remember, the small businesses don’t automate anything. Excel is frequently beyond them.
      - CyberDildonics 6y ago
        I don't think that is often trivial and it wouldn't surprise me to see junior programmers struggle with things like that, but maybe the average junior programmer is better than I expect.
        MattGaiser 6y ago
        V1 skimped on many of the things we might consider requirements such as preventing SQL injection. For a long time the username and password for this service consisted of hard coded if statements for each client. Plenty of plaintext passwords. Default admin logins. Even seen a frontend password checker with jQuery. So it isn't software we would consider production acceptable. The code quality is atrocious. None of these people I know who do this would ever get hired as a software engineer by any company that does a coding interview. But you pair their can-do attitude with a willingness to sell and tell them to use Django so they can get away with not knowing a lot about key software concepts, and you can make a living off selling niche atrocious software. Plus, 90% of what most small businesses need could be replicated in Wordpress with plugins.Plenty of money there too.
- gav 6y ago
  It wasn’t until I got a job in consulting and started traveling to what are often dismissed as the “fly-over states” that I got to see billion-dollar B2B businesses that were basically unheard of outside of their market. The B2B e-commerce market alone is over a trillion dollars. There’s a lot of opportunities for ERP developers and other tech roles that don’t exist in SV.
- chadash 6y ago
  I spoke to a guy recently who works for a company doing $300 million revenue/year as a wholesale distributor of internet networking equipment (think finger optic cables and equipment for housing them underground). Their customers are the ISPs. The company is privately owned and not venture backed so you'll never hear of them unless you are in that business.
  - hnick 6y ago
    > The company is privately owned and not venture backed so you'll never hear of them unless you are in that business. Is the implication that venture backing needs growth so they get heavily involved in the media circus? I suppose that makes sense. I've always liked these "shadow industries", I've run into a few personally looking for things like special cut metal or wholesale pie crust or curtain rails.
    - chadash 6y ago
      Venture capitalists are often looking for billion dollar companies. If you found a company and grow it organically to where it's worth $25 million, then sure, you are no Bezos, but you are fairly successful (financially) by any standard. But venture capital doesn't care about $25 million companies, because their business model involves investing in so many companies that fail that a $25m success doesn't really move the needle for them. They want to see B's not M's in their companies' valuations. Meanwhile, the media doesn't have much to work with when reporting on privately held, non-venture backed companies. There's no official valuation unless the company sells (sure, once you get to be the size of Cargill or Bloomberg, reporters will try to calculate some sort of valuation, but very few companies fall in this category), and the owners typically have no good reason to want publicity from the media, especially if they are selling B2B.
- pascalxus 6y ago
  the types of opportunities that lead to SaaS businesses, are extroadinarily hard to find. I've gone to dozens of dozens of networking events and talked to dozens of people from a variety of industries. I've done informational interviews, etc. It's very difficult to find problems that don't have good enough solutions. Most of the time people are pretty happy to continue dealign with the problem the way they have been.
  - chii 6y ago
    But that's why when you _do_ find a solution, it's worth money. But i agree that it's fundamentally a people business - you're trying to convince a business owner to change their way of working for the better. You will need to present evidence that it is _indeed_ better - that's even harder than it sounds. And in most cases, SaaS providers are very biased on the value provided vs charged. I tend to think business owners as conservative, and therefore, the new SaaS product will have to provide extraordinary value to be considered.
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_bxg1 6y ago
I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B. And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pacific that had never been in contact with our civilization and had steam-powered airships or some crap. And I'm sure this is just one of many such industries, even just within the umbrella of software.
- NikolaNovak 6y ago
  That is fascinating to me, because virtually all my friends have heard of SAP outside of IT - as users or recipients. My engineer friend uses it for supply chain management, a beer store hq clerk helped implement it, construction accountant has used it, etc. At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very starup focused, and occasionally in a bit of a bubble (which is fine - I come here to get away from my daily mainstream IT grind and see excited people talk about cool things:), yet a hundred reasonably successful startups won't employ or touch near as many people as a single "quietly" successful traditional behemoth.
  - NikolaNovak 6y ago
    And if it helps understand the ecosystem and its seeking oddness, this is the crucial part of article: "Implementing ERP isn’t just a purchasing decision: it’s committing to redoing how you handle operations. Installing the software is the easy part; adjusting the whole company’s workflow is the most of the work." Don't think of erp and implementing it as a software development challenge. Sure, Developers can fscrew up*, an erp implementation but they cannot make it succeed - it is fundamentally a business transformation endeavour and must be undertaken as such to have a chance.
    - sq_ 6y ago
blhack 6y ago
I’ve been saying this for years. There are THOUSANDS of small businesses out there who are mostly being ignored. Many, many, many companies still see shared excel spreadsheets on a windows shared drive as a technical innovation.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  > Many, many, many companies still see shared excel spreadsheets on a windows shared drive as a technical innovation. Not just small ones...
MattGaiser 6y ago
I’ve had four jobs in my life and have always been stunned by what is still done by hand. Every company had a task which could be heavily automated but was instead consuming 4-30 people. So if you think the software market is large, consider all the stuff software never reached.
- tootie 6y ago
  I've seen this even at technology companies. It's like our devs hours are valuable so we can't invest them in something everyone is comfortable doing with a spreadsheet already.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Internal access to developers is absurdly structured a lot of the time. One company a friend worked for billed internal developers at twice what IBM would charge for projects. At other companies, dev time is allocated without any kind of cost analysis whatsoever. It reminded our Romanian business analyst of the Soviet Union.
  - qppo 6y ago
    This happens to me a lot, but it's basically a kind of technical debt. Most of the time the upfront time investment to automate something properly versus doing it manually is hard to justify. Especially if it's a task that only I understand and now I need to document the problem and the automation instead of just the problem. Business logic doesn't make for elegant APIs that I can hide behind a script and throw on a server, even if it's repetitive or tedious.
    - tootie 6y ago
      There's also the risk of allocating a team of folks with spare cycles, having the get half way through the work, then getting pulled into billable work and leaving it unfinsihed.
- dillonmckay 6y ago
  We are always looking for ideas! Can you give a few examples, please?
bsder 6y ago
That's because this stuff isn't valuable because it's software, it's valuable because of "business value" and expensive because of "customer support". Seriously. I can list tons of things that are reasonably profitable, but I, personally, don't want to do the hard work of customer support so I won't even start.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  > Seriously. I can list tons of things that are reasonably profitable, but I, personally, don't want to do the hard work of customer support so I won't even start. This in itself is a business idea. We need an Uber for Sales Support Staff that entrepreneurs can just rent by the hour.
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    I'd never use that because support is mostly dealing with company specific problems.
  - CamperBob2 6y ago
    That will work at some point in the future, but it won't work right now, because B2B sales is still all about human relationships.
franciscop 6y ago
Having read patio11/kalzumeus a lot (excelent blog posts and talks!), I'd say if he has a law named after him, it should be "charge more" or some fancier title like "you are not charging enough".
- secondbreakfast 6y ago
  Lol, I agree that should be the real patio11 law
- jriordan42 6y ago
  Or maybe a rule or such for general peeps that doesn't necessarily involve some special coffee-drinking in trendy Oregon? And what the heck is a "bed-and-breakfast type coffee tray"? Or, Patio's Law, rephrsased: "Look at the very significant things you encounter with fresh eyes. You already know how to get to the crux of issues. When you get there, FRESH EYES!".
  - dspig 6y ago
    > And what the heck is a "bed-and-breakfast type coffee tray"? A tray loaded with tea and coffee making equipment and supplies, like you get in hotel rooms. Not a tray for carrying things around.
irrational 6y ago
I work for a Fortune 150 manufacturing company. When I started working here there was no IT group at all (it was all outsourced). The CEO and President said many times that we were not a software/technology company and that would never be a core focus. Nearly 2 decades later, technology is now listed as number 2 of our top 5 core focus. We are working on converting all contractors into full time employees. The IT group is no longer outsourced and takes up 20-30 buildings, out of 80 buildings on campus. We are still a manufacturing company, but software (websites) has become a huge part of the company with thousands of employees working on it.
- dillonmckay 6y ago
  What do you manufacture?
- vbordo 6y ago
  What kind of manufacturing applications does IT manage?
  - irrational 6y ago
    Mostly sales websites and design applications, not manufacturing applications.
- corpMaverick 6y ago
  I have learned to avoid companies that don´t understand that they are a software/technology company. You can't scale up if don't automate. IMO, It is just an excuse to do mediocre technical work.
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Kinrany 6y ago
This thread seems to suggest that there are heaps of 20$ bills lying all over the world and accessible to any software engineer. That they are not being picked up suggests that there's some other constraint. Either extracting this value is not really worth one's time, or the bottleneck is not the ability to automate things but some other rare skill.
- juped 6y ago
  It's sales and marketing.
  - Kinrany 6y ago
    There seems to be more people doing sales/marketing than software engineers (though I don't have any numbers). Why aren't they picking up the bills?
    - logicslave 6y ago
      These bills dont exist, they are an oasis. I dont believe in the idea that easy millions is just laying around
      - beckingz 6y ago
        There are millions laying around. But it takes a long long time to pick them up. "overnight successes" can take years.
    - hnick 6y ago
      Because once they get involved they're often not worth picking up. I think there's a lot of stuff out there that would provide value to both parties if they could simply connect. Something like Gumtree or Craigslist is an attempt to capitalise on this. e.g. I have a broken machine. It'll be useful to someone for spare parts, to fix and resell (or for fun), as a placeholder (since it sort of works) until they get something better. I'd probably give it away. But dealing with all the time wasters on such platforms makes me want to just toss it. It's similar for some ideas where there is definitely profit to be had, but simply connecting with the customer, convincing them that it will help them, convincing them you're actually honest, etc etc, all costs more than it's worth.
tim333 6y ago
Motivation to maybe get off my arse and actually build something useful.
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dpcan 6y ago
I keep running into organizations or industries that don't spend money on tech. They don't put it in the budget, or they choose to continue to use volunteers to accomplish tasks that really should be done with software. I am in situation after situation where I want to create software to make someone's life easier, but I know that in doing so, I won't make any money and it will make my life harder. I wish there was a way to make money creating software that could really help organizations that won't pay for the tech they need.
- pascalxus 6y ago
  the fact that organizations don't want software "they need" shows that those industry's companies are not competing against each other. If they were and the software really did make a big difference in their bottom line, then the ones that used the software would be stealing market share from those that don't use it. unfortunately, with a burgeoning govt and ever more companies that have monopolies, there's getting to be less and less competition and efficiency in the world
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  A lot of it really comes down to explaining that labor cost is equally a cash cost compared to spending on software.
  - AstralStorm 6y ago
    For some bigger companies it's not, software being capital expenses and labor being operational expenses. They're taxed and budgeted separately.
imgabe 6y ago
Not just software, but everything. Look around you. Everything around you was made somewhere. The example I like to use is shower curtain rings. Those plastic or metal things that hold your shower curtain onto the rod. Somewhere, there's a factory that makes those. The person who owns that factory is probably rich. My first job out of college was working for a company that makes tilt-tray sorter systems. These are giant machines that go in warehouses and sort packages into, for example, different bays to go on to trucks to different places. It's like a little roller coaster for boxes. It was something that I had never even considered the existence of before I worked there. But someone has to make it.
- Swizec 6y ago
  You know the ends of shoeleaces, those little plastic bits? Roughly a 800,000,000/year industry Cardboard box industry in USA is bigger than the NFL, NHL, NBA, and the other major sports leagues combined
  - chii 6y ago
    > Roughly a 800,000,000/year industry there's 7 billion people on this planet, and most of them wear at least 1 pair of shoes (so 4 end bits), which means there's about 4x7,000,000,000 pieces of these things. I'm surprised it's only a 800,000,000/year industry! That means they are able to produce it so cheap (i.e., less than 2c per bit, which is an over-estimate)!
    - aabhay 6y ago
      Yeah, now multiply 28 billion by... three cents. Also, just because an industry brings in lots of revenue doesn’t make it a good industry. I’m sure there’s trillions of dollars exchanging hands in the plastic bag market, but I’m also sure that the margins are getting squeezed so tight that even a PhD in OR couldn’t find a percentage point to optimize. The margin per bag is essentially zero.
      - chii 6y ago
29athrowaway 6y ago
> “Wait until you find out about the $100 million company that chops all the pre-cut fruit you buy in supermarkets,” he said. Imagine you harvest 1 fruit, chop it and package it, and then duplicate the result millions of times. Then each time you sell your chopped fruit, it's somehow teletransported directly to the customer. That's software.
tlb 6y ago
The metal economy is huge. Almost every product requires metal. But metallurgists don't take home a big fraction of it. What's special about the software economy is that people who write the software take home a large fraction of it. Maybe more than half, depending how you count. Which is unprecedented. It's not just because software can be zero marginal cost. Musicians don't take home half of music revenue. In most creative industries, the creatives take home less than 1/10th. Enjoy it while it lasts.
- whateveracct 6y ago
  What would cause it to not last outside of precedent? In all those cases, it sounds like middlemen exist that corner the end-market that you gotta go through to make big money. How would that even work with software in the age of the internet, open source, and commodity cloud infra?
  - save_ferris 6y ago
    AI-driven software development down the road could theoretically commoditize developer skills. I sometimes wonder how many decisions I make per day that an AI could replicate in some repeatable way. Who knows, but nothing lasts forever.
    - runawaybottle 6y ago
      We should technically be the last to be automated. We’ll destroy other labor systematically over decades, and then finally ourselves. We seem to be subconsciously precocious about our fate too, as we deprecate things at a faster and faster rate.
      - sgillen 6y ago
        I think you might be surprised, it’s possible some types of programming could be automated away. Honestly I would consider writing programs more straightforward to automate than a lot of systems that need to interact with the physics map world, or with people.
_bxg1 6y ago
I have to think there are lots and lots of industries ripe for disruption or even for their first taste of software, and it's just that they're outside the radar of the vast majority of engineers. Industries you never ever hear about unless you're an insider. Maybe we need some mechanism for cross-pollinating people from "deep industry" with entrepreneurs. Many of the "visible" ones have already been saturated to death with startups, and it's just because those are what software people happen to be aware of.
- pragmatic 6y ago
  maybe they don't want software people f#cking up their lives? I know it's hard for the avg hackernews to understand but software isn't always a blessing but many times a curse bestowed upon workers by someone in the mngmt chain who has been sold on a solution.
- travisjungroth 6y ago
  I was going to go home to the US and visit one or two companies per day that I felt were underserved. This was supposed to be early March. Didn’t go as planned.
jacques_chester 6y ago
This is because of a few factors, mostly availability bias. We find it easy to think of high-profile examples of tech companies, so we assume they are the industry. Previous comment with fancier wording: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17994976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17994976
moron4hire 6y ago
Jesus Christ, it's almost like the US economy is mostly ran by small businesses, what the fuck.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  Actually the trend is in the opposite direction, towards more enterprise size businesses.
  - richardwhiuk 6y ago
    Both are probably true - it's probably true that most of the US economy is SMEs, and that over time enterprises become a larger factor of the economy
nathanbarry 6y ago
Thanks for mentioning ConvertKit! We're happily building our niche product for creators and growing quickly. Just a couple corrections, at the end of 2019 we were just under $20M ARR (Not $24M). Today we are at $22M ARR and 30,000 customers. You can see all our numbers (updated in realtime) here on Baremetrics: http://convertkit.baremetrics.com http://convertkit.baremetrics.com I'm happy to answer any questions.
- secondbreakfast 6y ago
  hey nathan - big fan of what y'all are doing. also love boise (i lived in idaho last year). updated those numbers and added attribution to baremetric
- 1cvmask 6y ago
  why did you make it public?
- hnick 6y ago
  Very surprised he hadn't heard of ConvertKit. It's usually in the running whenever I google for email marketing/automation software. Price seems reasonable too (but not for us, we're more newsletter-based rather than conversion-based so it doesn't really work out).
  - secondbreakfast 6y ago
    i have now! my business partner introduced me to it, and we are happy convertkit customers. fantastic product. the crazy thing to me is none of my friends have heard of them.
  - jonathanbull 6y ago
    Can I throw my hat into the ring? I run an email marketing platform (https://emailoctopus.com https://emailoctopus.com) that’s affordable and aimed at entrepreneurs/makers with newsletters. Shoot me an email if you’d like a discount.
    - 6y ago
whateveracct 6y ago
I googled where IHOP gets their coffee since it's so pleasant. Royal Cup!
- secondbreakfast 6y ago
  Wow! Very cool. They are a fantastic company.
DarthGhandi 6y ago
This is hilariously self indulgent to the point of being cringeworthy. Along with the comments about basic products being worth billions to sell. Industries are deeper and wider than we assume, supposedly this is revelation for some? Is there a name for laws that gratuitously reference themselves?
patio11 6y ago
This is similar to Gell-Mann amnesia in that I had relatively little to do with writing this law ;) (For what it's worth, I think it's likely descriptively accurate, but not sure it's an observation worth the namespace.)
- BerislavLopac 6y ago
  It's a shame it wasn't called "McKenzie's Law". Has a much more serious ring to it. ;)
patwillson22 6y ago
I dunno man, sounds like bullshit to me. Some big brained engineers spent decades programming fizz buzz in brain fuck. This is temple OS for the We Work Generation.
- anonytrary 6y ago
  What gets you infinite upvotes on Reddit doesn't necessarily work here.
eb0la 6y ago
There are hidden "unicorns" everywhere. Sometime ago I heard Germany had a lot of "small" companies that are leaders in their market niche but you don't have it in the radar. For instance: Hohner (the Harmonica manufacturer), or Flexi (dog leashes) Every country has some of this hidden unicorns; but it is easier to spot them from the distance.
- heipei 6y ago
  For what it's worth, those German Mittelstand companies are the exact opposite of what's usually referred to as a unicorn. They are small to medium-size, multi-generational family-run and family-owned businesses that focus on a very narrow set of products, such as just making gears for automative applications, or ball bearings, or blades. The people working there often work there their whole life, with the understanding that the company doesn't take any gambles and will do its utmost to not lay them off even in recessions such as right now.
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    Doesn't unicorn just mean $1B+ valuation?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - andrewwharton 6y ago
      And that hasn't IPO'd yet.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      I think it has to be a startup, i.e. recently founded, hyper growth, usually VC-funded. A company worth a lot of money that has existed for 80 years isn't a unicorn, it's just a company worth $1B+.
      - rorykoehler 6y ago
BerislavLopac 6y ago
Nice to see HN considered "mainstream tech coverage"...
miki123211 6y ago
Basecamp is a famous example of this. It's a pretty popular project management software, 56 employees at this point if I remember correctly, probably millions in revenue. It's a tiny, bootstrapped company, no investors breathing down their necks, no IPOs, nothing. And they're one of the few companies who actually have principles, are committed to privacy etc.
- nojito 6y ago
  Because it’s almost impossible to switch out of Basecamp and use a competitor. The vast majority of companies like this have perfected the lock-in strategy to ensure that their customers can never leave.
  - atom-morgan 6y ago
    > Because it’s almost impossible to switch out of Basecamp and use a competitor. Is that unique to Basecamp or does it apply to all similar software? I haven't Basecamp all that much. What exactly do they do to ensure this?
  - brentm 6y ago
    I do recall Basecamp from day one allowed you to export your data which not many other people did. What you do with that and how you get it into something else is another story but also not really their problem.
    - daemin 6y ago
      I remember this too, but the second point is the crux of the usability and lock in. It kind of relies on another product having an importer to ingest it to another product/service. Or you have to pay a consultant to do this for you (write a converter and run it to do the import). Either way it does introduce some friction to leaving and using another service. There's also the idea that if you provide an easy way to exit the service then people are much more likely to buy the service. Since they know they can easily get out of it if they don't like it.
  - 6y ago
chvid 6y ago
Therefore it follows: everything is software and we are all living in a simulation.
matt_s 6y ago
This is why things like "most used languages" coming out of places like StackOverflow are laughable to think they represent the entire software industry.
asamant 6y ago
The statement reminds me of GEB: "Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law
bluedino 6y ago
>> software companies he’s never heard of in Oklahoma pocketing $10m/year in profit Every industry seems to be full of these. The last place I worked is using timeclock software that doesn't look like it's been updated since the Windows 3.1 days. They probably paid someone $50k at the time to develop it, and the minimum installation of it costs $25k.
quantumwoke 6y ago
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
peterlk 6y ago
A friend has described these to me as "dark matter companies". They are everywhere, and they permeate industries, but you never see them. They work in small, unmarked offices outside of the standard tech hubs. Some of these companies make billions, but you've never heard of them, and they'd like to keep it that way. In other cases, they're small companies that own a market that's too small for a large competitor to go after. $10m/yr will not make VCs happy. But it will certainly pay nicely to a team of 12.
- Rzor 6y ago
  It reminds me of Hidden Champions. >Hidden champions are relatively small but highly successful companies that are concealed behind a curtain of inconspicuousness, invisibility, and sometimes secrecy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions
Kye 6y ago
Corollary: the most popular hot-in-SV language has nothing on C++, Java, or even C#. They're used widely inside the dark matter.
ignoramous 6y ago
More patio11 laws: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/936615043126370306.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/936615043126370306.html A variant of the current law also makes an appearance: "The amount of money flowing through capitalism would astound you. The number and variety of firms participating in the economy would astound you." My picks are: "Startups are (by necessity) filled with generalists; big companies are filled with specialists. People underestimate how effective a generalist can be at things which are done by specialists. People underestimate how deep specialties can run. These are simultaneously true." "You radically underestimate both a) how much you know that other people do not and b) the instrumental benefits to you of publishing it."
- secondbreakfast 6y ago
  > a) how much you know that other people do not this is a particularly confounding problem, and i haven't figured out a way to combat it. it's so bad, that i'll often learn something new when scrolling twitter or clicking through wikipedia, and then immediately assume that 1) i'm the last person to the party, everybody else already knows, and 2) forget what it was like not-knowing this fact mere seconds before.
0898 6y ago
I call these companies RHBs: rich, huge and boring.
noch 6y ago
When talking about the size of an economy, it's more useful to give actual statistical calculations indicating hypothesised/alluded size than to offer anecdotes. Has anyone actually studied this and mathematised their thinking? One can't/shouldn't make business decisions based on anecdotes or bromides.
rukuu001 6y ago
Admin software for schools - ran into an ex teacher making an absolute killing selling some admin software to schools. And he’s one guy selling to schools in one state!
luord 6y ago
And yet I have no ideas. Maybe I should talk to my parents, they might have seen something in their old jobs that could have used automation.
hadlock 6y ago
I was surprised to find out one of my coworkers had been maintaining the point of sale (POS) machines for a local chain of comic book shops, running hypercard (yes, that hypercard) since the 1990s. The POS machines would sync their databases via write ahead logs over dialup

Yes I agree with this, but it's not that surprising. I never thought that Σ(companies mentioned in TechCrunch articles) = whole software economy, or even 1% of it.

bob33212 6y ago

"Thousands of people are making millions in software and they do not work for any of the tech companies you have heard about in the news" may be a better title.

ivalm 6y ago

This is somewhat true. However, unlike a regional coffee/fruit cutting business software still has fewer geographic barriers. This means winners will take (relatively) more of the market compared to more traditional businesses (and thus small software business is somewhat less stable).

meddlepal 6y ago

This does not just apply to software..., tons of small and medium sized businesses and opportunities out there. For engineers you will most likely never notice them if you're caught up in the Silicon Valley / VC thing. Of course it requires getting out of your comfort zone... a lot of dev's just want to exchange labor for cash and grind out code because it is comfortable and cozy (right now). There are tons of small towns and cities with their own economies. And a lot of these places it means a lot if the people purchasing your product or service can get on a phone and talk with someone 20 or 30 minutes away max.

Pmop 6y ago
That might be just the entry point for me, since I'm having a hard time at landing my 1st job as junior. I feel like I'll have a good time and lots of fun anyways. Any advice on how to approach clients? (I can do (full-stack) web development and solve problems/ optimize solutions with algorithms and meta-heuristics.)
- CyberDildonics 6y ago
  If you can't land a job as a junior programmer, you don't want to go around to businesses and end up responsible for promises you can't keep.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    What a lot of these businesses need is very simple stuff. Plenty of small businesses would have use for what would consider “toy” programs. A friend of mine built a text message to email system for this rural delivery guy for the purpose of letting his office assistant manage invoices, but also allowing him to fulfill orders on the go without talking on the phone as his customers can just text him. Charges him $500 a month for that. That kind of thing is trivial to do, but can still have a lot of value. Remember, the small businesses don’t automate anything. Excel is frequently beyond them.
    - CyberDildonics 6y ago
      I don't think that is often trivial and it wouldn't surprise me to see junior programmers struggle with things like that, but maybe the average junior programmer is better than I expect.
      - MattGaiser 6y ago
        V1 skimped on many of the things we might consider requirements such as preventing SQL injection. For a long time the username and password for this service consisted of hard coded if statements for each client. Plenty of plaintext passwords. Default admin logins. Even seen a frontend password checker with jQuery. So it isn't software we would consider production acceptable. The code quality is atrocious. None of these people I know who do this would ever get hired as a software engineer by any company that does a coding interview. But you pair their can-do attitude with a willingness to sell and tell them to use Django so they can get away with not knowing a lot about key software concepts, and you can make a living off selling niche atrocious software. Plus, 90% of what most small businesses need could be replicated in Wordpress with plugins.Plenty of money there too.
gav 6y ago
It wasn’t until I got a job in consulting and started traveling to what are often dismissed as the “fly-over states” that I got to see billion-dollar B2B businesses that were basically unheard of outside of their market. The B2B e-commerce market alone is over a trillion dollars. There’s a lot of opportunities for ERP developers and other tech roles that don’t exist in SV.
chadash 6y ago
I spoke to a guy recently who works for a company doing $300 million revenue/year as a wholesale distributor of internet networking equipment (think finger optic cables and equipment for housing them underground). Their customers are the ISPs. The company is privately owned and not venture backed so you'll never hear of them unless you are in that business.
- hnick 6y ago
  > The company is privately owned and not venture backed so you'll never hear of them unless you are in that business. Is the implication that venture backing needs growth so they get heavily involved in the media circus? I suppose that makes sense. I've always liked these "shadow industries", I've run into a few personally looking for things like special cut metal or wholesale pie crust or curtain rails.
  - chadash 6y ago
    Venture capitalists are often looking for billion dollar companies. If you found a company and grow it organically to where it's worth $25 million, then sure, you are no Bezos, but you are fairly successful (financially) by any standard. But venture capital doesn't care about $25 million companies, because their business model involves investing in so many companies that fail that a $25m success doesn't really move the needle for them. They want to see B's not M's in their companies' valuations. Meanwhile, the media doesn't have much to work with when reporting on privately held, non-venture backed companies. There's no official valuation unless the company sells (sure, once you get to be the size of Cargill or Bloomberg, reporters will try to calculate some sort of valuation, but very few companies fall in this category), and the owners typically have no good reason to want publicity from the media, especially if they are selling B2B.
pascalxus 6y ago
the types of opportunities that lead to SaaS businesses, are extroadinarily hard to find. I've gone to dozens of dozens of networking events and talked to dozens of people from a variety of industries. I've done informational interviews, etc. It's very difficult to find problems that don't have good enough solutions. Most of the time people are pretty happy to continue dealign with the problem the way they have been.
- chii 6y ago
  But that's why when you _do_ find a solution, it's worth money. But i agree that it's fundamentally a people business - you're trying to convince a business owner to change their way of working for the better. You will need to present evidence that it is _indeed_ better - that's even harder than it sounds. And in most cases, SaaS providers are very biased on the value provided vs charged. I tend to think business owners as conservative, and therefore, the new SaaS product will have to provide extraordinary value to be considered.

deleted 6y ago

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_bxg1 6y ago

I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B. And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pacific that had never been in contact with our civilization and had steam-powered airships or some crap. And I'm sure this is just one of many such industries, even just within the umbrella of software.

NikolaNovak 6y ago
That is fascinating to me, because virtually all my friends have heard of SAP outside of IT - as users or recipients. My engineer friend uses it for supply chain management, a beer store hq clerk helped implement it, construction accountant has used it, etc. At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very starup focused, and occasionally in a bit of a bubble (which is fine - I come here to get away from my daily mainstream IT grind and see excited people talk about cool things:), yet a hundred reasonably successful startups won't employ or touch near as many people as a single "quietly" successful traditional behemoth.
- NikolaNovak 6y ago
  And if it helps understand the ecosystem and its seeking oddness, this is the crucial part of article: "Implementing ERP isn’t just a purchasing decision: it’s committing to redoing how you handle operations. Installing the software is the easy part; adjusting the whole company’s workflow is the most of the work." Don't think of erp and implementing it as a software development challenge. Sure, Developers can fscrew up*, an erp implementation but they cannot make it succeed - it is fundamentally a business transformation endeavour and must be undertaken as such to have a chance.
  - sq_ 6y ago

blhack 6y ago

I’ve been saying this for years. There are THOUSANDS of small businesses out there who are mostly being ignored. Many, many, many companies still see shared excel spreadsheets on a windows shared drive as a technical innovation.

MattGaiser 6y ago
> Many, many, many companies still see shared excel spreadsheets on a windows shared drive as a technical innovation. Not just small ones...

MattGaiser 6y ago

I’ve had four jobs in my life and have always been stunned by what is still done by hand. Every company had a task which could be heavily automated but was instead consuming 4-30 people. So if you think the software market is large, consider all the stuff software never reached.

tootie 6y ago
I've seen this even at technology companies. It's like our devs hours are valuable so we can't invest them in something everyone is comfortable doing with a spreadsheet already.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Internal access to developers is absurdly structured a lot of the time. One company a friend worked for billed internal developers at twice what IBM would charge for projects. At other companies, dev time is allocated without any kind of cost analysis whatsoever. It reminded our Romanian business analyst of the Soviet Union.
- qppo 6y ago
  This happens to me a lot, but it's basically a kind of technical debt. Most of the time the upfront time investment to automate something properly versus doing it manually is hard to justify. Especially if it's a task that only I understand and now I need to document the problem and the automation instead of just the problem. Business logic doesn't make for elegant APIs that I can hide behind a script and throw on a server, even if it's repetitive or tedious.
  - tootie 6y ago
    There's also the risk of allocating a team of folks with spare cycles, having the get half way through the work, then getting pulled into billable work and leaving it unfinsihed.
dillonmckay 6y ago
We are always looking for ideas! Can you give a few examples, please?

bsder 6y ago

That's because this stuff isn't valuable because it's software, it's valuable because of "business value" and expensive because of "customer support". Seriously. I can list tons of things that are reasonably profitable, but I, personally, don't want to do the hard work of customer support so I won't even start.

MattGaiser 6y ago
> Seriously. I can list tons of things that are reasonably profitable, but I, personally, don't want to do the hard work of customer support so I won't even start. This in itself is a business idea. We need an Uber for Sales Support Staff that entrepreneurs can just rent by the hour.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  I'd never use that because support is mostly dealing with company specific problems.
- CamperBob2 6y ago
  That will work at some point in the future, but it won't work right now, because B2B sales is still all about human relationships.

franciscop 6y ago

Having read patio11/kalzumeus a lot (excelent blog posts and talks!), I'd say if he has a law named after him, it should be "charge more" or some fancier title like "you are not charging enough".

secondbreakfast 6y ago
Lol, I agree that should be the real patio11 law
jriordan42 6y ago
Or maybe a rule or such for general peeps that doesn't necessarily involve some special coffee-drinking in trendy Oregon? And what the heck is a "bed-and-breakfast type coffee tray"? Or, Patio's Law, rephrsased: "Look at the very significant things you encounter with fresh eyes. You already know how to get to the crux of issues. When you get there, FRESH EYES!".
- dspig 6y ago
  > And what the heck is a "bed-and-breakfast type coffee tray"? A tray loaded with tea and coffee making equipment and supplies, like you get in hotel rooms. Not a tray for carrying things around.

irrational 6y ago

I work for a Fortune 150 manufacturing company. When I started working here there was no IT group at all (it was all outsourced). The CEO and President said many times that we were not a software/technology company and that would never be a core focus. Nearly 2 decades later, technology is now listed as number 2 of our top 5 core focus. We are working on converting all contractors into full time employees. The IT group is no longer outsourced and takes up 20-30 buildings, out of 80 buildings on campus. We are still a manufacturing company, but software (websites) has become a huge part of the company with thousands of employees working on it.

dillonmckay 6y ago
What do you manufacture?
vbordo 6y ago
What kind of manufacturing applications does IT manage?
- irrational 6y ago
  Mostly sales websites and design applications, not manufacturing applications.
corpMaverick 6y ago
I have learned to avoid companies that don´t understand that they are a software/technology company. You can't scale up if don't automate. IMO, It is just an excuse to do mediocre technical work.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Kinrany 6y ago

This thread seems to suggest that there are heaps of 20$ bills lying all over the world and accessible to any software engineer. That they are not being picked up suggests that there's some other constraint. Either extracting this value is not really worth one's time, or the bottleneck is not the ability to automate things but some other rare skill.

juped 6y ago
It's sales and marketing.
- Kinrany 6y ago
  There seems to be more people doing sales/marketing than software engineers (though I don't have any numbers). Why aren't they picking up the bills?
  - logicslave 6y ago
    These bills dont exist, they are an oasis. I dont believe in the idea that easy millions is just laying around
    - beckingz 6y ago
      There are millions laying around. But it takes a long long time to pick them up. "overnight successes" can take years.
  - hnick 6y ago
    Because once they get involved they're often not worth picking up. I think there's a lot of stuff out there that would provide value to both parties if they could simply connect. Something like Gumtree or Craigslist is an attempt to capitalise on this. e.g. I have a broken machine. It'll be useful to someone for spare parts, to fix and resell (or for fun), as a placeholder (since it sort of works) until they get something better. I'd probably give it away. But dealing with all the time wasters on such platforms makes me want to just toss it. It's similar for some ideas where there is definitely profit to be had, but simply connecting with the customer, convincing them that it will help them, convincing them you're actually honest, etc etc, all costs more than it's worth.

tim333 6y ago

Motivation to maybe get off my arse and actually build something useful.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dpcan 6y ago

I keep running into organizations or industries that don't spend money on tech. They don't put it in the budget, or they choose to continue to use volunteers to accomplish tasks that really should be done with software. I am in situation after situation where I want to create software to make someone's life easier, but I know that in doing so, I won't make any money and it will make my life harder. I wish there was a way to make money creating software that could really help organizations that won't pay for the tech they need.

pascalxus 6y ago
the fact that organizations don't want software "they need" shows that those industry's companies are not competing against each other. If they were and the software really did make a big difference in their bottom line, then the ones that used the software would be stealing market share from those that don't use it. unfortunately, with a burgeoning govt and ever more companies that have monopolies, there's getting to be less and less competition and efficiency in the world
MattGaiser 6y ago
A lot of it really comes down to explaining that labor cost is equally a cash cost compared to spending on software.
- AstralStorm 6y ago
  For some bigger companies it's not, software being capital expenses and labor being operational expenses. They're taxed and budgeted separately.

imgabe 6y ago

Not just software, but everything. Look around you. Everything around you was made somewhere. The example I like to use is shower curtain rings. Those plastic or metal things that hold your shower curtain onto the rod. Somewhere, there's a factory that makes those. The person who owns that factory is probably rich. My first job out of college was working for a company that makes tilt-tray sorter systems. These are giant machines that go in warehouses and sort packages into, for example, different bays to go on to trucks to different places. It's like a little roller coaster for boxes. It was something that I had never even considered the existence of before I worked there. But someone has to make it.

Swizec 6y ago
You know the ends of shoeleaces, those little plastic bits? Roughly a 800,000,000/year industry Cardboard box industry in USA is bigger than the NFL, NHL, NBA, and the other major sports leagues combined
- chii 6y ago
  > Roughly a 800,000,000/year industry there's 7 billion people on this planet, and most of them wear at least 1 pair of shoes (so 4 end bits), which means there's about 4x7,000,000,000 pieces of these things. I'm surprised it's only a 800,000,000/year industry! That means they are able to produce it so cheap (i.e., less than 2c per bit, which is an over-estimate)!
  - aabhay 6y ago
    Yeah, now multiply 28 billion by... three cents. Also, just because an industry brings in lots of revenue doesn’t make it a good industry. I’m sure there’s trillions of dollars exchanging hands in the plastic bag market, but I’m also sure that the margins are getting squeezed so tight that even a PhD in OR couldn’t find a percentage point to optimize. The margin per bag is essentially zero.
    - chii 6y ago

29athrowaway 6y ago

> “Wait until you find out about the $100 million company that chops all the pre-cut fruit you buy in supermarkets,” he said. Imagine you harvest 1 fruit, chop it and package it, and then duplicate the result millions of times. Then each time you sell your chopped fruit, it's somehow teletransported directly to the customer. That's software.

tlb 6y ago

The metal economy is huge. Almost every product requires metal. But metallurgists don't take home a big fraction of it. What's special about the software economy is that people who write the software take home a large fraction of it. Maybe more than half, depending how you count. Which is unprecedented. It's not just because software can be zero marginal cost. Musicians don't take home half of music revenue. In most creative industries, the creatives take home less than 1/10th. Enjoy it while it lasts.

whateveracct 6y ago
What would cause it to not last outside of precedent? In all those cases, it sounds like middlemen exist that corner the end-market that you gotta go through to make big money. How would that even work with software in the age of the internet, open source, and commodity cloud infra?
- save_ferris 6y ago
  AI-driven software development down the road could theoretically commoditize developer skills. I sometimes wonder how many decisions I make per day that an AI could replicate in some repeatable way. Who knows, but nothing lasts forever.
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    We should technically be the last to be automated. We’ll destroy other labor systematically over decades, and then finally ourselves. We seem to be subconsciously precocious about our fate too, as we deprecate things at a faster and faster rate.
    - sgillen 6y ago
      I think you might be surprised, it’s possible some types of programming could be automated away. Honestly I would consider writing programs more straightforward to automate than a lot of systems that need to interact with the physics map world, or with people.

_bxg1 6y ago

I have to think there are lots and lots of industries ripe for disruption or even for their first taste of software, and it's just that they're outside the radar of the vast majority of engineers. Industries you never ever hear about unless you're an insider. Maybe we need some mechanism for cross-pollinating people from "deep industry" with entrepreneurs. Many of the "visible" ones have already been saturated to death with startups, and it's just because those are what software people happen to be aware of.

pragmatic 6y ago
maybe they don't want software people f#cking up their lives? I know it's hard for the avg hackernews to understand but software isn't always a blessing but many times a curse bestowed upon workers by someone in the mngmt chain who has been sold on a solution.
travisjungroth 6y ago
I was going to go home to the US and visit one or two companies per day that I felt were underserved. This was supposed to be early March. Didn’t go as planned.

jacques_chester 6y ago

This is because of a few factors, mostly availability bias. We find it easy to think of high-profile examples of tech companies, so we assume they are the industry. Previous comment with fancier wording: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17994976 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17994976

moron4hire 6y ago

Jesus Christ, it's almost like the US economy is mostly ran by small businesses, what the fuck.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago
Actually the trend is in the opposite direction, towards more enterprise size businesses.
- richardwhiuk 6y ago
  Both are probably true - it's probably true that most of the US economy is SMEs, and that over time enterprises become a larger factor of the economy

nathanbarry 6y ago

Thanks for mentioning ConvertKit! We're happily building our niche product for creators and growing quickly. Just a couple corrections, at the end of 2019 we were just under $20M ARR (Not $24M). Today we are at $22M ARR and 30,000 customers. You can see all our numbers (updated in realtime) here on Baremetrics: http://convertkit.baremetrics.com http://convertkit.baremetrics.com I'm happy to answer any questions.

secondbreakfast 6y ago
hey nathan - big fan of what y'all are doing. also love boise (i lived in idaho last year). updated those numbers and added attribution to baremetric
1cvmask 6y ago
why did you make it public?
hnick 6y ago
Very surprised he hadn't heard of ConvertKit. It's usually in the running whenever I google for email marketing/automation software. Price seems reasonable too (but not for us, we're more newsletter-based rather than conversion-based so it doesn't really work out).
- secondbreakfast 6y ago
  i have now! my business partner introduced me to it, and we are happy convertkit customers. fantastic product. the crazy thing to me is none of my friends have heard of them.
- jonathanbull 6y ago
  Can I throw my hat into the ring? I run an email marketing platform (https://emailoctopus.com https://emailoctopus.com) that’s affordable and aimed at entrepreneurs/makers with newsletters. Shoot me an email if you’d like a discount.
  - 6y ago

whateveracct 6y ago

I googled where IHOP gets their coffee since it's so pleasant. Royal Cup!

secondbreakfast 6y ago
Wow! Very cool. They are a fantastic company.

DarthGhandi 6y ago

This is hilariously self indulgent to the point of being cringeworthy. Along with the comments about basic products being worth billions to sell. Industries are deeper and wider than we assume, supposedly this is revelation for some? Is there a name for laws that gratuitously reference themselves?

patio11 6y ago

This is similar to Gell-Mann amnesia in that I had relatively little to do with writing this law ;) (For what it's worth, I think it's likely descriptively accurate, but not sure it's an observation worth the namespace.)

BerislavLopac 6y ago
It's a shame it wasn't called "McKenzie's Law". Has a much more serious ring to it. ;)

patwillson22 6y ago

I dunno man, sounds like bullshit to me. Some big brained engineers spent decades programming fizz buzz in brain fuck. This is temple OS for the We Work Generation.

anonytrary 6y ago
What gets you infinite upvotes on Reddit doesn't necessarily work here.

eb0la 6y ago

There are hidden "unicorns" everywhere. Sometime ago I heard Germany had a lot of "small" companies that are leaders in their market niche but you don't have it in the radar. For instance: Hohner (the Harmonica manufacturer), or Flexi (dog leashes) Every country has some of this hidden unicorns; but it is easier to spot them from the distance.

heipei 6y ago
For what it's worth, those German Mittelstand companies are the exact opposite of what's usually referred to as a unicorn. They are small to medium-size, multi-generational family-run and family-owned businesses that focus on a very narrow set of products, such as just making gears for automative applications, or ball bearings, or blades. The people working there often work there their whole life, with the understanding that the company doesn't take any gambles and will do its utmost to not lay them off even in recessions such as right now.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  Doesn't unicorn just mean $1B+ valuation?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - andrewwharton 6y ago
    And that hasn't IPO'd yet.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    I think it has to be a startup, i.e. recently founded, hyper growth, usually VC-funded. A company worth a lot of money that has existed for 80 years isn't a unicorn, it's just a company worth $1B+.
    - rorykoehler 6y ago

BerislavLopac 6y ago

Nice to see HN considered "mainstream tech coverage"...

miki123211 6y ago

Basecamp is a famous example of this. It's a pretty popular project management software, 56 employees at this point if I remember correctly, probably millions in revenue. It's a tiny, bootstrapped company, no investors breathing down their necks, no IPOs, nothing. And they're one of the few companies who actually have principles, are committed to privacy etc.

nojito 6y ago
Because it’s almost impossible to switch out of Basecamp and use a competitor. The vast majority of companies like this have perfected the lock-in strategy to ensure that their customers can never leave.
- atom-morgan 6y ago
  > Because it’s almost impossible to switch out of Basecamp and use a competitor. Is that unique to Basecamp or does it apply to all similar software? I haven't Basecamp all that much. What exactly do they do to ensure this?
- brentm 6y ago
  I do recall Basecamp from day one allowed you to export your data which not many other people did. What you do with that and how you get it into something else is another story but also not really their problem.
  - daemin 6y ago
    I remember this too, but the second point is the crux of the usability and lock in. It kind of relies on another product having an importer to ingest it to another product/service. Or you have to pay a consultant to do this for you (write a converter and run it to do the import). Either way it does introduce some friction to leaving and using another service. There's also the idea that if you provide an easy way to exit the service then people are much more likely to buy the service. Since they know they can easily get out of it if they don't like it.
- 6y ago

chvid 6y ago

Therefore it follows: everything is software and we are all living in a simulation.

matt_s 6y ago

This is why things like "most used languages" coming out of places like StackOverflow are laughable to think they represent the entire software industry.

asamant 6y ago

The statement reminds me of GEB: "Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law

bluedino 6y ago

>> software companies he’s never heard of in Oklahoma pocketing $10m/year in profit Every industry seems to be full of these. The last place I worked is using timeclock software that doesn't look like it's been updated since the Windows 3.1 days. They probably paid someone $50k at the time to develop it, and the minimum installation of it costs $25k.

quantumwoke 6y ago

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

peterlk 6y ago

A friend has described these to me as "dark matter companies". They are everywhere, and they permeate industries, but you never see them. They work in small, unmarked offices outside of the standard tech hubs. Some of these companies make billions, but you've never heard of them, and they'd like to keep it that way. In other cases, they're small companies that own a market that's too small for a large competitor to go after. $10m/yr will not make VCs happy. But it will certainly pay nicely to a team of 12.

Rzor 6y ago
It reminds me of Hidden Champions. >Hidden champions are relatively small but highly successful companies that are concealed behind a curtain of inconspicuousness, invisibility, and sometimes secrecy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions

Kye 6y ago

Corollary: the most popular hot-in-SV language has nothing on C++, Java, or even C#. They're used widely inside the dark matter.

ignoramous 6y ago

More patio11 laws: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/936615043126370306.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/936615043126370306.html A variant of the current law also makes an appearance: "The amount of money flowing through capitalism would astound you. The number and variety of firms participating in the economy would astound you." My picks are: "Startups are (by necessity) filled with generalists; big companies are filled with specialists. People underestimate how effective a generalist can be at things which are done by specialists. People underestimate how deep specialties can run. These are simultaneously true." "You radically underestimate both a) how much you know that other people do not and b) the instrumental benefits to you of publishing it."

secondbreakfast 6y ago
> a) how much you know that other people do not this is a particularly confounding problem, and i haven't figured out a way to combat it. it's so bad, that i'll often learn something new when scrolling twitter or clicking through wikipedia, and then immediately assume that 1) i'm the last person to the party, everybody else already knows, and 2) forget what it was like not-knowing this fact mere seconds before.

0898 6y ago

I call these companies RHBs: rich, huge and boring.

noch 6y ago

When talking about the size of an economy, it's more useful to give actual statistical calculations indicating hypothesised/alluded size than to offer anecdotes. Has anyone actually studied this and mathematised their thinking? One can't/shouldn't make business decisions based on anecdotes or bromides.

rukuu001 6y ago

Admin software for schools - ran into an ex teacher making an absolute killing selling some admin software to schools. And he’s one guy selling to schools in one state!

luord 6y ago

And yet I have no ideas. Maybe I should talk to my parents, they might have seen something in their old jobs that could have used automation.

hadlock 6y ago

I was surprised to find out one of my coworkers had been maintaining the point of sale (POS) machines for a local chain of comic book shops, running hypercard (yes, that hypercard) since the 1990s. The POS machines would sync their databases via write ahead logs over dialup