13 ms·

Entreporn, The Fallacy That Wastes Your Life

607 points by jv22222 16y ago

apike 16y ago
I used to get frustrated by the mentality that Justin is speaking out against. That said, those of us building "get rich slowly" businesses simply don't need the support network that people making crazy bets need. The huge risk, huge return world will always be exciting to watch and talk about, and it will always be splashing around waste money, so it will always get a disproportionate amount of attention.
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
Awesome article. I'd like to see this taken to the next level: some kind of diagnostic. It's easy to point out the general case. What's difficult is taking the general truth and turning it into stuff to do right now. Answer these questions. If you answer this way, you are heading down the wrong path. From what very little I've seen, this is something that everybody sees in everybody else but never see in themselves. Perhaps this is because it's easy to imagine somebody else having to "settle" for a business making shinier widgets for 3 cents profit per unit while we all easily imagine ourselves as being the person to "change X as we know it" I have no idea why some of us are like this. I continue to struggle with it, and I know better.
- deleted 16y ago
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- richcollins 16y ago
  Just start fixing things that you think are broken and charge for them. Eventually it will add up to enough to pay the bills.
- mkr-hn 16y ago
  A lot of people want to skip the buildup to success. They don't want to develop a small business over a few years for a stable launching point to more ambitious projects.
hasenj 16y ago
$10k/mo sounds pretty sweet.
- middus 16y ago
  I guess he's talking about revenue. Don't forget to take into account infrastructure costs, health insurance for yourself, taxes etc.
  - jv22222 16y ago
    Yup. $10k/month revenue is exactly what I mean.
- seanalltogether 16y ago
  And only requires making about $330 a day. This is the benchmark I'm shooting for with mobile apps, and right now with just 2 apps I'm at about $130 a day.
  - rodh257 16y ago
    What are your apps?
    - seanalltogether 16y ago
      http://www.10millionapps.com/lol-studio-ios/ http://www.10millionapps.com/lol-studio-ios/ http://www.10millionapps.com/space-gremlin-mac/ http://www.10millionapps.com/space-gremlin-mac/
deleted 16y ago
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r00fus 16y ago
TL;DR - Work for your customers, avoid the boss/investor.
ascendant 16y ago
I sense a backlash growing. It seems like the only time people take you seriously these days is if you're in your 20's, have a spiky-haired asian dude as one of your founders and are launching a social/mobile/streaming video app in a weekend. That's what they cover on TechCrunch but not what the vast majority of us out there are doing. Sidenote: I have nothing against asian dudes, spiky haired or not.
- fleitz 16y ago
  Hey, I'm in my 20s have spikey blue hair, and we started Answer in 30 (streaming video Q&A site w/ heavy social media integration) on Startup Bus, launched in private beta after 72 hours. No one takes us seriously which is why we're out there hustling and interviewing people so when we launch we have 1000+ videos. (Half way there!) Here's our startup bus pitch video. http://www.youtube.com/user/StartupBus#p/u/8/k4mixo4-SMs http://www.youtube.com/user/StartupBus#p/u/8/k4mixo4-SMs Show me an investor who takes us seriously and we'll be there to pitch within 24 hours. Or if you know TechCrunch people who are interested, we got wired coverage but it's not like it's 96 and people still read wired. http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/03/meet-startupbus-buspreneurs/?pid=3048 http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/03/meet-startupbus-buspr... That said, it's a lifestyle business that pays the bills and allows me to do crazy stuff like startup bus.
  - ascendant 16y ago
    I didn't say there's anything wrong with fitting that mold, only that it's what the media seems to be pushing as the "right" way to do it. Best of luck to you, I almost took the StartupBus out of Cleveland but had to pass due to money.
- storborg 16y ago
  Seriously? I think those are the types of people that get taken the least seriously by anyone that matters.
- nir 16y ago
  The whole point of this type of model is that you make you $10k/mo by selling something that people actually pay money for, which means you don't care what TechCrunch/VCs are excited about. They're irrelevant for you. $10k is your "fuck you money", provided you can rely on making it every month. This might be easier said than done, though.
VMG 16y ago
Meh. Conspiracy thinking.
ilcavero 16y ago
"the chances of building a $10k/month webapp business is pretty high" is this true? oh god, what am I doing with my life?.
- jv22222 16y ago
  Yes it's high if you work at it for a year or two.
  - borism 16y ago
    if you work at it for a year or two so this 10k/month figure is averaged from how many years?
    - jv22222 16y ago
      There's no average. It's just a target. You don't get $10/k a month overnight. It's a figure that you work toward. Many people don't need that much to live. It depends where you're at. If you need 5k/month to live then you can reach your goal even faster. $10k/month seemed like a good goal for the article that could support most people.
      - borism 16y ago
        There's no average. It's just a target. uh, okay. then you might want to update your blog before there are 1000s of unemployed web developers building their lifestyle web apps for eternal target of 10k/month.
        gridspy 16y ago
        'Entrepreneurs' who can't think critically for themselves regarding their potential are in for a rough ride.
Anjin 16y ago
David Heinemeier Hansson had the exact same conversation with Jason Calacanis and Jason just could not understand why DHH felt that building that kind of business made sense.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDGHxO6N3Ms http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDGHxO6N3Ms
jgh- 16y ago
This guy I like.
swampplanet 16y ago
The only problem here is that entrepreneurs are humans and as such they tend to swing for the fences. I know I do. Its the come big or go home mentality. Its the American way. Whatever you want to call it, its in our genes to do it that way. Yeah we could all become the equivalent of craftsmen who had to then organize into guilds/unions to get a decent wage. Why do that when we can go home millionaires with the right idea/right money.
- jv22222 16y ago
  If you build a small business you can build a large business. All the same principles are at stake. However, in theory it's easier to build a small business first time round (baby steps). You can swing for the fences on biz 2.
  - swampplanet 16y ago
    Yeah I hear you but the steps you take in building a small business, while perhaps less risky, are the same. Yet you even get cache in trying a big business. I've done 5 startups (2 successful and 3 not) but I can point to that in my next you can't use your small business as an example you can do a big one. So at a certain point in your life it makes sense to swing for the fences if you are the only bread winner for your family I definitely understand reducing risk.
deleted 16y ago
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Alex3917 16y ago
"The chances of building a Google, YouTube or Facebook and scaling to the millions of users required to be “considered” for VC investment are vanishingly small. We’re talking in the region of 0.0001%." You don't need millions of users to be considered for VC investment. More like 10,000 users if the service is free, or 100 paying customers. And it's really not that hard to do that, it just takes enough perseverance to make it through the first few iterations.
- jv22222 16y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with "Not that hard to get 10,000 free users?"
  - sabat 16y ago
    It's not that hard to get a fairly small volume of users (100-10,000) -- compared to getting a huge, YouTube-sized volume (millions of users). But it's still hard to get any number at all. It takes work, persistence, luck, and intelligence.
pavel_lishin 16y ago
Wait, what? > The absolute truth is that each and every one > of us can build a business that can support us. > ... > In truth, there is no reason to fail – other > than failing to learn from your mistakes. Yes, maybe we can - eventually. But while we're building it, we still need a paycheck. Building a profitable business doesn't seem like the kind of thing you can do in your spare time, unless you're willing to sacrifice absolutely everything else in your life. > But even better, once you have the knowledge that comes > along with building a succesful $10k/month business, you > also posses the exact same knowledge that it takes to > build a $100k/month business. And then, why not a $1M/month business? And then $10M/month! Etc! Etc! I'm pretty sure that a $100k/month business is an outlier, too, it's just closer to the center of the bell curve than Facebook, but still pretty dang far away from everyone else.
- jv22222 16y ago
  Myself & Jason (techzing) are both building businesses on the side. Our paycheck come from consultancy. We both lead very fulfilling lives as well as building our side projects... :)
  - pavel_lishin 16y ago
    How many hours a week do you spend on your consulting gigs, how many on side projects, and how many on your personal lives? Not trying to pull a GOTCHA, SEE, YOUR NUMBERS DON'T ADD UP, genuinely curious.
    - jv22222 16y ago
      Hopefully Jasons post can help to answer that: http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/bootstrapping-with-kids http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/bootstrapping-with-kids
    - gridspy 16y ago
      That was my story too for some time. Working on gridspy (still sub-profitable) while also holding down a fulltime job. See http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2010/02/part-time-entrepreneur.html http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2010/02/part-time-entrepreneur.htm... Now I'm contracting on the side while working on Gridspy. It is a hard slog, but totally worth it. We are creating a increasingly professional offering. I'm really looking forward to when we go to market and start selling this thing. Now I have the next problem - how much to contract (money) vs how much to work on Gridspy? http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2010/06/breaking-away-from-the-man.html http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2010/06/breaking-away-from-the-man...
lux 16y ago
37signals have been advocating this for years.
- nikcub 16y ago
  they also raised money in '06 from Bezos their argument isn't that VC is evil, more that in a world where a lot of entrepreneurs seem to be focused on the fundraising/grow-quick/big-swing path, there are alternatives the OP on the other hand is advocating something entirely different
MicahWedemeyer 16y ago
Excellent article. Embrace being a lifestyle business and ignore all the startup noise. Do your best to serve your customers and grow your revenue. You'll never get famous, but then again neither will 99.9% of the people who go the other route.
rythie 16y ago
He ignores that most categories only have 3 or 4 major players and rest can't get enough recognition to be profitable. Also $10k/month is ok for one or two people, but what if someone gets sick or leaves, a business is not very stable at that size. Additionally he assumes people want to change the world for monetary reasons, which I don't think is often the case, otherwise you'd manage a hedge fund or something.
Murkin 16y ago
That simple ? 10K/month ? Id love to hear how I can get one of those 10K/month businesses (outside of consulting/programmer-for-hire). People keep making it sound like it super easy to just get such a business going. How about some examples ?
- blhack 16y ago
  I'd love to know how I can get one of those consulting/programmer-for-hire jobs for $10k/mo. Do these things really exist? How do you find them?
  - joe_the_user 16y ago
    Just go back to the job that used to pay you $6K/month... In other words, the consulting jobs exist but they are for "niche markets" - companies hire back their most senior workers on a consulting basis. Also those explicitly trained by SAP and the like at one time could get the bucks. I don't know if that's still true.
  - modoc 16y ago
    Yes they really exist. Some niches pay more like 20k+/mo pretty easily. Consulting at 150/hour isn't that hard. If you want specific advice learn an eCommerce framework really really well or become a deployment specialist for large clusters of JBoss/Weblogic/Websphere.
  - nerfhammer 16y ago
    A short-term contractor with highly relevant domain expertise can charge 2-3x what the same person would be getting on salary. Finding clients reliably is the real trick of course, I wish I knew that.
  - jkahn 16y ago
    $10k/mo is just a decent salary. If you're a good consultant, you're looking at more like $25k/mo. And that's accounting for slack time.
- callmeed 16y ago
pg 16y ago
"If every developer was to focus on the very achievable goal of building a lifestyle/micro business – the entire house of cards would crumble." If that happened, the whole world would crumble, because we wouldn't have any technology bigger than could be built by lifestyle businesses. Anyone who wanted to build a lifestyle business on the Internet, for example, would find that there was no Internet. You wouldn't have servers or routers or clients or backbones or local cable.
- richcollins 16y ago
  Not if you view a lifestyle business as a lilypad for something larger. But even better, once you have the knowledge that comes along with building a succesful $10k/month business, you also posses the exact same knowledge that it takes to build a $100k/month business.
  - nupark 16y ago
    I run what would likely be classed as a lifestyle business (though I prefer to think of it as a large business in the process of bootstrapping). The more people there are running lifestyle businesses, the bigger the 'lillypad'. With a sufficiently large lifestyle-driven economy, we could move away from the VC model where very few people have the majority of the capital necessary to fund big ideas. We're already moving to a world where industrial costs continue to decrease, small businesses specialize in providing specific services (such as manufacturing), and computers and machines provide enormous leverage. Examples range from Amazon EC2 to affordable, low-scale manufacturing of injection molded plastics and cheap, on-demand PCB manufacturing. On the subject of building "big things", it's worth reading this blog post on how the Glif (http://www.theglif.com/ http://www.theglif.com/) was created by a small team of two, funded by Kickstarter, from design to manufacturing: http://www.therussiansusedapencil.com/post/2794775825/idea-to-market-in-5-months-making-the-glif http://www.therussiansusedapencil.com/post/2794775825/idea-t... In comparison to pg's example of a router, it is a small thing, but it's a great demonstration of how the bar is being lowered, and what was only accessible to large, capital-rich entities is now available to two guys with limited initial capital.
  - pg 16y ago
iuguy 16y ago
Note: I can only speak for my industry (penetration testing and antimalware) so YMMV Last month at DC4420 (the London monthly DEF CON chapter meeting): <dude from corporate security firm>: How many people do you have at Mandalorian? <iuguy>: 6 <dude from corporate security firm>: Really? I always thought you guys were bigger? So it's more of a lifestyle firm? <iuguy>: If by lifestyle firm you mean a company that treats it's people well for doing a good job - as well as they could do on their own - then yes. If you mean a firm that's focused on doing a good job doing work we enjoy instead of chasing cash and ticking boxes all day long, then yes. Probably the most successful example of this I've seen in my industry are these guys: http://www.pentestpartners.co.uk/ http://www.pentestpartners.co.uk/ I think http://www.fbtechies.co.uk/ http://www.fbtechies.co.uk/ was the first I knew of, but amongst us there's quite a few and it seems as though we're growing. I think the realisation of having a niche skillset combined with commercial ability makes for a compelling enough value proposition for people to go it alone outside the conventional areas. We don't all need to be multibillionaires (although some do). For some of us it's the choice between working on yet another PCI box ticking exercise, or charming the pants off some cool experimental tech. I would like to add though that the article really needs some data to back it up. While there's plenty of anecdata from patio11, peldi and (to some extent although I'm obviously not in the same league as those guys) me, a source of actual information would really blow the doors off.
vannevar 16y ago
This exact point occurred to me as I was listening to Reid Hoffman define 'entrepreneurship' at SXSW the other day. His definition restricted the term to 'industry-disruptive technology' and 'big ideas'. I thought it was a pretty self-serving definition coming from an angel investor who needs those kind of giant hits to cover bad bets. It's also a lot easier to start what Mark Cuban is calling the Ponzi-style investment process where every round at successively higher valuations leaves the next group of suckers holding the bag.
zyfo 16y ago
Regarding the chances to build something super-successful: It's more interesting to hear about startups that fail. Seeing patterns emerging from failure is way more useful than trying to pinpoint what Google and Facebook founders have in common. The problem I guess is that the failures mostly just fade away. A service where upstarters commit to write about their journey, especially if it goes bad, in exchange for helpful tips would be very useful.
nphase 16y ago
I started a lifestyle business. It did that, and very well. And then I became bored. If a lifestyle business works for you, then that's what you should strive towards. Some would call me naive or childish, but if you're the type of person who dreams about changing the world, don't sell yourself short. Don't grow up, and don't give up. Go for it.
michaelochurch 16y ago
"If you genuinely have the spirit of an entrepreneur inside of you, something about No True Scotsman". This article, as much as any feature on Mark Zuckerberg, is entreporn. Is it possible to build a $10k-per-month web app? Sure. Easier than building the next Facebook (which is a matter of mostly luck, a lottery)? Absolutely. Are most people who try going to fail? Yes. Is it possible to get funding for a lifestyle business? No, that doesn't exist. So you need to do it on your own time, which limits your losses but makes your likelihood of success very low. If nothing is lost but one's time, is trying a lifestyle business possibly a great idea? Of course. But is making it sound easy to make $10k per month entreporn? Yes. Also, as for lifestyle businesses, there are good and bad scenarios. A good lifestyle business provides reliable income at a decent rate (at least $100/hour) and the ability to control how much money you make and how much time you spend; if you want more money, you work harder. If you want a 3-month vacation, you take it but make less money. That's what you want: the freedom to decide how much you work and how much money you make. This is a great thing to have, and if some idiot hipster thinks it makes you a loser that you didn't cash out for billions, who cares? A bad ("walking dead") lifestyle business is one that just turned out mediocre and ends up had-by-the-balls by one or two clients who become, de facto, very demanding bosses. Companies like this exist: single-client consultancies that haven't gone out yet, but never got enough headway above the mediocrity of client demands to take off and become something.
- jv22222 16y ago
  If the article made sound easy to make $10k/month that was an error on my part. It is not easy, it's very hard. But no where near as hard as building a successful business on VC investment. Don't forget, after you get the investment you're only just starting out... 8 out of 10 VC funded projects fail.
  - michaelochurch 16y ago
    I think one also needs to consider the success and failure profiles in each. What do success and failure entail, and what are their implications for your career? The attraction of the get-rich-or-die-quickly company is that, if it doesn't make you rich enough never to have to work again, at least you can walk away from it and hopefully spin your story positively enough to get career credit, for your next job, for the time you spent there. Taking VC and making $120k/year, which is low-average for a VC-funded firm's CEO, and then failing after three years, doesn't entail much financial loss. And unless the failure is catastrophic and obviously reflects badly on a single founder, it's not a huge career hit. Sure, it's 3 years working very hard for middling pay, but there are worse things in the world. Depending on how one is able to bounce back from the failure, it may have been 3 years very well spent. As for lifestyle businesses, no VC is going to fund a lifestyle business; it's just not what they do. And bank loans are out because they make onerous personal-liability requirements, so scratch that. This leaves two options. (1) Don't quit your day job. Risk is minimal, but I'd be shocked if more than 2% of these also-employed "entrepreneurs" take off. (2) Quit your day job, and put personal savings at risk. This is a lot riskier, financially, than founding a VC startup if you have sufficient social connections to know (before you start) that you'll be funded. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing, and if you don't have those social connections you'll be eating savings either way while you hunt for funding, but it does mean that it's costly.
acconrad 16y ago
While I agree that you shouldn't knock lifestyle businesses, I feel that the TechCrunch quote was taken a bit out of context. The "dipshit" companies looks like its referring to the kind of apps that have no business model but ride on the hopes and dreams of overeager VCs who swear this is the next Google. Anyone who creates a company without a business model and hopes to sell to Google for $25MM is a dipshit. But those aren't lifestyle businesses, so it seems like that quote was a bit irrelevant.
pclark 16y ago
This post saddens me. Startups should aim larger, not smaller. That is, in my opinion. The blog post (which I am interpreting as "every entrepreneur wants to raise VC and swing for fences") is generally wrong, in my experience. For every "a million dollars isn't cool, you know what is? a billion dollars" startup founder, there is one that insists that Groupon is over valued, and startups should monetize on day 1 and be in charge of their own destiny by retaining all equity. There is no right or wrong answer in terms of what your aspirations are. But there is a huge audience of startup founders that are building lifestyle businesses, and killing it.
- akkartik 16y ago
  What's it wrong about, that people don't respect lifestyle businesses? Hmm, I wonder if that's the silicon valley reality distortion field. The post says that most people don't consider lifestyle businesses, and they should. And you're claiming that lifestyle businesses are in fact quite common, and that you wish more people were searching for scalable businesses. You agree with the post that a lifestyle business is a perfectly fine, viable option. Am I getting all that right?
  - pclark 16y ago
    I read the post as implying that all entrepreneurs are chasing mega hits whereas some may prefer, or be better suited towards, lifestyle businesses. " ... to the advantage of almost every player in our industry that we “believe” in chasing the next big thing. They need us to keep chasing it. In the truest sense – the next big thing – is a carrot on a stick that keeps us occupied and keeps them in business." Whereas in my experience, lots (loads!) of entrepreneurs are chasing lifestyle companies. You just don't see them as much because they need far less from the ecosystem. I can think of tons of ~$10k/mo companies building iPhone apps, wordpress plugins, b2b web apps, etc etc.
    - jv22222 16y ago
      I have a sneaking suspicion they are chasing after Angry Birds, or Zynga... once again very different to a solid $10k/month b2b webapp.
va_coder 16y ago
I want to believe this story, but the reality is that the big companies have economies of scale that are very difficult to compete with and they often win.
- jv22222 16y ago
  The agility of small companies makes it ridiculously easy to compete with large companies. Large companies have huge amounts of unsatisfied customers that are easy to research, find and sell to- who are more then happy to pay for a direct line to the software maker. Large companies don't even care if you do this, because unless you hit $100m revenue you're about as significant as a gnat on their butt.
  - va_coder 16y ago
    Honda, Trek, Dell, Proctor & Gamble, Exxon, Whole Foods: There are companies I give my money to and most people spend money like I do.
deleted 16y ago
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Lucadg 16y ago
I agree. You have no idea how much I agree. My small online business never made it to 10000 us a month, but I don't care. I am writing from a nice Balinese house with a great tropical garden where I'm spending 2 months. And then I'll spend a month in Sri Lanka. Then, maybe it will be China. I have been living like this for the past 10 years, working online and enjoying life as I never thought it was possible. So, go for your small business and be free, it's really much easier than it seems. And it's so beautiful.
- sr3d 16y ago
  I'm working toward this goal with my own startup. Thanks for the inspirational comment!
  - Lucadg 16y ago
    Ok so make sure you build it mobile from the beginning. I mean delegate any task which requires to be in a specific place or to be online at a specific time. Or, worse, to be in a specific place at a specific time. It may seem odd, but that's the key. If you want to be free to go anywhere anytime you can't be supposed to be somewhere sometime. There are so many tasks down the road waiting to get you stuck in some place. It may ne hard to do but you need to give them away. Sorry if that sounds insane :) But it worked for me, so I hope it works for you.
solsenNet 16y ago
happy st. patty's day! with a little Irish pessimism!
nadam 16y ago
I think there are already lots of software companies which aim not too high. Last time I heard there were 150.000 apps in the AppStore. There are lots and lots of indie game developers and casual game developers; a great chunk of them don't have the income to avoid their day jobs because they are not even ramen profitable. There are thousands of cheap shareware software on download.com. And lots of websites trying to generate money using adsense. I agree that it may be a bad decision to aim too high, but there is also a possibility to aim too low: into markets where there is not much money or there is free stuff as competition. I've first made the 'aim too high' and then as a compensation I also made the 'aim too low' mistakes. Now I finally aim in-between.
starpilot 16y ago
Wow, this is exactly what I was saying with a recent comment of mine (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2330900 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2330900). There's a wide continuum of successes in the startup world. VC's are interested in the funding the top end, but many devs would probably be satisfied by a much wider swath, that could include wholly bootstrapped operations.
al3x 16y ago
I'm disappointed that this has gotten so many upvotes and positive comments. There's a middle ground between web application "lifestyle businesses" (like duping credulous customers into overpaying for a time-tracking tool styled with this month's CSS trends) and trying to start the next Facebook. There's nothing wrong with being a small software company. People have been doing it for decades now. It's boring, but there's nothing wrong with it. Don't expect anyone to celebrate you for doing it, though. Our time on this earth is limited, and people's attention is even more limited. No wonder that more time and attention is put towards trying to execute on big ideas. Sometimes those ideas end up not working out, but we're all better, I think, for someone having tried. As pg points out, the ideas that led to the businesses that have formed the infrastructure that enables web lifestyle businesses could not have, themselves, been lifestyle businesses. Someone has to think big, take risks, and deploy significant capital in the interest of a dramatically better world. If you don't want to be that person, great, but don't tell the risk-takers that they're "wasting their lives". Would you say the same to scientists who take big risks? Artists? The media packaging of technology entrepreneurship is undeniably offputting. But that's no excuse for dim commentary like this.
- nhangen 16y ago
  Your comment is not only Offensive, but it is also ignorant. Boring? "lifestyle business?" have you built the next Facebook (which also happens to not be a "change the world" service anyway)? Disagree with the post...fine, but no need to drag everyone through the mud in the process.
  - jpcx01 16y ago
    Haha. Not sure if you realized this, but you are talking to the person who built the next Facebook, aka Twitter.
    - dpritchett 16y ago
      Google shows me that Twitter was founded nine months before Alex came on board. I've read plenty of his posts and presentations and I respect his technical abilities, but your "built Twitter" comment oversimplifies his involvement in the company's history. His presentations do imply that he was the driving force behind the Scala adoption for their messaging queue, so that's arguably a must-have to reach Twitter's current scale.
teyc 16y ago
Congrats JV. I've been listening to you on TechZing. You've hit this one out of the ballpark.
- jv22222 16y ago
  Thanks very much :)
mraybman 16y ago
I think this article is just an original argument for bootstrapping. I don't think this guy is saying: "don't reach for the stars" - at least that's not how I interpret it. He's saying: "set achievable goals, lean how to execute, then you might just build a big ship organically."
6ren 16y ago
DHH's "How to make money online" (Startup School) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY goes into more detail on this. The version with slides isn't working right now http://37signals.com/svn/posts/981-the-secret-to-making-money-online http://37signals.com/svn/posts/981-the-secret-to-making-mone...
conversionrater 16y ago
A few thoughts: - This already is happening. There are far more developers and entrepreneurs trying to build lifestyle/small businesses than their are trying to raise VC funding and shooting for the moon. It's just that the media and people don't care about them, and really why should they? Nothing against those businesses as I've had my own lifestyle business, but when there are so many of them and they have such a smaller number of customers and users it's not that interesting to read an article about a web application that has 1,000 users. - Why does the house of cards need to fall down? Is it a house of cards? Without getting into bigger global economy issues, isn't a system that has created companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. pretty good?
SpencerCooley 16y ago
Most startups need VC money because their ideas are obscure, stupid, and market-less. There is nothing wrong with using your skills to build a simple small business to fill a market need. Anyone who feels guilty for trying to make money with their talent is a sheep and a fool.
sreitshamer 16y ago
Arguing about the term "lifestyle business" is itself distracting. To me the point is that nowadays you don't have to get permission (in the form of someone else investing in your company) to get started. On your own you can fairly quickly build a business that pays your bills (your "lifestyle") and lets you escape "wage slavery". Once you do this, you have a lot of security and a lot of power/control over your next move. I didn't think the point was to build a business that makes enough to pay the bills and then stop building. I'm certainly not stopping.
grails4life 16y ago
I think Spolsky settled this dichotomy back in 2000: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html
ahoyhere 16y ago
This article is not sensational. It does not tell you what you should do with your life. It does not say VCs are evil. It doesn't say funded companies are a waste of time. The "if every developer" line is clearly just as much grandstanding as PG makes when he compares hackers taking a job to caging a lion. To take this line in this essay literally -- and be offended -- but not to take PG's line about lions literally is to be intellectually dishonest. Here's what this essay actually says: * there's a monetary reason that we're all soaking in VC/fund/"liquidity event" news * there's a psychological reason that we seek out VC/fund/"liquidity event" news * reading about this stuff isn't even the remotely same vein as working on it, or making real money * the author is angry that he believes people are being pushed towards lives/businesses that don't make them happy * every developer is capable of making a product for an independent income * and everybody might be happier if they did Gee, not so controversial, is it? All the hullaballoo about this article can be only one thing: overly identifying with your life/business choices and attacking anyone who dares call them into question. In a general sense. Not in a PERSONAL attack, for example labeling someone's work "a lifestyle business" or "like duping credulous customers into overpaying for a time-tracking tool styled with this month's CSS trends". The only reason anyone even paid attention to this article at all is because 98% of what everyone hears, all the time, is pro-big startup, pro-VC, pro-liquidity event, pro- this and pro- that. There is so rarely a dissenting voice that the moment there is one, however mild, everybody is in attack mode. In short... Look, dominant paradigm: You need to chillax.
- KirinDave 16y ago
  > The only reason anyone even paid attention to this article at all is because 98% of what everyone hears, all the time, is pro-big startup, pro-VC, pro-liquidity event, pro- this and pro- that. Perhaps because you're so far out in the (physical) hinterlands of software, you hear a time-delayed different message. Living close to the epicenter of the startup world, I hear very few people really talk about flip-based startups anymore, and the general consensus is to be wary of VC and take it as late as you need it. Indeed, if I had to describe a "pro-" that has infected Valley culture right now, I would call it the "pro-lean startup" fetishism. It gets a little tedious, but it's a far more reasonable sentiment than the pro-flip culture that dominated the Valley back a few years ago. Really, the difference between the idea put forth in this essay and a game-changing techcrunch-courting startup is scope. I could work on a small lifestyle product (and I have a few in mind that might be fun), but they're not... game changers. I'd like to work on a product that really makes a difference to a large number of customers. Very few independent products have the resources or scope to achieve this. Coming out of college, people think they have to work either for a big company or a big idea. The truth put forth in this article is that you need not do either, And That Is Okay. Indeed, there is a great deal of freedom that comes with it. > Look, dominant paradigm: You need to chillax. "Dominant," you say? Hardly. "Glorified," perhaps. The vast majority of people do what you do; sell small-scale contracts and services to small-scale partners and customers. And that's fine and good and noble and grist for the mill of global economics. But let's not kid ourselves, it is not an ambitious path, and western culture glamorizes (unfulfilled) ambition.
kennethologist 16y ago
I'm in a 3rd world country so $10K a month is more than enough for me to more things. Like 1. Start a foodstore, business; petrol stations (Startup cost around $50K), a popular restaurant etc. So this is what I'm doing now; trying to create a lifestyle business.

607 points by jv22222 16y ago

apike 16y ago

I used to get frustrated by the mentality that Justin is speaking out against. That said, those of us building "get rich slowly" businesses simply don't need the support network that people making crazy bets need. The huge risk, huge return world will always be exciting to watch and talk about, and it will always be splashing around waste money, so it will always get a disproportionate amount of attention.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

Awesome article. I'd like to see this taken to the next level: some kind of diagnostic. It's easy to point out the general case. What's difficult is taking the general truth and turning it into stuff to do right now. Answer these questions. If you answer this way, you are heading down the wrong path. From what very little I've seen, this is something that everybody sees in everybody else but never see in themselves. Perhaps this is because it's easy to imagine somebody else having to "settle" for a business making shinier widgets for 3 cents profit per unit while we all easily imagine ourselves as being the person to "change X as we know it" I have no idea why some of us are like this. I continue to struggle with it, and I know better.

deleted 16y ago
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richcollins 16y ago
Just start fixing things that you think are broken and charge for them. Eventually it will add up to enough to pay the bills.
mkr-hn 16y ago
A lot of people want to skip the buildup to success. They don't want to develop a small business over a few years for a stable launching point to more ambitious projects.

hasenj 16y ago

$10k/mo sounds pretty sweet.

middus 16y ago
I guess he's talking about revenue. Don't forget to take into account infrastructure costs, health insurance for yourself, taxes etc.
- jv22222 16y ago
  Yup. $10k/month revenue is exactly what I mean.
seanalltogether 16y ago
And only requires making about $330 a day. This is the benchmark I'm shooting for with mobile apps, and right now with just 2 apps I'm at about $130 a day.
- rodh257 16y ago
  What are your apps?
  - seanalltogether 16y ago
    http://www.10millionapps.com/lol-studio-ios/ http://www.10millionapps.com/lol-studio-ios/ http://www.10millionapps.com/space-gremlin-mac/ http://www.10millionapps.com/space-gremlin-mac/

deleted 16y ago

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r00fus 16y ago

TL;DR - Work for your customers, avoid the boss/investor.

ascendant 16y ago

I sense a backlash growing. It seems like the only time people take you seriously these days is if you're in your 20's, have a spiky-haired asian dude as one of your founders and are launching a social/mobile/streaming video app in a weekend. That's what they cover on TechCrunch but not what the vast majority of us out there are doing. Sidenote: I have nothing against asian dudes, spiky haired or not.

fleitz 16y ago
Hey, I'm in my 20s have spikey blue hair, and we started Answer in 30 (streaming video Q&A site w/ heavy social media integration) on Startup Bus, launched in private beta after 72 hours. No one takes us seriously which is why we're out there hustling and interviewing people so when we launch we have 1000+ videos. (Half way there!) Here's our startup bus pitch video. http://www.youtube.com/user/StartupBus#p/u/8/k4mixo4-SMs http://www.youtube.com/user/StartupBus#p/u/8/k4mixo4-SMs Show me an investor who takes us seriously and we'll be there to pitch within 24 hours. Or if you know TechCrunch people who are interested, we got wired coverage but it's not like it's 96 and people still read wired. http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/03/meet-startupbus-buspreneurs/?pid=3048 http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/03/meet-startupbus-buspr... That said, it's a lifestyle business that pays the bills and allows me to do crazy stuff like startup bus.
- ascendant 16y ago
  I didn't say there's anything wrong with fitting that mold, only that it's what the media seems to be pushing as the "right" way to do it. Best of luck to you, I almost took the StartupBus out of Cleveland but had to pass due to money.
storborg 16y ago
Seriously? I think those are the types of people that get taken the least seriously by anyone that matters.
nir 16y ago
The whole point of this type of model is that you make you $10k/mo by selling something that people actually pay money for, which means you don't care what TechCrunch/VCs are excited about. They're irrelevant for you. $10k is your "fuck you money", provided you can rely on making it every month. This might be easier said than done, though.

VMG 16y ago

Meh. Conspiracy thinking.

ilcavero 16y ago

"the chances of building a $10k/month webapp business is pretty high" is this true? oh god, what am I doing with my life?.

jv22222 16y ago
Yes it's high if you work at it for a year or two.
- borism 16y ago
  if you work at it for a year or two so this 10k/month figure is averaged from how many years?
  - jv22222 16y ago
    There's no average. It's just a target. You don't get $10/k a month overnight. It's a figure that you work toward. Many people don't need that much to live. It depends where you're at. If you need 5k/month to live then you can reach your goal even faster. $10k/month seemed like a good goal for the article that could support most people.
    - borism 16y ago
      There's no average. It's just a target. uh, okay. then you might want to update your blog before there are 1000s of unemployed web developers building their lifestyle web apps for eternal target of 10k/month.
      - gridspy 16y ago
        'Entrepreneurs' who can't think critically for themselves regarding their potential are in for a rough ride.

Anjin 16y ago

David Heinemeier Hansson had the exact same conversation with Jason Calacanis and Jason just could not understand why DHH felt that building that kind of business made sense.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDGHxO6N3Ms http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDGHxO6N3Ms

jgh- 16y ago

This guy I like.

swampplanet 16y ago

The only problem here is that entrepreneurs are humans and as such they tend to swing for the fences. I know I do. Its the come big or go home mentality. Its the American way. Whatever you want to call it, its in our genes to do it that way. Yeah we could all become the equivalent of craftsmen who had to then organize into guilds/unions to get a decent wage. Why do that when we can go home millionaires with the right idea/right money.

jv22222 16y ago
If you build a small business you can build a large business. All the same principles are at stake. However, in theory it's easier to build a small business first time round (baby steps). You can swing for the fences on biz 2.
- swampplanet 16y ago
  Yeah I hear you but the steps you take in building a small business, while perhaps less risky, are the same. Yet you even get cache in trying a big business. I've done 5 startups (2 successful and 3 not) but I can point to that in my next you can't use your small business as an example you can do a big one. So at a certain point in your life it makes sense to swing for the fences if you are the only bread winner for your family I definitely understand reducing risk.

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Alex3917 16y ago

"The chances of building a Google, YouTube or Facebook and scaling to the millions of users required to be “considered” for VC investment are vanishingly small. We’re talking in the region of 0.0001%." You don't need millions of users to be considered for VC investment. More like 10,000 users if the service is free, or 100 paying customers. And it's really not that hard to do that, it just takes enough perseverance to make it through the first few iterations.

jv22222 16y ago
I'm not sure I agree with "Not that hard to get 10,000 free users?"
- sabat 16y ago
  It's not that hard to get a fairly small volume of users (100-10,000) -- compared to getting a huge, YouTube-sized volume (millions of users). But it's still hard to get any number at all. It takes work, persistence, luck, and intelligence.

pavel_lishin 16y ago

Wait, what? > The absolute truth is that each and every one > of us can build a business that can support us. > ... > In truth, there is no reason to fail – other > than failing to learn from your mistakes. Yes, maybe we can - eventually. But while we're building it, we still need a paycheck. Building a profitable business doesn't seem like the kind of thing you can do in your spare time, unless you're willing to sacrifice absolutely everything else in your life. > But even better, once you have the knowledge that comes > along with building a succesful $10k/month business, you > also posses the exact same knowledge that it takes to > build a $100k/month business. And then, why not a $1M/month business? And then $10M/month! Etc! Etc! I'm pretty sure that a $100k/month business is an outlier, too, it's just closer to the center of the bell curve than Facebook, but still pretty dang far away from everyone else.

jv22222 16y ago
Myself & Jason (techzing) are both building businesses on the side. Our paycheck come from consultancy. We both lead very fulfilling lives as well as building our side projects... :)
- pavel_lishin 16y ago
  How many hours a week do you spend on your consulting gigs, how many on side projects, and how many on your personal lives? Not trying to pull a GOTCHA, SEE, YOUR NUMBERS DON'T ADD UP, genuinely curious.
  - jv22222 16y ago
    Hopefully Jasons post can help to answer that: http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/bootstrapping-with-kids http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/bootstrapping-with-kids
  - gridspy 16y ago
    That was my story too for some time. Working on gridspy (still sub-profitable) while also holding down a fulltime job. See http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2010/02/part-time-entrepreneur.html http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2010/02/part-time-entrepreneur.htm... Now I'm contracting on the side while working on Gridspy. It is a hard slog, but totally worth it. We are creating a increasingly professional offering. I'm really looking forward to when we go to market and start selling this thing. Now I have the next problem - how much to contract (money) vs how much to work on Gridspy? http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2010/06/breaking-away-from-the-man.html http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2010/06/breaking-away-from-the-man...

lux 16y ago

37signals have been advocating this for years.

nikcub 16y ago
they also raised money in '06 from Bezos their argument isn't that VC is evil, more that in a world where a lot of entrepreneurs seem to be focused on the fundraising/grow-quick/big-swing path, there are alternatives the OP on the other hand is advocating something entirely different

MicahWedemeyer 16y ago

Excellent article. Embrace being a lifestyle business and ignore all the startup noise. Do your best to serve your customers and grow your revenue. You'll never get famous, but then again neither will 99.9% of the people who go the other route.

rythie 16y ago

He ignores that most categories only have 3 or 4 major players and rest can't get enough recognition to be profitable. Also $10k/month is ok for one or two people, but what if someone gets sick or leaves, a business is not very stable at that size. Additionally he assumes people want to change the world for monetary reasons, which I don't think is often the case, otherwise you'd manage a hedge fund or something.

Murkin 16y ago

That simple ? 10K/month ? Id love to hear how I can get one of those 10K/month businesses (outside of consulting/programmer-for-hire). People keep making it sound like it super easy to just get such a business going. How about some examples ?

blhack 16y ago
I'd love to know how I can get one of those consulting/programmer-for-hire jobs for $10k/mo. Do these things really exist? How do you find them?
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  Just go back to the job that used to pay you $6K/month... In other words, the consulting jobs exist but they are for "niche markets" - companies hire back their most senior workers on a consulting basis. Also those explicitly trained by SAP and the like at one time could get the bucks. I don't know if that's still true.
- modoc 16y ago
  Yes they really exist. Some niches pay more like 20k+/mo pretty easily. Consulting at 150/hour isn't that hard. If you want specific advice learn an eCommerce framework really really well or become a deployment specialist for large clusters of JBoss/Weblogic/Websphere.
- nerfhammer 16y ago
  A short-term contractor with highly relevant domain expertise can charge 2-3x what the same person would be getting on salary. Finding clients reliably is the real trick of course, I wish I knew that.
- jkahn 16y ago
  $10k/mo is just a decent salary. If you're a good consultant, you're looking at more like $25k/mo. And that's accounting for slack time.
callmeed 16y ago

pg 16y ago

"If every developer was to focus on the very achievable goal of building a lifestyle/micro business – the entire house of cards would crumble." If that happened, the whole world would crumble, because we wouldn't have any technology bigger than could be built by lifestyle businesses. Anyone who wanted to build a lifestyle business on the Internet, for example, would find that there was no Internet. You wouldn't have servers or routers or clients or backbones or local cable.

richcollins 16y ago
Not if you view a lifestyle business as a lilypad for something larger. But even better, once you have the knowledge that comes along with building a succesful $10k/month business, you also posses the exact same knowledge that it takes to build a $100k/month business.
- nupark 16y ago
  I run what would likely be classed as a lifestyle business (though I prefer to think of it as a large business in the process of bootstrapping). The more people there are running lifestyle businesses, the bigger the 'lillypad'. With a sufficiently large lifestyle-driven economy, we could move away from the VC model where very few people have the majority of the capital necessary to fund big ideas. We're already moving to a world where industrial costs continue to decrease, small businesses specialize in providing specific services (such as manufacturing), and computers and machines provide enormous leverage. Examples range from Amazon EC2 to affordable, low-scale manufacturing of injection molded plastics and cheap, on-demand PCB manufacturing. On the subject of building "big things", it's worth reading this blog post on how the Glif (http://www.theglif.com/ http://www.theglif.com/) was created by a small team of two, funded by Kickstarter, from design to manufacturing: http://www.therussiansusedapencil.com/post/2794775825/idea-to-market-in-5-months-making-the-glif http://www.therussiansusedapencil.com/post/2794775825/idea-t... In comparison to pg's example of a router, it is a small thing, but it's a great demonstration of how the bar is being lowered, and what was only accessible to large, capital-rich entities is now available to two guys with limited initial capital.
- pg 16y ago

iuguy 16y ago

Note: I can only speak for my industry (penetration testing and antimalware) so YMMV Last month at DC4420 (the London monthly DEF CON chapter meeting): <dude from corporate security firm>: How many people do you have at Mandalorian? <iuguy>: 6 <dude from corporate security firm>: Really? I always thought you guys were bigger? So it's more of a lifestyle firm? <iuguy>: If by lifestyle firm you mean a company that treats it's people well for doing a good job - as well as they could do on their own - then yes. If you mean a firm that's focused on doing a good job doing work we enjoy instead of chasing cash and ticking boxes all day long, then yes. Probably the most successful example of this I've seen in my industry are these guys: http://www.pentestpartners.co.uk/ http://www.pentestpartners.co.uk/ I think http://www.fbtechies.co.uk/ http://www.fbtechies.co.uk/ was the first I knew of, but amongst us there's quite a few and it seems as though we're growing. I think the realisation of having a niche skillset combined with commercial ability makes for a compelling enough value proposition for people to go it alone outside the conventional areas. We don't all need to be multibillionaires (although some do). For some of us it's the choice between working on yet another PCI box ticking exercise, or charming the pants off some cool experimental tech. I would like to add though that the article really needs some data to back it up. While there's plenty of anecdata from patio11, peldi and (to some extent although I'm obviously not in the same league as those guys) me, a source of actual information would really blow the doors off.

vannevar 16y ago

This exact point occurred to me as I was listening to Reid Hoffman define 'entrepreneurship' at SXSW the other day. His definition restricted the term to 'industry-disruptive technology' and 'big ideas'. I thought it was a pretty self-serving definition coming from an angel investor who needs those kind of giant hits to cover bad bets. It's also a lot easier to start what Mark Cuban is calling the Ponzi-style investment process where every round at successively higher valuations leaves the next group of suckers holding the bag.

zyfo 16y ago

Regarding the chances to build something super-successful: It's more interesting to hear about startups that fail. Seeing patterns emerging from failure is way more useful than trying to pinpoint what Google and Facebook founders have in common. The problem I guess is that the failures mostly just fade away. A service where upstarters commit to write about their journey, especially if it goes bad, in exchange for helpful tips would be very useful.

nphase 16y ago

I started a lifestyle business. It did that, and very well. And then I became bored. If a lifestyle business works for you, then that's what you should strive towards. Some would call me naive or childish, but if you're the type of person who dreams about changing the world, don't sell yourself short. Don't grow up, and don't give up. Go for it.

michaelochurch 16y ago

"If you genuinely have the spirit of an entrepreneur inside of you, something about No True Scotsman". This article, as much as any feature on Mark Zuckerberg, is entreporn. Is it possible to build a $10k-per-month web app? Sure. Easier than building the next Facebook (which is a matter of mostly luck, a lottery)? Absolutely. Are most people who try going to fail? Yes. Is it possible to get funding for a lifestyle business? No, that doesn't exist. So you need to do it on your own time, which limits your losses but makes your likelihood of success very low. If nothing is lost but one's time, is trying a lifestyle business possibly a great idea? Of course. But is making it sound easy to make $10k per month entreporn? Yes. Also, as for lifestyle businesses, there are good and bad scenarios. A good lifestyle business provides reliable income at a decent rate (at least $100/hour) and the ability to control how much money you make and how much time you spend; if you want more money, you work harder. If you want a 3-month vacation, you take it but make less money. That's what you want: the freedom to decide how much you work and how much money you make. This is a great thing to have, and if some idiot hipster thinks it makes you a loser that you didn't cash out for billions, who cares? A bad ("walking dead") lifestyle business is one that just turned out mediocre and ends up had-by-the-balls by one or two clients who become, de facto, very demanding bosses. Companies like this exist: single-client consultancies that haven't gone out yet, but never got enough headway above the mediocrity of client demands to take off and become something.

jv22222 16y ago
If the article made sound easy to make $10k/month that was an error on my part. It is not easy, it's very hard. But no where near as hard as building a successful business on VC investment. Don't forget, after you get the investment you're only just starting out... 8 out of 10 VC funded projects fail.
- michaelochurch 16y ago
  I think one also needs to consider the success and failure profiles in each. What do success and failure entail, and what are their implications for your career? The attraction of the get-rich-or-die-quickly company is that, if it doesn't make you rich enough never to have to work again, at least you can walk away from it and hopefully spin your story positively enough to get career credit, for your next job, for the time you spent there. Taking VC and making $120k/year, which is low-average for a VC-funded firm's CEO, and then failing after three years, doesn't entail much financial loss. And unless the failure is catastrophic and obviously reflects badly on a single founder, it's not a huge career hit. Sure, it's 3 years working very hard for middling pay, but there are worse things in the world. Depending on how one is able to bounce back from the failure, it may have been 3 years very well spent. As for lifestyle businesses, no VC is going to fund a lifestyle business; it's just not what they do. And bank loans are out because they make onerous personal-liability requirements, so scratch that. This leaves two options. (1) Don't quit your day job. Risk is minimal, but I'd be shocked if more than 2% of these also-employed "entrepreneurs" take off. (2) Quit your day job, and put personal savings at risk. This is a lot riskier, financially, than founding a VC startup if you have sufficient social connections to know (before you start) that you'll be funded. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing, and if you don't have those social connections you'll be eating savings either way while you hunt for funding, but it does mean that it's costly.

acconrad 16y ago

While I agree that you shouldn't knock lifestyle businesses, I feel that the TechCrunch quote was taken a bit out of context. The "dipshit" companies looks like its referring to the kind of apps that have no business model but ride on the hopes and dreams of overeager VCs who swear this is the next Google. Anyone who creates a company without a business model and hopes to sell to Google for $25MM is a dipshit. But those aren't lifestyle businesses, so it seems like that quote was a bit irrelevant.

pclark 16y ago

This post saddens me. Startups should aim larger, not smaller. That is, in my opinion. The blog post (which I am interpreting as "every entrepreneur wants to raise VC and swing for fences") is generally wrong, in my experience. For every "a million dollars isn't cool, you know what is? a billion dollars" startup founder, there is one that insists that Groupon is over valued, and startups should monetize on day 1 and be in charge of their own destiny by retaining all equity. There is no right or wrong answer in terms of what your aspirations are. But there is a huge audience of startup founders that are building lifestyle businesses, and killing it.

akkartik 16y ago
What's it wrong about, that people don't respect lifestyle businesses? Hmm, I wonder if that's the silicon valley reality distortion field. The post says that most people don't consider lifestyle businesses, and they should. And you're claiming that lifestyle businesses are in fact quite common, and that you wish more people were searching for scalable businesses. You agree with the post that a lifestyle business is a perfectly fine, viable option. Am I getting all that right?
- pclark 16y ago
  I read the post as implying that all entrepreneurs are chasing mega hits whereas some may prefer, or be better suited towards, lifestyle businesses. " ... to the advantage of almost every player in our industry that we “believe” in chasing the next big thing. They need us to keep chasing it. In the truest sense – the next big thing – is a carrot on a stick that keeps us occupied and keeps them in business." Whereas in my experience, lots (loads!) of entrepreneurs are chasing lifestyle companies. You just don't see them as much because they need far less from the ecosystem. I can think of tons of ~$10k/mo companies building iPhone apps, wordpress plugins, b2b web apps, etc etc.
  - jv22222 16y ago
    I have a sneaking suspicion they are chasing after Angry Birds, or Zynga... once again very different to a solid $10k/month b2b webapp.

va_coder 16y ago

I want to believe this story, but the reality is that the big companies have economies of scale that are very difficult to compete with and they often win.

jv22222 16y ago
The agility of small companies makes it ridiculously easy to compete with large companies. Large companies have huge amounts of unsatisfied customers that are easy to research, find and sell to- who are more then happy to pay for a direct line to the software maker. Large companies don't even care if you do this, because unless you hit $100m revenue you're about as significant as a gnat on their butt.
- va_coder 16y ago
  Honda, Trek, Dell, Proctor & Gamble, Exxon, Whole Foods: There are companies I give my money to and most people spend money like I do.

deleted 16y ago

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Lucadg 16y ago

I agree. You have no idea how much I agree. My small online business never made it to 10000 us a month, but I don't care. I am writing from a nice Balinese house with a great tropical garden where I'm spending 2 months. And then I'll spend a month in Sri Lanka. Then, maybe it will be China. I have been living like this for the past 10 years, working online and enjoying life as I never thought it was possible. So, go for your small business and be free, it's really much easier than it seems. And it's so beautiful.

sr3d 16y ago
I'm working toward this goal with my own startup. Thanks for the inspirational comment!
- Lucadg 16y ago
  Ok so make sure you build it mobile from the beginning. I mean delegate any task which requires to be in a specific place or to be online at a specific time. Or, worse, to be in a specific place at a specific time. It may seem odd, but that's the key. If you want to be free to go anywhere anytime you can't be supposed to be somewhere sometime. There are so many tasks down the road waiting to get you stuck in some place. It may ne hard to do but you need to give them away. Sorry if that sounds insane :) But it worked for me, so I hope it works for you.

solsenNet 16y ago

happy st. patty's day! with a little Irish pessimism!

nadam 16y ago

I think there are already lots of software companies which aim not too high. Last time I heard there were 150.000 apps in the AppStore. There are lots and lots of indie game developers and casual game developers; a great chunk of them don't have the income to avoid their day jobs because they are not even ramen profitable. There are thousands of cheap shareware software on download.com. And lots of websites trying to generate money using adsense. I agree that it may be a bad decision to aim too high, but there is also a possibility to aim too low: into markets where there is not much money or there is free stuff as competition. I've first made the 'aim too high' and then as a compensation I also made the 'aim too low' mistakes. Now I finally aim in-between.

starpilot 16y ago

Wow, this is exactly what I was saying with a recent comment of mine (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2330900 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2330900). There's a wide continuum of successes in the startup world. VC's are interested in the funding the top end, but many devs would probably be satisfied by a much wider swath, that could include wholly bootstrapped operations.

al3x 16y ago

I'm disappointed that this has gotten so many upvotes and positive comments. There's a middle ground between web application "lifestyle businesses" (like duping credulous customers into overpaying for a time-tracking tool styled with this month's CSS trends) and trying to start the next Facebook. There's nothing wrong with being a small software company. People have been doing it for decades now. It's boring, but there's nothing wrong with it. Don't expect anyone to celebrate you for doing it, though. Our time on this earth is limited, and people's attention is even more limited. No wonder that more time and attention is put towards trying to execute on big ideas. Sometimes those ideas end up not working out, but we're all better, I think, for someone having tried. As pg points out, the ideas that led to the businesses that have formed the infrastructure that enables web lifestyle businesses could not have, themselves, been lifestyle businesses. Someone has to think big, take risks, and deploy significant capital in the interest of a dramatically better world. If you don't want to be that person, great, but don't tell the risk-takers that they're "wasting their lives". Would you say the same to scientists who take big risks? Artists? The media packaging of technology entrepreneurship is undeniably offputting. But that's no excuse for dim commentary like this.

nhangen 16y ago
Your comment is not only Offensive, but it is also ignorant. Boring? "lifestyle business?" have you built the next Facebook (which also happens to not be a "change the world" service anyway)? Disagree with the post...fine, but no need to drag everyone through the mud in the process.
- jpcx01 16y ago
  Haha. Not sure if you realized this, but you are talking to the person who built the next Facebook, aka Twitter.
  - dpritchett 16y ago
    Google shows me that Twitter was founded nine months before Alex came on board. I've read plenty of his posts and presentations and I respect his technical abilities, but your "built Twitter" comment oversimplifies his involvement in the company's history. His presentations do imply that he was the driving force behind the Scala adoption for their messaging queue, so that's arguably a must-have to reach Twitter's current scale.

teyc 16y ago

Congrats JV. I've been listening to you on TechZing. You've hit this one out of the ballpark.

jv22222 16y ago
Thanks very much :)

mraybman 16y ago

I think this article is just an original argument for bootstrapping. I don't think this guy is saying: "don't reach for the stars" - at least that's not how I interpret it. He's saying: "set achievable goals, lean how to execute, then you might just build a big ship organically."

6ren 16y ago

DHH's "How to make money online" (Startup School) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY goes into more detail on this. The version with slides isn't working right now http://37signals.com/svn/posts/981-the-secret-to-making-money-online http://37signals.com/svn/posts/981-the-secret-to-making-mone...

conversionrater 16y ago

A few thoughts: - This already is happening. There are far more developers and entrepreneurs trying to build lifestyle/small businesses than their are trying to raise VC funding and shooting for the moon. It's just that the media and people don't care about them, and really why should they? Nothing against those businesses as I've had my own lifestyle business, but when there are so many of them and they have such a smaller number of customers and users it's not that interesting to read an article about a web application that has 1,000 users. - Why does the house of cards need to fall down? Is it a house of cards? Without getting into bigger global economy issues, isn't a system that has created companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. pretty good?

SpencerCooley 16y ago

Most startups need VC money because their ideas are obscure, stupid, and market-less. There is nothing wrong with using your skills to build a simple small business to fill a market need. Anyone who feels guilty for trying to make money with their talent is a sheep and a fool.

sreitshamer 16y ago

Arguing about the term "lifestyle business" is itself distracting. To me the point is that nowadays you don't have to get permission (in the form of someone else investing in your company) to get started. On your own you can fairly quickly build a business that pays your bills (your "lifestyle") and lets you escape "wage slavery". Once you do this, you have a lot of security and a lot of power/control over your next move. I didn't think the point was to build a business that makes enough to pay the bills and then stop building. I'm certainly not stopping.

grails4life 16y ago

I think Spolsky settled this dichotomy back in 2000: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html

ahoyhere 16y ago

This article is not sensational. It does not tell you what you should do with your life. It does not say VCs are evil. It doesn't say funded companies are a waste of time. The "if every developer" line is clearly just as much grandstanding as PG makes when he compares hackers taking a job to caging a lion. To take this line in this essay literally -- and be offended -- but not to take PG's line about lions literally is to be intellectually dishonest. Here's what this essay actually says: * there's a monetary reason that we're all soaking in VC/fund/"liquidity event" news * there's a psychological reason that we seek out VC/fund/"liquidity event" news * reading about this stuff isn't even the remotely same vein as working on it, or making real money * the author is angry that he believes people are being pushed towards lives/businesses that don't make them happy * every developer is capable of making a product for an independent income * and everybody might be happier if they did Gee, not so controversial, is it? All the hullaballoo about this article can be only one thing: overly identifying with your life/business choices and attacking anyone who dares call them into question. In a general sense. Not in a PERSONAL attack, for example labeling someone's work "a lifestyle business" or "like duping credulous customers into overpaying for a time-tracking tool styled with this month's CSS trends". The only reason anyone even paid attention to this article at all is because 98% of what everyone hears, all the time, is pro-big startup, pro-VC, pro-liquidity event, pro- this and pro- that. There is so rarely a dissenting voice that the moment there is one, however mild, everybody is in attack mode. In short... Look, dominant paradigm: You need to chillax.

KirinDave 16y ago
> The only reason anyone even paid attention to this article at all is because 98% of what everyone hears, all the time, is pro-big startup, pro-VC, pro-liquidity event, pro- this and pro- that. Perhaps because you're so far out in the (physical) hinterlands of software, you hear a time-delayed different message. Living close to the epicenter of the startup world, I hear very few people really talk about flip-based startups anymore, and the general consensus is to be wary of VC and take it as late as you need it. Indeed, if I had to describe a "pro-" that has infected Valley culture right now, I would call it the "pro-lean startup" fetishism. It gets a little tedious, but it's a far more reasonable sentiment than the pro-flip culture that dominated the Valley back a few years ago. Really, the difference between the idea put forth in this essay and a game-changing techcrunch-courting startup is scope. I could work on a small lifestyle product (and I have a few in mind that might be fun), but they're not... game changers. I'd like to work on a product that really makes a difference to a large number of customers. Very few independent products have the resources or scope to achieve this. Coming out of college, people think they have to work either for a big company or a big idea. The truth put forth in this article is that you need not do either, And That Is Okay. Indeed, there is a great deal of freedom that comes with it. > Look, dominant paradigm: You need to chillax. "Dominant," you say? Hardly. "Glorified," perhaps. The vast majority of people do what you do; sell small-scale contracts and services to small-scale partners and customers. And that's fine and good and noble and grist for the mill of global economics. But let's not kid ourselves, it is not an ambitious path, and western culture glamorizes (unfulfilled) ambition.

kennethologist 16y ago

I'm in a 3rd world country so $10K a month is more than enough for me to more things. Like 1. Start a foodstore, business; petrol stations (Startup cost around $50K), a popular restaurant etc. So this is what I'm doing now; trying to create a lifestyle business.