10 ms·

How on earth I became an entrepreneur

220 points by herbertl 5y ago

jacobobryant 5y ago
I hate how HN automatically strips out words like "how", "why", etc and this is a hilarious example of how that fails.
- phgn 5y ago
  Context: the HN post title was originally "On earth I became an entrepreneur".
  - swyx 5y ago
    its been fixed, but now i wish it hadn't.
  - ProAm 5y ago
    Heh I would have read that post too. Great title (but I agree with OP about stripping words)
- manxman 5y ago
  …on Earth as it is in Heaven. Amen!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ValtteriL 5y ago
What determines the value for a domain? 18k for duderanch.com feels insane.
- ianpurton 5y ago
  I guess it depends on the investor, but one question to ask would be. Does it get traffic, and if so can I convert that traffic to $
- subpixel 5y ago
  When a single vacation costs several grand, your commissions add up fast across hundreds of vendors - especially when there is little competition in the early days. This is before they had reservation software of their own tying then directly into other marketplaces. This is an example of understanding and recognizing an opportunity earlier than the big guys. Nowadays it looks like simple paid ads - but that can still add up to a lot.
  - cushychicken 5y ago
    >This is before they had reservation software of their own tying then directly into other marketplaces. Dude ranchers are, for the most part, not a very technically savvy group, and that's an opportunity he's pursued pretty heavily. (This is reading from his own tweets and writing, plus a bit of my own experience growing up in Montana.) Peter's main gig these days is running RanchWork.com, which is a job board for dude ranchers. He's been writing and tweeting about how he paid like $3k for a print ad in a ranching magazine and nearly tripled his posting revenue the following month. ($3k posting per month before the print ad, $8k after.) Most dude ranches are mom and pop shops out west. They're not owned by Hilton or Mariott; there's no software engineering staff helping them build SEO platforms and booking systems.
    - subpixel 5y ago
      > there's no software engineering staff helping them build SEO platforms and booking systems. All true, but on the one hand even commodity tools, the ones moms and pops most likely set up on their Wix page or whatever, now have SEO optimizations like open graph tags and the like. And on the other hand they are very likely using AirBnb, Booking.com and related platforms. So I maintain the best time to develop a market among these vendors was ten+ years ago, when you were giving them a true leg up.
      - cushychicken 5y ago
        Most dude ranchers I've met have barely figured out text messaging and email. To assume that they know about Wix, or Squarespace, or even AirBnB, vastly overestimates their level of technical capability. That's the gap you can fill. Find Luddite industries, and serve them. There is far more opportunity there than I think anyone realizes. I say this as someone building a job board around a decidedly non-Luddite industry (www.rtljobs.com). If a really tech savvy industry segment can use the help, imagine what the Luddites need!
- eightturn 5y ago
  Peter here.. I mention how I valued the duderanch.com domain in this essay I wrote a few years back, if you're curious: https://www.deepsouthventures.com/dude-that-built-duderanch-com/ https://www.deepsouthventures.com/dude-that-built-duderanch-...
- chasd00 5y ago
  but duderanch.com was going to be the name of my blink182 fan site :( Value is what you do with it not what the name is.
  - 2ICofafireteam 5y ago
    If you can afford to hold onto something, the value is what others want to do with it.
- tetsusaiga 5y ago
  I don't know either, but I can confirm that's within the scale for a domain I sold in the last year. Got 6.5k and it wasn't even a .com
cushychicken 5y ago
Peter is an unsung genius of web businesses. Domains are automatic marketing jet fuel in a way that few other things are.
bradrn 5y ago
Note that this is the same person from https://www.deepsouthventures.com/i-sell-onions-on-the-internet/ https://www.deepsouthventures.com/i-sell-onions-on-the-inter.... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132)
barrenko 5y ago
The classic example of how (sometimes) when you're an employee you can't capture not even nearly enough of a value you create, as the existing form of employment was really not designed with this end in mind.
- polalavik 5y ago
  I've been saying it for years - all roles should work somewhat like sales. Sales incentivizes work and productivity. The harder you work the more you may get paid off that sweet sweet commission. That isn't easy to do for engineering roles though. How do you quantify productivity in engineering? There are probably a few ways: 1. royalties for reusable code (you no longer receive this if you leave, incentivizing people to stay as your royalties stack up). Any time code you've worked on is reused you get % x (equivalent hourly wage when you wrote it) x (# of hours it took to write the first time around). Possibility of backfiring if people ramp up hours spent producing high value stuff to maximize that royalty. This also only works in a job that allows you to build a lot of tooling for the team or something like that. 2. royalties/bonuses per team every time that teams work is used. This only works in highly profitable businesses maybe like google - i.e. anytime your code that served an ad is used the team gets a portion of that money to distribute evenly to the team. This doesn't really incentivize anything except getting onto productive teams. 3. in a fair and just workplace some sort of bonus based on democratic vote/ranking system on who is the most valuable to the entire team instead of one single person deciding (the boss) haha! that would never work. 4. bounty on features or something like that? I don't know, I wish there was a way though.
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
Used to work at Intermec, which got bought by Honeywell. They just wanted the customers, so began to cut back the midwest office. Guy I knew who still worked there, a customer special projects Engineer, got asked "What would it take to keep you?" He said "$1M a year and my own budget". They said "No, really?" See, he routinely made several times that annually for the company in retained customers and won contracts. If they'd had any sense, any idea of how profit and loss worked, they'd have snapped him up in a minute. But they let him go. Of course later the office closed entirely, not making enough money. What a surprise.
- alexpotato 5y ago
  Reminds me of the whole "I left b/c I asked for a raise to $X and then the company had to hire 3 people at a total cost of $2x to replace me" scenario. Seen similar discussions of: "Well you have the skills of 4 people but we don't want to pay you 1.5x of what most people here make so we're not going to hire you." I always wonder if this is just a poor understanding of the value individuals bring or just short shortsightedness on the part of management/the finance team.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    People are replaceable cogs, and since people are replaceable cogs, one person can not create as much value as 3 other reasonably competent ones. Since that is common knowledge shared by all the administrative personal, it's impossible to justify somebody paying 1.5x your salary range. Even if you personally realize some specific person doesn't look replaceable (who am I kidding? You don't. You don't stay in management on places like those and keep that ability, you either move or change), you can't communicate that fact.
    - trabant00 5y ago
      > People are replaceable cogs, and since people are replaceable cogs, one person can not create as much value as 3 other reasonably competent ones. What is circular reasoning?
AussieWog93 5y ago
I feel this guy 100%. The economics of employment simply don't make rational sense, and was a huge part of why I started working for myself too. You provide literally nothing of value to the customer, burden the customer-focused employees with unnecessary bullshit and use all of your political capital to advocate for the hiring of more deadweight employees? 100k per year. You advocate for, build and maintain a product worth $10m/year to the business? Wow, you're pretty special. You can have 150k!
- itsmemattchung 5y ago
  This whole article is music to my ears. I left behind a rewarding career to test out entrepreneurship and while rocky initially, it's paying back in ways I could not have imagined. Similar to the author, I'm perfectly content with a 9-5 job but since taking the leap, I can now no longer imagine returning to my position.
- NAHWheatCracker 5y ago
  That reminds me of a few years ago when a director gave a presentation to the whole organization about innovation. Near the end of the presentation, he summarized that everyone needed to share ideas. Then he anticipated a few questions. If we a good idea, would we be able to work on it? Probably not, the "innovation team", which was his team, would be the ones to build the prototype. If we had a successful good idea, would we receive any compensation? No, and that's very selfish. He insinuated that we should rethink priorities or place of work if compensation was important. He also talked about how he only wanted ideas that had the potential to make billions.
  - cushychicken 5y ago
    lol I've been on the receiving end of that pitch too. Felt a lot like: "Give us your best ideas, then GTFO of the room so we can implement your cool brainchild - with no credit to you!" There's practically zero reward for the folks with good ideas in that model, yet it's sort of the table stakes innovation model.
    - 5y ago
kubb 5y ago
> So I sold my house to stay afloat – unloading a $130,000 mortgage that I was fortunate to break even on oh, brother
eightturn 5y ago
Peter here (author).. I'm guessing the person who laid me off from eTour may read this.. hi Jim! no hard feelings : )
- amrrs 5y ago
  Hey Thanks so much for the amazing article. What would you advice for someone in a full time job but feeling like the same? I know a lot of people say quit and try freelance consulting but I'm not sure if it'd be sustainable. Would love to know your thoughts!
  - eightturn 5y ago
    See if this essay I wrote (on buying & developing on neat .com domain names) helps: https://www.deepsouthventures.com/build-a-side-business/ https://www.deepsouthventures.com/build-a-side-business/
    - dbancajas 5y ago
      In OP article you had a lot of skillsets acquired through the years. For somebody just starting, what would be the most important ones: html, adsense, seo, codings skills ? Any pointiers.
      - eightturn 5y ago
        it doesn't matter, just start building.
    - mtVessel 5y ago
      Sorry, all I get out of this is 1. Buy domain names 2. ??? 3. Profit
Lamad123 5y ago
Such as a great read!!
theHNAcct 5y ago
I've seen references to Benihana online or in American tv. Why does it warrant it's own punctuation here? "..attended my own birthday party. At Benihana." I understand it's a Tepenyaki place which are expensive places to go to. Though the novelty wears off. Is it considered tacky in the states?

220 points by herbertl 5y ago

jacobobryant 5y ago

I hate how HN automatically strips out words like "how", "why", etc and this is a hilarious example of how that fails.

phgn 5y ago
Context: the HN post title was originally "On earth I became an entrepreneur".
- swyx 5y ago
  its been fixed, but now i wish it hadn't.
- ProAm 5y ago
  Heh I would have read that post too. Great title (but I agree with OP about stripping words)
manxman 5y ago
…on Earth as it is in Heaven. Amen!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ValtteriL 5y ago

What determines the value for a domain? 18k for duderanch.com feels insane.

ianpurton 5y ago
I guess it depends on the investor, but one question to ask would be. Does it get traffic, and if so can I convert that traffic to $
subpixel 5y ago
When a single vacation costs several grand, your commissions add up fast across hundreds of vendors - especially when there is little competition in the early days. This is before they had reservation software of their own tying then directly into other marketplaces. This is an example of understanding and recognizing an opportunity earlier than the big guys. Nowadays it looks like simple paid ads - but that can still add up to a lot.
- cushychicken 5y ago
  >This is before they had reservation software of their own tying then directly into other marketplaces. Dude ranchers are, for the most part, not a very technically savvy group, and that's an opportunity he's pursued pretty heavily. (This is reading from his own tweets and writing, plus a bit of my own experience growing up in Montana.) Peter's main gig these days is running RanchWork.com, which is a job board for dude ranchers. He's been writing and tweeting about how he paid like $3k for a print ad in a ranching magazine and nearly tripled his posting revenue the following month. ($3k posting per month before the print ad, $8k after.) Most dude ranches are mom and pop shops out west. They're not owned by Hilton or Mariott; there's no software engineering staff helping them build SEO platforms and booking systems.
  - subpixel 5y ago
    > there's no software engineering staff helping them build SEO platforms and booking systems. All true, but on the one hand even commodity tools, the ones moms and pops most likely set up on their Wix page or whatever, now have SEO optimizations like open graph tags and the like. And on the other hand they are very likely using AirBnb, Booking.com and related platforms. So I maintain the best time to develop a market among these vendors was ten+ years ago, when you were giving them a true leg up.
    - cushychicken 5y ago
      Most dude ranchers I've met have barely figured out text messaging and email. To assume that they know about Wix, or Squarespace, or even AirBnB, vastly overestimates their level of technical capability. That's the gap you can fill. Find Luddite industries, and serve them. There is far more opportunity there than I think anyone realizes. I say this as someone building a job board around a decidedly non-Luddite industry (www.rtljobs.com). If a really tech savvy industry segment can use the help, imagine what the Luddites need!
eightturn 5y ago
Peter here.. I mention how I valued the duderanch.com domain in this essay I wrote a few years back, if you're curious: https://www.deepsouthventures.com/dude-that-built-duderanch-com/ https://www.deepsouthventures.com/dude-that-built-duderanch-...
chasd00 5y ago
but duderanch.com was going to be the name of my blink182 fan site :( Value is what you do with it not what the name is.
- 2ICofafireteam 5y ago
  If you can afford to hold onto something, the value is what others want to do with it.
tetsusaiga 5y ago
I don't know either, but I can confirm that's within the scale for a domain I sold in the last year. Got 6.5k and it wasn't even a .com

cushychicken 5y ago

Peter is an unsung genius of web businesses. Domains are automatic marketing jet fuel in a way that few other things are.

bradrn 5y ago

Note that this is the same person from https://www.deepsouthventures.com/i-sell-onions-on-the-internet/ https://www.deepsouthventures.com/i-sell-onions-on-the-inter.... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132)

barrenko 5y ago

The classic example of how (sometimes) when you're an employee you can't capture not even nearly enough of a value you create, as the existing form of employment was really not designed with this end in mind.

polalavik 5y ago
I've been saying it for years - all roles should work somewhat like sales. Sales incentivizes work and productivity. The harder you work the more you may get paid off that sweet sweet commission. That isn't easy to do for engineering roles though. How do you quantify productivity in engineering? There are probably a few ways: 1. royalties for reusable code (you no longer receive this if you leave, incentivizing people to stay as your royalties stack up). Any time code you've worked on is reused you get % x (equivalent hourly wage when you wrote it) x (# of hours it took to write the first time around). Possibility of backfiring if people ramp up hours spent producing high value stuff to maximize that royalty. This also only works in a job that allows you to build a lot of tooling for the team or something like that. 2. royalties/bonuses per team every time that teams work is used. This only works in highly profitable businesses maybe like google - i.e. anytime your code that served an ad is used the team gets a portion of that money to distribute evenly to the team. This doesn't really incentivize anything except getting onto productive teams. 3. in a fair and just workplace some sort of bonus based on democratic vote/ranking system on who is the most valuable to the entire team instead of one single person deciding (the boss) haha! that would never work. 4. bounty on features or something like that? I don't know, I wish there was a way though.

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

Used to work at Intermec, which got bought by Honeywell. They just wanted the customers, so began to cut back the midwest office. Guy I knew who still worked there, a customer special projects Engineer, got asked "What would it take to keep you?" He said "$1M a year and my own budget". They said "No, really?" See, he routinely made several times that annually for the company in retained customers and won contracts. If they'd had any sense, any idea of how profit and loss worked, they'd have snapped him up in a minute. But they let him go. Of course later the office closed entirely, not making enough money. What a surprise.

alexpotato 5y ago
Reminds me of the whole "I left b/c I asked for a raise to $X and then the company had to hire 3 people at a total cost of $2x to replace me" scenario. Seen similar discussions of: "Well you have the skills of 4 people but we don't want to pay you 1.5x of what most people here make so we're not going to hire you." I always wonder if this is just a poor understanding of the value individuals bring or just short shortsightedness on the part of management/the finance team.
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  People are replaceable cogs, and since people are replaceable cogs, one person can not create as much value as 3 other reasonably competent ones. Since that is common knowledge shared by all the administrative personal, it's impossible to justify somebody paying 1.5x your salary range. Even if you personally realize some specific person doesn't look replaceable (who am I kidding? You don't. You don't stay in management on places like those and keep that ability, you either move or change), you can't communicate that fact.
  - trabant00 5y ago
    > People are replaceable cogs, and since people are replaceable cogs, one person can not create as much value as 3 other reasonably competent ones. What is circular reasoning?

AussieWog93 5y ago

I feel this guy 100%. The economics of employment simply don't make rational sense, and was a huge part of why I started working for myself too. You provide literally nothing of value to the customer, burden the customer-focused employees with unnecessary bullshit and use all of your political capital to advocate for the hiring of more deadweight employees? 100k per year. You advocate for, build and maintain a product worth $10m/year to the business? Wow, you're pretty special. You can have 150k!

itsmemattchung 5y ago
This whole article is music to my ears. I left behind a rewarding career to test out entrepreneurship and while rocky initially, it's paying back in ways I could not have imagined. Similar to the author, I'm perfectly content with a 9-5 job but since taking the leap, I can now no longer imagine returning to my position.
NAHWheatCracker 5y ago
That reminds me of a few years ago when a director gave a presentation to the whole organization about innovation. Near the end of the presentation, he summarized that everyone needed to share ideas. Then he anticipated a few questions. If we a good idea, would we be able to work on it? Probably not, the "innovation team", which was his team, would be the ones to build the prototype. If we had a successful good idea, would we receive any compensation? No, and that's very selfish. He insinuated that we should rethink priorities or place of work if compensation was important. He also talked about how he only wanted ideas that had the potential to make billions.
- cushychicken 5y ago
  lol I've been on the receiving end of that pitch too. Felt a lot like: "Give us your best ideas, then GTFO of the room so we can implement your cool brainchild - with no credit to you!" There's practically zero reward for the folks with good ideas in that model, yet it's sort of the table stakes innovation model.
  - 5y ago

kubb 5y ago

> So I sold my house to stay afloat – unloading a $130,000 mortgage that I was fortunate to break even on oh, brother

eightturn 5y ago

Peter here (author).. I'm guessing the person who laid me off from eTour may read this.. hi Jim! no hard feelings : )

amrrs 5y ago
Hey Thanks so much for the amazing article. What would you advice for someone in a full time job but feeling like the same? I know a lot of people say quit and try freelance consulting but I'm not sure if it'd be sustainable. Would love to know your thoughts!
- eightturn 5y ago
  See if this essay I wrote (on buying & developing on neat .com domain names) helps: https://www.deepsouthventures.com/build-a-side-business/ https://www.deepsouthventures.com/build-a-side-business/
  - dbancajas 5y ago
    In OP article you had a lot of skillsets acquired through the years. For somebody just starting, what would be the most important ones: html, adsense, seo, codings skills ? Any pointiers.
    - eightturn 5y ago
      it doesn't matter, just start building.
  - mtVessel 5y ago
    Sorry, all I get out of this is 1. Buy domain names 2. ??? 3. Profit

Lamad123 5y ago

Such as a great read!!

theHNAcct 5y ago

I've seen references to Benihana online or in American tv. Why does it warrant it's own punctuation here? "..attended my own birthday party. At Benihana." I understand it's a Tepenyaki place which are expensive places to go to. Though the novelty wears off. Is it considered tacky in the states?