13 ms·

The Coffeeshop Fallacy (2011)

130 points by rzk 4y ago

ElevenLathe 4y ago
I agree with the premise but not the prescription, which boils down to "Find any profitable business at all, even if you find the product you're selling intensely dull or harmful." This is stoicism applied to the worst kind of Roundheaded/Puritanical, market-worshipping capitalism. It winds up teaching you that the needs of people are irrelevant, and only the needs of the market matter.
- epr 4y ago
  > It winds up teaching you that the needs of people are irrelevant, and only the needs of the market matter. The market is simply people's wants+needs in the aggregate
  - wpietri 4y ago
    The market expresses the needs of the consumers. But the producers also have needs, including needs not easily expressible in dollar terms.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I wasn't totally clear on the prescription. But yeah. Loving coffeeshops isn't really a great reason for starting one. On the other hand, if you despise coffeeshops and the people who frequent them, you almost certainly don't want to start one even if they were good business opportunities.
- whitemary 4y ago
  In capitalism, it is a fact that the market predominates human needs. Your feelings don't change that.
- coldtea 4y ago
  Well, the needs of people include food and shelter, so if they can't meet those (because they followed some "passion", which for many young people is a BS fashion "lifestyle" thing that they don't even fully care for and don't really want to pay their dues to get there, just want it because it looks "cool") capitalism wins even more...
- 972811 4y ago
  Actually I don't think the author was trying to be super prescriptive. His writing is actually pretty muddled, but the main points I got were: 1. Focusing on your idea of ideal business rather than just running the business can be constraining in a way that kills the company 2. Maybe that's ok, because maybe your team doesn't want to optimize for business at any cost vs. a defined mission I think some rewrites would have helped with this article
Reason077 4y ago
The 2020s version of this might be called "The craft brewery fallacy"!
- jml78 4y ago
  As a brewery owner, yes there are some people who like to drink beer and started a brewery but those are very few. More common is homebrewers who like making beer and decided to go pro. That is where I came from.
  - Sebb767 4y ago
    Still the same thing. Doing some brewing for yourself and friends in your spare time is quite different from having to brew all the time and having to produce something good in order to have anything to sell. Not to mention marketing expenses, taxes and the general overhead of running a food-related business.
    - monocasa 4y ago
      Scaling particularly is hard for tech employed home brewer turned pro. It's one thing when you can babysit five gallons at a time, but making quantity takes a commitment to process improvements that few appreciate before they get into it. Not to mention when one beer gets popular, then consistently reproducing it over time. Or you just sell your IPAs that have such a high IBU that only other brewers can taste all the cultures you didn't mean to be growing in there.
  - suls 4y ago
    Have you written about your journey from homebrewer to pro somewhere? Would love to read about it! Especially about the initial sizing of the equipment ..
    - jml78 4y ago
      Nah, it isn’t anything all that impressive. I actually just sold a majority of my ownership to pursue other interests. Retained a small stake just in case it goes regional. I worked full time as a software engineer(remote since 2016) while opening and running the production side of my brewery for about 3 years before I could afford to hire help. Hired a brewer, got him up to speed then Covid hit. We kept him on full time during Covid and I didn’t spend much time there. Once covid calmed down I still didn’t do much reengaging on production and just managed brew schedule and ordering shit. Went from pulling 70-80 work weeks prior to Covid to a standard 40-45 hours. Covid basically made my wife and I realize that our kids learned more with us driving their education for 2-3 hours a day than they were getting in 8 hours at school. Sold most of my ownership as we plan to move onto a sailboat and travel the world with our kids until they go to college. My wife and I both have remote jobs and plan to continue working. Yes, we are insane.
theFletch 4y ago
I have to believe this contributes to the growing number of mediocre coffee shops I've been to over the years. I love coffee and can see the allure of owning a shop, but I go to a shop because I stink at making a good cup myself.
projektfu 4y ago
Also see the E-myth, which is the idea that being good at something means you should make a business out of it. People who are good at business should start them, and you should be creating a business instead of buying a job. I think it could help startup founders avoid burnout if they realized that they're not much different from the person who tries to open a restaurant because they like to cook. I wish that book had a better title. I skipped it for a long time because I had no idea what it was trying to convey.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Love that book. Such useful content for anybody thinking of starting something.
- synu 4y ago
  How do you get good at businesses without starting them?
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Most people do so by working at one someone else started.
  - hudon 4y ago
    part of the book is an exhortation for introspection, to ask yourself what you really want out of a business (lifestyle, cash flow, money, etc.), and to realize that starting a business involves working ON your business, not IN it. There's a chapter too on the different personality types (entrepreneur, manager, technician) and how they relate to starting a business. All these together informs the reader on if they should start a business or not. It's a great book and really helped me--as a technician/tinkerer type--understand what sacrifices I'd have to make to start a business.
Leires 4y ago
I often try to explain this concept to people that want to work in IT engineering jobs. They see qualities like: high salary, work from home, no physical labor, no college degree. I explain to people that read less than one book a year that you have to read a lot, every day. Or that you're going to have to change your lifestyle to balance out the negative health effects of sitting for 9+ hours. Then they ignore me and get Security+ and complain no one wants to hire them. I should just send this article in the future.
- tptacek 4y ago
  This article has almost nothing to do with what you're talking about; the people you're talking to want to get into IT specifically for the attributes of the job itself, not because they enjoy consuming IT products. They're much closer to the mark than the aspiring coffee shop owners are.
nobleach 4y ago
A few years ago I was staying at an AirBnB in Carlsbad/Oceanside. I wandered down to a little coffee shack/breakfast place across the street from the beach. As I sat out front, enjoying my cup of coffee, I thought, "this is exactly what I want to do with my retirement... I want to buy this shack and pay some 17 to 20 year olds to make people coffee and pancakes". While that sounded great in my vacationing mindset, the reality is far more soul-crushing. Upon returning home I started doing some back of the napkin math on what it'd actually take to run a place like that. 3 or 4 employees at $20 an hour (this is California), plus insurance, plus... well all the other stuff it takes to employ a human. That's before I even consider food and supplies. Coffee at 2 dollars a cup, pancakes at 8 dollars a plate. Could we sell enough even to make payroll? Forget any profit. I believe this is why we're seeing the sunset on the little mom-n-pop businesses. There's no way these folks can pay living wages. Now if this were Reddit I'd be angrily shouted down and told, "then they deserve to be out of business!". Fine, let's put all those evil family-run donut shops out of business. But let's not complain that we only have even more evil McDonalds-style franchises that own everything. All this to say, I wish there were some middle ground. The truth is, I'll probably have to figure out how to like Starbucks.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I expect that over time, we'll see: - More automation - More self-service - And more labor-intensive services and things people want that can't be delivered at the prices mainstream consumers are willing/able to pay
- fulltimeloser 4y ago
  2 dollar coffee is quite cheap :-)
  - nobleach 4y ago
    That's fair. By the time I retire, 8 dollar coffee will probably be quite cheap.
  - chongli 4y ago
    Yeah. That’s pretty unrealistic pricing these days. Maybe if you’re in Italy charging €1 for an espresso. In North America you gotta charge more. People pay $7-8 for a cup of sugar milk (with a shot of burnt espresso) from Starbucks. As a small café owner you should be comfortable charging $5-6 for a decent coffee.
joshgachnang 4y ago
I absolutely love coffee. I love drinking it, trying all the different preps, roasting my own beans, all of it. I started and ran a coffee shop in college. 2 friends and I basically convinced our business school to foot the bill and pass it off as a learning experience for us and have various classes do final projects helping (marketing plans, web site, etc). Even removing the need to turn a profit, it was a slog. Getting to the shop at 530a multiple times a week to get it opened, dealing with employees, dealing with shitty customers, dealing with suppliers, even simple things like managing cash. It was a great learning experience about business and I often want to open a shop again to get away from software development, but it's really not glamourous.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Yeah, with a business that size people say that you own the business, but it's as least as true that the business owns you. My mom got sick of real estate sales. A deal to sell an adult foster care home fell through at the last minute, so she ended up buying it. For the next few years, that was her life. She never really got a day off, because the margins were too thin to afford a manager.
steveBK123 4y ago
Summarized as "making a hobby your job might make you no longer enjoy your hobby". Hobbyists photographers quickly discover this when they do a paid shoot for a wedding for example. It turns out that running a business involves a lot more of "running a business" than the creative hobby part you thought it would involve. Doing Sales, marketing, accounting.. dealing with suppliers, employees, landlord.. etc. All the things that have nothing to do with the hobby you thought you enjoyed & were good at.
- RegularOpossum 4y ago
  As a pretty decent hobbyist photographer this runs through my head every time someone suggests I do it for a living. The only happy wedding photographer I know is by his nature more business oriented and I don't have that edge.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Even back in the day when photography was far less democratized, being a pro photographer almost certainly did not mean being a staff photographer for Life Magazine or even working for AP. It meant working for some school's news office and shooting pictures of alumni receiving awards or various small town newspaper stuff.
- t344344 4y ago
  Not really! My uncle is a wedding photographer, it is a side gig he does on weekends. He has no sales, marketing..all based on recommendations. Accounting is dead simple. It is actually pretty good compared to his other gigs (taxi driver, plumber). I think key is to have realistic expectations. Trying to scale it up into "real" business, or insert some artistic stuff would be mistake.
- KineticLensman 4y ago
  Yes. And with weddings, it's not just making 'sales'. It's managing complicated families and personalities on the day. E.g. getting them all together for a group shot, and a lot of group shots.
- 4y ago
aranchelk 4y ago
There’s a danger for first-time founders buying into this 100% — having special knowledge in a subject gives us a big advantage, we can’t all just hire experts like Levchin and other successful repeat well-funded founders can. We have to be the experts (or team up with them). That expertise is probably coming from either a love of (or at least a familiarity with) a subject.
drakonka 4y ago
I self-publish fiction in my spare time and this article reminded me of that. In my dreams, I would be typing away at my computer in some cozy coffee shop or something, crafting my next awesome book. That _does_ happen, but I'm also spending a ton of that time communicating with cover designers, booking editors, fighting with figuring out marketing, writing blurbs, hosting a website, running a newsletter, writing bonus scenes for newsletter magnets. If I didn't care about the business side of it I'd just be sitting there writing with not a care in the world, putting it out there with no proper planning and crappy covers. But while I don't _enjoy_ doing a bunch of that other stuff, the success of the thing and seeing royalties come in is part of the fun, so I'm compelled to do it. In the end the other parts may not be _fun_ for me, but they sure are satisfying when a launch comes together (or, alternatively, sad if the book flops).
pjdkoch 4y ago
Maybe add (2011)?
msluyter 4y ago
A compelling narrative on the topic that went around a number of years ago: https://slate.com/human-interest/2005/12/my-coffeehouse-nightmare.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2005/12/my-coffeehouse-nigh...
6stringmerc 4y ago
Was dropping a grand on new Michelin AS4s and overheard the NTB managers talking in the office about paperwork - specifically TAXES. These guys know cars and wrenches and tires and batteries and oil changes. They are not bookkeepers by trade, and that used to be a reasonable job. A facility that size with the revenue overall, and others like it, might benefit from a centralized resource where bookkeepers keep the books and shop employees stay in the shop. All this middle working class stuff cut out by the Baby Boomers just to jack up prices on college degrees to be a Secretary ahem Office Assistant or whatever, and basically business processes suffer. Taxes are necessary and their own problem. Also, reformed drug dealers make really good bookkeepers.
jancsika 4y ago
> The founder of a cafe becomes a mopper and accountant. Rank speculation: a cafe founder spends more time in desperate attempts to get wifi working again than they do mopping. Founders of cafes: am I correct?
- yodon 4y ago
  Wifi encourages people to sit in your limited number of chairs for hours a day, all for the same few pennies of profit as a customer who walks out immediately or drives away from your drive through immediately and leaves all the resources available for the next customer at the register. Even wifi users who are regular customers and great tippers make for terrible business, simply because of the resources they occupy. If your customers use Windows, you can generally get a decent fraction of them to cycle out by just hiding the power outlets, but Mac battery lives tend to be long enough that that trick doesn't work with Apple using customers.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I suspect even not having WiFi makes less of a difference these days people do so much on their phones.
brvsft 4y ago
This reminds me of every cute little store I've lived near that is frequently closed due to the owner(s) being on vacation. I'm not sure how many others have experienced it, but when I see this, it's clear to me that the owner/operator is not truly interested in the business, at least not in some sense that this is a do-or-die investment for them that they feel the need to see through to the end. No, it's a hobby for them. So they never get past the coffeeshop fallacy, as they're just going to keep on with their normal lifestyle and eventually close up shop as they realize this business endeavor is more of an inconvenience than a necessity for them.
- projektfu 4y ago
  We should normalize closing two days a week and vacations for stores. It would make many things improve.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    When I was an undergrad, in a major city, essentially nothing was open on a Sunday--including chain stores although there were fewer of those at the time. Which meant if I had sports on a Saturday as I often did, getting shopping done could be awkward. Over the next decade or so, the blue laws started to get relaxed.
chmod600 4y ago
Software engineering, at least for the lucky ones (a not-small percentage), is the inverse coffee shop fallacy: people imagine it to be boring and it's not. (Note: the following is relative to other jobs, not relative to some ideal.) First of all, coding is pretty fun. If you end up bored, it's probably because you are being too repetitive and in many places you can find new challenges. Technical debt is not great, but mostly because it disrupts you from the fun. Second, software engineers are in demand. More perks, like opportunities for travel, relocation (an underrated opportunity), etc. Third, it's inherently a cooperative thing. This is hugely underrated. You and your colleagues and boss all pretty much want the thing to work and are excited when it does. Lots of jobs are very competitive where people are always working against each other in political games, which is not a recipe for happiness.
warner25 4y ago
> You you can’t be in love with a particular idea or business. You have to be in love with the idea of running a business. I'm saving this quote. I'm a career Army officer and the application to my world is that newly minted officers compete like mad to get into their preferred career fields / communities, because some like "Aviation" (e.g. flying helicopters) are hot and others like "Ordnance" (e.g. managing the lifecycle of ammunition and hardware) are not, but then find that 90% of their careers end up being the same HR and logistics middle-management with attendant meetings and paperwork and bureaucracy. The result is that the hot career fields actually tend to have the worst rates of retention, as officers become disillusioned when reality doesn't meet expectations, among a few other reasons. So prospective officers should really be in love with the idea of leading organizations of all various types.
- projektfu 4y ago
  It also seems the actual flying is done by NCOs, right?
  - warner25 4y ago
    Warrant officers, not NCOs. But yes, this is the crux of it. New lieutenants go to flight school alongside new warrant officers, and then their day-to-day responsibilities rapidly diverge. The lieutenant becomes an administrator who, at best, struggles to keep up with the warrant officers in the cockpit for a few years. At worst, the lieutenant ends up in jobs (as a captain and major) where they don't even have flight-hour minimums anymore.
- leobg 4y ago
  You you noticed the duplicate word?
  - warner25 4y ago
    Sadly, I did notice only after I couldn't edit anymore.
    - 4y ago
angarg12 4y ago
I see this in the ML space as well. I'm working in a team doing ML and ML-ops, and every time we open a position we get a flood of applications. Some have masters degree in ML but many are regular devs who want to move into the ML space. I always try to convey that, ML or not, this is still a dev job. You still need to do all the boring, down to earth stuff, like hunting down bugs, fixing broken builds, or battling poor APIs. The supposedly "fun stuff" (modeling, etc.) is but a tiny part of the job. I'll add the Coffeeshop Fallacy to my vocabulary to explain this point better.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  That’s interesting. Honesty I always thought ML would have the opposite problem. Numerics folks tired of the grind of being a scientist, looking to cash out and sell GEMVs and linear fits at a premium.
thenoblesunfish 4y ago
Great points - I've worked in many areas where the end result is "cool" though the work is just a hard grind (like most work) but there's an extra penalty because the coolness attracts people who will put up with worse conditions in exchange for pursuing their passion, which really sucks when you discover how quickly your passion can dry up once the grind begins. On the other hand, if what you like is being around (at least formerly) passionate people, that's a huge perk. So start the coffeeshop, if you like the community it'll make you a part of. That's usually what makes people happy, in the end.
warner25 4y ago
I've never thought that I want to own a coffee shop, but I've sometimes thought about being a barista (i.e. "Barista FIRE"). I make my wife a latte every morning, and it can be fun and satisfying. I imagine being focused on perfecting a simple craft, and then being able to turn it off at the end of a shift. My work, in comparison, feels like I'm trying to solve impossible problems, and it never ends. However, I suspect that the reality of being a barista is dealing with lots of demanding and angry customers, frustrating corporate management practices, and more cleaning than making coffee.
hmcamp 4y ago
This is a good read! Thanks @yamrzou.
shove 4y ago
I wasn’t 100% naive going in, but I wish someone had sent me this article before we opened an arcade bar. The economics of retail small businesses that pay living wages is break even at best unless you’ve somehow hit the jackpot on rent/location. Markup on alcohol is 3-500% and we still barely covered expenses. Games made just enough money to cover their repairs. I’d probably do it again, but it’s definitely irrational.

130 points by rzk 4y ago

I agree with the premise but not the prescription, which boils down to "Find any profitable business at all, even if you find the product you're selling intensely dull or harmful." This is stoicism applied to the worst kind of Roundheaded/Puritanical, market-worshipping capitalism. It winds up teaching you that the needs of people are irrelevant, and only the needs of the market matter.

epr 4y ago
> It winds up teaching you that the needs of people are irrelevant, and only the needs of the market matter. The market is simply people's wants+needs in the aggregate
- wpietri 4y ago
  The market expresses the needs of the consumers. But the producers also have needs, including needs not easily expressible in dollar terms.
ghaff 4y ago
I wasn't totally clear on the prescription. But yeah. Loving coffeeshops isn't really a great reason for starting one. On the other hand, if you despise coffeeshops and the people who frequent them, you almost certainly don't want to start one even if they were good business opportunities.
whitemary 4y ago
In capitalism, it is a fact that the market predominates human needs. Your feelings don't change that.
coldtea 4y ago
Well, the needs of people include food and shelter, so if they can't meet those (because they followed some "passion", which for many young people is a BS fashion "lifestyle" thing that they don't even fully care for and don't really want to pay their dues to get there, just want it because it looks "cool") capitalism wins even more...
972811 4y ago
Actually I don't think the author was trying to be super prescriptive. His writing is actually pretty muddled, but the main points I got were: 1. Focusing on your idea of ideal business rather than just running the business can be constraining in a way that kills the company 2. Maybe that's ok, because maybe your team doesn't want to optimize for business at any cost vs. a defined mission I think some rewrites would have helped with this article

Reason077 4y ago

The 2020s version of this might be called "The craft brewery fallacy"!

jml78 4y ago
As a brewery owner, yes there are some people who like to drink beer and started a brewery but those are very few. More common is homebrewers who like making beer and decided to go pro. That is where I came from.
- Sebb767 4y ago
  Still the same thing. Doing some brewing for yourself and friends in your spare time is quite different from having to brew all the time and having to produce something good in order to have anything to sell. Not to mention marketing expenses, taxes and the general overhead of running a food-related business.
  - monocasa 4y ago
    Scaling particularly is hard for tech employed home brewer turned pro. It's one thing when you can babysit five gallons at a time, but making quantity takes a commitment to process improvements that few appreciate before they get into it. Not to mention when one beer gets popular, then consistently reproducing it over time. Or you just sell your IPAs that have such a high IBU that only other brewers can taste all the cultures you didn't mean to be growing in there.
- suls 4y ago
  Have you written about your journey from homebrewer to pro somewhere? Would love to read about it! Especially about the initial sizing of the equipment ..
  - jml78 4y ago
    Nah, it isn’t anything all that impressive. I actually just sold a majority of my ownership to pursue other interests. Retained a small stake just in case it goes regional. I worked full time as a software engineer(remote since 2016) while opening and running the production side of my brewery for about 3 years before I could afford to hire help. Hired a brewer, got him up to speed then Covid hit. We kept him on full time during Covid and I didn’t spend much time there. Once covid calmed down I still didn’t do much reengaging on production and just managed brew schedule and ordering shit. Went from pulling 70-80 work weeks prior to Covid to a standard 40-45 hours. Covid basically made my wife and I realize that our kids learned more with us driving their education for 2-3 hours a day than they were getting in 8 hours at school. Sold most of my ownership as we plan to move onto a sailboat and travel the world with our kids until they go to college. My wife and I both have remote jobs and plan to continue working. Yes, we are insane.

theFletch 4y ago

I have to believe this contributes to the growing number of mediocre coffee shops I've been to over the years. I love coffee and can see the allure of owning a shop, but I go to a shop because I stink at making a good cup myself.

projektfu 4y ago

Also see the E-myth, which is the idea that being good at something means you should make a business out of it. People who are good at business should start them, and you should be creating a business instead of buying a job. I think it could help startup founders avoid burnout if they realized that they're not much different from the person who tries to open a restaurant because they like to cook. I wish that book had a better title. I skipped it for a long time because I had no idea what it was trying to convey.

wpietri 4y ago
Love that book. Such useful content for anybody thinking of starting something.
synu 4y ago
How do you get good at businesses without starting them?
- kube-system 4y ago
  Most people do so by working at one someone else started.
- hudon 4y ago
  part of the book is an exhortation for introspection, to ask yourself what you really want out of a business (lifestyle, cash flow, money, etc.), and to realize that starting a business involves working ON your business, not IN it. There's a chapter too on the different personality types (entrepreneur, manager, technician) and how they relate to starting a business. All these together informs the reader on if they should start a business or not. It's a great book and really helped me--as a technician/tinkerer type--understand what sacrifices I'd have to make to start a business.

Leires 4y ago

I often try to explain this concept to people that want to work in IT engineering jobs. They see qualities like: high salary, work from home, no physical labor, no college degree. I explain to people that read less than one book a year that you have to read a lot, every day. Or that you're going to have to change your lifestyle to balance out the negative health effects of sitting for 9+ hours. Then they ignore me and get Security+ and complain no one wants to hire them. I should just send this article in the future.

tptacek 4y ago
This article has almost nothing to do with what you're talking about; the people you're talking to want to get into IT specifically for the attributes of the job itself, not because they enjoy consuming IT products. They're much closer to the mark than the aspiring coffee shop owners are.

nobleach 4y ago

A few years ago I was staying at an AirBnB in Carlsbad/Oceanside. I wandered down to a little coffee shack/breakfast place across the street from the beach. As I sat out front, enjoying my cup of coffee, I thought, "this is exactly what I want to do with my retirement... I want to buy this shack and pay some 17 to 20 year olds to make people coffee and pancakes". While that sounded great in my vacationing mindset, the reality is far more soul-crushing. Upon returning home I started doing some back of the napkin math on what it'd actually take to run a place like that. 3 or 4 employees at $20 an hour (this is California), plus insurance, plus... well all the other stuff it takes to employ a human. That's before I even consider food and supplies. Coffee at 2 dollars a cup, pancakes at 8 dollars a plate. Could we sell enough even to make payroll? Forget any profit. I believe this is why we're seeing the sunset on the little mom-n-pop businesses. There's no way these folks can pay living wages. Now if this were Reddit I'd be angrily shouted down and told, "then they deserve to be out of business!". Fine, let's put all those evil family-run donut shops out of business. But let's not complain that we only have even more evil McDonalds-style franchises that own everything. All this to say, I wish there were some middle ground. The truth is, I'll probably have to figure out how to like Starbucks.

ghaff 4y ago
I expect that over time, we'll see: - More automation - More self-service - And more labor-intensive services and things people want that can't be delivered at the prices mainstream consumers are willing/able to pay
fulltimeloser 4y ago
2 dollar coffee is quite cheap :-)
- nobleach 4y ago
  That's fair. By the time I retire, 8 dollar coffee will probably be quite cheap.
- chongli 4y ago
  Yeah. That’s pretty unrealistic pricing these days. Maybe if you’re in Italy charging €1 for an espresso. In North America you gotta charge more. People pay $7-8 for a cup of sugar milk (with a shot of burnt espresso) from Starbucks. As a small café owner you should be comfortable charging $5-6 for a decent coffee.

joshgachnang 4y ago

I absolutely love coffee. I love drinking it, trying all the different preps, roasting my own beans, all of it. I started and ran a coffee shop in college. 2 friends and I basically convinced our business school to foot the bill and pass it off as a learning experience for us and have various classes do final projects helping (marketing plans, web site, etc). Even removing the need to turn a profit, it was a slog. Getting to the shop at 530a multiple times a week to get it opened, dealing with employees, dealing with shitty customers, dealing with suppliers, even simple things like managing cash. It was a great learning experience about business and I often want to open a shop again to get away from software development, but it's really not glamourous.

wpietri 4y ago
Yeah, with a business that size people say that you own the business, but it's as least as true that the business owns you. My mom got sick of real estate sales. A deal to sell an adult foster care home fell through at the last minute, so she ended up buying it. For the next few years, that was her life. She never really got a day off, because the margins were too thin to afford a manager.

steveBK123 4y ago

Summarized as "making a hobby your job might make you no longer enjoy your hobby". Hobbyists photographers quickly discover this when they do a paid shoot for a wedding for example. It turns out that running a business involves a lot more of "running a business" than the creative hobby part you thought it would involve. Doing Sales, marketing, accounting.. dealing with suppliers, employees, landlord.. etc. All the things that have nothing to do with the hobby you thought you enjoyed & were good at.

RegularOpossum 4y ago
As a pretty decent hobbyist photographer this runs through my head every time someone suggests I do it for a living. The only happy wedding photographer I know is by his nature more business oriented and I don't have that edge.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Even back in the day when photography was far less democratized, being a pro photographer almost certainly did not mean being a staff photographer for Life Magazine or even working for AP. It meant working for some school's news office and shooting pictures of alumni receiving awards or various small town newspaper stuff.
t344344 4y ago
Not really! My uncle is a wedding photographer, it is a side gig he does on weekends. He has no sales, marketing..all based on recommendations. Accounting is dead simple. It is actually pretty good compared to his other gigs (taxi driver, plumber). I think key is to have realistic expectations. Trying to scale it up into "real" business, or insert some artistic stuff would be mistake.
KineticLensman 4y ago
Yes. And with weddings, it's not just making 'sales'. It's managing complicated families and personalities on the day. E.g. getting them all together for a group shot, and a lot of group shots.
4y ago

aranchelk 4y ago

There’s a danger for first-time founders buying into this 100% — having special knowledge in a subject gives us a big advantage, we can’t all just hire experts like Levchin and other successful repeat well-funded founders can. We have to be the experts (or team up with them). That expertise is probably coming from either a love of (or at least a familiarity with) a subject.

drakonka 4y ago

I self-publish fiction in my spare time and this article reminded me of that. In my dreams, I would be typing away at my computer in some cozy coffee shop or something, crafting my next awesome book. That _does_ happen, but I'm also spending a ton of that time communicating with cover designers, booking editors, fighting with figuring out marketing, writing blurbs, hosting a website, running a newsletter, writing bonus scenes for newsletter magnets. If I didn't care about the business side of it I'd just be sitting there writing with not a care in the world, putting it out there with no proper planning and crappy covers. But while I don't _enjoy_ doing a bunch of that other stuff, the success of the thing and seeing royalties come in is part of the fun, so I'm compelled to do it. In the end the other parts may not be _fun_ for me, but they sure are satisfying when a launch comes together (or, alternatively, sad if the book flops).

pjdkoch 4y ago

Maybe add (2011)?

msluyter 4y ago

A compelling narrative on the topic that went around a number of years ago: https://slate.com/human-interest/2005/12/my-coffeehouse-nightmare.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2005/12/my-coffeehouse-nigh...

6stringmerc 4y ago

Was dropping a grand on new Michelin AS4s and overheard the NTB managers talking in the office about paperwork - specifically TAXES. These guys know cars and wrenches and tires and batteries and oil changes. They are not bookkeepers by trade, and that used to be a reasonable job. A facility that size with the revenue overall, and others like it, might benefit from a centralized resource where bookkeepers keep the books and shop employees stay in the shop. All this middle working class stuff cut out by the Baby Boomers just to jack up prices on college degrees to be a Secretary ahem Office Assistant or whatever, and basically business processes suffer. Taxes are necessary and their own problem. Also, reformed drug dealers make really good bookkeepers.

jancsika 4y ago

> The founder of a cafe becomes a mopper and accountant. Rank speculation: a cafe founder spends more time in desperate attempts to get wifi working again than they do mopping. Founders of cafes: am I correct?

yodon 4y ago
Wifi encourages people to sit in your limited number of chairs for hours a day, all for the same few pennies of profit as a customer who walks out immediately or drives away from your drive through immediately and leaves all the resources available for the next customer at the register. Even wifi users who are regular customers and great tippers make for terrible business, simply because of the resources they occupy. If your customers use Windows, you can generally get a decent fraction of them to cycle out by just hiding the power outlets, but Mac battery lives tend to be long enough that that trick doesn't work with Apple using customers.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I suspect even not having WiFi makes less of a difference these days people do so much on their phones.

brvsft 4y ago

This reminds me of every cute little store I've lived near that is frequently closed due to the owner(s) being on vacation. I'm not sure how many others have experienced it, but when I see this, it's clear to me that the owner/operator is not truly interested in the business, at least not in some sense that this is a do-or-die investment for them that they feel the need to see through to the end. No, it's a hobby for them. So they never get past the coffeeshop fallacy, as they're just going to keep on with their normal lifestyle and eventually close up shop as they realize this business endeavor is more of an inconvenience than a necessity for them.

projektfu 4y ago
We should normalize closing two days a week and vacations for stores. It would make many things improve.
- ghaff 4y ago
  When I was an undergrad, in a major city, essentially nothing was open on a Sunday--including chain stores although there were fewer of those at the time. Which meant if I had sports on a Saturday as I often did, getting shopping done could be awkward. Over the next decade or so, the blue laws started to get relaxed.

chmod600 4y ago

Software engineering, at least for the lucky ones (a not-small percentage), is the inverse coffee shop fallacy: people imagine it to be boring and it's not. (Note: the following is relative to other jobs, not relative to some ideal.) First of all, coding is pretty fun. If you end up bored, it's probably because you are being too repetitive and in many places you can find new challenges. Technical debt is not great, but mostly because it disrupts you from the fun. Second, software engineers are in demand. More perks, like opportunities for travel, relocation (an underrated opportunity), etc. Third, it's inherently a cooperative thing. This is hugely underrated. You and your colleagues and boss all pretty much want the thing to work and are excited when it does. Lots of jobs are very competitive where people are always working against each other in political games, which is not a recipe for happiness.

warner25 4y ago

> You you can’t be in love with a particular idea or business. You have to be in love with the idea of running a business. I'm saving this quote. I'm a career Army officer and the application to my world is that newly minted officers compete like mad to get into their preferred career fields / communities, because some like "Aviation" (e.g. flying helicopters) are hot and others like "Ordnance" (e.g. managing the lifecycle of ammunition and hardware) are not, but then find that 90% of their careers end up being the same HR and logistics middle-management with attendant meetings and paperwork and bureaucracy. The result is that the hot career fields actually tend to have the worst rates of retention, as officers become disillusioned when reality doesn't meet expectations, among a few other reasons. So prospective officers should really be in love with the idea of leading organizations of all various types.

projektfu 4y ago
It also seems the actual flying is done by NCOs, right?
- warner25 4y ago
  Warrant officers, not NCOs. But yes, this is the crux of it. New lieutenants go to flight school alongside new warrant officers, and then their day-to-day responsibilities rapidly diverge. The lieutenant becomes an administrator who, at best, struggles to keep up with the warrant officers in the cockpit for a few years. At worst, the lieutenant ends up in jobs (as a captain and major) where they don't even have flight-hour minimums anymore.
leobg 4y ago
You you noticed the duplicate word?
- warner25 4y ago
  Sadly, I did notice only after I couldn't edit anymore.
  - 4y ago

angarg12 4y ago

I see this in the ML space as well. I'm working in a team doing ML and ML-ops, and every time we open a position we get a flood of applications. Some have masters degree in ML but many are regular devs who want to move into the ML space. I always try to convey that, ML or not, this is still a dev job. You still need to do all the boring, down to earth stuff, like hunting down bugs, fixing broken builds, or battling poor APIs. The supposedly "fun stuff" (modeling, etc.) is but a tiny part of the job. I'll add the Coffeeshop Fallacy to my vocabulary to explain this point better.

bee_rider 4y ago
That’s interesting. Honesty I always thought ML would have the opposite problem. Numerics folks tired of the grind of being a scientist, looking to cash out and sell GEMVs and linear fits at a premium.

thenoblesunfish 4y ago

Great points - I've worked in many areas where the end result is "cool" though the work is just a hard grind (like most work) but there's an extra penalty because the coolness attracts people who will put up with worse conditions in exchange for pursuing their passion, which really sucks when you discover how quickly your passion can dry up once the grind begins. On the other hand, if what you like is being around (at least formerly) passionate people, that's a huge perk. So start the coffeeshop, if you like the community it'll make you a part of. That's usually what makes people happy, in the end.

warner25 4y ago

I've never thought that I want to own a coffee shop, but I've sometimes thought about being a barista (i.e. "Barista FIRE"). I make my wife a latte every morning, and it can be fun and satisfying. I imagine being focused on perfecting a simple craft, and then being able to turn it off at the end of a shift. My work, in comparison, feels like I'm trying to solve impossible problems, and it never ends. However, I suspect that the reality of being a barista is dealing with lots of demanding and angry customers, frustrating corporate management practices, and more cleaning than making coffee.

hmcamp 4y ago

This is a good read! Thanks @yamrzou.

shove 4y ago

I wasn’t 100% naive going in, but I wish someone had sent me this article before we opened an arcade bar. The economics of retail small businesses that pay living wages is break even at best unless you’ve somehow hit the jackpot on rent/location. Markup on alcohol is 3-500% and we still barely covered expenses. Games made just enough money to cover their repairs. I’d probably do it again, but it’s definitely irrational.