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That depends on what you qualify a "startup." My husband and I run a SaaS/infoproduct business which grossed right around $600k last year and we do not work lo

That depends on what you qualify a "startup." My husband and I run a SaaS/infoproduct business which grossed right around $600k last year and we do not work long hours (or even 40 hours/wk). In 2011, we invested heavily in our next product, a new office, a lot of lawyering & tax accountanting (and made a couple rather big (hiring) mistakes with money), so our take-home wasn't glorious, but next year it will be. We: * built the product in a hack day a week or so for 3 mos * worked pretty hard the first year, since we were doing it alongside consulting; but literally there were weeks, and months, where we did nothing, and our business survived & even grew for a time * quit consulting in 2010 (me in Jan, my husband later) To put this in perspective: In late 2009, I had mono, which knocked me out for a few mos. I got better for a while, but then a series of viral infections landed me with chronic fatigue syndrome. Several times since then, I've been incapacitated for 1-3 mos. Now I'm mostly better, but every time I get sick, I'm unable to work for a week or two. I don't make it up by working long hours when I'm well, either. We're talking 20-30 hours a week for me, max. We haven't worked more than a 40-hour work week for more than two weeks at a time in nearly 2 years, and our biz is 3 years old. In short: it's totally doable. Focus on solving a pain people will pay for. Build something simple, which doesn't require a lot of maintenance. Choose customers who aren't needy fuckers. Pick your hours. Example: Our 1st product is a time tracking tool. Unsexy but it's got a run rate of just over $300k/yr now, just over 3 years old. We had 8% growth in revenue month over month from Dec to Jan. Which is totally sexy. And… right now we're on a month-long trip to NZ. I've been working an average of an hour a day because I'm running a course to teach people how to build this kind of biz. (That's in 2-4 hour stretches, not actually 1 hour a day, which would be useless.) My husband hasn't worked at all on this trip except yesterday he had to reset one of our (redundant) servers because of an apparent hardware failure. That'll probably take a couple more hours of his time this week. Sure, we could work more, hit it harder, and probably earn more money. But we're nicely on track for $1.5m in yearly revenue inside of ~2 more years (when I turn 30!) so I figure, why bother? What could we NOT have with $750k/yr of sustainable household income, even if we spent half the gross revenue on overhead (which is ridiculously unlikely)? We already get to touch thousands of people's lives every day. We can already invest in charities and nice things. As Felix Dennis, who's ludicrously rich (in my mind), wrote in his very excellent How To Get Rich: "Ask me what I will give you if you could wave a magic wand and give me my youth back. The answer would be everything I own and everything I will ever own." He says no less than 3 times in his book that if he could go back to his youth and live a different life, he would have spent way, way, way less time accumulating his obscene (hundreds of $mils) riches and more time living. I take him at his word. In short, it's totally possible. You won't believe it if you spend too much time reading HN, however. Or people will tell you that your ambition is too small… and sneer that you run a "lifestyle business." But then, you will have a life, so you can laugh all the way to the bank. NB: I blog about this stuff at http://unicornfree.com http://unicornfree.com in case you're interested.

ams6110 15y ago
It's inspiring that you are successful with something as "ordinary" as a time tracking tool. Just goes to show that there is still opportunity even in what most people would think of as a totally saturated space.
- grammati 15y ago
  Almost all the ideas for webapps that I have had over the years have been discarded because I thought, or was told by people, that "no-one will pay money for that". No offense to Amy, but time-tracking is pretty much the canonical example of the app that "no-one will pay for". So thank you, Amy, for proving me wrong.
  - ahoyhere 15y ago
    You're welcome :) This exact thing here -- the idea that "no one will pay for it" or a question of whether there is "still opportunity" -- is why hanging around HN without the right mental filters is detrimental to your success. There is not only "still" opportunity in boring sectors like time tracking, there's LOTS of it. LOTS and lots. The more people who use a tool, the more pain they experience, the more people who are left out by certain viewpoints on how to build or run the tool, etc., who discover they need an alternative. "Startups" may be sexy and exciting, but the basic tools people have to use to run their businesses and their lives still suck goatnuggets. And these basics are a friggin gold mine. :) There is MORE opportunity there than in some green field where nobody has gone before, because there's a reason nobody has gone there before. As for time tracking being something "no one will pay money for," tell that to all the businesses who I'm sure make wayyyyy more than we do -- Harvest, FreshBooks, RescueTime, toggl, mite, etc. For a long time, the only compelling reason to upgrade to the higher level of Basecamp was because it came with (the most terrible) time tracking. And lots of people upgraded. People who say things like "no one will pay for that" pretty much never do their research. What they mean is "I won't pay for that," which is totally immaterial, just so much self-absorbed gasbaggery. They simply can't imagine that anyone is different from them. And there are tons of those people in the "startup scene." If you just open your eyes and look at the businesses you interact with every day, and look at how long they've been in biz, how many people they employ, what kinds of promotions they do, etc., you will see that there are a bazillion businesses like mine -- and much much much bigger -- which never make tech news coverage, they just quietly tick along making millions a year. I know a guy whose business has millions in revenue a year from a Wordpress plugin that you've never heard of. But it's unsexy so HNers aren't generally interested. :) So I pretty much hang around here for the occasional breaking news & the opportunity to spread the gospel. This discussion will turn into a series of blog posts so I'm getting something out of it too :)

ams6110 15y ago

It's inspiring that you are successful with something as "ordinary" as a time tracking tool. Just goes to show that there is still opportunity even in what most people would think of as a totally saturated space.

grammati 15y ago
Almost all the ideas for webapps that I have had over the years have been discarded because I thought, or was told by people, that "no-one will pay money for that". No offense to Amy, but time-tracking is pretty much the canonical example of the app that "no-one will pay for". So thank you, Amy, for proving me wrong.
- ahoyhere 15y ago
  You're welcome :) This exact thing here -- the idea that "no one will pay for it" or a question of whether there is "still opportunity" -- is why hanging around HN without the right mental filters is detrimental to your success. There is not only "still" opportunity in boring sectors like time tracking, there's LOTS of it. LOTS and lots. The more people who use a tool, the more pain they experience, the more people who are left out by certain viewpoints on how to build or run the tool, etc., who discover they need an alternative. "Startups" may be sexy and exciting, but the basic tools people have to use to run their businesses and their lives still suck goatnuggets. And these basics are a friggin gold mine. :) There is MORE opportunity there than in some green field where nobody has gone before, because there's a reason nobody has gone there before. As for time tracking being something "no one will pay money for," tell that to all the businesses who I'm sure make wayyyyy more than we do -- Harvest, FreshBooks, RescueTime, toggl, mite, etc. For a long time, the only compelling reason to upgrade to the higher level of Basecamp was because it came with (the most terrible) time tracking. And lots of people upgraded. People who say things like "no one will pay for that" pretty much never do their research. What they mean is "I won't pay for that," which is totally immaterial, just so much self-absorbed gasbaggery. They simply can't imagine that anyone is different from them. And there are tons of those people in the "startup scene." If you just open your eyes and look at the businesses you interact with every day, and look at how long they've been in biz, how many people they employ, what kinds of promotions they do, etc., you will see that there are a bazillion businesses like mine -- and much much much bigger -- which never make tech news coverage, they just quietly tick along making millions a year. I know a guy whose business has millions in revenue a year from a Wordpress plugin that you've never heard of. But it's unsexy so HNers aren't generally interested. :) So I pretty much hang around here for the occasional breaking news & the opportunity to spread the gospel. This discussion will turn into a series of blog posts so I'm getting something out of it too :)