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> Vastly many more people get rich with 'lifestyle' companies than get rich with moonshots. Not being combative, but can you justify that statement with data?
by temphn 15y ago
> Vastly many more people get rich with 'lifestyle' companies than get rich with moonshots.
Not being combative, but can you justify that statement with data? It just seems implausible to me, given that the moonshot companies tend to employ a lot more people. Yes, relatively few companies become "big deals", but those companies (Adobe, MS, Google, Facebook, Apple) are the ones that actually employ most of the people in the industry.
Aside from 37Signals, what lifestyle businesses are (a) less stressful and (b) more lucrative than a shoot-for-the-moon startup? If it's a technology business, it's something that will be obsolesced rapidly unless you keep moving (e.g Yousendit being obsolesced by Dropbox), so where's the "lifestyle" in that?
It seems that your best options are either (a) join a startup or (b) work for a large company. The no man's land in between seems to be the highest stress and worst returns, with no prospect of your ship ever really coming in.
- ahoyhere 15y agoThey are all around you. My business. Gravity Forms. Campaign Monitor. Harvest. Peepcode. Marc-André Cournoyer. WooThemes. Tick. Envato. Beanstalk & Postmark. And on and on and on. These are just some of the folks I know personally, in our space. I could name so many more in other industries. There are so many more, everywhere. You're soaking in it. Most of these people are too busy making bank to blog about it (or they simply don't care to be recognized as business experts). Why do you equate headcount with riches? As one of the richest people to ever write a business book, Felix Dennis says "Overhead walks on two legs." It was an important enough statement for him to include it at least 3 times in one little book. That should tell us something. Employing people isn't a correlation to riches. Employees cost a lot of money. As for "tech businesses"… Harvest has been virtually the same for years and years. So has my "competitor" to Harvest, Freckle. It doesn't matter. Your model of "tech biz obsolescence" is dependent on a winner-take-all scenario. Real business -- what you call "lifestyle business" -- doesn't operate that way.
- chc 15y agoTo offer another example that occurred to me when I was reading this: HN's Jason Kester has frequently written about how his simple, little app S3Stat allows him to travel the world, rock-climbing and working when he wants to, with S3Stat itself requiring next to no maintenance. See, for example, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1925214 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1925214
- wmboy 15y agoSomeone should put together a "Founders At Work" for lifestyle software businesses.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]