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Why do you need investment? If you can build it on your own and there is a real niche with people willing to pay money for what you build then you can make a lo

Why do you need investment? If you can build it on your own and there is a real niche with people willing to pay money for what you build then you can make a lot of money as an individual.

JohnFen 3y ago
Yes! If your goal isn't to build a kind of empire or to shoot for unimaginable riches, but instead to start a solid small business that lets you do the sort of work you enjoy and provides enough income to live in your preferred style, then it's never been easier than it is today. All you really need is to find a niche that has a small market. How small is OK depends a lot on the specifics of a business, but if we're talking a one-person software shop, you can probably live decently with a customer base of a handful of thousands. Even less if your niche supports very high profit margins. And, as an old mentor pointed out, if you're fishing in the pool of the entire world (which the internet allows at low cost), then you can just nail two boards together and find a thousand or two who are willing to buy it.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
  My app is attracting a lot of Australians. It was built for US and Canada but I won't say no to AUD.
anileated 3y ago
I can’t because I need money to survive, and this will not provide that money for months until the thing is written, deployed, and has an established enough paying user base… And good luck me not getting seriously ill or get affected by whatever calamity in meantime!
- jstanley 3y ago
  If it will be a matter of mere months until this thing is making enough money to pay for you to live, then it shouldn't take you too long to save up to start? Maybe a bank would even lend you the money? Maybe even a credit card would be enough?
  - anileated 3y ago
    Yes, saving is the way to go, but with my salary and life costs to save enough to last even 6 months will take me about 1 year without much other spending. Like probably with most people, my job and this project are not the only things I care about, I have other hobbies and interests too. I want to buy a camera and travel a bit in meantime for example.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
  Fwiw my web app costs like $80/mo in hosting fees, and could be done for even less. I forget how much we paid to register our company but it wasn't much. The startup costs aren't that much, it's mostly time. I wouldn't be so optimistic on a few months to start generating cash tho unless it's a simple yet novel idea.
  - anileated 3y ago
    I could spare that much, but the idea in question is a bit different. Without going into too much detail, each upload consumes some compute, equivalent of like 10 seconds on a M1 MBP with 16GB RAM when nothing else is heavy is running. So I think my costs will be a bit higher and I would need to start billing customers early on.
- imilk 3y ago
  If you have the ability to program you can find time around your day job to make a little progress each day until you have something ready to market. Because it just sounds like you're lazy and are throwing up random excuses.
  - anileated 3y ago
    Nah, no time at all. Can barely keep up. Recognize not everyone’s job is as easy as yours.
    - imilk 3y ago
      Do you also have no time in the evenings or weekends? Spend the hours that you normally watch TV or browse social media/Hacker News working on your project. But the fact that you're posting on here while complaining that you don't have time tells me you just don't want to do it enough for it to ever be worthwhile.
      - anileated 3y ago
        No time means no time in which I can do productive work. I still have time to, say, occasionally exercise or have a walk or deal with life chores or get out with friends once in a while, but if I stop doing those things that would hurt my health/life and therefore my ability to work even further, as I know from experience. As to HN, I read it mostly when I can’t sleep or in public transport. I don’t watch or have TV.
- garrickvanburen 3y ago
  have you considered that some people would pay you up-front to build this because they need it so badly?
- jononor 3y ago
  Sell it first, build it after. Helps with this conundrum - but more importantly it forces you to focus on the customer and their problem, finding what people are willing to pay for. And that is what successful business is made of.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  You should never found a business. If you are already thinking about becoming ill, then it's just not the path for you. A business founder has to be prepared and eager to sacrifice his personal well being for the business.
  - anileated 3y ago
    What you are describing seems like hustling and/or privilege. If your goal is to create value long term, the worst way to go about it is to not take care of yourself. For people who were not born into strong safety nets it is usually harder and includes finances. Becoming ill is a sure way to be unproductive and make bad decisions, going broke and struggling to make ends meet is not going to help you focus on getting things done, dying early is not compatible with seeing your idea to success.
    - carlosjobim 3y ago
      > For people who were not born into strong safety nets "Hustling" as you call it is pretty much the only way to start a successful business exactly for the people not born into "strong safety nets" and "privilege" as you call it. If you have those you can start your business and coast. I don't know any business owner - including myself - who didn't have to make sacrifices to his or her well being to push through. That's the thing with having a business, there will be times were you just can't relax or take a day off. You are in fierce competition with the world, and as a founder you should work at a minimum twice as hard as somebody who is hired. It can and it will lead to partial or complete burn out, but one thing that I've noticed among myself and every other business owner is that they push through and simply don't get sick when they can't be sick. After it's over and they've pushed through a project or a season, they will get sick as dogs and disappear for a couple of weeks to lay on the sofa. The overload cannot be constant, you need to have some time to recover in the foreseeable future. The human mind has an incredible force to resist becoming ill and for those who cannot channel this, starting a business is a bad idea. Being ill is mainly the body's reaction to fight the sickness, so it's somewhat under our control. Having a business puts incredible pressure from all sides on a person, and you can't be a person who thinks about "tapping out" as an option. Especially in situations when other people's salaries depend on you.
tiedieconderoga 3y ago
Simple: capex and economies of scale. Suppose that I have an idea for a widget which market research indicates could sell for $20/, but probably not $50/. I can hit the $50/ target with small contract runs, which would cost about as much as a down payment on a house. Or I can make it in volume for less than $10/, but I need a large minimum order, space, equipment, logistics. Now we're looking at 7-8 figures. If you aren't independently wealthy, neither option is really feasible, and the former option will almost certainly end in tears if you try to stretch and bootstrap with your own money.
- Domenic_S 3y ago
  If you're really sure, you do that first run and lose money, then show a bank/investor the explosive popularity and get money for manufacturing at scale. Relatively speaking it's close to the easiest type of funding you can get.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- brigadier132 3y ago
  > I can hit the $50/ target with small contract runs, which would cost about as much as a down payment on a house. I wasn't thinking of this from the perspective of a hardware startup but a software startup which doesn't require either of those things. I should qualify my original post with that. You don't need to be independently wealthy to launch a software business on your own provided you have the ability to build it yourself.
  - groby_b 3y ago
    Kind reminder that starting a software business still requires you to, you know, live and stuff :) Even if you can build it all by yourself, for most people runway is limited by savings. And that means that with a few exceptions, it's hard to stretch beyond a couple of months (or maybe one-two years) before you need to think about shutting down. If you can get to profit before that, awesome, your business might be a good idea. (You'll still have depleted a good chunk of your savings, and it's not like the world comes with profit guarantees) Investment buys runway, opex, and scale. Some businesses need that, some don't. Software work reduces the opex load (for many attempts), but scale and runway might still be necessary.

Why do you need investment? If you can build it on your own and there is a real niche with people willing to pay money for what you build then you can make a lot of money as an individual.

JohnFen 3y ago

Yes! If your goal isn't to build a kind of empire or to shoot for unimaginable riches, but instead to start a solid small business that lets you do the sort of work you enjoy and provides enough income to live in your preferred style, then it's never been easier than it is today. All you really need is to find a niche that has a small market. How small is OK depends a lot on the specifics of a business, but if we're talking a one-person software shop, you can probably live decently with a customer base of a handful of thousands. Even less if your niche supports very high profit margins. And, as an old mentor pointed out, if you're fishing in the pool of the entire world (which the internet allows at low cost), then you can just nail two boards together and find a thousand or two who are willing to buy it.

8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
My app is attracting a lot of Australians. It was built for US and Canada but I won't say no to AUD.

anileated 3y ago

I can’t because I need money to survive, and this will not provide that money for months until the thing is written, deployed, and has an established enough paying user base… And good luck me not getting seriously ill or get affected by whatever calamity in meantime!

jstanley 3y ago
If it will be a matter of mere months until this thing is making enough money to pay for you to live, then it shouldn't take you too long to save up to start? Maybe a bank would even lend you the money? Maybe even a credit card would be enough?
- anileated 3y ago
  Yes, saving is the way to go, but with my salary and life costs to save enough to last even 6 months will take me about 1 year without much other spending. Like probably with most people, my job and this project are not the only things I care about, I have other hobbies and interests too. I want to buy a camera and travel a bit in meantime for example.
8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
Fwiw my web app costs like $80/mo in hosting fees, and could be done for even less. I forget how much we paid to register our company but it wasn't much. The startup costs aren't that much, it's mostly time. I wouldn't be so optimistic on a few months to start generating cash tho unless it's a simple yet novel idea.
- anileated 3y ago
  I could spare that much, but the idea in question is a bit different. Without going into too much detail, each upload consumes some compute, equivalent of like 10 seconds on a M1 MBP with 16GB RAM when nothing else is heavy is running. So I think my costs will be a bit higher and I would need to start billing customers early on.
imilk 3y ago
If you have the ability to program you can find time around your day job to make a little progress each day until you have something ready to market. Because it just sounds like you're lazy and are throwing up random excuses.
- anileated 3y ago
  Nah, no time at all. Can barely keep up. Recognize not everyone’s job is as easy as yours.
  - imilk 3y ago
    Do you also have no time in the evenings or weekends? Spend the hours that you normally watch TV or browse social media/Hacker News working on your project. But the fact that you're posting on here while complaining that you don't have time tells me you just don't want to do it enough for it to ever be worthwhile.
    - anileated 3y ago
      No time means no time in which I can do productive work. I still have time to, say, occasionally exercise or have a walk or deal with life chores or get out with friends once in a while, but if I stop doing those things that would hurt my health/life and therefore my ability to work even further, as I know from experience. As to HN, I read it mostly when I can’t sleep or in public transport. I don’t watch or have TV.
garrickvanburen 3y ago
have you considered that some people would pay you up-front to build this because they need it so badly?
jononor 3y ago
Sell it first, build it after. Helps with this conundrum - but more importantly it forces you to focus on the customer and their problem, finding what people are willing to pay for. And that is what successful business is made of.
carlosjobim 3y ago
You should never found a business. If you are already thinking about becoming ill, then it's just not the path for you. A business founder has to be prepared and eager to sacrifice his personal well being for the business.
- anileated 3y ago
  What you are describing seems like hustling and/or privilege. If your goal is to create value long term, the worst way to go about it is to not take care of yourself. For people who were not born into strong safety nets it is usually harder and includes finances. Becoming ill is a sure way to be unproductive and make bad decisions, going broke and struggling to make ends meet is not going to help you focus on getting things done, dying early is not compatible with seeing your idea to success.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    > For people who were not born into strong safety nets "Hustling" as you call it is pretty much the only way to start a successful business exactly for the people not born into "strong safety nets" and "privilege" as you call it. If you have those you can start your business and coast. I don't know any business owner - including myself - who didn't have to make sacrifices to his or her well being to push through. That's the thing with having a business, there will be times were you just can't relax or take a day off. You are in fierce competition with the world, and as a founder you should work at a minimum twice as hard as somebody who is hired. It can and it will lead to partial or complete burn out, but one thing that I've noticed among myself and every other business owner is that they push through and simply don't get sick when they can't be sick. After it's over and they've pushed through a project or a season, they will get sick as dogs and disappear for a couple of weeks to lay on the sofa. The overload cannot be constant, you need to have some time to recover in the foreseeable future. The human mind has an incredible force to resist becoming ill and for those who cannot channel this, starting a business is a bad idea. Being ill is mainly the body's reaction to fight the sickness, so it's somewhat under our control. Having a business puts incredible pressure from all sides on a person, and you can't be a person who thinks about "tapping out" as an option. Especially in situations when other people's salaries depend on you.

tiedieconderoga 3y ago

Simple: capex and economies of scale. Suppose that I have an idea for a widget which market research indicates could sell for $20/, but probably not $50/. I can hit the $50/ target with small contract runs, which would cost about as much as a down payment on a house. Or I can make it in volume for less than $10/, but I need a large minimum order, space, equipment, logistics. Now we're looking at 7-8 figures. If you aren't independently wealthy, neither option is really feasible, and the former option will almost certainly end in tears if you try to stretch and bootstrap with your own money.

Domenic_S 3y ago
If you're really sure, you do that first run and lose money, then show a bank/investor the explosive popularity and get money for manufacturing at scale. Relatively speaking it's close to the easiest type of funding you can get.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
brigadier132 3y ago
> I can hit the $50/ target with small contract runs, which would cost about as much as a down payment on a house. I wasn't thinking of this from the perspective of a hardware startup but a software startup which doesn't require either of those things. I should qualify my original post with that. You don't need to be independently wealthy to launch a software business on your own provided you have the ability to build it yourself.
- groby_b 3y ago
  Kind reminder that starting a software business still requires you to, you know, live and stuff :) Even if you can build it all by yourself, for most people runway is limited by savings. And that means that with a few exceptions, it's hard to stretch beyond a couple of months (or maybe one-two years) before you need to think about shutting down. If you can get to profit before that, awesome, your business might be a good idea. (You'll still have depleted a good chunk of your savings, and it's not like the world comes with profit guarantees) Investment buys runway, opex, and scale. Some businesses need that, some don't. Software work reduces the opex load (for many attempts), but scale and runway might still be necessary.