I guess this will get rapidly downvoted, but let me say it anyways, because I've always felt there's more than a grain of truth to it - If you want to obtain $

I guess this will get rapidly downvoted, but let me say it anyways, because I've always felt there's more than a grain of truth to it - If you want to obtain $$, and you feel the way to obtain $$ is to find this mythical customer, and then solve that customer's problem, and then get that customer to part with his $$, so his $$ becomes your $$....its extremely longwinded and convoluted and most importantly, unnecessary. I had this professor at UChicago who used to say people who did not have a ballmark estimate of M1 & M2 should not even talk about money, let alone suggest how to make it ( http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/58/MB%2C_M1_and_M2_aggregates_from_1981_to_2012.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/58/MB%2C_M1_and_M... ) Now its one thing if you are working at a high beta startup...going from 0 to 100MM in a few short years is definitely commendable. But otherwise, this whole idea of squirreling away money little bit by little bit as you find customers and solve their mundane IT problems, whilst not taking an interest in the "pointless meetups & language-centric threads"...is like, I dunno, computing the Riemann integral of some exponential function by taking tiny narrow slices and systematically adding them up one by one. While the procedure is very sound & society will commend you for being this patient, upright, model citizen, you are never going to ever compute that integral this way...life is just too short & there will always be 20 year old Zucks around who will plug the upper & lower bounds into a closed form formula & spit out the answer you were chasing for your entire life. Its just not worth it. Instead, do it for the fun.