3 ms·

I found five examples to back up my case, so listen to me! As all the YC companies can tell you, for your average case building a business still takes a lot of

by tsally 18y ago

I found five examples to back up my case, so listen to me! As all the YC companies can tell you, for your average case building a business still takes a lot of work.

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
bigbang 18y ago
Yeah. The fact that examples have to be pointed out, says it more of an exception.
ryanwaggoner 18y ago
Forget the YC companies...almost anyone who has started any kind of business will tell you that it's a lot of work.
- davidw 18y ago
  It seems like it would be a natural equilibrium for it to be a lot of work unless it's something where it's basically impossible to not work a lot. If person A works 5 hours a week, and person B does 20, even if person B only gets twice as much done as A, there's still twice as much going into the business. I guess there are outliers, where someone gets really lucky and manages to stumble on to some sort of very easily defensible barrier to entry, but that's not the norm.
  - eru 18y ago
    Depends on the business. If A's shorter working hours allow him to offer dramatically lowered costs, then he may succeed.
    - ryanwaggoner 18y ago
      Example?
      - eru 18y ago
        Startups like other companies, too, have to pay for their factors of production. Labour is one of them. The labour of the founder also has to be payed --- either explicit or implicit.
  - jlangenauer 18y ago
    The examples that 37 signals are relying on are ones where there is already the opportunity to outsource business processes - order fulfilment to Amazon etc. This is all well and good where you're doing something which is not too different from what is being done before (and at a similiar scale to what has been done before). But what about the people trying to do something new? You're going to have to invest a lot more time for two simple reasons: a) You may not have external systems you can simply outsource to, because they may not exist, or may not fill the exact need of your business, and b) if you are doing something new, there's a whole heap more experimentation, research and trial and error involved to get a working product that has traction in the marketplace, as no-one's made the mistakes with a similiar product before which you can learn from. You gotta make those mistakes yourself.
- hwijaya 18y ago
  Agreed. And, a lot of passions. Beside, i think most people that Matt points out is still quite exceptional. For one thing, John Gruber and Jason Kottke know what they are talking about more than majority of people. In fact, the act of starting itself (let alone know more than most people) is already a difficult thing to achieve. As i can testify, my friend who told me he want to be pro-blogger months ago, hasn't even started now. So, i would probably say Matt's post is more exception rather than rule.

by tsally 18y ago

I found five examples to back up my case, so listen to me! As all the YC companies can tell you, for your average case building a business still takes a lot of work.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

bigbang 18y ago

Yeah. The fact that examples have to be pointed out, says it more of an exception.

ryanwaggoner 18y ago

Forget the YC companies...almost anyone who has started any kind of business will tell you that it's a lot of work.

davidw 18y ago
It seems like it would be a natural equilibrium for it to be a lot of work unless it's something where it's basically impossible to not work a lot. If person A works 5 hours a week, and person B does 20, even if person B only gets twice as much done as A, there's still twice as much going into the business. I guess there are outliers, where someone gets really lucky and manages to stumble on to some sort of very easily defensible barrier to entry, but that's not the norm.
- eru 18y ago
  Depends on the business. If A's shorter working hours allow him to offer dramatically lowered costs, then he may succeed.
  - ryanwaggoner 18y ago
    Example?
    - eru 18y ago
      Startups like other companies, too, have to pay for their factors of production. Labour is one of them. The labour of the founder also has to be payed --- either explicit or implicit.
- jlangenauer 18y ago
  The examples that 37 signals are relying on are ones where there is already the opportunity to outsource business processes - order fulfilment to Amazon etc. This is all well and good where you're doing something which is not too different from what is being done before (and at a similiar scale to what has been done before). But what about the people trying to do something new? You're going to have to invest a lot more time for two simple reasons: a) You may not have external systems you can simply outsource to, because they may not exist, or may not fill the exact need of your business, and b) if you are doing something new, there's a whole heap more experimentation, research and trial and error involved to get a working product that has traction in the marketplace, as no-one's made the mistakes with a similiar product before which you can learn from. You gotta make those mistakes yourself.
hwijaya 18y ago
Agreed. And, a lot of passions. Beside, i think most people that Matt points out is still quite exceptional. For one thing, John Gruber and Jason Kottke know what they are talking about more than majority of people. In fact, the act of starting itself (let alone know more than most people) is already a difficult thing to achieve. As i can testify, my friend who told me he want to be pro-blogger months ago, hasn't even started now. So, i would probably say Matt's post is more exception rather than rule.