Ask HN: Who has started a business because they couldn't get hired for work?
Many people start businesses for more financial independence, or simply want to be their own boss. How many of those started it out of a more dire need, from being unable to get hired anywhere and so needed to make money independently for themselves? Maybe from a pivot away from skills that are no longer in demand, or simply having trouble passing interviews due to a lack of a good network or bad soft skills.
It could be anyone from HN reading this, or just anybody else, who has shared their story somewhere about starting their business under these circumstances.
EDIT: I have years of experience as a software developer, but my inability to survive in the job market in the past three years has inspired me to make this topic. Either due to bad luck/timing, or bad soft skills, I can't get an offer anymore. So I'm considering other avenues to make a living.
183 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 206 ms ] threadIn my experience the whole "must have formal background" began with Google, some years later.
But if you're looking for ft positions I would definitely consider rewriting portions of your pdf resume job descriptions. I'm confident you could sound much more impressive.
Lots of immigrants. There are tons of folks with Ph.D.s or who were doctors or lawyers in your own country, but in the U.S. the best job they could get was bagging groceries.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-cost-of-convicti...
That's so depressing.
I graduated in 2009 from a masters with a focus on financial engineering. At the time it was very hard to get a job doing what I want (let me emphasize this point - I could get a job but just not in what I wanted).
Eventually, I took a job to afford living in a major US city. Due to my frustration I began coding much more at home.
Fast forward to now, I have a few projects under my belt that are generating more cash than my day job. Additionally, the skills I acquired working on my personal projects absolutely helped me land my current job.
I have had my share of disappointments, successes and career frustrations along the way, but I get the most satisfaction out of the work I do on my own.
The projects I focus on are related to investing - buying and selling securities programmatically.
Kind of a bummer but that's how it goes.
I tried to get clients for my life coaching biz (budget, brain, and brawns as I called it). Got some traction at just 7 bux a month (I was living in Chile), but not enough once I moved back to NY.
I also tried to test product market fit for a site i was developing (a curated list of multi-month foreign apartment leases), but that was too expensive for me to scale.
Ultimately, making a prototype and getting some users wasnt even the hardest part. It was trying to grow past that base and make the unit economics work that was impossible, maybe even with outside funding.
After one year of job hunting, I found another sales engineering position that Im happy with :)
So, in my case, I was living in Chile and I had booked tickets to Thailand and Japan (Ironically I ended up moving back to the USA for a full time job that I wasn't planning on landing!!)
In Chiang Mai Thailand, specifically, you can book a 1-3 month apartment for about $150 a month USD cash. They speak english, there's no lease, no craziness. And only a few guest houses offer these types of prices and terms, so you really had to hear about it from a friend of a friend type situation.
So I wanted to build a site that was a "curated list" of these apartments. And I didn't even have firm data, names and numbers of landlords, availability, etc. I just wanted to make something that looked and felt like airbnb, but was light-weight and mobile friendly (text, css, and basic js only. site load files of just a few KB not MB!!!)
So, I mocked it up, and made some posts to some reddits and discords where I was only sort of a contributing member. I basically said, "guys, all of us are having a lot of problems finding legit landlords with good terms and prices abroad. I have a list of a few that are good, but I want to scale it out and make it available as like a public service to our channel. Is this something you guys would read? aka, is it worth my time to do this for fun?"
And the response was overwhelming. "YES! I want to see this list!" and "Thank you so much!!! I'm having no luck booking a room right now". and etc etc. People I've never heard of messaging me for months, "Did you finish it yet?"
From a technical standpoint, the site was a success. It looked and felt like a responsive airbnb that worked on any device. The problem was that it was extremely, extremely difficult to collect data of any kind. Language barriers, not network effects, nothing. These landlords are so hard to find, they're like ghosts!!!
So the product fell dormant because of an inability to scale to the level of service needed for it to be useful. But the demand is there, and the grassroots method I used to discover that demand was really successful and mostly by accident ;)
You can’t do Thai from Chile. It needs to be done by being physically present in different major Thai destinations that you want to list, going from door to door to meet the landlords you already know about, and to discover other you don’t know about. It is literally a pariah dog’s job while you’re getting started (and you’ll graduate into a working dog’s job if you’re successful), but once you have established basic rapport and have the contact numbers (not just emails) of the landlords, you could very well just call from from a nice Thai beach, as long as you maintain periodic physical contact. It is great that the app is polished, but additionally (if you already havent) you’ll have to make the technical side such that it is extremely easy to update - and the owners can do it themselves. Convice the owners to do it themselves. Make a few local friends who speak English, and are young and hungry, make them commissioned agents. Take them along with you, assign each renter to an agent, and be fair (and initially generous) with the agents. But be sure you the “keys” are with only you.
If you do it right, and are able to be accepted into the culture (important to behave as they do, be very humble, and give up the traditional “confidence”/arrogance commonly espoused in western society), and be sociable enough to blend in with the landlords, you might become a social phenomenon, and get many more landlords through word of mouth. I strongly recommend you give a serious go, physically, hyper-locally, town-to-town, house-to-house. Not just make the app and expect that the supply side will come looking (the demand side will, you’ve already figured that out). You have to go to them, convince them, request them, implore to them, show them the money, and the potential market (don’t expect them to understand the benefits straight off the bat). You’ll also get into trouble when a renter trashes a place. When you do, either sell to AirBnB or hire experienced people from that company. When you pull it off, you’ll be like a mini/local airbnb, and worth a decent fraction of what they’re worth.
Understand that this is a supply-demand business. Your demand will be off the internet. Market it the way you know. The supply part is very different. Do Thai landlords frequent Reddit in droves?
30 years * 40k/year = 1.2mil
((30 years - 3 years) * 80k/year) - 200k = ~2.3mil
This assumes you can pay that 200k all at once upon graduation and that salary is stagnant, but even if you drop that first assumption take your whole career to pay off your loans and end up paying 2-3x the principle you still come out ahead with a law degree.
Don't choose education for money though, choose it because you want to be educated.
I agree with not choosing an education due to money, but money is a great reason to NOT choose an education.
Law is a totally broken model where the 5% who get big law do great and the other 95% get slaughtered.
And professional education isn't really "an education." That's undergrad. Go to law school because you enjoy the work and want to be a professional -- here I'm using the definition by the estimable Dr. J: "being a professional means doing what you love even on days when you don't feel like doing it."
Big law jobs only go to something like 5% of lawyers. (correct me if I am wrong). The other 95% would be better off doing any other job.
The real question is one that's not unique to lawyers, but we as a profession seem to complain more loudly than others, and it's the work-life balance. Too many lawyers just don't enjoy the day-to-day of what they do. But there are plenty of options for stepping off the treadmill and making less money in exchange for quality of life. Like a lot of careers and industries.
It was my first round to see the world after graduation. Note: I worked on serious jobs during my studies, no internships, actual jobs.
Will start my serious round soon. If no one wants me for what I think I am worth/can offer, then I will start on my own too. I chose this profession partially because of this ‘power’.
<sigh>
Where is it?
I had a nice offer for Vienna two years ago but I refused after strong family protests. Now the situation is different for a few reasons so, starting August, I'll be looking again.
It's incredible how different are salaries just crossing the border. One would believe that sharing a common currency that wouldn't be the case, but we earn half the money for the same positions. And not only developers, just any profession.
The first one I get under certain perspectives but it is only one data point. The second one is my personal life and the interviewer made the assumption it would apply to me professionally. Since he made the assumption in his mind, I couldn’t tell him that this person has been late with me a lot of times and that we are fine with it since we can both multitask and do some work on our laptops at any given moment.
Or maybe INHolland had just terribly bad applied uni students. The vu and uva did not (bad, yes, but not terribly bad - at least everyone understood x = y at a normal uni, even the math haters).
I council patience. I also council not doing PHP. the salaries are lower for PHP. if you manage to get in at a Java or .Net firm your salary can be raised after a year or two.
I ended up learning mechanics and after finishing my apprenticeship I founded my first company (~2000).
After 18 hard working years of entrepreneurship I managed to start and exited 2 successfull companies with 8 figures volume.
I can only suggest to start your own business if you are dedicated. Don't think it is easy, or that you will have a lot of spare time. But I won't miss a day of my journey so far. And yes, I don't need to work anymore, but can't stop!
:)
I dropped out of college at 20. Worked a few jobs in cafes and then in sales and finally as a technician. First technician job was fixing ATM machines, second was building high-end gaming computers for an Amazon merchant.
I studied FreeCodeCamp after work and got into a coding bootcamp that I thought would help me get into the industry. I moved to Utah and got kicked out of it midway through for smoking weed. I lived out of AirBnb for a month and a half before getting a job on my own at startup. The school gave me a refund though because I guess they felt bad for me and wanted to help. Good on them, still grateful for that.
That job was for an MLM startup and I had to leave because it was not a good dev environment. I got hired by Bluehost and I learned all about DNS, email, popular CMSs, SEO, and all kinds of problems that everyday non-tech people run into with computers and with the Internet. It was a great learning opportunity for me. Then they laid me off along with 900 other people...they were bought out and this was common procedure for their acquisitions. I did not know that when they hired me :/
I decided to start my own agency/consultancy since I had a few friends who needed sites made. It's been miraculous how each of them always sends me new work through their network. Now I have a pipeline of clients always coming in and I just have to keep shipping work every day and money will keep coming in. :)
I've started working on ideas that I've drawn out and lost sleep over with some friends of mine who are engineers and investors. Maybe I can start a 2nd income stream too and eventually buy some real estate too!
That's really interesting, can you provide more details about it? I'm really curious how a kid could make money from coding in the early 90's.
An engineer's career usually tapers off beyond a certain age. Risk taking therefore has to be reduced as your career options get narrower with seniority -- moral of the story.
That's honestly the question when it comes to this type of thing, there are so many different skillsets and not everyone can find contracts as easily as they'd hope; or it's not as reliable as they need for their life.
That said, this also works for permanent jobs, so if you're struggling to find those then maybe you are out of luck.
Boy does that sound familiar. I’m fine financially, but mainly due to luck. Tried looking for work before family medical issues took higher priority, but if getting a new job had been as easy as I had expected before the sabbatical, I wouldn’t have been available to help the family.
I still don’t know how much of my problem was down to me vs how much was down to looking in Berlin when all of my previous work had been in the UK.
I'm pretty sure you're on thin ice with this one...
Not only that, developing software is generally a "slow" task, not constant decision making in spans of milliseconds like in a "fast" sport you mentioned. If you want to compare, try a "slow" sport like golf, does your observation still hold true?
In engineering tasks you also gain a lot of productivity (at least if your metrics aren't crap, might be often a problem here) from years and decades of building up experience and knowledge. Moreover this doesn't get lost to a huge degree if you pause 1-2 years, not like physical training which goes away quickly and is hard to build up again.
I think what could play a role here is that older people may often be less focused on the job because that focus shifts to other things in life like e.g. family.
FWIW I'm not talking out of my hat here, I "played" a very thought intensive sport in my younger day and was one of the top guys in the US on any given day. I still have ridiculously quick decision times and the concentration of a Monk with ADD when I drive, But there's no way my bod could compete with a my former self of 20 years ago. I'm in pretty good shape now but I'm not a World class athlete anymore.
Tennis or sports coach? A typical age is much older.
With any decline in focus it is important to see a therapist and find out if you are really suffering from depression. It is stunningly common for people to mistake the symptoms of depression for the symptoms of aging.
The only advantage we (younger people) have is energy and fewer responsibilities (take care of kids, grandsons, medical issues). But we are still reckless and have many unknowns unknowns compared to the older folk.
Did you mean, if you want to stay an engineer as you age, then you have to take less risks because it will be difficult to get that next job as an engineer? Do you also mean, that it actually becomes more likely that you will be forced to start a business if you fall out of the engineering career due to age / circumstance, because it is difficult to be hired as one?
I'm curious because, it seems like the older you get but are still capable of working, if you are unemployed, the higher the likelihood that you will be forced to take more risks than less to find the employment or make a business.
I have heard that you are more likely to be successful starting a business if you are older, not younger [1] [2] [3]. I'm sure it's not true for everyone, but that might make sense if you are unable to work in the normal job market but have experience and ability.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-business/wp/201...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgedeeb/2015/04/16/does-age-...
[3] https://news.vice.com/en_ca/article/59jeex/the-most-successf...
The reason you need to take less risks is because your ability to execute a task that you were used to executing before is reduced due to the ageing process. For example, you need to take longer breaks and sooner. In other words, your full speed to work goes down. So to compensate, you have to be more careful with the work you undertake. For example, it's easier to supervise someone else on a task you are familiar with instead of doing yourself at your lower efficiency.
In a sense, your conclusion about needing to take more risks is true. But the risk is being taken by your oerganization in betting on you to be able to execute on the task you have set out to do. What I am talking about is personal risk, that you take in your choice of what you will do. That choice needs to get a little more conservative as a you age so as to give some margin for error that you probably didn't need as much before.
The second part of your question regarding how things will turn out regarding whetehr you work for an org or yourself is more circumstantial than anything else.
The third observation seems to make sense regarding success of business as a function of age of founder. As you age, you choose your work better because you have more experience.
> your full speed to work goes down
> your lower efficiency
Do you have sources on this? On its surface, it sounds like fairly ageist thinking. I'm not young, but I don't feel like I've slowed down at all. In fact, my experience keeps me from making as many mistakes as when I was younger.
I know folks, considerably older than I, who are faster still at the things with which they have experience, and quick to pick up new things, too.
I don't think this is true. It might be more true if the task involves learning a lot of completely new stuff, but there's very little completely new stuff - experience helps in learning most of what comes out these days.
Execution is sped up more by doing the right thing than doing things quickly. Just like typing speed is not normally the limiting factor, speed qua speed isn't what makes things slow. I've seen younger devs work very fast in the wrong direction especially when they are lacking in code design and debugging skills.
Interesting that you mention breaks. Breaks are opportunities to get your head up. Taking fewer breaks will increase the probability of spending too much time on the wrong road.
I'm 40, so one foot in the grave in the tech world, yet I have managed to keep myself marketable by not being afraid to jump in and learn new things when needed, just like a college kid, but with experience. Maybe I'm wasting my time spending hours learning Vue or Kubernetes for the future but if I had stayed "safe" developing WPF calendar apps and cursing the new stuff I'd be dead in the water. And taking on new positions and companies puts me out of my comfort zone and teaches me new things.
Everyone's mileage varies on this of course.
I’ve also noticed that many of the (s/w) engineers who’ve survived way past that certain age tend to be of a very different personality type than those who “retire early”, and their persona has more in common with the average non-software engineer of comparable experience. Of course the huge bias on the recruiting side, and the fact that a majority of apps are basic CRUD type stuff fuelled primarily by cheap VC cash, that have no real use for 20 years experience, exacerbates this situation. But I wonder as the industry matures, and the proportion of apps with serious scale possibly grows, if the need for engineers “past their prime” wouldn’t gradually rise.
Just a thought...
Once the company grew to the size that we needed a real office, my need to exit was at least partially influenced by IBS as well.
I could have gotten a job in a lot of different places, but I couldn't handle the workplace environment because I needed to use the restroom more than 10 times per day. I also had accidents where I would need to change my pants at least once a week, and always carried spare clothes in my backpack. I still keep that habit, even though I've largely conquered the disease. It's a weird PSD I kind of have.
Even today, I'd probably accept a 20% pay reduction for if a company would give me a private restroom connected to my office.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FODMAP
Did it help you?
I discovered my Keto for weight loss and noticed a huge improvement in my IBS. That led me to r/ZeroCarb eventually and after a year or two of healing, I am now to the point I can have 1 high carb meal per week without a problem. I just have to take big breaks in between carbs or my body starts breaking down fast.
Funnily the website solves the problem of how to learn anything in the most effective way.
Website: https://learn-anything.xyz
Everyone is interviewing, no one hiring due to current fashion. If you don't have contacts inside a company, there's perhaps a 1% chance of getting hired.
The only other way in is to have "nerves of steel" and get lucky in the interview, where the random coding exercise is one you have recently practiced. They will attribute these two factors to you being a good hire, a connection that is tenuous at best.
So I am practicing that now and hopefully will pass some interview one day.
I am wondering whether you have considered companies that don't white board.[1]
[1]https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards
Big fan of dark interfaces and visual (relationship) flow-graphs like this.
There was a lot of learning when getting started, but the business is roughly a 10-person concern, and growing — all completely bootstrapped.
Edit:
More details on what it took to get started
- Studying the materials one needed know to get a contractor's license
- Actually getting licensed
- Setting up an online presense
- Acquiring our first customers
- Earning a good reputation
- Incorporating, hiring, worker's comp/various insurances ($$$$)
One of the biggest ongoing challenges is competing with unlicensed contractors, and being able to hire enough skilled labor.
- Customer leads are almost 100% digital (Website, Google Ads, Yelp). This means they can reply back and forth without having to call, so no paperwork is necessary until they're customers. Everyone involved seems to appreciate this.
- Estimates and invoices are delivered digitally, we currently use Waveapps, which is good enough for the small business for now. This allows us to keep track of who has/hasn't paid yet. This is a huge help with staying on top of things.
- My parents aren't tech people, so after much trying with iCal/Gcal, their best calendar to work with is actually an old fashioned paper one. Used to keep track of estimates, and project scheduling.
- Ultimately we've had to hire a 3rd party to help with tracking worker hours, payroll, and taxes. Yes there's payroll software, but again because my parents aren't tech people and they're currently at their wits just running the business, it was best to hire outside help. I'd like to help with this, but I work full-time, and screwing this up can result in extremely steep fines to the business.
- Really the only new paperwork we have to deal with on an ongoing basis is storing copies of customer contracts.
Triplebyte denied me in a phone screening and at that time I had just read all Paul Graham's essays and would have sacrificed a lot to move back to USA and work for a YC startup.
At this point I'm very happy things turned out the way they did. One thing I will never miss is having my life controlled by an alarm clock.
This means I eventually get replaced and scramble for another job. I'd like to start my own thing but it doesn't feel viable sometimes, seeing as I'm not a developer.
So just make sure that you have at least an idea of how you will get some sales that involve minimal interaction with other people.
Yes and no. The good thing about the internet is that you can get a decent sales funnel without having to talk to a single person. Write interesting blog posts on relevant topics, help others by showing how to solve their problem with your product, etc. There's a lot to learn here for a techie nerd, but the learning curve here is much easier for those who aren't naturally good at dealing with people.
Writing blog posts is about 10% of my job.
Most of the time I'm either doing live screensharing sessions with people or writing code.
Keep in mind, this is working as someone who helps other people solve their individual problems, not so much selling a SAAS application.
I say this as someone who had no problem getting jobs, but social anxiety made me desire the idealized notion of working in my home office and seldom conferring with people -- just delivering great solutions with every waking moment.
I started my own business and quickly discovered that about 80% of my time was courting and talking to people. People love talking. Getting someone to commit to a sale is often just a brutal enterprise.
From a time perspective, the advice to write pertinent blog posts just isn't really that lucrative anymore.
Same here.
>People love talking. Getting someone to commit to a sale is often just a brutal enterprise.
You just need to distinguish the types. The type that just loves talking is usually obsessed with self-importance and doesn't really care about the solved problems. You can talk them into a sale if you schmooze them good enough, but as a nerd you have a few chances. The type that appreciates great solutions doesn't care about chit-chat more than you do, but they are harder to reach because they are usually busy solving problems. There's a separate long story why the first type is better at forming hierarchies and obtaining political pull, but long story short, you need to focus your funnel on the second type. If the central part of your site is your smiling picture and a phone number, you'll attract the former. If it's a product trial, well-organized documentation and tutorials, the latter will be your catch.
In any case I seek to find work that I would be happy with, and where my current soft skills wouldn't prevent me from doing so.
In the professional sense, I have pretty good interactions with people at work, and generally considered to be a reliable worker. But social faux pas are judged ever more harshly at job interviews.
In the field I work, we mostly joke that we are a bunch of unemployable people. We like being our own bosses, working in small teams. I formed a worker's co-op with a few ex-colleagues and I'm happy with it. We also federate loosely with other companies in our field (around the FOSS project that we provide support for).
Most of their immediate responses are go get a new job if you are unhappy with your current position, but that is more of them being entertaining, but I guess a truthful answer in most of the scenarios they are presented with.
[0] https://softskills.audio/