Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?

Without knowing more about your skills, experience and interests it is hard to make suggestions. But I'll try anyway ...

Instead of focusing on your desire to be an entrepreneur, why don't you stop and look about you and see what problems, challenges, etc exist (there are literally hundreds if you look empathetically). Look at those problems that resonate with you and sketch out how you could address them. Not all solutions involve computers, programs and websites. Eventually you could stumble across a problem that you can see a solution to and can see how you can focus your knowledge, skills, experience and connections to implement the solution. Often times, the solution will involve reaching out to other people, etc.

2) Don't be too hard on yourself. Your brain needs some rest. Rest as long as you need. Don't ever compare yourself to Zuck, you see a billionaire now but he was a student when he started FB, and probably as lost as you are.

3) Not much time? Focus on the essential: find a real problem to solve. Maybe a problem you have, maybe a friend's. Maybe something related to your hobby. Don't focus too much on coding, maybe you can solve problems with a simple spreadsheet for now, and build a site when you have your first customers

And I'm in the same boat you. I am so tempted to go off on my own.

edit: fixed my typo or your term :-)

So start by learning the problems that people have and truly validate that problem's existence and significance in their lives.

The second thing I would consider are your execution abilities. Looking at your websites, it's clear that web design isn't your strong suit; it seems your strong suit might be having deep knowledge of the linux ecosystem (taking a guess here). Then again consider your market size.

I spent a good week trying to figure out what they meant because the term never seemed to correlate to the size of the success of the pitch they were hearing.

At one point someone came in who has built some kind of underwater propulsion device which was the culmination of 3 years of work. He had a pretty polished prototype too and was currently working as an engineer for one of the big 4 tech companies making a large salary. This guy had never tried to actually sell his product to anyone. He just kept building. And I remember again Cuban calling him a "wannpereneur".

At that point it struck me that the apparent definition of wannapreneur is "Someone who wants the trappings of an entrepreneur (ie the social capital, the identity etc) and goes to all the entrepreneur conferences but doesn't actually _find customers_ and try to _sell_ a product to them." Its a threshold of actually putting yourself out there with a product and selling. Thats the line.

By this definition you definitely aren't a wantapreneur. You are an _entrepreneur_ but you haven't found your audience and product yet.

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You have to remember that becoming good at entrepreneurship means being decent at finding cofounders to complement you (ie being easy to work with) and/or being good at a few of the things to do with business: building, marketing, sales, hiring. If you're trying to do evertyhing on your own you have to be at least average in all these areas. Are you at that point?

If you aren't then find books/courses in those areas and try to become good in those areas (very hard to do) Or find co-founders to complement you.

You're on your way. Keep your income and keep trying with different ideas.

Best of luck!

There are people who devote 100% of their mental energy to whatever they are doing right now. Those people are not going to be successful with side projects. When I am building something, it is on my mind 100% of the time, waking up, showering, getting dressed, driving, eating, all the time.

I cannot do 2 projects at once.

In regards to coding, being a good programmer is only a small part of running a business. Marketing, managing a team, working with designers, and inspiring others with your idea are all skills that are incredibly important.

The code needs to work, sure. And hopefully it is reliable, but just as important, the business needs to work. You need to be able to send cold emails, handle rejection, and be able to put a smile on your face on demand at any time of day at any place meeting with anyone.

Of course before you quit your day job, make sure you have an idea that people want. Throw some marketing $ at it and see what your conversion rate it, even if it is to a "sign up for more info" form.

Go out and talk to people on the street, one of the most difficult things I did, which was step 1, was literally go to different neighborhoods, walk up to people, and ask them about my product idea. Especially for mass market products, this is a quick, and painful, way to cycle through ideas really quickly.

Also, for your email address extractor, have some sample input there. It'll go a long way towards explaining your value prop.

1. Create more niche "properties" that provide a small to medium services. focus on something people might need, be willing to pay a small amount for, and ideally can run with minimal supervision.

2. Rinse repeat #1 until a few of those are ongoing. 8 euros per month becomes maybe 800 and growing over time.

3. Don't try to be Zuckerberg. There is only one of him, thank all the gods.

4. Don't even think about the words "startup", "exit", "investment" etc. Focus on stuff that will provide you with a lifestyle of your choice.

5. Try to make each "property" the best you can. Focus on making a "Good Product" (tm). Good products have better chance of being used. Give each one the love it needs. Stay focused. Complete the project. Take it slowly, there is no rush. You have no Boss here. No deadlines.

6. One of these days, one of those niche idea becomes semi-niche, broader audience. Go with it.

7. Remember there is no magic formula, no secret sauce, luck is a huge factor and there is no guarantee for anything.

8. Aim for lifestyle. It's a good aim.

Honestly I would put ads on the extractemailaddress.com website and work on improving it's position on the search results. In addition to that localization to one or two other languages would probably be nice to boost the views. That "make a small donation" button really put me off.

I had this fatigue when I started learning too much about technology and devops like hosting a site using Docker and stuff and I soon realized that instead of working I was just playing with technologies all day and getting fatigued over nothing. My lesson, there is stuff for big companies and then there is stuff for the solepreneurs.

Also one more piece of advice is there are technologies offered these days as SaaS. You don't have to do everything. A lot of the times you can just buy a service for $30 / mo and get going. Don't wander around too much trying to reinvent the wheel. Need authentication, use auth0, need a file uploader use uploader.win, need to deliver mail use mailgun. This can save you a lot of time and headache.

Market research takes time and effort, just like programming does. If you do not already have an idea you know will make you money, you will need to put in the time and effort to find one instead of using that time making random websites. Some people do get lucky and find a niche without much effort, but that is likely not the case for most.

Writing code and starting a business are different activities. You need to learn how to start a business, figure out what product you want to build, find out what market you want to target, merge the product and market to get a product/market fit. Then figure out selling/marketing/funding and all the rest.

Ideas are actually the easiest thing, execution is the hardest.

You might not want a startup but a small business that can make more than you currently make, then head over to indiehackers.com

You can do it. Have you considered partnering up with someone else? It's really hard to go at it alone. Not impossible, but really tough.

You've said yourself that people have paid for the things you've built in the past, so you are definitely more capable than you think when it comes to building stuff.

If the money you make barely covers your hosting costs, this might mean two things: 1) Not many people know about your solution, 2) you are not solving a big problem. 1 should be correct, if you've managed to make 8€/month, it'd be really odd if all the money you can make with your solution is capped at this amount. There should definitely be more people willing to pay you, you just have not managed to meet them. Maybe you should spend more time about distribution. I also think 2 might be true, too. Maybe instead of building ideas right away, you may spend more time evaluating ideas, talking to people to understand what's important.

Last of all, I think defining characteristics of successful entrepreneurs include resourcefulness and perseverance.

This sounds to me like you are looking at the "skin" of what other people do and trying to replicate that instead of digging into the guts behind why their thing was successful.

I talk a lot with my sons about how dragons in fiction are "the red dragon" and "the blue dragon" and "the green dragon" etc. And maybe the red dragon breathes fire and the blue dragon breathes ice and the green dragon breathes acid, but they all look essentially identical except for the color, like you took a stamp and stamped out three dragons and colored them all differently with crayons.

In reality, if you have three species that are that fundamentally different in function, they will look vastly different. It won't be the same body, but with different skin.

You can see this readily in nature. Penguins are birds. But they are birds that don't fly, live in a very cold climate and swim. They look vastly different from most birds that live in warmer climates and fly instead of swimming.

So, no, it isn't sufficient to replicate the "skin" of a successful business. You need to do research and find out what the hidden parts are that make it actually work. This is sometimes called "the secret sauce."

No matter how much public data is available about a business, there will be things the public doesn't know -- The working guts of the business that happens behind the scenes. This is what you appear to be missing.

In my thirties, I was doing similar things. I was pursuing the trappings of a business without actually accomplishing anything.

The crux of all business is you need paying customers. You need to figure out a thing of value that people will pay you for. If you can't figure that out, the trappings aren't going to do anything. If you have that, layering on some trappings of business can improve things.

But you have to have that piece first and foremost. And from where I sit, you don't seem to be doing that piece.

So long as you’re actually putting businesses out into the universe you’re a full fledged entrepreneur.

I can’t tell you why you haven’t been as successful as you want to be. That kind of advice is all over the place. Perhaps the comments here are right: figure out what the customer wants first and make a minimal first product. Perhaps they’re wrong and you should incubate them for longer or perhaps some third thing (partner with someone else? It’s not bad to be the drummer in the Beatles).

But I think self-doubt is a natural part of creativity and maybe even a sign you’re on the right track.

1. Do a Google Trends research on the Linux commands people search for (and get trouble with/get confused with). Pick ~5 most popular ones.

2. Find 2-5 pages on the Internet for each command where people asked for help and didn't get a 100% satisfying reply.

3. Write a description page (or article) for each of those commands, explaining the stuff people struggle with. Publish link on pages found at #2. Unless you write something cheesy there, people will actually be helpful and won't ban you.

4. Install Google Analytics. Set yourself a proxy goal of 1000 users per day. Start analyzing: how many views per day do you get from a Linux command with score of X in Google Trends with Y links on it from other forums? Back-propagate your goal to actionable items: write N more pages on topics A,B and C, M links for each.

5. Once you get >1000 visitors/day, you can start monetizing it. A very rough ballpark estimate is $1 per 1000 views (give or take, more like 0.1$-10$ depending on a plethora of factors).

6. Once you get a flow of at least $1/day, do your back-propagation again and make a system for yourself when you can look at a topic in Google Trends, quickly search relevant forums, and know exactly how many $/month would an article on this topic bring you. Then compare this income with your effort to write and promote an article and decide whether this is a business you want to do.

P.S. You can also get traffic on writing articles like "did you know those rare time-saving features of commands X, Y or Z" and publishing them on Reddit, HN and other similar sites. Once you figure out the right style to do it so that people will consider it helpful advice and not spam, you can get decent traffic.

Disclaimer: I use those techniques to advertise my paid tool for developers. It may not pay off for a purely ad-monetized content site.

If it is for yourself, then it will be hard.

If it is for the possible customer, then it might be a little bit easier.

Read “Leadership an Self Deception” for help in changing your mindset.

Maybe these are not the ultimate questions you want to get an answer for but are a great start.

Also be aware that everyone will start to realize their limits at some point. As children we could improve by endlessly repeating whatever we saw. After a while we need to work on finding the things from which we can learn and improve in a better rate. Also finding a balance between work and regeneration is key. Work efficiency and regeneration speed can be increased - thus allowing for better rate of learning. Also by not stressing over needless things you can save a lot of energy.

The more stable a system is the harder it is to rewire it - so we must sometimes start over and make things a bit unstable to find new paths.

Good luck!

1. Use my own time to learn new things while building a startup. This means I get less fatigued after s day job.

2. Focus more on solving a passion problem than being an entrepreneur. I’ve found I’m a lot happier building the right solution to a problem than figuring out how to make it a business. I won’t taint the right solution by putting business needs first.

3. Learn to enjoy the act of creating than the art it produces. This means you’ll sustain being in ‘the dip’ for longer.

4. Listen to audio books and mix it between entrepreneurship/startup topics and self decelopment. Some of my biggest improvements to happiness have come from books that help me enjoy the moment more.

5. Do one thing at a time and focus on doing it well. A fox can’t chase two rabbits, so you can’t chase building 5 parts at once. No. 3 and 4 help me do this.

6. Consider finding a cofounder who can do the bits you don’t enjoy. They should also be obsessed with solving the same problem.

7. Don’t let imposter syndrome get to you. Some people let it affect them, others don’t even consider it. It has nothing to do with ability. Learn to enjoy learning, and explore No. 4 to build your resilience to feeling anxious and how to deal with other people in a more enjoyable way.

8. Be okay with the discomfort you are felling and believe that a set of actions can solve it. You just need to experiment with different actions and see which ones fail and which ones succeed. You have a lifetime to explore this.

I was in your shoes for the past 10 years. I get distracted too easily. Since then I found a great couple of co-founders, we’ve released a beta but are completely obsessed with the problem area we’re solving. We love what we are doing and aren’t in a rush, but are hungry for success. You too can get there, it won’t happen overnight so thinking in terms of smaller wins is the best approach. The big wins are a product of lots of smaller ones.

It's hard to keep anything going only during weekends as you spend 90% of your energy just trying to find momentum.

Re "But after one day of programming for my job, I am exhausted and I cannot extract any brain-juice any more. And if I try to work during the week-ends, I can't rewind enough for the next week" -- I had exactly this problem too. It depends a lot on your other commitments, but after years of failing to do anything productive in evenings and weekends (evenings, too tired; weekends, too easy to procrastinate), I partially solved this by spending 30-60 minutes every morning on side projects. Waking up earlier was hard, but I managed to get into the habit of spending some time in a cafe on my way to work. The change in environment (not home) and the very limited time (often I only have one well-defined goal for a morning session) makes me super productive.

I still battle with consistency, but I create a lot during these times. One thing I'm working on is a guide on how to start your own company in 30 minutes a day. It's still at idea stage, but there's a (currently partially broken) website slowly being pieced together[0]

[0] https://startyourown.co/