I am done. I give up
I tried everything - building an audience, making sure my product actually solved a problem, getting paying customers, and writing high-quality content and contributing to the community. But no matter what I did, I couldn't seem to get anywhere. My efforts were fruitless and I'm tired of trying. I barely had 20 followers, my substack and product blogs didn't get any signups, and while I did get a few upvotes (8) on Product Hunt once, I never had a paid customer. It was as if the world was against me and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make any progress. I remember trying to interact and hype up my fellow indiehackers on Twitter, regularly engaging with their content, but no one ever paid any attention to me or followed me back. It was like I didn't even exist in the world of entrepreneurship. And even when I did get some attention, it was short-lived and never led to anything substantial.
But it's not just the lack of success that's getting me down. It's also the constant stream of digital nomad influencers on Twitter who sell extremely distorted, rosy, and often times false dreams to indie entrepreneurs like myself. They make it seem like building a successful startup is easy and anyone can do it with the right mindset and a few key tips. But the reality is that it's not that simple. It's fucking hard and it takes more than just a positive attitude to make it.
I know I'm not alone in feeling this way. There are so many other indie entrepreneurs out there who are struggling and feeling like they'll never make it. If you're one of them, I want you to know that you're not alone. It's okay to feel defeated and to want to give up. But please don't give up. Keep pushing forward and don't let the failures define you. There's always a chance for success, no matter how small it may seem.
But for me, I can't take it anymore. I've hit rock bottom and I have nothing left to give. To all the indie hackers, hacker news, and Reddit readers out there, please don't be fooled by the false promises of digital nomad influencers. Building a startup is hard work and it takes time. It's not as easy as they make it seem and it's not for everyone. Don't let your dreams consume you like they did for me, and PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PROTECT YOUR MENTAL HEALTH AT ALL COST! Don't make the same mistakes I did and realize that entrepreneurship may not be the path for you. It's okay to admit defeat and move on to something else.
1,016 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 525 ms ] threadOtherwise, yes, this was my experience too: in our noisy world dominated by huge corporations, indie hackers stand little chance to get their message out and pick some interest.
I wish you all the best in whatever it is that you choose to do.
don't be so hard on yourself. sadly the market is rational when mature, and a lot of social media driven ideas have already hit that stage of low alpha.
Maybe an unfair view but those are the "get rich quick with no effort" ideas that these people are into.
Here's some advice: if you want to make money selling a software product, sell to people who are able and willing to spend money on it.
Two things come to my mind:
1) "indie hackers" are way easier to get a relation started with than companies or even start-ups. And forget about big enterprise if you don't have an angel investor or some other experienced and well-connected guidance.
2) With smaller users, you're more likely to get better testing and feedback. In companies of all sizes, it's rare to have a "we have an issue with vendor X's software" pipeline that goes straight from the affected user to the vendor, in most cases every report or feedback question will take six to seven steps in between.
Most people that have expertise on agriculture, oil drilling, saw-milling etc where there are real opportunities don't know much about startups or know how to build an app.
They’re influencers. That’s why people want their attention.
I think it kinda has the look of a cool lifestyle from the outside (to some). They’re digital nomads and they travel to cool places and meeting cool people and tweeting big graphs that go up and to the right. They disavow lots of possessions (again a nomad) while professing being all tech all the time. Once upon a time tech-entrepreneurs might have rented a shack in Palo Alto, but now they tweet while couch surfing in Lisbon. Silicon Valley is too crowded when you’re solo.
I would take a house in Palo Alto over an airport lounge and an AirBnB du jour but the nomadic life is honestly cheaper and seems attainable, if only I can build that indie business.
What is an indie business?
The actual business seems to be taking photos of yourself on the beach and making money as an influencer, while telling people you made money from your startup though.
At least that’s my impression. Maybe there are counter examples.
You're more likely thinking of Instagram, Twitter or YouTube influencers.
A key theme for many is building lifestyle businesses that collectively provide “passive income” and financial independence. But unlike “FIRE” it’s “financial independence, casually work while enjoying life”
A common and well known person is Pieter Levels:
https://levels.io/projects/
Mostly video courses, job board websites, affiliate link hustles.
I was looking at some forums and it seems that the first question after someone arrives in a new place is "where do i meet you guys (digital nomads)". It seems to me that it's a closed group of people selling things to each other.
Tbc, I don't have anything against this kind of living, and in fact i d like it to be easier to work in other countries. Unfortunately, even within the EU you can't work in another country.
For digital nomads, that community has to be online, which is a difficult landscape. You are competing with every online business across the globe, and it's difficult to gauge the desire for what you're selling. Just being online won't do it, and even if you find some customers, have you found all of them? Maybe you missed a connection to a broader community that needs what you sell. You'd never know.
But from my thrown made of failed SaaS products, the biggest mistake I see solo-entrepreneurs make, often they don't know what they're selling. They know what they're building, and they conflate their solo-SaaS business with venture capitalist powered startup. VC startups aren't businesses yet, they're proto-businesses, they can afford to be a lofty idea and the money can happen later. Solo-entrepreneurs, you don't have that luxury. You have to have the "business" part, the money flow, figured out already.
My advice for someone who is trying to bootstrap a solo-business on the net: have a product that someone can buy as soon as you quit your paying job. If no one can give you money, you're just counting down the days until you can even begin being a business.
Developers are cheap bastards (I'm still fighting over whether I should shell our $99 for Panic's Nova editor or not - even though it would be the perfect fit for my editing needs. But I'm a cheap bastard and VIM is good enough so...)
I guess "indiehackers" aren't much different. Only maybe they have less disposable income that old fart developers?
Dev tools is one of the hardest segments to tackle.
Developers are notoriously cheap and every one of your developer-customers (falsely) assumes they could build a better version of your product over the weekend.
Developers will always compare your fully-featured, supported product to a shitbag OSS "free" alternative they found on GitHub (abandoned by some dude who tried to build a clone to a real product over the weekend and then discovered that is actually not possible...)
Developers will take great pains to overstate the case for building internal tools as it gives them more control and embededness in an organization.
Selling to developers is not for the faint of heart -- and ironically, takes MORE* sales skill than, say, selling marketing automation tools to marketers. No sales/marketer will say to you on a sales call:
"You know, I could build that if I wanted to...."
First-time entrepreneurs who happen to be developers often attack devtools because that is all they know.
*This is a weird self-esteem insecurity tic.
Am a developer and can confirm. I am a cheap bastard.
They get to maintain one version of the app, with a reasonable number of feature flags, and users get to pay when something adds value.
[1] https://agenda.com/
Just like being an author, it's hard to make a living writing (books : software) unless you're either very skilled+lucky (Brandon Sanderson : Jetbrains) or sell to companies (HR/marketing position at a company : either making B2B software or working for a software company yourself).
You can use that stuff safely if you can survive losing it and continue reasonably (e.g., switch to Emacs or Jenkins). If you can't, it's a huge risk.
This has nothing to do with proprietary software. Sublime Text, for instance, is proprietary software, but there is zero lock-in because it operates on plain text files. This argument is invalid.
But yeah many developers look at prices badly. Will it save you more time/effort than the price? That's the threshold. Not some abstract idea of "worth the money."
I strongly doubt OP wants advice.
I want to be rich and famous and loved by the world... I want a private jet... I want to be successful and admired by many... I want a big house... I want to be recognised as the best amongst my peers... I want a nice car... I want to get promotion and a pay rise... I want a house... I want to keep this job... I want to rent somewhere better... I want a job I don't hate... I want to afford to have the heating on...
Unfortunately, as you point out, the internet makes your own perceived 'failure' seen like an outlier, rather than the norm that it actually is. It's infuriating when you've worked hard at something --like a product or a written piece or some art-- and got no interest at all. And you look at YouTube and see some vaccuous fuckwitt with a million views for a video of them opening a box.
I know. I've 'Been there. Done that. Bought the T-shirt ' so many times I could open a T-shirt shop... which, naturally, wouldn't get any customers.
I'm guessing you're pretty young, as you're taking this failure to become the next Elon Musk pretty personally. You also need to learn to separate you as a person from your crazy schemes and, when they come crashing down round your ears, just shrug and move on.
As I've got older, I've come to terms with the fact I'm never going to amount to anything, if my yardstick for success is internet likes or upvotes. But I'm a decent person and, in the real world, my family and friends think I'm a good bloke. So fuck all that fake internet popularity shite.
Why would it be defeat? I understand you would like to have taken this path, but it not meant to be for you, so what?
I'm guessing you are under 30 and did not figure out everything life has to offer (as nobody ever can), but in the grand scheme of your life, you should be proud you tried and moved on, you probably won't regret it later. The things we always regret in life are the "what would have happened if"s, not the trying hards, so I consider this a win, not a failure.
Staying disciplined for years is so much easier when you have competent and compassionate cofounders with you. You might even get away with a few vacations.
It does not help that the media only celebrates the few lucky ones, and because they were lucky they will propagate all their steps of wonderful execution, but overlooking the fact that they were just with the right timing, market & people. That it was pure luck.
There are more journeys in life to be happy than being an entrepreneur. There are more paths towards personal fulfilment.
And for anything with bigger ambitions than a lifestyle business, don’t forget connections. Most founders are still men from Ivies or Stanford. Just look at the “PayPal mafia” to see how inbred tech investing can be.
Not that most entrepreneurs need or should expect VC funding, but this is HN, run by a VC. You can totally run a business and be successful without it.
Is that also true for YC startups? I felt like YC (while still playing the capitalist's game) was providing a more equal opportunity to start-up "luck" by just looking at the numbers :)
Eg - academic breakdown of founders
- % founders that already knew a YC grad personally
- founders that knew YC investors
- etc
If you are the principal investor in your venture, you may be willing to leave some potential return on the table, in exchange for dialling down risk to a comfortable level.
If funds are the principal investors, they have already dialled down their risk via diversification over the rest of their portfolios, and they will view any risk-adversity on your part as inefficient dead loss.
Solid base hit or swing for the bleachers? You may have the option to pick either strategy in the former case, but will not in the latter.
I wrote about these options long ago:
https://jacquesmattheij.com/three-roads-to-the-top-of-the-mo...
"Living well is the best revenge". And if you're someone who has the skills to turn their time into significant value-add, seeking revenge is an opportunity cost that undoubtedly counts as "living poorly".
[caveat: I have had to litigate on occasion, but (a) that is something where hours spent are indirect, via counsel, and (b) it's not exactly "living well", either]
There are also a lot of products and services that can't be built by venture backed businesses. If you are bootstrapping, there is a big advantage in building something in this category, because then you can go at the pace that's organically the most efficient.
I just wanted to provide a counter-example: Bootstrapping worked for me, but I was ready to live happily on 1800€ per month (France, where it’s reasonable), and remain small. It also required being able to part from anyone who would think 500€ a day for a consultant is reasonable, or that 20€/u/m is ok for a SAAS app.
A common thread is the celebration of how far they've come. One from living in a shed (with his wife) in a friends backyard. Another in an unused room of a 100 year old building.
Even with funding there are no guarantees.
Historically to the term, people would retire to vacation towns (the lifestyle) and run things like bike shops or an ice cream stand just to have some income, not to be CxO and get rich.
You can't be coerced to make business decisions like selling out to a competitor or aggressively raising prices if you own the company.
I sometimes explain to customers that if my business were VC-funded, it would grow and be developed much faster, but in the end there would need to be an exit and there is no exit scenario that is good for the customers. Think about it: there could be an IPO, in which case the business would need to start addressing a huge audience and increase growth (which always hurts existing customers), there could be a strategic acquisition or an acquihire, very few of which go right (this usually results in shutting down the service within 2-3 years), or the VCs could decide to fold the company, stopping the service outright. There is simply no good scenario.
And employees.
This early employee was doing some real heart-searching about what he was going to do though, now that any hopes of personal growth at this company had been dashed. He could probably stay a developer there forever, of course, but any career growth would not be in the cards for at least several years since all management positions were filled and he was already the most senior engineer around.
I don't mean to imply that stable businesses who make employees happy are impossible, but at some point you will just not be able to make everyone happy at the same time.
Next year we’ll drop to 4 day weeks at some point to further reward the staff beyond ever growing comp.
I wouldn't say that a "able to run on autopilot" is necessarily the defining feature, but rather the attitude towards growth. The simply, the goal in starting and running the business is to support a work-life balance that is more strongly weighted towards life. As such, growing a lifestyle business beyond a certain point is counter productive since that leads to a more responsibility and less time for other stuff.
A bootstrapped business does still have growth as a primary goal and there is intention to reach a larger size and complexity.
While I'm not sure that I like the term "lifestyle" to describe it, I'm not sure what a better one is since "bootstrapped" means something different in this context.
I don't think this is right, most of the "lifestyle businesses" I've seen involve at least "normal" levels of work on their part, but are structured so that the work happens where & when suits other parts of their lives, or similar. At least the ones where that term made sense.
They are often located somewhere that causes some friction, or have opportunities to grow that they don't take on, etc.
Most people who look down on lifestyle businesses often have the lifestyle to begin with, or are their… yet to be accomplished followers. It’s koolaid that can lose a decade of so many peoples lives. Anyone who looks down on lifestyle businesses should introspect on where it came from that it’s ok for them to look down kn another’s choices and personal formula. Not everyone has a safety net and building one for yourself let’s you really swing for the fences if you wanted. Or not.
Lots of business skills transfer from small business to big things.
All big things consist of small things.
Getting really good at small things is what makes you really good at big things instead of having the details to others.
Learning enough business skills before you need them means you can self fund though paid customer discoveries but being a well paid enough consultant. But that takes years to get really good at, and many times we don’t really consider if we’re going to love an area for the rest of our lives it’s going to be decades and not years. Having 5 figure monthly skills puts you on a very different and equal footing with investors who buy the time of people in their 20s like a toy. Others are much more conscientious. Anyone who wants to help you investment or not needs to bring more tot he table than money, specifically relationships that are meaningful to you.
How small, is there not just as much innovation and vision required to make an atom work compared to a molecule or something bigger?
Lots of things must be learned by learning to sit stand and walk before running. Entrepreneurship is a pretty harsh self development mirror.
Entrepreneurship is a marathon, as much as people feel it’s a sprint.
If founders take vc money save for angels, founders are almost guaranteed to be replaced as founder by a corporate type one day because founders usually don’t have or develop the business skills quickly enough.
Investment is not for the many, it is for the few. Most startups in all sectors are self funded. I feel this is one of the biggest sleights of hand for our time. Investment isn’t success either, it’s just a different kind of pressure to grow at any cost even if it’s not the right one or the one you might have picked had you waited a few months extra.
If you don’t want any investor to tell you when to go home, it’s often valuable to learn the difference between freelancing -> contracting -> consulting —> product. Lots of transferable skills the least of which is understanding jobs to be done.
You can benefit from a natural relentless curiousity and resourcefulness. Otherwise building a startup falls to being about tech and not learning how to build distribution.
Customers don’t care what you code in. Spending more time hanging around hanging out in online communities vs with customers and their pains is a red flag. Indiehackers is a great read, product hunt is nice too but none will replace doing the work that is hitting the streets and talking to elope face to face even if on video.
To the OP: It’s ok to go build other skills and often they will shed a more positive light on this time. You will discover you certainly have picked up a lot of valuable skills that others will pay for. That experience can uncover lots of needs that have no solution. Or, you may find something that you can do, and consider with a different perspective. You have value. You will add value. You will create value. You will continue becoming more well rounded.
Mostly true. I won’t be your customer if you use electron though.
You’d might get stuck with Flutter instead :)
- It is about building solid product and distribution at this stage, other stuff can wait
- If you can self-fund customer discoveries (essentially get people to pay you while teaching you about the market) you are 80% of the way there
- If you have nothing else, business skills plus an enormous amount of elbow grease will go a long way
That's my own personal lens on it anyway
About creating millions in value, it really does compound, and it’s about capturing the value too.
I have self-funded customer discovery regularly, if they won’t buy a discovery, they probably probably won’t buy a solution. It’s ok to educate them, let them try to solve it on their own and then the good ones come back.
Getting investment can be super helpful though. I like knowing how’s to get 2-10x value out of each dollar. It helps with growing fast. Current recession likely makes it easier for me to raise investment in some ways.
I sometimes go out of my way to recommend everything but my own solution. It’s better when they connect the dots, and if they can’t.
Most B2B saas in time need a professional services division of some kind - so why not get the customer to pay for the sales cycle, as long as it might be. It’s an easier form of seeming the breakthrough. I hang out in Academia and other slow industries though sometimes and have to pass the time. It’s changing though thankfully.
Many customers want to pay to learn and get comfortable and build buy in to become a 10-20y customer.
Business skills get you in the room for conversations at the level of strategy and direction, way better than selling in. It’s great leaving management consultants making way more than you adding no value to the convo because they don’t get the fundamental shift in the business is doing the change not studying it.
Lots of people will say that’s not advisable to go this deep, and they might be right. I’ve found going deep on things leads to warm introductions to other people’s problems. Demonstrating care about someone else’s business done right does open doors. Doing things that doesn’t scale gets you access that doesn’t scale to the many.
I’ve recently come across an author by the name of April Dunford that made my add value first and awesome approach fell a little less alone, and special which is awesome. She is amazingly well written and spoken. Going to read more of her stuff in the next few months.
I accidentally closed a paid pilot over a lunch by making fun of all the software in my space including my own as the reason to refused to put it in place for him even though it would get him forward in the short term. He is a pioneer and because the future needs to be built in his world his tools have to be as well instead of doubling down on tech anchored the past.
I find most sales are the byproduct of trust in showing people how to navigate the information overload out there. It’s good to get the bad fits out of your hair, the rest more than make up for it. I’m going to try to make 2023 more vocal about being very different and see how it goes.
Edit: Timebox it. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work.
Running a business is always hard and will always be hard, since it's a competitive activity against other humans who are also clever, hard-working and ambitious. Non-hardworking founders need an incredible niche or they will eventually be driven out by competitors who are just as smart but work harder.
But..isn't that how it always worked?
That's the key part of the "entrepreneur" story the OP missed. From Gates over Zuckerberg to Musk, all these people were born rich, into well-connected families. If you do not belong to this ultra-privileged class of people, your chances of doing what they did is practically zero.
There's no way I wanted the pressure to run a business in my 20s. A decade or so later with a cushy job gives me the financial freedom to do this without the high risk of failure, since if it tanks I'll still have other investments. Most entrepreneurs are in their 40s apparently according to research.
This is not true!
I have seen successful business built from scratch by people who had no connections, no money and no privileged background (and no VC money). And I will say this for sure, it is lots of hard work and hustle. Luck comes to those who do these things first, it is not the other way round.
The people I known are serial entrepreneurs, so this certainly is not luck. Yes, some ventures do not succeed, but then the company immediately pivots to things that are actually making money.
As I mentioned earlier, it is not easy. It is lot of hard work and hustle.
If you don't want to rely on luck, you have to work from the bottom. The VC, top down approach is very risky indeed, but a different game exists.
Finding people who have problems that could be solved through better software is not hard. Listen to them. Make their life easier. Generalize, improve, start selling to other people who have the same issues. Spot opportunities related to your market, your tech, your customers.
There is a ton of demand, especially at small/local scale. If you are efficient, a moderate amount of upfront work can provide ton of value to countless people. They will gladly pay for it, especially if they feel listened to.
You will recognise the speaker :)
May I ask what industries you’ve targeted?
Businesses or Customers?
Look around you. What problems do you see, for yourself or for others?
If you want to solve your own problem then that is easy. Then you have to look for other people in your circle (online and offline) who have this same problem and then charge them for that.
If you see someone else with a problem, then talk to them face to face to understand the real issue and whether they will pay. See if there are at least 5-10 people with this same problem, and you have some opening that will start a business.
After that you have to keep hustling to keep this growing. It is a hard slog, but that is how it actually works.
Education and general SMEs.
> Businesses or Customers?
B2B, B2C and also B2B2C.
There is luck involved too.
It may not be obvious from the outside and may not require connections, coming from money.
Every successful startup and bootstrap story there are elements of being lucky.
The right idea at the right time has an element of luck.
Being featured in a major publication or website.
Meeting the right clients.
Hiring people with unknown connections or skills or just hiring the right people.
Even down too day to day operations, there are events that luckily happen. Catching a bug, calling a client at the right time, raising prices, choosing a new feature to roll out that brings product market fit.
There is definitely skills, planning, research and hard work.
But if you've worked for a startup you know there is an element of luck.
I've worked on/for dozens of indie/bootstrapped startups.
Currently employee #8, developer #2 at a funded startup.
Follow the dream, the journey is part of the fun, do it responsibly financially and take care of your mental health, take time for family and friends, have hobbies. It's not for everyone but most people can do it.
Don't become consumed by the entre-porn. This is a real problem. It's addicting and can easily affect your mental health.
I always recommend this talk for those interested in creating their own startup, still relevant today. Thanks @DHH. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY
A simple "proof" using logic is finding someone who worked really hard and failed (called a proof by contradiction): this is not hard, many have worked really hard and don't have much to show for it. Thus, hard work does not lead to success. But it does enable it.
Similarly, there are plenty of cases where someone was lucky but still blew it up (FTX anyone?). So just like with hard work, luck does not mean guaranteed success. It does, however, enable it.
That "hard work" you describe is missing the component of "smart work". If people "have worked really hard and don't have much to show for it", then that is not smart work. When I used the words "hard work" it implicitly includes smart work. Otherwise the person should not be an entrepreneur. If I start digging a hole in the hope that some how I will build a castle is not smart work. Hard work, definitely but not smart work.
You also used "hustle", which is usually unrelated to "smart", and actually has negative connotations as well (as in a "hustler") — I did not take it as such because that wouldn't make sense. Again: doh!
It helps nobody to be overly pedantic instead of looking for the most reasonable interpretation of what you read.
If you don't risk destitution after your startup fails, you can try and fail many times, learn and try again.
It's like continuously rolling two dice, and you only need to get double sixes once, and after that it's private jets until you die.
One of the many reasons the rich get richer and the poor, well you know how it goes.
Most startup founders work other jobs while building their project - if they can afford to fail, it's because they have that other job. But they're spending those four hours (and many, many more) on labors of love.
Sure, there are some trustfund kids who get to play founder and have the odds stacked in their favor, but that's neither the soul nor the joy of starting your own project. In my experience most of those types are miserable even in success.
Who built their billion dollar company while working a day job again?
Same for Zuckerberg and school.
You don’t hit a billion dollars while having a dayjob. You validate the idea and approach work and can get you there.
Anthony Bourdain famously quit his job only when it had become absolutely impossible to keep alongside his public persona work because interviewers/journalists kept disrupting restaurant operations at his job.
Citation needed. I’m quite sure that working a second job does not go down well with VCs. In most cases the networking required and high risk of failure is only achievable through having well-off parents.
You can't really tell if something's possible if you begin by simply complaining it's impossible. Is the world rigged toward helping rich kids? Sure. But fools and their fortune are quickly separated. Using inequity as a basis for complaining and giving up before even trying is really the fastest road to bitterness... and it's not even a fair or knowledgeable take, since it doesn't come from true personal experience or personally failed attempts which are, if nothing else, highly educational.
Unfortunately it's rarely discussed in society as such. The political parties that built these welfare states have traditionally been associated with worker unions, and entrepreneurship isn't high on their agenda. The Nordic right-wing parties got ideologically married to Thatcher-style neoliberalism and prefer to yammer endlessly about tax cuts instead of thinking about how the welfare foundation can help entrepreneurship.
Fortunately there are some successful people who talk about this. For example in Finland the Supercell founders (gaming company with $10B exit) have been emphasizing the importance of the welfare structures for enabling entrepreneurship opportunities.
Nordic countries have the safety net countered with a mentality that is borderline entrepreneur-hostile and the law of Jante on top of that so safety nets may be the few pro-entrepreneurship things they have. Finland of the lot is also capital poor so no huge investor funds or such.
Just Eat, Deliveroo and The Hut Group; Monzo, Starling and Revolut, from another era, there's ARM.
I'm sure there's fintech ones (not a sector I know much about) and the guy who sits near me in the office, who has an AI-healthcare startup, says the Britain is very good at those too.
The UK has an advantage here over the US in that the tech and finance sectors are both based in London whereas in the US they are split between California and New York.
At least in Finland, most of the stuff that would be big is sold early, the founders take the 10M and retire to their cottages in the middle of nowhere (edit: I don't mean this the bad way, I'd probably do it too).
Without basic foundational creations/discoveries that we can all take for granted, there would be nothing for the vectoralists to build on top of.
California has very little in common with Nordic social-democracy. Even when looked at relatively to the rest of the US. And this is particularly true when one looks at the subject at hand, which is social safety nets. The "relative" approach has its limits.
You’re right it makes no sense but I think it’s undeniable California is used as an example of failed policies around social welfare and taxation by, say, Texas and Florida politicians.
But I do live in California for the last 10 years.
In Europe, I heard that you have personao liability to your employees, libertarian-style.
The Netherlands is split in this I think, but the entrepreneurs I know are nothing like this. They appreciate the safety net and often happily pax taxes, its more that they hate the labour involved. And everybody I speak to has acutely aware of the possibility of failure. Maybe its my circle though, there are also more radical libertarians in my country, but they are a rarity.
The risks are too high to found a company for little payoff.... and most founders that exit already pay a significant tax on exits (even when they are structured to reduce tax). Entrepreneurship is too hard of a game to put up with the mental and work grinding for a decade for small returns. Everyone focuses on the "money" a founder may make (with heavy survivorship bias) - but don't focus on the high probability of losing years, or a decade, of lost revenue and social life if a company fails.
HN is filled with want-trapreneurs who are mis-guided about the game they're entering.
Heavily progressive income tax makes it harder for individuals to accumulate capital for enterprenial endeavours, be it their own or investing in others'. This limits early stage investments and growth.
Also, there are limited incentives in investing in careers and productivity as net income is surprisingly similar in lowest 10% and highest 10% income earners.
Also, the military is 20% of the discretionary budget, but 10% or less of the total budget.
Something doesn't quite add up, as there's appears to be a constant shortage of such talent.
Perhaps high skilled ones would prefer a country with better climate ... :-)
You do pay out the ass for it though so good job making someone rich I guess? Shame about all the dead babies though[2].
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health... [1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality... [2] https://www.americashealthrankings.org/learn/reports/2019-an...
Just to be clear, I was referring to the Nordic countries, Australia, better performing OECD countries, etc and not referring to the US.
Your links bear out my position, that US "free market | low taxes" approach doesn't deliver good outcomes for the masses.
The argument that other countries might be technically higher in taxes will remain moot so long as in the US, needing an ambulance could mean years of financial hardship if you're not sufficiently well off. The same goes for lodging, food safety, etc.
Once you add those in, the Nordics still pay a bit more, but not by the margin you might expect.
Your mileage will of course vary a lot depending on specifics, and especially which US states you compare with.
While you could probably find cheaper places to live in the US than California, and therefore find much more agreeable tax rates, it's not that easy. Culture varies a lot in the US. I love the South, but a some folks would rather drink poison than live there.
And you can't forget property taxes. These vary at the county or city level and can be quite significant. And, just for fun, they generally pay for the public schools, which depending on where you are may be abysmally awful, so now your "tax rate" includes stumping for private school, which could be the equivalent to a year's salary in some Nordic countries.
If you want to compare the real costs and benefits of starting a business you need to compare like for like, which includes all national, state, and privatised taxes and other indirect costs.
When you include those the reality-based answer is that the US fares relatively poorly.
Which is why the US has a more aggressive VC sector. Whether by accident or design start-ups are forced to look for outside funding far earlier, and bootstrapping is far harder.
The result is more of a monoculture that chases unicorns and less of a vibrant sector of independent small and medium businesses, some of which will grow into unicorns naturally.
What the US does differently from most of the EU is to hide as much spending as possible in the form of targeted tax breaks. From a cash flow perspective little changes but from a political standpoint it’s not spending.
The real drag is the US healthcare system, which effectively finances most of the medical R&D for the US, India, South America, and Europe, and also provides ridiculous levels of treatment for people who are about to die (in comparison to other health systems). There is also the US social security system, which seems to be very inefficient at best...
US healthcare spending hardly subsidizes the rest of the world. Paperwork and insurance overhead don’t magically turn into R&D money. Litigation, malpractice insurance, excessive testing etc is just waste.
At best ~12% of US healthcare spending is for retail drugs, but it’s not that relevant globally when you consider how much US companies are spending on advertising vs R&D. Which is then compounded by how much more expensive US drug trials are.
So yes, you can get imaginary defense costs to ~4%, but I ask you where is the coast guard, national guard, DoE, or VA’s budget here? “The budget funds five branches of the U.S. military: the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Space Force.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_... Some might argue the national guard isn’t defense spending but we sent 250,000 guard members to Iraq and the guard is fielding F-35’s.
I will acknowledge some some outliers like the United States Border Patrol, while it’s job is literally defending the border it probably shouldn’t be included in defense spending.
PS: It gets even sillier, not that long ago we where hiding the cost of the Iraq war from defense spending numbers.
The question is, how do we build a stronger representative government in the United States (where I live) when we're so divided and distrusting? Having a common enemy might work, but it can't be another group of people to go to war with. Might need to be the metaphorical devil(s) on our shoulders, and for that we need good mental health training from a young age, which now, given how broken and dispersed so many family groups are, requires tax money guided by science and wisdom.
You and I are here but a moment. The bleeding edge of life will quickly pass us by, and the positive impact I am most proud of is the love and care I give to future generations, human and otherwise.
Also, you’re romanticizing what happens with tax money. When a major portion of it is going to a military I have no say in, I don’t get warm fuzzy feelings contributing my portion to the feds.
> how do we build a stronger representative government in the United States (where I live) when we're so divided and distrusting?
You’re assuming the conclusion here. Many people want a much weaker federal government and your question can be rephrased as “how do we make the anti-government people go away?”
Additionally, the government doesn’t require you to network with the right people, come from the right subculture, etc.
Do you want your “taxes” to go to the needy or the wealthy? Because in startups angel investors are capturing bigger percentages of the capital from your labor than the government.
Best data I could find[2] after a quick google on USA puts income distribution ratio around 5.2x, so not much of a substantial difference in gross income disparity vs USA at the 20th/80th percentiles. Personal income tax rate is about 37%[3], so certainly USA lets you keep more of your paycheck than Denmark.
So high earners in US are making ~20% more than their peers in Denmark relative to the bottom 20% in their respective countries, and folks in the US pay ~20% less tax as well.
Certainly it's a notable difference but we're not talking orders of magnitude here, especially since the above math doesn't account for all of the benefits that higher tax rate brings, both tangible and intangible.
However, when we're talking in absolute numbers, most Danes out-earn most Americans. The median wage in the US is ~$52k [4] vs Denmark at ~$72k [5], which closes the gap even more.
I suspect there are significant differences and outliers at the extremes however, and that is likely where most of the VC money lives - whether we're talking about angel investors dropping >$100k or VCs spending millions on pre-revenue companies. I'd wager we're well into the top 1% of earners in the US doing the funding. This is the most likely explanation to account for the differences in early stage investments and growth opportunities you described above, imho.
[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/denmark/income-distribution-eur...
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/denmark/personal-income-tax-rat...
[2] https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-income-percen...
[3] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/personal-income-t...
[4] https://www.averagesalarysurvey.com/united-states
[5] https://www.averagesalarysurvey.com/denmark
This is one reason the energy Windfall taxes being proposed everywhere seem ludicrous to me. If you tax energy producers at a high marginal rate, they will actually be disincentivized from producing a lot of energy. This is basic economics/human nature.
>The people you rob (the ones paying the bulk of taxes) have a lower incentive to produce.
Sure, the thought of being worth only 150 billion dollars rather than 300 would stop Bezos from starting Amazon.
The fact of the matter is that the EU has a staggeringly low output when it comes to tech innovation compared to the US. Their policies and regulations shape this.
Marginal personal income tax rates, which is what others keep comparing here, are only relevant for wage earners.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Norway
Depends what you’re comparing to. Total comp for great engineers in Oslo is lower than for their peers in Silicon Valley.
They're not particularly cheap in the US either. Toronto might be better but hi-tech salaries are going up as well.
https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/rates/wealth-tax/
I wonder how the wealth tax actually works. Do I want people to invest in my company if that's just going to increase the valuation and my tax bill? Surely there must be some exceptions...
Moving to the US I was able to 5-6x my income (from what I could have realistically made) , while reducing my tax burden by 15 percentage points, and so I've been happily living a workaholics' lifestyle since.
Looking back, it really boggles my mind how much engineering potential is squandered in Europe. You'd have to be an idiot to want to work hard given how raw of a deal you are getting (work for almost 2 decades as an engineer just so you can afford the average one family home - what a joke!) and people understand that intuitively (hence pushing for ever fewer work hours or even days because what else is there if your salary is essentially capped and you quickly hit a 50 % tax rate (when combining income tax and social security) for every additional hour worked).
</rant>
But I'm originally from Italy, and the tax rate is exorbitant down there as well, with ridiculously low salaries.
You do you, but there is more to life than gross income from your employer. This is why I'd rather stay in this continent.
Here in DC metro, a mid-career developer should be able to afford a home without much trouble. Many of the best jobs are well outside the city (Tysons to Ashburn corridor) where housing costs aren’t terrible.
I really don't understand this take. Why so many engineers feel entitled to have more than the average working Joe? If you are employed, our work is not risky, doesn't consume all your energy or your time, and so on.
I fully understand the _economics_ behind our salaries, but I am more than happy to give 45% of it to the society as a whole, so also who cannot afford the economy of scale (e.g., nurses, teachers), can still have a decent life.
I really cannot grasp the individualism about "I know how to write code, I deserve a better life than 95% of the population".
The difference is not that US workers earn more on average, but that being an engineer doesn’t make you automatically rich in Europe like it does in tbe USA.
What if we worded this in a different way: "I have a skill which is more in demand than the skills of 95% of the population"
Still, it doesn't mean I _deserve_ a high salary: I totally get why I get it, but I don't work harder, or studied harder, or really did anything more special than 95% of the population.
So, while I am able to earn more, I am happy to share part of it with the society as a whole, and this is why I am happy about my level of taxes, compared to the services provided.
There are wastes? Of course there are! So many! But the solution to "governments waste money" is not "less money to the governments", is "more accountability".
This is of course my view of the world, but I still haven't found anybody that explains why my job deserves to be in the top 5% earner in my country, apart from being just a consequence of the fact that my job scales to billions of users due its very nature (that is completely inconsequential from the choices I have made), while other jobs have physical limits and they don't scale.
On a more ideological level it feels like you're looking for some sort of moral or "greater truth" behind the economics, but I'm not sure it's there. You've shared your personal beliefs and motivations, and seem to have lots of conviction to guide yourself, so why ask someone else to convince you there's a deeper cause? Just use your results to act how YOU want to impact the outcomes of others.
I don't think any other (widely popular) work occupies so much of a one's mind as software engineering.
You're missing something here. You can omit the first sentence. People already believe they deserve a better life than 95% of the population, even without being able to code specifically.
It's not "I am a engineer, thus I deserve to have more", it's "I deserve more, what part of my life can I use to say this?".
If everyone desires to be above average and strives to produce more, earn more, then over time the average will rise. This is good.
Just because the nano machinery is invisible, doesent mean it cant spin great things from nothing. Half the giants you see today, were nothing one generation ago.
Above average investments (time , effort & money) have a natural feeling of entitlement for above average returns.
Cost of getting an engineering degree of value is nowhere near any "average" degree.
Recent years have driven the median cost up and the median returns down. Hence the laments about "college is not worth it"
Yeah sorry I can't fly to another country because I'm not satisfied with -only- a family home.
Overall, it's a trade-off, though. You are right about the US opportunities, but there are downsides, too:
- crime (you get crime everywhere, but the US has a particularly and unnecessarily high level of serious crime like gun crime - e.g. school shootings happen pretty regularly);
- not everyone has good healthcare & social services (I am aware you will not personally be exposed to that, as you will have private healthcare; but it even bothers me if people around me are ill and cannot afford to get cured. I don't want to live somewhere where I can get a regular check at the Mayo clinic and my neighbor cannot afford their emergency dentist);
- low average education level (people generally don't know much of the world, history, literature).
- cultural life (theater, classical music etc.) is very uneven distributed.
Also, US taxation isn't that low in general, it dramatically depends on the state you live in (TX 0% state tax versus NY, MN etc. >40%).
There are places in Europe that have small tax rates (CH, LU), but they are not the best places to live for everybody. Everyone needs to weigh their priorities and match with the overall "package" (e.g. Canada is a good compromise: near-US salaries but Europe-like education of the general public) - and in any case, not everyone is free to leave where they currently reside.
Austria in particular has rather low salaries (but also low rents) - but places like Vienna have a magic feel to it that just doesn't exist on other continents. In comparison, in neighboring Switzerland are very high (anyone with a tech Master's degree would be on a six digits salary), but with a huge salary gap between locals and expats for doing the same job.
(I have lived in the UK, US, CH and DE.)
I love Europe: its history, its music, its art, its architecture, its legacy - yes! the good and the bad -, its food, its cultures. But from my point of view we are killing ourselves, choked in an endless decay, metastasizing bureaucracy, and never-ending hopelessness.
I'm sure the Nordic Country are happy though, and that's the problem: American tend to compare the worst of their country with the best of our continent.
Everyone does that. There seems to be a type of bragging that works by emphasizing how much more dangerous one's own country/state/town/village is than someone else's.
If you're lucky. The salaries in my country are so abysmal that nobody in my generation can buy a house: the only one with houses inherited them or have rich parents.
> and so o I've been happily living a workaholics' lifestyle since.
That is one key aspect. I'm not a workaholic and most other people aren't either. I do somewhat enjoy my work, but I work to pay for my live, not the other way around. I make a decent salary and work 35h/week with 36 days of vacation. I do pay a lot of taxes, but I live in a city with pretty good and affordable public transit, I got my university education for free (okay, I admit, I paid a total of 600€ for my bachelors), etc.
In a well governed country, you don't only pay taxes but also receive something in return.
> work for almost 2 decades as an engineer just so you can afford the average one family home - what a joke!
This isn't necessarily a result of high taxes, its also a result of Europe being much denser populated than the US (or Australia), limiting the supply side for construction land. The kind of the construction also plays a role, the average newly built European home is substantially more solidly constructed than the reference in the US.
> hence pushing for ever fewer work hours or even days because what else is there if your salary is essentially capped
Have you ever considered that many people would much rather have more free time than more money? Beyond a certain level, increased income doesn't correlate with increased happiness/wellbeing. Where this level is certainly depends, but it is much lower than many people anticipate.
You will bankrupt from your accountants’ bills.
The EU has a lower output because there are fewer investors. One successful startup creates wealth in the hand of knowledgeable people who can create the next startup. There are simply not thousands of millionaires and billionaires who can successfully pick the next round. There is also less of a network effect where venture capitalists can offer their portfolio as leads for the sales teams of their new investments.
The Nordic welfare levels can turn out to be the path to European success. It's easier to start an idea when failure doesn't end in an existential crisis.
2. Progressive taxation is the basis on which the best places to live were built. This is an empirical observation, make of that what you will, but it's strange to give your gut feelings of "basic economics / human nature" more weight than objective reality.
3. Why do is the word "rob" applied to taxation? Without the state to at least enforce laws, enforce property rights, and physically protect you, there wouldn't even be any wealth creation. Your current life is only possible because you are inserted in a society, it's only far you have a debt to pay society back.
This is the kind of minimalist state that libertarians would agree to. People talk about robbery when the state is spending money on arbitrary things.
The fact that most people don’t agree is why tax is taken by force.
I'm quite confident that a lot of thought goes into pretty much all government spending, even if a proportion is misguided, counter productive, and non-essential.
Sure, but at some point it starts to sound abusive, like a narcissistic parent telling their child that they and not the little child owns their accomplishments, because without them the child would not have existed.
The state, at least in the US, is supposed to work for you, the people. The burden of proof is on the state if it wants to tax more and expand itself. It needs to justify every penny of the taxpayer's money it spends. It simply cannot take the position that everyone's output is by default a debt owed to it, and by its grace alone are the people allowed to keep some of it. That's the talk of the divine right of kings.
Perhaps Peter has earned his cash by working really hard. But perhaps not, perhaps he just exploited other people to hustle his way up some corporate food chain.
If Peter did in fact work hard and now he's stripped of the results of his labor while being told that probably he only managed to accumulate capital because he was just exploiting others, what incentive landscape does that create.
Is a lot of profit a function of factors much less commendable than creating value for others? Sure. But by lumping in the productive people with the parasites, you are undermining those people who deserve your protection the most.
At the very least, you have to start out with wealth or a strong support system (which is down to luck in your input conditions), or get fantastically lucky in your first(-ish) attempt at starting something.
Then, if you want to make the kind of money that, say, Bezos or Musk makes, you have to make the kinds of decisions that many of us simply would never make, because they're morally reprehensible. I wrote another comment about this [0] on an article about a week ago, but basically, in the very best case scenario, once you're past the point where more money would make no material difference in a healthy lifestyle (which is going to happen, at the very latest, somewhere in the millions), if you're using the excess to make yourself more money, rather than help improve other people's lives, you are being selfish at a level that makes you effectively indistinguishable from evil.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34013858
> if you're using the excess to make yourself more money, rather than help improve other people's lives, you are being selfish at a level that makes you effectively indistinguishable from evil.
If you're using your business to create value for millions of people, you are in fact improving millions of lives by the amount of value created. If you capture a little bit of that value for yourself and become fantastically rich, good for you and good for the system that enabled this whole thing. Even better for you if you decide to give some of it away, but to call you evil if you don't? I suppose your own belt could be tightened a bit more so that you could give more away?
Other than what arises from rent-seeking behavior, profit is not inherently immoral.
If you take enough profit to make billions of dollars for yourself, that's bad.
Because no one person (or family) can ever realize anything resembling a proportionate benefit from that money, all you're doing is raising your dollar-denominated high score, at the expense of all the other people you could be helping more if you invested that money back in your business, or paid it in taxes, or invested in other local businesses, or any of a thousand other ways to make it work for the world instead of just being a selfish Number Go Up for you.
Once again, profit is not immoral. It serves as an important signal for capital to be directed in the value-creation cycle that ends up producing wealth for everyone. In the words of Isabel Paterson: "Production is profit; and profit is production. They are not merely related; they are the same thing. When a man plants potatoes, if he does not get back more than he put in, he has produced nothing."
You are saying that if a man who planted potatoes harvests them and keeps some for himself above and beyond what he needs to subsist, he is evil. I'm really not sure how you justify that position.
I don't, because that's not what I'm saying.
If you actually read my post, I did not say that taking any profit was evil. I said taking enough profit to make you a billionaire was evil.
The scale of what it takes to become a billionaire is absolutely mind-boggling. I might, if I am lucky, make enough in my lifetime to have a million dollars saved up.
I would have to work a thousand of those lifetimes to get a billion dollars.
And yes; someone who is a billionaire keeps that money in stocks and things, and it's true that it's not just a pile of cash...but that doesn't actually mean that it's usefully "in the economy". It's still theirs. (And remember, unless you buy it as part of a direct issuance from the company, buying stock doesn't actually put more money in their pocket.)
Full story here: https://www.propublica.org/article/lord-of-the-roths-how-tec...
I can tell you what kind of incentives such a system promotes: different ones!
In particularly a welfare system gives incentives to people who want to create something out of intrinsic motivation, not because of financial motivation. Many of the things the most profitable companies use are actually but on tools and mathematics that were created without any financial freedom.
So I would rather reserve the word "toxic" rather for the current system consisting of purely financial motivation to hoard money that your are so vigorously defending.
unlike the US you can just leave and not pay.
it seems to me people outside countries with decent welfare have all of the issues?
something like give me private jets or let me starve by the side of the road, nothing in between must exist.
i actually enjoy paying for people playing video games all day while smoking weed and getting drunk while businesses scream how they cant find employees. Specially the combi self centered and assholes really cant find anyone anymore.
You have to pay what it costs to hire people. If the offer isn't competitive with not working you are going to have to pay more.
Long term employees are also leaving for better jobs.
ill gladly pay for the transition back to sanity.
One of the things that are never really discussed in these kind of things is that you are already paying for welfare, its just not even. Poverty leads to crime, which costs you, either in lost property, crap neighbourhoods, or in insurance.
Also, banks should chip in a lot more than they do. They’re basically printing money and should be taxed harder.
And yet when the top tax rate was 96%, Americans still produced.
When I was 12, I was impressed by Atlas Shrugged, but by the time I was 17 I realized it was ludicrous.
People are forgetting that the high tax countries are enjoying the fruits of lower-tax countries labor.
Technology and drugs are the big ones. Big, evil companies create life-saving drugs and generics are created and sold for pennies to these countries.
With no incentive to create (ie: large profits), humans will definitely not advance.
Money is also freedom. The less we are able to keep, the less free we become (and more dependent on the government/state).
Do you think people do Office Space style work out of the goodness of their own hearts?
> That’s frankly ridiculous.
The feeling is mutual.
The world is full of software that people built because it’s interesting and/or useful. Linux for example was created as a hobby project during college.
People love to create. Just because YOU wouldn’t touch software doesn’t mean it’s true for everyone.
If you're so inclined to work on things for your own pleasure, please do give us a hand by solving some of these.
https://github.com/bitemyapp/esqueleto/issues
And I do contribute to open source, but I prefer to work on stuff that isn’t connected to some company.
That's exactly my point.
I work in a field that is really very important, but it's not interesting enough for you to work on purely for your own amusement. That's why there needs to be a financial incentive.
> "Esqueleto, a SQL DSL for Haskell"
The code specific to the business is proprietary.
Obviously.
You seem to be under the impression that unless people are coerced they'll only work on projects that entertain them in some way, like a child playing with bubbles.
I feel sorry for you that you have such a poor opinion of humanity. Personally, I think humans are curious, collaborative, and like to build things. Yes they like to build things they find interesting but interesting is a wide concept. If my Mom got cancer then I'd probably be more likely to work on cancer software.
I want to live in a world where people can voluntarily work together to build things based on shared interests, whatever those interests might be. A world where people aren't forced to submit to business owners like you.
I’m aware that people like to create things, but that depends on what those things are. Your offer to work on cancer software to help cure your mother’s hypothetical cancer only comes with intrinsic motivation. If we relied on that, we would not have made the progress in that field that we have made, and many more people would be dead.
My mother has cancer. I’m quite glad the scientists working on researching better treatments are actually getting paid.
> A world where people aren't forced to submit to business owners like you.
It’s curious that you have such contempt for entrepreneurs on a website themed around entrepreneurship and published by a venture capital firm.
---
I get the feeling you’re no stranger to the words “anarchist”, “ancap”, and “communist”, so I’ll just leave this here:
https://youtu.be/fibDNwF8bjs
>writing software for banks or insurance companies
Look at Gimp. It's the software that people like to write but not the one designers like to use.
There was this submission: 'Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?' [1]. With Mastodon, people create a social network, but one that is unnecessarily inefficient. Why hasn't that submission led to a better social network?
Ford is quoted with saying: 'People would have asked for faster horses'.
How do you give the people with new ideas the power to implement them?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33999296
It’s no wonder projects like GIMP don’t take off because these developers work on it in their spare time. They don’t have the time or energy to fully commit to it because they’re busy being forced to write someone else’s software.
Linux, for example, was built over the course of 8 years while Linus Torvalds was in college. He was able to do so because his college in Finland provided room and board and the freedom to pursue his interests alongside his studies.
You proved my point again. Everything in your responses is about YOU and YOUR software and what people can do for YOU.
If you want someone to work on your project you should have to convince them that it’s worth their time. Instead they rely on you for insurance and a livelihood. If you think your employees would still work for you if they had the freedom to pursue their own interests then I have a bridge to sell you.
This is interesting because you look at the situation from a different point of view. I was wondering how somebody can influence others to create change and you focus on how to remove influence to create change.
I believe that you can never supply enough resources for people to feel free to implement change. What are the basic needs that have to be met? I would like to say that they are already met. Every software developer can reduce their working hours to a minimum and have ample time to pursue whatever they want.
People are already empowered but they lack motivation. Compared to the global south, the north has plenty of resources. But most citizens don't invest them. Instead they spend them on vacations, clothing, cars and houses because they want to match their peers.
With that perspective, what could incentivize people whose basic needs are met, to spend their time on innovations?
Reducing your hours is a risky proposal. Even asking your boss about it can be a big risk. Becoming a contractor is a big risk too. The reality is that, for most people, their boss owns most of their lives, and trying to go off on their own is very risky. Plus you risk messing up your resume and having to explain yourself which is yet another thing working against you.
So yes, being employed might put food on your table and a roof over your head. If your a software developer it'll even let you buy gadgets and take vacations. However, the current system prevents people from reaching farther up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, because taking that next step to pursue your own interests in very risky and expensive.
So to answer your question, I don't think you need incentives. You need to enable people to pursue their intrinsic motivations.
But that's kind of the point. In a world where there is no majority to give people the space for their intrinsic motivation, who is going to pursue innovative ideas? People could make it socially acceptable to take time off or to work less, but they don't. If you have to nudge them to make that change, you are back at square one: 'How do you give the people with new ideas the power to implement them?'
If it is work itself that inhibits people from pursuing their intrinsic motivation, how could you make it economically viable to give everybody the space for their intrinsic motivations? If it is not viable, doesn't that leave us with incentives?
There isn't a fixed amount of stuff, nor a fixed amount of money. Otherwise turnover, ie GDP, would never rise.
Don't get your stocks and flows mixed up.
Maybe a tendency to not interfere with tasks assigned to others to avoid having to deal with people is being misinterpreted as trust?
Go to America and it seems like the country is a decayed husk wrapped in gold. Roads are barely functional. Schools do not educate children. Each day there is a new story about a politician who is corrupt either through insider trading, being a pedo, or whatever. The government of America does not appear to do things for Americans.
Thus, it's easy to see why you can trust the government in Norway but not in America to me.
This is not quite true in Denmark.
There's have been multiple cases in recent times with the government willingly taking illegal action. Trust in public health care is that it'll keep you alive, but that's getting a nurse to look at you takes half a workday and the majority of the staff is running away due to poor pay. Those needing psychological help have generally been neglected, and those with gender identity issues are borderline abused. Environmental policies are "revised" as we get close to the deadline and haven't made the progress needed.
So I would not say that there is trust in the government and its services - merely an understanding that as change is very slow, you can expect the same tomorrow as you do today. That the US is worse is somewhat of a different discussion to whether or not the Danish people is a "high trust" society.
That’s not to say it’s a rosy picture of multiculturalism, there has been at least a building up of angst in the minority parties over immigration (and islam).
Having many large political parties and a trend of (almost) always having minority governments also help limit possible damage.
But yes, the comparison was mainly to the whacky US system with just two sides to pick from.
Instead, the no risk route is to assimilate into the status quo, become a cog in The System's wheel. Providing foundational First World "human rights" would allow more professional / career freedom.
For certain personality types. Let's say with some high conviction, the typical technology / engineering personality is already highly risk adverse.
Thus - they need all the risk avoidance as possible. Entrepreneurship is a risk game. It is defined by risk; those that won't start without safety nets will probably never start at all.
I know enough family men who built startups for years with young kids - earning nothing. It's not the situation, it's the person.
But like I said, this another discussion for another day :)
In fact, I'd almost certainly have gotten more a month in welfare support if I'd been unable to find a new job if we'd closed my first company down than what we paid ourselves.
The benefits if anything serves as an incentive to give up failing ventures sooner.
Source: https://thegedi.org/global-entrepreneurship-and-development-...
I think the reason why welfare is irrelevant here is because the people going into entrepreneurship tend to be skilled enough to find a good-paying job even if their startup fails. Suppose that you're a good product manager or a good developer that's going into the startup world and you don't get lucky with your startup, you'd still be able to find a good job as soon as you're done... in fact, you might even get a higher-paying job because of this experience you've had.
I'm being sort of picky, focused on quality over quantity of opportunities, but it doesn't mean your statement is true.
You can see this effect inside the US. The most “business friendly” states often do not lead in entrepreneurship because they’re culturally more conservative.
I also think the cultural thing is obvious there. Texas is very pro-entrepreneurship generally.
Much of America does have an amazing "safety net": generational wealth.
There's a reason why startups tend to spring from elite schools like Stanford, MIT, Yale, etc. Those kids have the brains, yes, but also the family connections and the parental safety nets and the connections to capital investment. These kids don't have to worry about food security or having healthcare.
If you're from that upper 10%/5%/1% or so of American society, that's GREAT!
It's an incredible primordial soup from which startups can spring. We are a big country, so we are still talking about perhaps 30,000,000+ people in this lucky category. That's more than all of Scandinavia's population combined. Goes a long way toward explaining why so many "big" startups come from the USA.
However, if you don't come from one of these blessed demographics in the USA, you have a much harder road. If you didn't go to an "elite" school and don't have a parental safety net it's very difficult... I fall into this category and simply didn't have access to healthcare for five years while I pursued my tiny indie business. It made money, but not enough to buy healthcare for a family, so I had to ditch it.
Today it will largely come down to the investment of time... that doesn't mean you will succeed... I spent my time on knowledge growth, others will spend it on building a business. Most will simply waste it and complain that they spend too much time working.
I saw a lot of this when I was single in the last decade. So many people want a relationship, too few would actually take the time to make it happen. Most won't even take the time/effort to go out on a date on a work night.
No, it's not easy. There are no guarantees... but it's mostly laziness that stops people from getting things done in life.
> That's more than all of Scandinavia's population combined. Goes a long way toward explaining why so many "big" startups come from the USA.
Expand it to all of the European countries with free healthcare to match the populations and the outcome is the same.
There is some subset that has to bail because of healthcare, but it’s not relevant in the larger picture.
The children of the top 1% make up 14.5% of the admissions to these schools. The chart of students by parental income[0] speaks for itself.
The children of the bottom 20% make up a mere 3.8% of the student body. I'm not sure how anyone can look at the current situation and suggest there's nothing wrong with it.
Perhaps these people are inherently inferior? Instead, I would suggest that we should do something about the talent that we're intentionally wasting.
[0] Chetty R. et al, Figure I. B, MOBILITY REPORT CARDS: THE ROLE OF COLLEGES IN INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY, Page 80. url: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23618/w236..., image: https://i.redd.it/tbh2qmozodv91.png
I don't view 95% of the population making up 58% of the student body as an indicator that we're doing things particularly well. Especially when you don't ignore the fact the bottom 20% make up only 3.8% of students and the bottom 60% of the population only account for 18%.
These statistics fly in the face of any belief in meritocracy, social mobility, access to education, academic achievement etc. They imply either the children of the top 5% are genetic superhumans or that, as a society, we're failing spectacularly at living up to those goals.
Yeah, and then go on to create things like Theranos, Alameda and FTX... never mind the obscene amount of these kids who end up in banks and hedge funds because of their connections that end up destroying the global economy thorough their grift.
I'm a former boot-strapped founder and a strong believer in entrepreneurialism, but you have to be brain-dead levels of naive to not know the odds are entirely against coming in you but to then think you're on the same playing field as the children of the privileged makes it clear one really doesn't have the slightest skill-set it takes to make it in that World: if your discernment is woefully inadequate to see the reality of being wealthy, how can you ever see, build and ultimately profit from market or paradigm shifts?
> However, if you don't come from one of these blessed demographics in the USA, you have a much harder road. If you didn't go to an "elite" school and don't have a parental safety net it's very difficult... I fall into this category and simply didn't have access to healthcare for five years while I pursued my tiny indie business. It made money, but not enough to buy healthcare for a family, so I had to ditch it.
I think these are the untold stories that really should be more widely known and perhaps even celebrated: when something doesn't reach unicorn level, but still does what it sought out to do but cannot grow/scale in order to justify it's immense effort is more honest and real to the reality of how most small startups go and end up.
Personally speaking my end-goal was to ultimately challenge Federal Law to make hemp legal in order to serve as a much needed cash crop to help offset climate change via carbon sequestration and possibly aid in the decrease use of opioids for pain and provide more usecases for something I feel incredibly passionate about: Bitcoin and Farmers.
After the Farm bill was passed in 2018, nearly 4 years since launch, I realized 'we won' as I saw all the signs in front of my face I saw no point in working 90+ hour work weeks and having no Life what so ever because I dissapointed my partners and family so I just leveraged my acquired skill-set in various private Industries and continued to travel the World for new opportunities.
Ultimately the money I made, in BTC, could have made me a millionaire several times if I never spent it and just held on to it over the years, but as mentioned before I was also not of the privileged class and needed those funds to ever rising rents, food, or the rainy day funds use in between jobs.
I don't regret it, but like JB I had to exit and focus on other priorities when I realized the reality that it was never going to be much more than it was, profitable but not b much, never mind ever being a unicorn.
I've since did corpo life and to be honest, their is a reason former startup founders are preferable over most candidates, the harder part is actually getting your foot in the door to be able to prove why that is.
I really cannot tell.
Very few are “hungry” and “hunger” is an important ingredient to startups
I've worked in/around govt that I'm not a no government mindset, but definitely feel that more government tends to be worse than a very limited one at the scale of the US... and would favor letting states/counties have more independent creativity in solutions.
That is a false romantization. The reality is if you live in Copenhagen you need a full time job to to pay for expensive rent, food, and of course tax. That is not true in Berlin where rent, food, and taxes are cheaper. On average the price level in Berlin is half of that of Copenhagen.
It's a bit of a mixed bag that's much harder to implement at a larger scale. If the US split up into separate states, much more loosely joined like the EU or original confederate structure before the constitution, each state would stand a better chance at such a system.
In addition to the psychological aspects mentioned below (why try so hard when you’ll be fine either way), there are bigger reasons.
While the safety net makes it less dangerous to fail, it also makes it harder to succeed.
The barrier you need to clear before the business can be successful is much higher, due to:
- 15-20% higher taxes than the US at every level. Cut your profit margin by 15% and you need roughly double the amount of revenue you’d need in the US to pay yourself a good salary.
- high cost of living (like living in NYC/SF but without all the opportunities)
- inability to hire full time employees until you get much bigger (they literally cannot be fired and if one goes on maternity leave you can be stuck paying someone without getting their labor for a year+)
-lack of funding/financing and risk capital (Europe is starting to catch up, but nowhere near the US, especially at the small business levels). There’s nothing like the SBA loans the US has.
-more severe penalties for failure in the form of bankruptcy, you cannot walk away relatively unscathed in the same you can in the US
-impossibility of building wealth by working a job to fund the business yourself (salaries are extremely low due to the massive social benefits overhead)
> “high cost of living (like living in NYC/SF but without all the opportunities)”
My fixed monthly expenses were over 3x higher in Manhattan than in Helsinki. Housing, child care, etc.
Alternatively: Finland has a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling.
So then the Nordics are the startup capitals of the world, far surpassing all other countries, right? Right?
- Objectively is not an issue to fail and you know it
- It gives you the security to take risky decisions and at the end it is a matter of expectation, bet and see if you win. To me this goes along with the mantra that failing is not bad and you have to do so few times before you succeed. Obviously, the more you try the more chances you have. If you are not a casualty.
In our culture there is an immense preoccupation with the unfairness of this but the reality is that if you don't come from wealth and privilege, you need a different playbook. Dwelling on the inequity neuters you. If you want to win you need to figure out what the playbook is and then do the right things.
I found a playbook that worked by reading all the self help and business books I could (preferably from the public library because that was free and I was poor). My playbook ended up being: move to a country with a lower cost of living, and get good enough at freelancing online that I essentially had a safety net and a long-term runway for other pursuits.
I then tried a few different business models, each failed a bit less than the last until I hit a winner which bankrolls about a dozen people on my payroll.
A rich guy wouldn't have had to go through all that but I don't care. It's totally irrelevant to the requirements for success in my reality. Which were build my own baseline from scratch and then fail until I succeeded.
People born into easier paths than mine have sneered at many many elements of what I did over the years (living in a "shithole" country, working with a "shitty" tech stack, taking "shitty" Elance gigs that didn't pay enough, etc. etc.). Other people who were able to tolerate remaining victims of the system tuned out my story and focused on other things, like bitching about politics. I'm worth more than most of the people in both categories now and I feel like this is just the beginning. I haven't had children yet but if I do they will have fewer disadvantages than I did.
There are different and easier playbooks than the one I used. If I was starting again I would probably go into a more conventionally profitable vocation and save for 15 years, studying business and coding on the side, and then start a business.
But either way the point is your playbook if you start poor needs to be different. It's not as easy as the one the rich guys have but that fact is a distraction. You should be too busy figuring out your plan to care.
What you’re saying is that the only way for you to get ahead is by exporting your own lack of class mobility to another nation. This is akin to shipping trash to other shores so we don’t have to deal with the repercussions of landfills in wealthier nations.
If that’s considered a sane way to get ahead, home is not economically well.
I understand and agree with your overall point, but the fact that this an option underpins a certain amount of privilege.
Edit: country level is 6.5 for the US vs 17.5 for Guatemala, which is also not a difference consistent with war vs peace. But since "refugees" end up mostly in cities, and hundreds of thousands end up in the very same cities that are more violent than Guatemala, the city data is perfectly sufficient to show they aren't all fleeing violence.
Edit 2: I would continue this discussion, but somehow my original reply to you got flagged and my commenting privileges suspended, even though I had net three upvotes at the time.
It's probably for the better, I shouldn't even be bothering with someone who complains that I "cherry pick" 50 city homicide data and then replies to me with El Paso.
It certainly shows how strong your facts are (i.e. "the data is wrong") that you get me suspended instead of engaging them.
I have personal experience with refugees from Central America and Mexico. I can assure you, many are fleeing violence.
Edit: Dismissing 2.7x rate does not make for a strong point. You are jumping through hoops to not be wrong. E.g., one of the cities that receives the most refugees from Guatemala is El Paso, TX, which is consistently one of the safest cities in the U.S.
Your choice of metrics also does not paint a full picture. Many people are fleeing to avoid being conscripted by a cartel. That type of violence does not show up in homicide statistics. You're demonstrating a superficial understanding.
Edit 2: El Paso is the opposite of cherry picking; as I already pointed out, they are relevant because they take in a disproportionate amount of refugees. So, of the U.S. cities that you point to with higher per-capita homicides, can you point out if any absorb more refugees than El Paso? Because that was central to your point that refugees are jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
I did not get you "suspended". You got your own post removed because you weren't following HN guidelines. I tried to point that out to help, but you were too busy arguing to notice. Not everything is a personalized attack.
My point is that the OPs “model” is a strategy for a limited population and not very generalizable. Within those caveats, I have no issue with their suggestion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
He laid his heart and mind out for our benefit, and you rewarded it by attempting to bully him. Don't tell me I'm being uncivil.
You're right that I'm not adding to his discourse. I'm just trying to hush the people who are attempting to bully him.
You choose here to focus on the fact that some people have more angles available to them than others. You call them privilege and believe them to be unjust. If you do that too much, you'll defeat yourself and destroy your own agency.
Maybe you're right, maybe they are unjust, I do have opinions on that sort of thing, I also think the best places to indulge those opinions are at the ballot box and at my desk writing checks to nonprofits. I mean I do screw this up and focus my time/energy/attention on them at inappropriate times. But I know it is a screw-up when I do it. No one is serving the greater good by wasting time.
What you do with the cards in hand is what matters. Other paths lead to insanity.
If you are outside of US, your chances of liquidity event decrease even further.
I think people always divide into two camps here, its either hard work or luck but the truth is somewhere in between.
As a normal non-privileged person, I can't afford placing all-in bets. But I can go to a different table with different stakes and different strategy.
I get the case for some capital accumulation. Capital does make for an amazing economic engine that we all benefit from. Capitalist countries are richer than non capitalist countries. Easy to understand. But there is a point where more capital accumulation and inequality just makes the rest of us become serfs to oligarchs.
Although, obviously, we don’t want more people who got rich by being politicians.
I’m stealing this. Fantastic analogy.
It was hard but worth it.
I understand that to mean that your income was enough to keep (at least) both of you fed, housed and clothed.
Maybe you also had some savings/family support to use as a Kickstarter for her business and possibly to help pay the bills but maybe you didn't.
If both of you had to work 40+ hours a week and there is still too much month left at the end of the money, it's really hard to afford so much as a car repair not to speak of starting a business.
Is it possible to be an entrepreneur in that case? Yes but it's an enormous gamble and needs for all the stars to align just right. The consequences of failure are immediate (there are no 5 years to get started) and dire (homelessness/ no ability to get to work).
It's a much worse bet than for someone from the middle class who might have to move in with their parents again. Not pleasant but endurable.
Someone well off suffers not even that and is, at worst, a little bit embarrassed in front of their family. They can also try again and again.
There were a lot of trials. We were close to having to file for bankruptcy 6 different times during a particularly difficult 2 year stretch. Our exit plan was always that she just go back to work with the potential to have to sell our house to pay of debts or lease agreements.
Starting a business is hard with a lot of risks and that's before you actually hire staff. The moment that you have to consistently make payroll on time, your stress level goes through the roof with the combination of obligation to financial consistency and the knowledge that you are responsible for other people (and their families in many cases).
I appreciate the insight.
This interactive website does a good job of explaining the model itself: https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/
I didn't know him on day one of his startup, but I knew him from very early on. He had some initial customers, and was making progress, but slow.
Early on, through connections, he landed a remote contracting gig that paid a full 40 hours/week, but usually didn't consume more than 10-15 hours of his time per week, and that went down over time. It was supporting a legacy system, so there wasn't a whole lot of new dev/work, but it was seasonally important, and had to be up/maintained/etc. That was, IIRC, something like $60/hr. So, early on in his startup, he ended up having a 'side gig' that was paying $100k/year, but only taking up ~12 hrs/week most of the time.
That left plenty of time to focus on building out things the initial handful of customers wanted. It also gave him a lot of time to just... grow slow. Ended up getting to .... $30k/month in recurring revenue while employing just a couple of folks (part time, IIRC), and... then one of his larger competitors decided to close up. He had a few months of non-stop working building data migration tools to convert competitors to his platform. But that took him to another level.
Getting a remote consulting gig paying guaranteed base while not consuming much time was very... lucky. He didn't look for it, but knew it was a good deal when it arrived, and he jumped at it. This was crucial to the 'afford to fail' part referenced above (apologies for the long post here - that was the trigger phrase).
That second part was very 'luck' based as well, but he was prepared to capitalize on that luck. This was years in to the journey, and the startup was already comfortable with respect to revenue/profit/etc.
But... he built that over years, very slowly. No amount of 100 hour weeks could have landed him any of the competitors' clients early on, because he wasn't known.
During that build, he could 'afford to fail' because of that remote contract. And now... he can try new things and afford to fail for the rest of his life (assuming the gamble isn't too big!)
A lot of word of mouth, a lot of slow growth, a lot of initial luck, a lot of patience. It worked out for him over about ... 8-9 years, but any of those pieces missing early on would have resulted in much lower growth, or stalling, or he might have given up and moved to something else.
Some people have one at-bat. They save some capital, take their swing, and maybe get a base hit, maybe strike out. If they are lucky, they hit a home run and end up set for life.
The rich get an infinite number of at-bats. They can just swing and swing until they hit their home run, then swing again. Then they write books about how hard work and hustling can make anyone a millionaire.
If—; Kipling, Rudyard; 1910
https://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-on-the-ovaria...
There are a number of comments saying very similar things to the top voted one: so it was indeed luck that their comment floated to the top among the many others. Perhaps they were there right when the story was posted (luck, right?) Perhaps they used exactly the trigger words that made others appreciate the comment (luck, right?).
The fact that there is a luck element to many things does not mean that those are unworthy pursuits. And it's ok to acknowledge the luck factor when it can dominate the results (i.e. you wouldn't talk about a lottery without considering luck).
There's a reason why a lot of businesses fail, and it's not that the people who start them are lazy, stupid or lacking in skills. Obviously some are, but there are a great many people with great ideas that never make it, just like there are brilliant musicians, artists, designers, and anything else you care to name that you'll never hear of but who are very good at what they do.
The OP should be proud of their efforts. This was a learning experience that will absolutely help them in the future. Think of this as finishing a super tough college course and passing. On to the next phase.
Once we gain our most desired possessions, we'll try and do everything not to lose them - and what comes fast goes fast. Keep grinding, I'm sure it won't go to waste.
One can choose to try a lot of different things, and another will choose to have a single few shots. One can choose to accept the “truth”, and the other will refuse to do so.
We get feedback from the world, and we choose how to analyze it and interact with it.
It’s easy to be fooled by the fact that we have only one choice. Or that the feedback reflects the absolute truth.
OP: My personal advice is to stick with a part/full-time job and continuing to explore your business ideas on the side until they are generating enough revenue to cover your expenses. Focus on businesses that sell something practical and don’t need lots of marketing or engagement (at first).
“Hobbies”, relationships, family, etc don’t do that. If you can’t find fulfillment in your 9-5 you’re still stuck grinding through it everyday looking forward to get back to those things. 8 hours every weekday. A HUGE chunk of your life.
if you consider anything other than becoming a billionaire "failure" I guess that's a different matter.
Too many people focus so much on the luck they neglect the required positive talents and labors to even try.
I'm sorry that your enterprises have failed but this doesn't surprise me. I'm happy that you changed your direction (imho, it's not giving up) to something different. It's very hard to find the point where you let it go while success seems such a very short distance away like you can reach your hand and grab it. But it's so frustrating that even if you are approaching your goal, you can't just close the distance and it's still far away.
There will be people who will label you as a "loser" as you "gave up on your dreams", but you are not actually. You are just one of millions of people who were trying to make it but didn't. I doesn't matter if your idea was great or not, if your execution was perfect or not, if your audience was willing to pay or not, if the time was right or not, sometimes it just doesn't work. And it's still OK.
Best of luck to you.
It is better to have tried and failed than not having tried at all.
I live the comfortable life of a decently paid employee, but I always wonder what could have been had I chosen a different path.
Good luck with whatever and wherever your life takes you next!
Head up, chin up. Take some time to breathe and reflect, but don't let it consume you. The best years of your life are still ahead of you. The journey isn't over. Maybe it's not the entrepreneurial journey you want, but it could be something else that lets you embody that other ideas, people and places.
I think it's unfair to characterise the "digital nomad influencers" on Twitter as making it seem easy. I know a few of them personally and they work incredibly hard. You can tell by the speed at which they ship new products. They work a lot.
That said, building a Twitter audience of indie hacker types is massively overrated. It's a huge amount of work and the space is utterly saturated. These people generally don't buy stuff and if you try a lot of different ideas then the chances are that many of them are not in your target market.
Maybe it won't be entrepreneurship, however. The world is huge and there's an unlimited number of ways to define success besides creating a successful business.
Mental and physical health and good social connections are one such way. If you can find your way back to those and recognize that as the success you need, at this time, then I for one will be applauding you.
Once you've climbed that mountain another purpose will find it's way to you.
On a personal note, I think the world would be a better place if less people defined success as personal wealth and power, and more defined it as improving the society around them. When you have energy to be active in the world again, maybe you could try looking at it that way instead?
What kind of service can you, and your skills, best give to this world and its people, animals, and environment?
So I guess what I'm trying to say here is that, all these parts of entrepreneurship that you didn't like, they were actually just distractions posturing themselves as Entrepreneurship™ and their shilling was probably the product of other entrepreneurs. Take care and remember that failure is a byproduct of trying and there's absolutely no shame in that.
If it becomes a burden, then it's a problem.
Also, luck may play a big role, but there's something you learn failing over and over again. You start to see what it's actually working and what path is closer to success. Patterns will emerge. You know that saying that sometimes you do your own luck.
The easiest path to success for a SaaS is getting a feature of a big product into a standalone specialized product and going after that niche. This simple thing so many indie hackers fail to realize, many try to build the next unicorn, the unique idea. If you keep trying like this, you'll likely fail 50 more times.
I think a lot of us have been there.
There's a big difference whether your service:
- is B2B/B2C;
- uses product-led/marketing-led/sales-led growth;
- targets a broad market or a niche (the more niche it is, the better it speaks to your target market, f.e. coaching vs developer coaching vs coaching Java developers VS coaching Java developers in machine learning vs coaching Java developers that use machine learning in the agricultural world...)
- uses different pricing models;
- ...
I've been on this route for 8 years with some consulting stints in between to pay the bills, and it wasn't until this year that my sales pitch finally started to land. Refining my target audience has been a big part of this...
There's a lot of nuance in how to present your offer, and you need to get everything exactly right to convert someone. You have to make someone an offer so good it would feel stupid for them to refuse.
In my opinion a lot of the "snake oil sellers" try to pitch the universal product-led growth approach to a very broad market that works for everything and that you can do from your computer.
In reality, they are most likely optimized to sell as much courses as possible, coming with very generic advice, and don't really care about the results for their target audience.
Another point: unless your target audience is on indie hackers, you should not be spending your time there at all.
I feel for you, so if you want to have a short chat, I might be able to give you some pointers. Feel free to reach out.
In the end, there is a lot of survivorship bias going on, and as the world is in constant flux, what works today will probably not work tomorrow, so you have to find your own path...
And, there's no shame in having tried and failed; by trying you're already within the minority that took action.
By the way, in my experience, people pay way more for an IT consultant that has lived and experienced the bigger picture of running a business, so even if you failed, you should be better off that someone that didn't try...
Update: formatting
What exactly do you mean here? because I'd argue depending on the product, each of the 3 could be the way to go over the others. Are you trying to say one is the best way of growing? Curious to hear your thoughts.
I tried combining both product-led and sales-led, and addressing a lot of different kinds of businesses, but this ended up making my go-to-market more complicated and resulted in almost zero sales.
Second half of this year I finally switched it to sales led targeting a very specific niche, and ended up with a very clear and simple offering for a very specific kind of customer.
This feels counterintuitive because you exclude a huge part of your TAM, but it allows you to be the perfect match for a very specific profile.
Instead of getting a lot of leads with a gazillion questions because they don't trust you, they now start thinking about if/how they can afford it after the first online session.
To get the path of the least resistance, you need to address the exact problems of a certain kind of prospect, conveying your value as easy as possible, and making it a no-brainer for them to commit.
But, don't take my word for it, just ask me again by the end of 2023 whether this all worked out of not.
(I did get some very positive feedback from somebody who bootstrapped, scaled up and sold his company, so I do have high hopes/expectations.)
Perhaps since many broader (less niche) bases are covered by the innumerable products out there today, maybe this is a good way to go for solo people.
One problem is not just the influencers peddling their books and their bullshit, it's also the eco-system that sells the dream itself. This site is part of that and you should take the success stories with a large grain of salt, usually things are not as easy as they are made out to be and for every success there are 100 failures. And those are rarely talked about.
Best of luck with the recovery, I can see it weighs heavily on you.
There are older, successful entrepreneurs, one guy I knew started his first company in his mid-50's and had a massive success but he's definitely the outlier. But most successful entrepreneurs I know started their first successful company in their 20's or 30's, rarely 40's. And most unsuccessful entrepreneurs have the exact same demographic...
A couple of things that I've seen really do help, but they still require a substantial investment in time and have an opportunity cost as well: work for one of the large, well paying companies for a while, save up a nest egg and use that as a jump off point if you weren't born into capital (though the risk of becoming addicted to that income stream is real and letting go of it will not be easy). Another is to first start a regular career in order to identify pain points in some industry or other and then later use that knowledge to create a product that addresses those pain points.
But that's not the kind of thing that you can spin out far enough for a book or a TED talk. I do believe that those two will increase your chances.
“Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45”
https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
Discussion on HN here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18212409
I'm sure they did a great job at researching that but it really does not match my experience at all. And I see a lot of start-ups (up to 50 / year) from the inside, at least a few hundred founders if not a 1000+ by now over the last 15 years. The bulk of the successful ones is late 20's to mid 30's.
The younger ones are not alone ( the successful 45/50+ parents/mentors/etc are supporting them financially and more ).
Otherwise, without the experience of your 20s and 30s you cannot understand the world, you haven't build the network you need to succeed ( I am my own example), basically you cannot manufacture you "luck".
- people in the VC entrepreneur world are seeing mostly 20s and 30s be successful
- VC world is, as one previous commenter put it, swing for the bleachers
- researchers are saying average age of success is 45, so more than half are 40+
This seems to perhaps indicate (though needs research) that
- those 40+ prefer bootstrapped businesses
- bootstrapped businesses are over half the successful entrepreneurs, so tend to be more successful
Many things could be wrong with this:
- different definitions of successful
- research bias
- geographical bias
However, it's something that seems to bear investigation.
And if true, what is it that is driving the budding entrepreneur to think that to be more successful they need to seek VC funding, when it may actually be the opposite. Would you rather take a 1 in 1m shot at 1m/yr, or a 1 in 10k shot at 300k/yr? Numbers made up in the question of course, research needed to figure out what they are.
Jeff Bezos?
This is a myth. It is purported because most of the 30+ entrepreneurs are not vocal about their successes.
You can do the math for yourself.
> Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
> Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.
> Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.
-madaxe_again, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076
We grew, we went bankrupt, we laid off most the company, the founders kicked in enough to keep us going and we restructured to give the remaining people larger shares. We became profitable and finally sold to another company.
My payday was about $70k, which was a nice bonus, I was happy to get it. I moved on to big tech. The company withered away, the company that bought it withered away too. I think the company that bought that company might also have disappeared. The domain keeps getting renewed, but has been broken for a couple of years, and for half a decade before that was just a WordPress site hosting a scrape of some of the content that used to be on the website.
And we were one of the lucky ones.
It's annoying that even the successes tend to screw over the employees and more often than not the founders as well. Typical dilution by the time you reach series 'A' (assuming that that's all that you need to take off) is terrible and if you need more capital you end up working for banks and VCs.
If I were to start another company (which I am trying very hard to avoid) I would try extremely hard to do it without outside capital and I would do it in some boring b2b field where nobody else wants to go because it isn't sexy enough to be able to attract capital. That way you avoid several of the risks of starting a new company at once: you have a relatively safe niche, no outsider is going to jump in giving away their product just to grow market share and the people that will receive your product are going to be super happy simply because there is no alternative.
* https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/why-private-equity-...
What advice could you share for discovering this kind of problems that also can also be monetized?
Don't get me wrong; it was a good experience, as well as being good experience. I got paid a decent salary throughout, the work was frequently interesting, and my coworkers were great, not that I've done a good job of keeping in touch.
But it wasn't a life-changing payday, and even the investors mostly broke even. It was a success in that it became profitable with a couple mil in revenue, not in the VC sense.
Besides the whole period where we ran out of money, laid off half the company, and were months away from going under, the only real downside was that, as a small company, I was basically on call 24/7 to deal with problems with my part of the world. It didn't come up often but when it did it sucked.
It’s a quite boring project, but it is niche - and there is no alternative, at least not in the JS/TS ecosystem. Many startups/crypto/financial institutions (including YC startups) uses and are paying customers of my product.
I’ve tried finding an investor (including YC) to grow the project but no-one is interested. It doesn’t matter, I’ll keep going anyway. But if someone is interested reach me at info@fixparser.io
I wonder how much innovation is being stifled by this practice. I know I have at least one very viable idea (I've shopped it around) that could result in substantial improvement to the overall Internet experience, and I'm doing nothing with it because the minute I make it available, a Big Tech company will either steal it, try to buy me out (and I don't like them so my answer will be no) and then copy/reverse engineer what I've done. So I've opted to spend my time/energy on something else.
Basically what's the opportunity cost of these uncompetitive practices for the industry and field of study as a whole?
How many Einsteins perished in the fields or trenches? How much innovation and genius is stifled through lack of access to food, water or education?
I think that would be an area where improvements would be more impactful than trying to prevent copycats.
If BigTech gets into it, that will be a positive signal which will make idea known and make a market of customers for it. I have no need to be the first, but just be in the game.
There was interesting work on crawling and search, we went bankrupt trying to provide useful tools for people to find different products and the different places to buy them, then became profitable farming our content out for SEO.
We were then bought out by a domain parker who wanted to marry our monetization with his traffic; as far as I know it didn't work, but that was when I left.
This is a funny thing with companies that get taken over.
My dad used to run an ISP, one of the first ones in my home country. I'm talking 28.8kbit modems. The company was sold and shut down more than 20 years ago. The company that bought them out got bought out, that company then got bought and, and this repeated a few times.
The domain still keeps getting renewed, and for a while redirected to the main page of the largest IT firm in the country. I assume that, along the way of all those acquisitions, domains just kept getting transferred, and nobody knows what those domains are, but it's cheaper to just renew than to find out.
Anyway, it's a fun little reminder of the impact my dad made in this world :)
https://web.archive.org/web/19970409101251/http://www.est.is...
When I've spoken to people about the finance/big tech/startup trade-offs, we've often talked about the upside from startup success (outside of the Google or Instagram case) being around an order of magnitude bigger than that - in the 'pay off your mortgage' ballpark. Is this unrealistic?
But on the other end of things... it was still a nice cap on my time there. And even if it's not quit-your-job money, it was still an Everest.
(An Everest being the amount of money it takes to climb Everest, buy a luxury car or a small cabin on a lake, or any other number of reasonably achievable dreams.)
The word 'influencer' is already a red flag. Personally wouldn't touch anything with that word in it with long pole. It won't be too long before that word is morphed into another buzz word.
I have friends with a string of successes under their belts. My own track record is ~half the companies I advise get from garage to series A, and I've had three IPOs and numerous acquisitions.
My rules of thumb:
- do something with big impact. "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized." - Daniel Burnham: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Burnham
- answer this question honestly: "why now?" i.e. why couldn't this have been done last year or last decade.
- answer this question honestly: "why me?" i.e. am I really the best person in the world to do this?
- check that your competitive position or margins are strong enough you won't have a zillion competitors causing margins to compress. For example, 15 minute food delivery is tough. For example, don't launch a CPG product on Amazon without a strategy to deal with knockoffs!
- check that your regulatory position isn't so crazy that you'll get shutdown before demonstrating outrageous value.
- create an elevator pitch of one or two sentences and see if a majority of legit prospective buyers get excited.
hope this helps!
Since then, I started up a company that I think I am uniquely qualified to run, but we'll see if we get there.
For now: you have a ton of experience and are invaluable for any employer. See this as an investment and see you get a return.
Can you elaborate on this please?
digital nomad = selling a common service - probably cheaper since you can work remotely from cheaper countries