Ask HN: What keeps you away from starting startups?
Just finished reading "Ramen Profitable" of Paul Graham (http://paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html). Asking from you guys,
What keeps you away from starting startups?
If you overcome from this, what is your story of survival?
67 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadMy other guess would be that many ideas are largely just modifications of things that already exist that a large company like facebook could easily replicate. Coming up with brand new ideas is not easy.
Digression :: Has anyone noticed that myspace has recently ripped off a lot of facebooks features too?
It's hard to be "ramen AND medical bills profitable" if you or one of your founders has an urgent medical issue when you're trying to bootstrap yourselves with no insurance.
The Obama administration should look at this issue and provide significantly reduced healthcare to bootstrapped startups.
The routine physicals have led to me getting back into shape. My doctor also did some blood work and discussed some changes I needed to make in my diet to reduce the risk of developing some conditions that afflict other family members. This is a major benefit of having a family doctor that everyone goes to. When your other family members aren't insured and consequently don't see a doctor, your doctor doesn't have as complete perspective of potential risks to your health. Incidentally, I'm now earning more and contributing more to taxes, so I feel like the money spent on covering my healthcare was a worthwhile investment. And no, I didn't have to wait 6 months for a physical, I waited precisely 9 days for the next schedule window that was convenient for me. The flu shot was a walk-in procedure when I had an empty patch in my schedule.
Healthcare shouldn't only be about tending to urgent matters. Not getting your yearly physical is potentially like having a memory leak. You won't know something is wrong until it's potentially too late and when you do find out, it will be a major dilemma. All too often, even when healthcare costs are covered, people just don't bother going. If you're a startup founder, don't neglect your health, and make sure you take care of your body as well as you would your car.
9oliYQjP: you're one very interesting person but with a bad user name. Do you mind putting a note in your profile with a more pronouncable name? Everytime I read a comment of yours I am distracted by the machine generated name, which I somehow pronounce in my head as "Nine Olly Qiyuu Jay Pee".
I've spent the past few years SEuO (search engine unoptimizing) my personal online presence including quitting Facebook and started signing up to new services with different aliases so that people can't so easily aggregate what I say. It's kind of embarrassing how paranoid that sounds, but there's the rationale. I don't mind defending my opinions, but I'm loathe to put my friends in a position, as one was, to try to explain my opinion when they might not share it. On the other hand, it's quite liberating being able to say what I want without having to worry about the political costs associated with those comments.
From PG's essay (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html):
When you find something you can't say, what do you do with it? My advice is, don't say it. Or at least, pick your battles.
My tactic online is to say it anyways but make sure nobody knows who said it :)
For this account, you can ask email pg@ycombinator.com to change the username to woollymammoth (available)
:-)
Take care man.
Fixed.
The notion that medical insurance has to be expensive is a myth. The notion that medical insurance has to cover every bout of the sniffles is a myth. My policy had a $1000 deductible, which meant I was on the hook for routine medical visits (I didn't have any in two years), but that policy relieved me from worries about financial ruin due to any potential major medical problems. The high-deductible policy that I purchased was less than half the cost of my former employer's COBRA plan. It was well within the realm of ramen profitability. It doesn't take much effort to be an informed consumer in the medical insurance marketplace, but many people (it seems) can't be bothered to try.
1) The Ramen-way works only for people who are fresh out of college or at least are still with no liabilities. This doesn't work for people who have families, mortgage etc. In this case the YC-type funding just doesn't cut it. I would love to be proved wrong here with example(s) of YC company founders, since that might give me motivation.
2) Most poeple need some validation of their ideas, especially if they have more than one. Ideally it would be nice if YC, or someone else, can just help people validate their ideas and provide input, and might even take a small stake just for that service. Additional guidance along the way would be awesome.
3) How to form a team? OK, I'm committed in my idea and my idea is validated, where do I find at least 1-2 additional people I need. This is true especially since not everyone is an expert in all the technologies. Attending Meetups etc. is a way, hopefully there are others.
A lot of things around the cloud and hosting had really reduced the cost of an initial launch, but some of the above bottlenecks still stay, at least IMO.
YC-type funding in this case would probably help a little, assuming you have some cushioning elsewhere, e.g. savings, live with family, etc.
Then again, I bet there are probably founders out there that started their project on the side and slowly grew into a startup.
This is simply not true. My wife and I have medical debt and my partner has a family and a mortgage. You just work your 8 hour day job and come home and work another 4 to 6 hours in the evening. It's not a lot of fun -- it took us about a year to get to enough revenue to pay my salary.
You are a better human being then me.
Finding a team also helps validate the idea. Bouncing your thoughts off sharp colleagues is a key step in honing your idea. Once they're excited (about either you or your idea) you pop the question.
When I was younger I didn't have the skills and/or energy as I was acquiring knowledge and experience.
Now I'm in a position to do something with those attributes: it has to be a spare time effort - which doesn't seem to be enough.
I prefer a steady income.
I'm uncertain whether the expected value of a startup is more than my current income.
I've done some reasonably interesting stuff - none of which was for-profit, but also none of which was hugely successful. Turns out marketing is hard!
It's taken a lot of thinking and reading of YN essays to discover that it is possible to start up a web company and that, in fact, I had all of the tools at my disposal coming out of college to do it! I just didn't know it was possible.
Now, I'm working for a late stage startup that has excellent potential and the golden handcuffs are keeping me around until an IPO.
It's frustrating because I have execution skills (I've launched 'startups' for larger companies), I could fund a small startup without external help and I have access to good design & technical talent. Am I being unreasonably risk averse? Lacking vision? Words of wisdom will be much appreciated!
So, it's a huge sacrifice and gamble you take to either lead the quote/unquote normal life or start-up. If you start-up it becomes your life and entire focus. I pretty much dropped off the radar of my friends and devoted all my time and focus on my start-up. The journey it led me on was an awesome one re: attention, publicity and getting funding. Though all that awesome stuff was a great life journey it did not lead me to a healthy business that pays the bills and now I'm back to looking to get into the real world.
My start-up is still active and ppl do use it (just not that many). Though the things I learned from my first attempt and the journey it took me on has taught me a ton. I have the fever to start-up all over again, yet doing so on the side. The gamble was worth it just for the awesome experiences it led me on, but now it's time to get on with life and dream/enjoy the experiences on the side!
I'd rather code full time, and talk to customers (as in support etc , not sales). This attitude + the lack of a "business" partner stops me from attempting a startup.
Not having a cofounder is a good reason not to start yet - but it's mostly a good reason to go and look for a cofounder, rather than a reason to cancel your start-up plans altogether.
I completely agree. But in the meantime I am doing some fun stuff, (working on AI algorithms and such when I am working and now doing a 6 month "technical immersion" type thing http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=700891) and so that contributes to the "I'll do a startup sometime,but not just yet" feeling.
I guess I should change my reply to "Why aren't you doing a startup yet?" to "lack of a business focussed co founder and meanwhile I am doing other interesting things, which doesn't leave me enough time and energy to go look for one".
Thanks for that suggestion. It helped me clarify my thoughts.
You need to find a business partner who thrives on this stuff. My suggestion: don't worry too much about your idea. Find a salesman partner who has experience in a field unrelated to yours, a solid network and an interesting idea.
For the record, my first swing was an awful idea -- social networking mumbo-jumbo. Half-baked, totally impossible to monetize. Four of us worked on it for about four months before the whole thing melted down and everyone but me (including my wife!) quit one at a time.
When I finally gave up and let it die, I became deeply depressed. I didn't even want to get out of bed. I felt like a total failure. But the truth was, we discovered a bunch of really important things during the total-failure startup. Those things stewed in my mind, and when the opportunity showed itself, I tried again. Now all those important things that I learned are contributing to my new company.
So, "I have a bad idea" is not much of an excuse. Take your free time and start working on it. Put up a reality distortion field and make yourself believe in it. Failing is also progress.
Regarding insurance - If I didn't have a cheap policy I kept since I was 18, a startup wouldn't even be an option - I'm uninsurable on an individual plan.
B. I can't find any ideas for niche markets because I'm not involved in any niches except for programming and anything for programmers is definitely a saturated market.
C. Cofounders I've come across have always flaked out. Granted I may have too but I think if just one of us had been persistent it would have been enough.
D. Don't want to spend my savings.
E. I think that's it.
It is not a zero-sum game, you're essentially growing the market by providing a feature or value that other products don't.
1. I have very little clue what gets people to spend money. I keep wanting at least a plausible theory of how this could make money before I dive in. I am particularly discouraged by the idea of making a web site that requires high traffic in order to be ramen-profitable.
2. I am easily distracted. I find myself getting sidetracked at all time-scales: by administrative and sysadmin junk, by other project ideas, etc.
3. I find it particularly hard to implement a software idea that I've come up with myself. It's weird, but I find myself in a mode of "just wanting it done" instead of enjoying the coding. No joy, no work.
4. I don't tolerate mediocrity in my life. Just posted about this in another thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=730261
These all seem fixable.
I want to become a professor so I'm paid to indulge my curiosity, teach, and write interesting books into my old age. I imagine that as a professor, as I age into my 50s and 60s and 70s, I would be an appreciated contributor in a loving community, and I imagine that as a start-up founder, I would be cast aside in my old age the way they do in Ik society.
I am now at the age when there's not much time left to go down the professor track and be successful.
If I wasn't trying to become a professor, I would do a start-up without hesitation. The above four reasons wouldn't stop me.
My first year as a grad student was so miserable, I am now reassessing.
and, why do you think that as an entrepreneur you won't still be building businesses well into your 50s 60s and 70s with teams of ambitious and motivated people?
1. Grad school was miserable because of time-fragmentation. Four simultaneous projects (classes) => couldn't focus on any of them.
2. I think that by nature, I am not really an entrepreneur. I'm a curious person, a tinkerer, someone who mostly enjoys coming up with a really good theory to explain some facts and open up new lines of thought and research.
I've met people with a genuinely entrepreneurial mentality: they can't help but see how to negotiate a better deal, broker solutions to practical problems, pounce on opportunities before the crowd values them correctly, surprise their competitors with something unexpected. I admire those qualities, but that sort of thing wears me out fast. Theorizing and seeding other people with cool ideas, though—I never tire of those.
I also happen to have a decent job where I am the lead developer on a product -- which in itself means I get to make the choices I want to make and I don't have to worry about all the stuff I don't care about (sales/marketing, finances, etc...).