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Ask HN: Non hypergrowth startups

5 points by holocat ↗ HN
Most of materials devoted to startups are focused on hypergrowth business.

I am currently thinking about lifestyle SaaS business. What can you recommend to read on this topic? Are such goals worth pursuing if we consider corporate career vs small own company?

11 comments

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danieltillett
Why are you considering SaaS? The reason I ask is you might be prematuraly optimising your thinking of the best way to go with a lifestyle business.

This is an off topic rant, but can we please come up with a less pejorative term than "lifestyle business" to describe non-"shoot for the moon or crash" type start-ups?

mindcrime
but can we please come up with a less pejorative term than "lifestyle business" to describe non-"shoot for the moon or crash" type start-ups?

FWIW, this is the first time I've ever heard anybody suggest "lifestyle business" is an inherently pejorative term. I don't consider it a pejorative in any way, and I don't know anybody offhand who does. That said, I've heard tell of VC's and other people who are deeply invested (no pun intended) in the "shoot for the moon" approach being somewhat dismissive of lifestyle businesses, and perhaps couching their discussion of them in pejorative terms... I just haven't known anybody who holds the phrase to be intrinsically pejorative.

danieltillett
The term "lifestyle business" is certainly used here on HN in a pejorative way to dismiss start-ups that hold little value to the VC industry.

I have been thinking about an alternative and I would like to suggest the term "founder-focused" instead of "lifestyle".

michaelbuckbee
I'd suggest the term "Bootstrapped" to "Lifestyle".
danieltillett
Bootstrapped is a description of the funding not the purpose of the business. We need a term to capture the purpose of the business.
MCRed
I believe the correct term is startup. It is only in recent years that people have tried to make startup mean a very specific, narrow, method of launching a business. But the term, traditionally, means a business in its early phase, pre-profitability. Whether this is an international shipping concern or a mobile hook-up app, they're both startups.

GitHub isn't a "lifestyle business" (even before they took A16Z money)

danieltillett
I agree, but in HN any start-up that is not set-up to be an extreme outlier is considered somehow a lesser business.
logn
less pejorative term than "lifestyle business"

Independent business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_business

MicroISV: http://www.singlefounder.com/2009/11/17/the-day-the-microisv...

danieltillett
Both of these names are fine, but they don't really capture the idea of a start-up that has been structure to optimize the founder's interests rather than the VC interests.

Creating an extreme outlier business is rarely in the founder's interest since the most common outcome of such a business is failure. VCs's can afford to average out the risks by investing in hundreds of start-ups, but each founder only has one life.