Ask HN: Have you started a company that has zero to do with software?

I didn't specifically but my father is an entrepreneur many times over. He's since moved into software. However, often times he has said he did better in non-software businesses.

The two that he did that were quite successful (which I worked at as a teenager) were a plastics manufacturing business and a series of hair salon's. Both were very successful, very lucrative, and very time and physically intensive. I guess most businesses are!

Last year I flew to Kenya for 6 months to help a friend of my partner start a furniture business.

I run Hacker Paradise, which organizes workaway trips for developers, designers, and entrepreneurs.

While many of our participants have software companies, we're really an operations company, kind of like a specialty tour operator. As opposed to working with software or hardware, we spend a lot of time scouting hotels, running events, and facilitating the community.

Happy to answer any questions about that. So far, we've been to Costa Rica, Thailand, and Vietnam, and this summer, we'll be in Estonia, Spain, and Germany.

Not exactly... I toyed around with doing bicycle repair out of my home when I was a kid. I was pretty handy with BMX bikes, but I was honestly in over my head at the time when it came to road bikes or anything with a derailleur. Never made any money off of it, but I still like wrenching on my own bikes.

Later in life, after spending some time doing finish carpentry work (hanging doors, doing door trim, window trim, molding, shit like that), I got interested in hardwood flooring and considered starting a business to specialize in installing that stuff. But after chewing on the idea a while, I decided it would just be a distraction and forgot about it.

My dad, on the other hand, was a serial entrepreneur who ran all sorts of businesses throughout my childhood. Of hand, I can recall:

1. Owning a pulpwood truck and chainsaws, and cutting down trees and hauling logs to the paper mill.

2. Building and selling handmade crab-pots.

3. Building docks and bulkheads.

4. Owning a bulldozer, loader, dump-truck, etc., and doing land grading, lot clearing, driveways, etc.

5. Shrimping and clamming and selling seafood to the local wholesale seafood house.

6. Finishing cement pours - doing foundations, slabs, etc.

I probably missed a few, but he was always doing something. I think I picked up the whole entrepreneurial spirit thing from him, even though I'm not sure he even knows the word "entrepreneur". My dad is more "street smart" than "book smart" but he's done OK for himself.

I owned a few before getting into tech. I was a half owner of a limo business. I owned an auto repair shop. I also had a side gig with that doing fabrication for race cars. Later I started making metal furniture in partnership with the cabinet shop next to me. I also invested money I'm a friends motorcycle repair business but cashed out on that and my other businesses to get into the world of software. It was a lot of fun.

In 2010 I started a vampire themed energy drink company. Before even having a product, I secured the interest of a Fortune 500 company with 800 retail stores nationwide. In short, based on my proposal alone, they requested "samples & costs". I scrambled to create a product from scratch and sent it off, and to my surprise they did a 5,000 unit test order, based on the success they did a first full order of 35k-40k units.

It was short lived (do to the nature of the vampire fad), but a learning experience that put me in touch with the likes of the original inventor of Jelly Belly, who not only gave me advice but was impressed with my sales numbers. Prior to that I had never had any experience in the beverage (or candy/confection as it was labeled) industry nor any real desire pushing me in that direction.

www.vblood.com

I used to rehab and build eco friendly homes. It was definitely a hustle and grit and grind type of business.

It was all about snowballing your bankroll into more and bigger projects. You find ways to turn $10k into $100k and then you get addicted to trying to literally flip that money many times over.

Working with a guy on energy storage, first startup period...excited / nervous for all the usual reasons, but grateful that at the end of the day an actual physical product could ship to thousands of people.

This dude tells you exactly how he built a subscription box company to $100k in 6 months, $360k by year end: http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/2h1mlt/the_inn.... He isn't technical, and actually uses the YC company www.cratejoy.com for his ecommerce platform.

Inspirational. I recommend you find a concept that has reoccurring (high repeat) revenues, just because it's tough to have to keep getting new customers each day.

One of my friends works in software during the day and runs a Gaming store(mostly MtG) in the evening. She is successful enough at it that she just moved into a new location double the size.