

3 Years, 6 Months, and $0 MRR - programminggeek
http://retromocha.com/learn/3-years-6-months-and-0-mrr/

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fearless
Welcome to the unfortunate reality of most internet businesses. The default
outcome of a lifestyle business is a lot closer to this than a patio11 style
runaway success. The lifestyle entrepreneur myth is so pervasive on HN that
the common mindset of non startup people is "Oh, I don't want to do the
startup thing, I'll just build a steady slow growth business and make $10K a
month". The reality is that a side project making $10K a month is even less
likely than a multi million dollar acquisition of a venture funded startup.
The median outcome is not that you'll get 0.01% of a niche market, it's that
you'll get 0%

~~~
patio11
_The default outcome of a lifestyle business is a lot closer to this than a
patio11 style runaway success._

Maybe this is a matter of perspective, but I don't consider my business a
runaway freight train. There exist many, many, many businesses in your town
which make more than I do.

I know literally hundreds of people who have businesses which are roughly
similar (consultancies / SaaS shops / infoproducts / etc, created without
substantial non-founder investment), and believe me when I say this, I neither
optimize for nor have achieved an unattainably high watermark.

~~~
davidw
It's logarithmic. But your time as a consultant is worth more than some number
of 9's of people on the planet (99.99% for instance). You've got one business
that runs itself, and another one ticking along pretty well. Maybe you haven't
made all the money you want to make, but you're well on your way to financial
freedom, appear to be doing something that makes you happy, and have a family
(congrats!), friends, and seem to be fairly happy with the world.

If you look at things in absolute terms, rather than relative terms (someone
_always_ has more), you seem pretty successful to me in a way that not a lot
of people manage. I wouldn't belittle it too much.

~~~
amyhoy
He's not belittling it, he's (politely and patio11-ly) saying: "Stop putting
this huge space between me and you because it isn't there, and you're short-
selling yourself by pretending it is."

~~~
davidw
If we were to look at the most quantitative, objective thing, consulting
rates, there very certainly is a difference between patio11 and the average HN
user (and most of _us_ are better off than the population at large, I'm
willing to bet).

I've met him, and you're right that he's very polite, generally humble and a
good guy, and I can appreciate he's seen plenty of people making orders of
magnitude more money than him. Still though, he's pretty successful.

~~~
mischanix
It's a bit irrelevant to go down this road since patio11 has quit direct
consulting, but from what I've read, patio11's path to (consulting) success
goes like this: patio11 likes teachers, makes bingo card app, charges for it
like a reasonable person; patio11 notices all these mistakes he's making while
selling to teachers, blogs about it, blog gains popularity among like-minded
individuals; patio11 falls into consulting, delivers a good service, and finds
out how much he can charge for it.

There's nothing in this story that's dependent on being very lucky or being
exceptionally smart; the only outstanding traits here are overcoming the fear
of the unknown that plagues everyone and being a good teacher, but both of
these can be learned. It mostly just comes down to spending your time doing
the right things.

And now with AR, just by focusing on the major mistake from BCC (selling to
teachers), patio11 has sort of proven my point for me: it doesn't take that
long to bootstrap a successful business with all the resources available to
you now. There are more than enough blog posts telling you what to do, what
not to do, and there are more than enough open niches that are _perfect_ for
microbusinesses to supplant the dayjobs of everyone on HN who has the same
restless ambition that makes staying in those dayjobs an impossibly depressing
prospect. And from there, consulting for larger businesses with what you learn
in your micro is just icing on the cake.

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bdunlap
Sounds like people are consistently willing to pay money for Paint Colors;
i.e., it provides real value to real people.

So why not focus on it?

~~~
programminggeek
That's a good idea that we are tinkering with. However, the economics of the
app store aren't awesome.

At an average revenue of say $1.50 per sale, we need sustained sales of like
10,000 or more units per month. We are in the 100-200 sales a month currently.
I can see us getting to 500 sales a month maybe, but growing sales 50-100x is
not something we have figured out how to do.

At some point we would run up against the low revenue per sale and lack of
recurring revenue. I have some ideas, but I don't see it being much more than
a $10,000-$25,000 per year app.

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noso
Life is too short - Good luck with your experiments!

