

Don't Quit Your Day Job - aceregen
http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneurs/forbes/2008/0721/060.html

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hugh
_Lisa and Jeff R. Peri of Los Angeles depleted their $200,000 in savings,
maxed out their credit cards and borrowed $300,000 from family and friends to
develop and market their low-impact car-wash product. The concoction, Lucky
Earth, comes in a quart-size spray bottle that retails for $17. It's a mixture
of water, coconut by-products, sodium carbonate and water-soluble silicone,
blended with the notion that eco-sensitive customers will gladly substitute
some elbow grease for a garden hose._

Idealism-induced myopia combined with the current "green tech" fad is breeding
some truly bad business ideas. This is one of them.

Seriously, I'm supposed to wash my entire car with a quart-sized seventeen-
dollar bottle of mostly-water in order to save a few gallons of tap water?
There's a small number of people out there who are dumb enough to pay for
anything if they think it's "helping the environment" (at least until the next
fad comes along to displace the green-panic fad of the moment) but the market
seems really very limited, both in extent and in duration.

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nanijoe
Turns out the most successful of all the examples they gave in the article DID
quit his day job (actually got fired from it)

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goodkarma
"Not so long ago an Internet venturelet like Otrib might have seen a swarm of
venture capital firms, or at least some commercial banks offering high-priced
loans. Nowadays such financiers want to see businesses with revenue, customers
and a logo solidly in place before they commit capital."

Revenue, customers, and.. a logo?

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josefresco
Yet the VC crowd is dumping money on web apps like Twitter with no revenue.

They do have 2 out of the 3, maybe it's like the ol' "good/cheap/fast, pick
any two" thing.

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LogicHoleFlaw
This may be a shallow thing to take away from the article, but "Lobster Gram"
is most appropriate and hilarious name for a company that I've heard in a long
time.

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bdotdub
duplicate? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=235658>

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Mistone
pretty cool to see these companies and founders reaching success milestones
while doing the day job thing. the quote from the ZoomInfo CEO about
supporting his employees in their entrep. pursuits was great. A friend
recently left zoom to start viximo, so its the truth. some inspiration for all
the yc moonlighters, including me.

