
Giles Bowkett: No New Languages In 2010; New Businesses Instead - ph0rque
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/12/no-new-languages-in-2010-new-businesses.html
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phren0logy
Starting a new business is hard. It takes time and energy. While I applaud the
ambition, wouldn't it be a better idea to focus on one or _maybe_ two new
projects at a time?

Once they are established and doing well, adding another might not be a
problem. Starting a bunch of new businesses all at once seems like a poor
strategy.

~~~
petercooper
I've kinda done what Giles is planning by _accident_ over the last few years.
I now have a gaggle of different projects all making a little money in
different ways - mostly passive. I think it can work. You're not going to
found a Reddit or a TechCrunch every month, but there are some more passive,
smaller things that could work.

For example, one of my sites - RubyFlow.com - makes several hundred dollars a
month and I spend an hour or two each month editing the odd submission, etc.
If you have the leverage to start new projects without it being a crazy level
of work, it can pay off.

~~~
yes_its_giles
Yeah, it's the Four-Hour Work Week thing. All you need is a business model
which requires neither time nor energy and you're fucking DONE. So many lazy
thinkers on a site like this. I never said I was starting businesses that
require time or energy. I said I was starting businesses. Period, the end.

Apart from anything else, say for the sake of argument that it just offends
your sense of logic to put together a business which requires time and energy,
when you know business models exist which don't require much time or energy.
Just assume, for the sake of argument, that it horrifies you to your core,
this insane idea of wasting your precious moments on this earth making money
the hard way when you could have made it with much less effort.

If you say "I'm launching a new business every month this year," you've just
painted yourself into a corner which __requires __that you put together
businesses that __don't __require time or energy. That's a good corner to be
in. With our hypothetical, how do you feel about that corner? You feel pretty
good.

But if you say "I'm going to set up one business this year, just one, only
one, and after I make that choice, I'm committing to it for years", you're
painting yourself into a different corner, where whichever business you choose
to start, you're fucking stuck with it. It's your whole life now, for years to
come. So you're going to hem and haw a long god damn time before you choose
which kind of business to start, and when you finally make the choice, you
might choose a shitty business model because it revolves around a technology
which would be fun to build.

That's a bad corner. It's bad for your integrity and it's bad for your quality
of life. (And this whole site is basically devoted to exalting that particular
bad decision.)

Also, RubyFlow could _become_ a Reddit or a TechCrunch. The fact that it isn't
one now doesn't mean anything. The fiercest tiger starts life as a kitten. If
you start 12 companies in a year, you can always come back to them a year
later and decide to put a little more effort into a few of them and build them
into larger things. I aimed for 12 miniapps last year. I didn't hit that mark,
but I ended the year having built a bunch of miniapps, and one of them (Hacker
Newspaper) I'm definitely going to keep around, and can, if I wish, add new
features to. That's so much better than just building one thing and betting
the farm on that one thing.

I mean there's a reason venture capitalists never bet the farm on one company.

~~~
ssp
_All you need is a business model which requires neither time nor energy and
you're fucking DONE._

The obvious objection is that such a business model is unsustainable because a
competitor can deliver the same thing for a lower price (with fewer ads, say).
And you have no defense against it because that would require effort.

~~~
yes_its_giles
You people on Hacker News need to figure something out about me. I don't
address the obvious objections, because they're obvious. I just solve them and
move on. This objection is so easy to solve it's not worth talking about.

------
Thoreau
Dear Giles,

I hope your businesses become very successful and you become too rich and busy
to blog.

Sincerely, A fellow hacker/entrepreneur leading a life of quiet desperation

------
toisanji
I think this would be a really fun thing to try to do. How would one go out
figuring out some good small ideas that are doable in a month?

~~~
gruntruk
Maybe I should write a mini-app for idea generation. I feel like everything I
come up with is a rehash of something already out there. I tend to focus on
small business stuff since these are people with money that might actually
cough up some dough... maybe that's the problem?

