
Ask HN: Is it harder and harder to be an entrepreneur as time goes on? - hnx3
In the late 90&#x27;s and early 2000&#x27;s seems like a golden era to be an software entrepreneur. Internet was still relatively new.<p>Nowadays, any cool idea or problem you want to solve already has multiple solutions. Now, that&#x27;s not completely true but I feel that it is harder to be a solo entrepreneur or have a small, lean, and efficient team that does more with less.<p>Maybe a particular problem is already solved in the United States, but maybe it is not in Europe. So maybe that&#x27;s a way to think about it. Maybe pick an existing problem and make it better.<p>Will we ever reach a point where a solo entrepreneur is just a pipe dream? Where every problem is saturated with several solutions.<p>My dream is to bootstrap a company and never have to rely on investors. Create something that nets me a decent passive income and then never have to worry (as much) about money as I do now. This seems possible for a pure software solution but anything non trivial that involves hardware or tangible things, one needs investment.<p>I wish I had the knowledge and mindset I do now 18 years ago. I am 29 years old. But I feel that nowadays I will have little choice to but to work for someone else and make that someone else rich.<p>I just wanted to see what you all think.
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shubhamjain
> Nowadays, any cool idea or problem you want to solve already has multiple
> solutions. Now, that's not completely true but I feel that it is harder to
> be a solo entrepreneur or have a small, lean, and efficient team that does
> more with less.

There was rarely a time when this wasn't the case. Hindsight might tell you
otherwise, but consider that Wordpress was launched in 2003, long after
blogging phenomenon started in 1997. Stripe was launched in 2010, long after
Paypal, Authorize.net. Look around you, there isn't a lack of problems to be
solved.

And I don't mean to cool-and-sexy stuff like VR and AI, but basic ones.
Wordpress sucks. Why there isn't a CMS that combines static file generation
with Wordpress' ease of customisability? Why is server administration still so
hard? Why isn't there a programmer-friendly search engine that focuses of
giving relevant examples (which constitute most of my Google queries)? Google
Analytics shows too much stuff, why isn't there something simple for bloggers
and publishers?

I accept, these ideas might be not be great, but these are problems I face
frequently. Chances are even you (and people around you) would have
frustrating problems that can be solved.

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bsvalley
At 29 years old you grew up with the fact that the Internet is like
electricity. It’s everywhere and part of our life. Same goes for mobile phones
and Amazon Prime for 15-20 years old kids. At 50 years old you can’t seem to
imagine life without a personal computer. New born babies may not have to work
a day in their life thanks to AI and will never learn how to drive a vehicle
ever. The list goes on and on.

If you want to be a successful “entrepreneur” you need to ask yourself this
kind of questions. How can I make the world a better place? How can I improve
our lives? What will we be doing in the next 50 years that we’re not doing at
the moment?

Orherwise you’ll quickly fall into a world of sheep. People who take
everything for granted and keep consuming until there’s nothing left. Then
wait for producers to produce so they can consume everything. It’s been this
way since the begining of our human race. If you simply create value, you’ll
be fine.

~~~
aregsarkissian
"People who take everything for granted" so so true. Everything that is, was
once not. And everything that is, will soon not be.

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ian0
There is still a huge demand for b2b software and large swathes of industry
that are in the very early stages of digitalisation. We work in an old
fashioned industry (education) and are constantly asked to build x, y & z
outside of our scope.

Get to know businesses and their problems and there are plenty of
opportunities to build helpful software. You will constantly be battling to
stay product-based vs service-based but if your building a small company this
isn't as big a problem as it seems (Ive met more well off entrepreneurs with
service-style businesses)

I think the best assistance you can give yourself is to reduce your personal
expenses and save up a nest-egg that would allow you to work on this for quite
a bit longer than you would think. While saving up, go out and talk to people
about their problems. You'll find there are a million problems to which the
current solutions aren't a perfect fit.

PS If you run a business you will be thinking about money far more than you
are now!!

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segmondy
Yes, it get's harder. All I had to do was buy a domain names and I would have
retired. Today I need to write 50,000 lines of code across 25 micro services,
running a hybrid multi cloud cluster of kubernetes instance consumping 100
other APIs with a sharded and replicated DB cluster to have a chance. :-) But
it's still easier than tomorrow, tomorrow you will need to train a deep
learning model that runs on 10k GPUs and using all sorts of Phd level maths.
So start today instead of over thinking it. :D

~~~
AznHisoka
I think developing, while not trivial is the easy part. its finding the right
product idea and opportunity, and then marketing it, that is harder than ever.

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rubenhak
I think its harder to some extent, but you can always find a niche to make
significant improvements. If you think that everything is already done and
there is nothing else left, that just means you're spending enough time on
experimenting and researching.

As far as investment concerned, I'm personally a self-funded solo founder.
This is a very hard and stressful path. I'd love to get an investment with a
reasonable deal, but for me that's a little bit early. I probably start
working in that area once I get few paying customers.

If you haven't yet already done so, read the "Lean Startup" book. I'm by no
means associated with it. It was very useful to me, and I think this should
the very first think for entrepreneurs to do. Will be probably best $15 spent
on amazon.

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Regardsyjc
Last year I met 4 people under 25 who each respectively built $1m+ businesses.
One guy started by flipping video games. The other was a programmer who did
$300k+ revenue within a few months of starting his Amazon business. Another
built an 8 figure business within 2 years making software for Amazon sellers.

All of them bootstrapped their businesses. The first 3 were Amazon seller
product businesses. It's possible and maybe even easier now than before.

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tmaly
I read your title a little differently. I have to say as we age it becomes
harder to do entrepreneur stuff. Once you start a family and have more than
one kid, you literally are strapped for time.

Take advantage of every minute you have if you really want it.

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mindcrime
_. Internet was still relatively new._

I mean, if your approach is "find problem, add Internet, equals solution" then
yeah, you're probably going to find it a tough row to hoe these days. But I'd
challenge you to broaden your thinking and be more imaginative. There's a lot
more to creating solutions that "mix in some Internet".

Think about the staggering array of things you can do today, with almost no
up-front investment at all, using AWS, GCE, Azure, etc., that would have cost
millions 20 years ago. You can deploy a virtual super-computer running in AWS
and throw it at a problem for crying out loud.

Consider too the range of awesome open-source / free software packages that
are out there, and all the capabilities they enable. Consider cheap, small,
embeddable single-board computers, inexpensive software-defined-radio, cheap
webcams, accelerometers, gps chips, and other sensors. Consider all the Open
Data that's out there already, and everything streaming in minute-by-minute
(see, SDR and receiving satellite data right off the air in real-time).

Consider the 8+ billion people in the world who are mostly all potential
customers given how interconnected we are with the internet and global payment
systems. Look at how much easier it is now to get content in front of
potential customers with Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, etc.

Consider that you can prototype a physical item with a cheap 3D printer, using
Open Source OpenSCAD software, ship a prototype off to an injection molding
outfit, sell your item on Amazon, using Amazon's warehouses and logistics
infrastructure, and never touch the inventory.

Further consider how much more we know about the mechanics of starting and
running a tech startup now. Ideas like "product market fit" have been
formalized and are better understood, Steve Blank's Customer Development
process is out there as guide, and there are tremendous resources like Startup
School, etc. out there to consult.

One could go on and on and on... personally I think there's never been a
better time to be an entrepreneur than right now. There is so much possibility
and so much potential out there that it's staggering, IMO.

Here, try this on for size and see if maybe you can draw some inspiration from
this guy (Alan Kay):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1WShzzMCQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1WShzzMCQ)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e8VZlPBx_0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e8VZlPBx_0)

Even better, go off somewhere and lock yourself in a room with a bunch of
books by Philip K. Dick, Greg Egan, William Gibson, Charles Stross, and H.P.
Lovecraft - and biographies of Nikola Tesla and Charles Proteus Steinmetz -
and devour that stuff for a while. That's practically guaranteed to get your
mind running in all sorts of interesting new directions.

