

Ask HN: Are you an entrepreneur or just like to build things? - carlos

During the last years I've been developing web sites as a hobby, I really enjoy doing the development, improving performance, and always looking for new ideas to build. But I don't feel like an entrepreneur, I'm still working for a company and basically don't want to leave as I prefer to build sites as a hobby without the pressure to making them profitable.<p>Is any of you in the same situation?
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sgentle
Respectfully, I think this is a false choice. A rephrasing:

"Are you a developer or just like to write code? During the last few years
I've been making functions. I really like writing the code and choosing good
sets of functions but I don't really feel like a developer. I don't want to
make the jump because I like writing code without the pressure of making those
functions into an actual application."

To explain:

If you're doing side projects, you _are_ an entrepreneur. You might not be a
very good one (yet), but an entrepreneur is just someone who takes risks for
an uncertain payoff. The risk in this case is your time, and the uncertainty
is that a project might take off.

It is worth realising that the difference between "someone who builds things"
and an entrepreneur is largely about focus. Why are you making these things?
If you're building them in the hope that people will use them, then you should
think about users. How might they find your thing and what would they like
about it? If you're making things in the hope that they might make money, then
you owe it to yourself to learn a bit about why people pay for things and keep
it in mind. If you hope to work with others, then any effort you put into
meeting people and figuring out if you should work with them is well spent.

I don't want to discount here the possibility that you genuinely don't want
your projects to get users or make money. If you're building things just to
learn and would be mortified if they got into the hands of real people, this
probably doesn't apply to you, but I suspect that's not the case.

Otherwise, it's merely a question of how much are you doing to make your hope
(project takes off) into a reality?

It doesn't have to be scary. Admitting that you're an entrepreneur doesn't
mean you have to quit your job tomorrow. Many entrepreneurs wait before
jumping ship, because they want to take a calculated risk. Nothing wrong with
that. The point is that if you're starting side projects and you hope they
succeed, you're doing entrepreneurial things. There's no harm in accepting
that and learning how to do it better.

~~~
hasenj
> If you're doing side projects, you are an entrepreneur.

I disagree. If you rely on your day job for income, you're not an
entrepreneur.

But, that's not all. You could quit your job and do your own business, and
still be quite different from what an entrepreneur is.

I'm personally not in it for the "getting rich" stuff. I'd rather take the
37signal approach than PG's approach. Meaning, I'd rather not take any venture
or angel investment. I don't plan to sell (aka exit). In fact I'm quite scared
by the prospect of taking large sums of outside investments (like twitter and
facebook).

So, I'm not an entrepreneur and I don't want to be one.

> The point is that if you're starting side projects and you hope they
> succeed, you're doing entrepreneurial things.

This, I agree with. It's somewhat entrepreneurial to quit your job and try to
pursue your own projects.

I think the difference comes down to why you'd do it. My impression of
entrepreneur types is that they get a kick of taking risks.

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krainboltgreene
I'm a hacker who has a small hope that maybe something I do will help others
and make me a little money on the side.

Short Answer: Yes.

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kakaylor
I am in a similar situation.

I started working full time after completing undergrad a year ago, and am
working on side projects more to learn than for entrepreneurship. They have
been a great low cost way to continue my undergraduate math + cs education.

I certainly wouldn't mind if a project really took off and allowed me to work
on it full time, but I understand that I would have to make a significant
commitment (time + money) to really have any of them gain traction. Just look
at <http://signal.am> . It is absolutely begging for someone with more UI/UX
skill than I personally have -- but it has been priceless in advancing my
personal skill set (outside UI/UX).

~~~
ColemanF
I don't have any UX training (Econ major, myself), but I recommend making
bigger stories take up more space, like TechMeme does. I do like how you de-
emphasized related stories, because they make TechMeme kind of noisy. I also
miss the pictures TechMeme puts next to most stories. In general, it is a
little bland, as you seem to realize. Then again, HN is bland and I don't have
a problem with it.

The story ranking and discovery is good, though. Seems on par with TechMeme,
which is impressive.

I found it with a Facebook ad. Are you advertising it a little just to see if
it takes off, or what?

Anyways, good job and good luck.

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user24
In the past I've simply built fun things. A few have even been pretty popular
(front page of digg for one (back when that meant something), and one of my
OSS projects was used by mozilla and apple, which was neat). Others, like
steganography in PHP[1], were simply random ideas I built for a laugh.

Now I'm trying to move into building things _that have a market_ , and keeping
the 'cool but useless' or 'cool but not profitable' stuff to a minimum, or for
blog-fodder.

[1] - <http://www.puremango.co.uk/2005/03/steganography_112/>

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conjectures
At the moment I just like to build things. If I'm lucky and keep it up,
hopefully there might be some opportunities in the future to do more with it.

------
cme
carlos interested in talking on side jobs? I'm into the business side of
things, maybe we should talk?

