
Ask HN: How do you decide when to start your own business - Sherxon9
As a full time software engineer, I am wondering if I need to work on my profession, learn new areas such as ML or start implementing my simple ideas and publish them  in my free time and at the weekends. Improving my skills on software engineering gives guaranteed value slowly over the years while starting with small apps gives better foundation to do my own startup company later.<p>Can you please give me you feedback&#x2F;comment from your experience, which helps me to decide which way to go.<p>Thank you :)
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sbinthree
In my experience, you learn useful things faster when running your own
company, compared to working for someone else. Pretty much by definition, you
tend to specialize when working for someone else. You can get unusually good
at a certain thing, but you miss out on other things that you could be
learning. The thing you specialize in gets boringly easy (from the perspective
of what is good enough for the employer), and everything else remains a black
box.

As a software engineer, the challenge is learning sales, and the art of
distribution in general. If you don't want to do sales, avoid B2B software
startups entirely, because that is pretty much always the bottleneck unless
you are doing some kind of fundamental innovation.

I don't know anyone who was so good at technical things that a market formed
around them and their technical skills, where I know several people who
basically knew they wanted to start a software company, started it, slogged in
obscurity for 6-12 months thinking product was the most important thing, and
then either gave up and got a job again or learned sales in order to survive,
and then after another year or so had a business with more fulfilling work and
income than the job they left.

The key, regardless of how technical they were, was figure out how to be
passable at sales before they ran out of money. Passable sales and passable
product ability in practice seems to run circles around great product ability
but insufficient sales ability (anecdote, at least for B2B since no one I know
has a successful B2C startup). So that is probably the biggest observed blind
spot for a software engineer.

The other thing is that a particular idea might have a shelf life, but the
concept of starting a business doesn't. Besides having kids or impulsive
lifestyle inflation, you can pretty much put off or pull forward starting a
business with impunity and you just accept the trade offs. Having a job is
without question an easier way to make money though, it's just a harder way to
make _lots_ of money or have _deeply_ fulfilling work. I suspect much of the
problem actually isn't the job itself, it's the nature of specializing.

~~~
chrisabrams
I sell crypto market intelligence; I've never put any effort in sales. Good
work simply markets itself in the right scenarios. Yes what I do is very
niche, but simply pointing out that in the right market conditions (huge
demand low supply) you don't need sales.

~~~
sbinthree
I meant to add a caveat that you can also commercialize b2b if your audience
is technical without sales or with much less one to one sales. Stripe has
sales people but they also have a good number of people just find them and
start making API calls. But there are always exceptions too, just much less
common.

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JAFTEM
I'm not one to take advice from and I would never assume to give any on this
matter. Just a short anecdote.

Max Levchin [Affirm] visited my university my senior year and someone in the
audience asked something similar. He told us (paraphrasing) "if you keep
holding off building a startup, it will never happen, and if you hold off
until you have a stable job and income, it's definitely not going to happen."

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muzani
It's like having kids. Logic says that it's better to do it later on in life
but the best time is a little earlier than you think you're ready.

Some people are disciplined about it. They plan and save years in advance,
build skills and connections, then build a company after a well planned
ritual.

Some people cheat on their day jobs, working on a side project at night and on
slow days at work. One day, they wake up and realize... oh no, they have 10k
users and not enough time to take care of them.

~~~
quickthrower2
If you have 10k users and you still need a day job, you don't have a business.

~~~
muzani
I've seen a startup bootstrap up to 400k monthly active users before anyone
would give them seed funding.

~~~
quickthrower2
It is hard to determine what to make of this anecdote, without more
information.

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SirLJ
Do both... when you start making more from your side projects, it will be the
time to consider leaving your day job and starting a business... By that time,
you'll have the experience with running the business and the leap will not be
that painful... (unless you are like me and really love your job, then, it
will be hard... every year I am postponing my "early retirement")

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hufx56
Learn how to work with people. There are too many people around here who sit
in front of a comp the whole day, and develop the misguided notion that
developing their sw skills is all that's required. But in a few years some kid
is going to come along and do whatever you are doing faster and better.

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Sherxon9
Thank you everybody. I really appreciate all of your comments)

