
Startup vs. Lifestyle Business (A Short Comparison from a Guy Who's Done Both) - wallflower
http://www.corbettbarr.com/startup-vs-lifestyle-business
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scottyallen
"I wanted to start a business doing something I enjoy that let me live a great
life now."

I wish we as a valley entrepreneur culture valued this more.

I quit my fulltime job at a startup recently, with the goal of starting my own
company. I spent a bunch of time having fairly in depth conversations with
potential cofounders. Really sharp people, many of which who had solid, well
validated business ideas with significant investor interest.

But I couldn't fully commit. In the end, I realized it was because deep in my
heart, I wanted to have a great life now, not at some unspecified (and
uncertain) point way in the future. So I decided to focus on building a
business that generates solid cash flow and which doesn't require a 60 hour
workweek for me to maintain, once I get it up and running.

The process of going around and explaining my decision to everyone who I had
been talking with awkward. If you liken the process of finding a cofounder to
dating leading up to marriage, then the process of "breaking up" was akin to
going around to all of the girls you're dating and telling them you're gay.
"We're both attracted to different things", and, "I respect your lifestyle
choice" were common phrases:) People were supportive in a "That's nice for
you, I'm glad you're following your heart, but I would never choose that" sort
of way.

It's a shame that the valley culture is so focused on big, home run hit
businesses. We're now in an era of entrepreneurship where very solid cashflow
businesses can be created with very little capital, and significantly lower
risk than a big homerun hit business. Yet, as a community, we treat them like
the uncle whose lifestyle everyone accepts but no one wants to talk about. A
lot of the advising, incubators, and accepted best practices all center around
taking funding and growing as big as possible as quickly as possible, above
all else.

If any "lifestyle" entrepreneurs want to grab a cup of coffee sometime and
swap advice and/or encouragement, drop me a line - my contact info is in my
profile.

~~~
ramanujan
The thing is though that a lifestyle business is quite stressful in many ways:
you have to innovate like a technologist while _also_ having the enormous
stress of bottom line responsibility for profit & loss...without the
possibility of getting more hands to help you out through growth, or the
margin of a large company to tide you over should times get bad.

37Signals is not the typical lifestyle business. A business you've never heard
of, or which you frequent without paying much thought, is the typical
lifestyle business. No one will make a movie about such a business, or be in
awe at its growth rate, or fund a bunch of competitors to get into the space.
It certainly has its pluses and minuses, but if you are an ambitious kind of
character who loves the clang of battle, there's a reason that a lifestyle
business seems like a defeat.

Finally, it's not much easier to build a lifestyle business that actually
makes more money (and hence provides more freedom) than your alternatives. If
you have such talent, you could probably make more of an impact either at a
big company or by joining/founding a top startup.

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cstross
I've done the startup thing (I was first programmer hire at Datacash in 1997;
reverse takeover onto AIM in 2000, after which I left: acquired by Mastercard
last year). And I've done the lifestyle thing -- self-employed full time for
the past decade, doing very nicely but in a niche where it's almost impossible
to scale up beyond sole trader.

If I'd stuck in the startup mode, I'd be dead.

See, startups are very demanding. And if you don't have great health, or a
tendency towards stress-related illnesses, that's a very bad situation to be
in. I've seen a friend die of it (hypertension plus 90 hour work weeks are a
bad combination) and I was on course for it myself before I got out.

It doesn't matter if the startup is going to make you rich at the IPO if it
kills you first. And it won't do the startup any good if one of the founder
dies in harness, either.

~~~
davidw
> doing very nicely but in a niche where it's almost impossible to scale up
> beyond sole trader.

cstross is a sci-fi author:-)

I think for many, that would be going from startups to writing would be from
the frying pan into the fire in that they're both "black swan" industries.
Glad it's worked for him, though.

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hxf148
I have worked corporate government web development for over a decade (sigh). I
helped bring in use of open source and php there and in a way it has always
operated as a startup with constant staff/tech changes.

But going it alone in the real world has been a teacher of many new lessons. I
am struggling everyday to balance working towards a goal while maintaining the
present reality. I am not alone in my current startup
(<http://infostripe.com>) but it's pretty much down to me right now to
finance, develop, market, and support it. Developing and managing growth are
tasks I actually crave to do and my goal right now is to build an idea slowly,
work hard, refine and iterate the results until it begins to take on a life of
its own and we can afford specialists and consider investment.

I would say for sure that until you do reach the point of stability in your
code and business model that you are living a particular lifestyle. Any time
you can find to get closer to profitability is your life. I've watched many
small business owners go through the same startup cycles. Some make it and
some don't. It just really comes down to the fact that if the thing you are
going after is something that you Love to do it will ultimately get easier if
it is a decent idea. The something whether code or knitting is the thing that
you want to do so figuring out the rest just enables your passion.

I believe ultimately that being able to think up, program and execute
technical and/or products and craft ideas for making coin online is an ever
growing small business of the now and future.

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theitgirl
Great post! I am a software developer currently working full time for a
company. Recently, my husband and I started talking about having kids and the
first thought that came to my mind was that I don’t want my kids to be left in
someone else’s care while I work for someone else. I don’t want to stop
working entirely and become a housewife either.

I started looking into other options. From what I understand, startups are for
people who want to run a business and a lifestyle business is for people who
want to own a business with a focus on maintaining their preferred lifestyle.

I am choosing to go the lifestyle business route. We’ll see how it goes :)

~~~
funcall
My wife and I made this same decision about 5 years ago when we were expecting
our first child, for pretty much the same reasons you cited. We were extremely
fortunate to have found a niche for which we could build a product, and find
paying clients relatively quickly.

It took us about 18 months to reach a level of stability - literally, our
business grew alongside our first child. But, even during this phase we were
able to spend quality time with our child. Although, as one of the other
posters indicated a lifestyle business doesn't automatically mean tons of free
time and no stress. It's just that relative to a traditional startup life
(which I experienced as a principal when I was still single), it's still night
and day.

My wife and I are extremely grateful for the time and freedom our business
afforded us. We were able to spend more time with our children during those
precious first few months and years than we would have even working for a big
company, let alone a startup. There were still stressful times, especially
finding clients, or when servers went down in the middle of the night (funny
how that always happened just as soon as you go back to sleep after walking a
crying child to sleep :), but it was all worth it.

I wish you best luck in your path.

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Lucadg
I have been living the lifestyle business for more than 10 years now. Here in
HN I feel a bit ashamed of: \- not having raised millions \- not having made
millions \- my small company staying small for so long.

but who cares? What I wanted was traveling and travel I did. The author is
right to point out that there's an (easier?) alternative to make it big. Make
it now.

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dangravell
Both descriptors are too general, they hide the good and bad implementations
of either approach.

Depending on your experience of either side (which I, too, have) another way
of looking at the comparison is, respectively, an organisation that hopes to
turn into a business in the future, or a profitable business now.

Naturally, both sides want to earn revenue and be profitable. Only, on the
'startup' side, you have to have a really good reason to be in the position to
take that funding. You need to know, I think, the first market you will
tackle, the first problem you will solve and the first ways you will begin
building revenue and profitability, otherwise you are just wasting time with
other people's cash.

If a startup is a medical company needing funding for R&D, fine. If a startup
is a hardware company needing to fill inventory, fine. If the startup is a
software company that has worked out a repeatable sales model and now wants to
get boots on the floor peddling those wares, also fine.

I guess what I'm saying is that it feels to me in software that 'startup' is
almost the default, when in reality it should be a special case, or a latter
day option as you scale up an already proven sales model.

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killerswan
There's also the alternative of working for someone else's lifestyle
business.........

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
A lot of us "lifestylers" have similar ambitions to the startup folks, like
wanting to work for ourselves and be masters of our own destiny.

Working for someone else's lifestyle business kind of has all the downsides.
You know it's not going to go big and turn your equity into big money, plus
you're still working for someone else, not being your own boss.

On the flip side, for the people who just want a good, low-stress job, working
for a lifestyle biz can be a great thing. There's a better chance the founders
will understand and respect your own lifestyle choices (kids, family, travel,
etc.) and try to prevent the job from interfering.

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EECS
I've been on both sides as well, having done many lifestyle projects and
businesses as well as building startups including successfully getting
acquired and I have the opposite view.

I strongly believe that the main reason the author claims he prefers a
lifestyle business really boils down to financial reasons and freedom of time
associated with running a simple lifestyle business. But if you're in a
position where finances are no longer an issue, it boils down to what you
really want to do. For me, having been through both and having both do well
enough to financially secure me for life, the concept of doing a business to
"allow me to live life _now_ " doesn't really apply. I can technically not
work by choice and just enjoy life to the maximum extent doing whatever
(financially related or not) or do projects on the side to fill up time if
that's my hobby.

Instead, I find that I have a tremendous passion in doing startups, where the
lifestyle IS the life I want and I don't really care about doing all the other
so called "living life _now_ " junk because this is living life at its best in
my definition. I am the type that would rather not travel, hit up happy hour,
or do other leisurely things in lieu of running my startup doing something
cool or what I want to do. I rather focus all my spare time building a startup
anyway. So to me, to some extent, it seems like the authors decision is base
on the fact that financial, no matter how small of a factor it currently
plays, is still a determining factor nonetheless (read associate of time
included). The OP can feel free to correct me if this isn't so.

It also doesn't help that it seems the OP only has one startup experience to
relate to and its one that didn't succeed (not counting the experience
portion; which can be considered success or not separately) and ended up
making him and his cofounder split ways (which even on the best of terms and
all could still have some influence). Just my two cents.

After all is said and done, it also reflects how many people consider getting
into doing a startup under the notion of either not wanting to work for
somebody else or because of financial wins, less so because they just have a
strong passion for doing startups (similar to people who do open source
projects that aren't commercialize to an extent). I'm not saying the OP is
like that in any way, but as the old mantra goes, do what you love. And if you
love doing startups, freedom/finances isn't going to change your love of the
game.

Side Note: I lived in SF for over three years before moving down to the Valley
(Mountain View) in favor or startup life over city living. While SF is still
very tech centric, in my personal honest opinion, it doesn't hold much of a
candle to the Valley itself and _majority_ of the people I've ever talked to
arguing in favor of living in SF, are to a large extent, arguing for a life
outside of the startup world. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that but
the distinction should be made for non-Bay Area residents who may not
understand the difference. (Again, personal opinion)

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neilk
This was nearly content-free. No details about either business.

It does outline the difference between a VC-backed startup and a regular
business but I hope that distinction is clear to most of the people here.

There is Tim-Ferriss-esque hinting at "dream lifestyle" stuff that disturbs
me.

~~~
noodle
follow the links in the post and you'll find it. he actually has a somewhat
lengthy thing about what he did and how.

what's disturbing about the dream lifestyle stuff?

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jingerso
Let me guess, you are non-technical?

~~~
rewind
Can you elaborate? As a one-liner, that sounds both ridiculous and belittling.

