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I am done. I give up
1237 points by wakana on Dec 23, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 972 comments
I'm writing this post because I'm done. I can't do this anymore. After three failed attempts at building a successful startup and spending time institutionalized, I'm giving up on my entrepreneurship dreams.

I tried everything - building an audience, making sure my product actually solved a problem, getting paying customers, and writing high-quality content and contributing to the community. But no matter what I did, I couldn't seem to get anywhere. My efforts were fruitless and I'm tired of trying. I barely had 20 followers, my substack and product blogs didn't get any signups, and while I did get a few upvotes (8) on Product Hunt once, I never had a paid customer. It was as if the world was against me and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make any progress. I remember trying to interact and hype up my fellow indiehackers on Twitter, regularly engaging with their content, but no one ever paid any attention to me or followed me back. It was like I didn't even exist in the world of entrepreneurship. And even when I did get some attention, it was short-lived and never led to anything substantial.

But it's not just the lack of success that's getting me down. It's also the constant stream of digital nomad influencers on Twitter who sell extremely distorted, rosy, and often times false dreams to indie entrepreneurs like myself. They make it seem like building a successful startup is easy and anyone can do it with the right mindset and a few key tips. But the reality is that it's not that simple. It's fucking hard and it takes more than just a positive attitude to make it.

I know I'm not alone in feeling this way. There are so many other indie entrepreneurs out there who are struggling and feeling like they'll never make it. If you're one of them, I want you to know that you're not alone. It's okay to feel defeated and to want to give up. But please don't give up. Keep pushing forward and don't let the failures define you. There's always a chance for success, no matter how small it may seem.

But for me, I can't take it anymore. I've hit rock bottom and I have nothing left to give. To all the indie hackers, hacker news, and Reddit readers out there, please don't be fooled by the false promises of digital nomad influencers. Building a startup is hard work and it takes time. It's not as easy as they make it seem and it's not for everyone. Don't let your dreams consume you like they did for me, and PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PROTECT YOUR MENTAL HEALTH AT ALL COST! Don't make the same mistakes I did and realize that entrepreneurship may not be the path for you. It's okay to admit defeat and move on to something else.




> It's also the constant stream of digital nomad influencers on Twitter who sell extremely distorted, rosy, and often times false dreams to indie entrepreneurs like myself. They make it seem like building a successful startup is easy and anyone can do it with the right mindset and a few key tips.

This is just startup porn. It’s the same in any category (make money flipping houses!, crypto!, etc.) As a rule of thumb, assume 99% of influencers are full of shit. Stay off instagram.

Running a business is definitely hard. I don’t think it’s for everyone. You need to handle failure, long hours, lack of balance, and disappointment in a sort of irrational way. Kind of like a fanaticism / religion of self. Ultimately it’s probably not healthy!

I don’t recommend persevering due to FOMO. See if working for others scratches the itch so you have something to compare it to.


> This is just startup porn. It’s the same in any category (make money flipping houses!, crypto!, etc.) As a rule of thumb, assume 99% of influencers are full of shit. Stay off instagram.

This 100x! Many of the big influencers in these indie/startup/productivity niches seem to earn a lot of money at first sight. If you look deeper, a lot of these influencer seem to be making a lot of money from courses they are selling instead of operating the business they sell courses about.


My all time favorite is Robert T. Kiyosaki's book "Poor dad, rich dad". Pretty much everything he teaches about financial success is fiction. In reality he worked a regular 9 to 5 job, failed at starting his own business, and finally made money by selling this book and providing seminars.


You are completely correct. I hate this stuff that's peddled on YouTube, it's pretty simple, ask yourself what do they get out of telling you this if they are making so much money doing it. They are making money selling you courses.

What made me more susceptible I think is that my father made his money grinding up, buying a few flats , moving into full on property development. I paid no attention to his business until it was too late for me to learn from him (he died). Sure I worked on his building sites as a teenager, grafted cleaning out flats after tenants moved out (this is while my mates enjoyed their school holidays). He did pretty well and I grew up in a pretty affluent way. The stress was awful for him. I believe it fucked him up a bit. I have a few bad memories of him being a bit horrible. I forgive him that now looking back at the pressure he was under.

After his death I was desperate to emulate him. I began to think working for a salary was a mugs game. I paid for some bullshit property courses. Never went all in on anything thank god.

Anyway, eight years later I've accepted what I am, I'm in a job I actually like. I'll plough my furrow doing software and getting better at it. It's modest, but it's more certain. And uncertainty is the root of stress for me.

One bit of advice he gave me when I was complaining about working and having a manager etc "son, the bank manager is my boss, he can call in my loans any time" I can see now that this is a great antidote to the bullshit financial freedom advice on YouTube


I appreciated your comment. However with respect to what your Dad told you :

> "son, the bank manager is my boss, he can call in my loans any time"

that would have been true for him (being in property development). But there are people who build successful businesses or just work for themselves who never go into substantial debt and thus are free of any such 'creditor boss'.


True. Though anyone I know who is owns a business uses debt to grow it. But you make a fair point.


I fell into this whole startup hustle bubble a while ago, obviously I also read the book "Rich dad, poor dad". At least I tried, it was bad. Not only was it unrealistic, it also dismissed a whole lot of external factors at play at accumulating such wealth and didn't feel realistic at all. I did not know that he worked regular 9 to 5 and only generated his wealth by providing advice how to build wealth, but its not really surprising and fits the picture fairly well.


It made you poorer and him richer though, so from his perspective it's a good book.


This genuinely made me LOL


The takeaway I got from him was positive. First, start buying real estate and renting. THEN, with that financial security try to build a business of your own if you are motivated. The first part is hard to fail at, and you can do it while working a full time job.


He also mentioned that property is a liability, not an investment. I guess many property management companies would disagree.


> THEN, with that financial security ..

Nah, you'll just mooch off your stable unearned, unproductive income source for the rest of your life. It's called rent seeking -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking and it's the absolute core of the disease that is modern capitalism.


Basically, how VCs works too. And that's why we have to take their feedback carefully.


Yes, definitely. Invariably they're looking out for #1 first.


Just looked at his Twitter. Seems like he's gone off the deep end and is now grifting like Alex Jones. Posts about Fauci, woke liberals, FBI + KGB working in cahoots....pathetic, really.


He was always a Trump-like persona whose audience tended towards the same demographic.


Pathetic to have different political opinions? Is that where some of us has landed. Anyone speaking against my own views are pathetic worthless and worthy of scorn? Then you wonder why society has divided into culture wars and why so much hate exists in the world.


Watching an unwell person publicly spiral into paranoia and conspiracy-obsession and then calling that a "different political opinion" is a pretty bizarre take.


Possibly not when you share those opinions and are into conspiracy and paranoia yourself. Plenty of people like that, unfortunately.


Not familiar with this author and which particularly views he shared - but between COVID passport, COVID being human made, Fauci funding COVID and the FBI paying to hide Hunter Biden's laptop, conspiracy theories are being more accurate than mainstream news.


It’s one thing to have viewpoints, there are a lot of traditionally conservative ideals that have value, but, like many things, become a nightmare scenario when taken to the extreme.

I think the “pathetic” comment is aimed at the fact that if you’re running with the Alex Jones camp, you’re not really on planet earth anymore.


You are welcome take a look for yourself and ponder whether you'd take business advice from him.


I’ll teach you to become rich by teaching other people to become rich by teaching other…

It’s charlatans all the way down.

I am a fairly successful YouTuber, and the same thing exists in my space. It pains me to see the YouTube gurus out there, fleecing people of their money by selling them dreams. Dreams they themselves have not achieved.

Beware of anyone who is selling risk-free shortcuts to hard work. They also go by a different, less appealing name: get rich quick schemes.


i don't understand why people fall for it. if anyone is making a killing in their business, they're not going to sell a book about how to create a killing in thay field. (a) they don't need to because they're already making a killing (b) ahy create more competition for yourself/give away your secrets? if selling your secrets nets more money than the business... then obviously it wasn't a good business


In Italy we said: who knows make business, who do not teach how to make it. We have some journalists here selling courses I did not understand what business they was successful…


Would you mind naming who specifically you would put into that group?

E.g. Would you put Pieter Levels into that category?


And the ones that make money whose products sold to those "I bought shits from this popular guy", "I'm trendy now", too much bias.


It's the same way many startups make products that they sell to other tech companies.


What do people think of Alex Hormozi in this regard?


The insidious part is that these grifters make it seem as if everyone had a fair shot at the startup game, when in reality they just pretend it to make their audience of potential customers larger.

My experience going to business events is that all of the startup founders who made it had parents well into the top 1% or 0.1% of the income range. That's why it's so common to raise a $100k friends and family seed round and not even feel worried about losing it all.

If OP wasn't privileged enough, he/she might be doing everything correctly, but the results without a $100k megaphone will be very different.


Who are these “influencers” everyone is talking about? Never once in my lifetime I have ever heard anyone say “building a successful startup is easy!” WTF?


No, of course not. If it were easy, why would it take six payments of $24.95+S/H to teach you how to do it?


Shipping and handling for a digital course? Sounds suspect but if it’s guaranteed to make me rich and put me on a beach in six months, I’m sold.


This also applies to other fields. People also believe that it is simple to make money through day trading. There are many tiktok influencers and youtubers who portray themselves as millionaires, trading on a beach while digital nomading and giving nonsense advice. Yes, it is possible to make money day trading, but it takes a significant amount of learning, practice, patience, time, and discipline, and even then, the results are not always consistent, and it is not for everyone.


CAVEAT EMPTOR friend. I have day traded for 3 yrs. There is no edge to be had for retail day traders. It’s a suckers game, where the odds are stacked against you, just like in a casino. The platforms that trade against retail order-flow make all the money by front running trades at the sub-millisecond level, on every trade. It’s called electronic market-making. Everyone is a glorified speculator. Evidence is ask any of these influencers for an audited trade history or P&L… you’ll never see one. You may get lucky trading and win big, like a gambler, but if you keep playing, you’ll give everything back, then if you buy on margin or leverage with options, you’ll lose it all and more. There are no repeat fund managers that make the top of the list year after year. It’s just dumb luck, they get paid management fees (2 and 20) to gamble: Please save yourself years of misery.


biaheza on YouTube makes a bunch of good videos debunking the git rich quick schemes and showing the other side of the coin. https://www.youtube.com/@biaheza


Is he really though? I did view a bunch of his videos and realized the "Dropshipping course" for 294$. I obviously haven't watched the course, but dropshipping is basically one of the most popular "get rich quick schemes" on YouTube aside from daytrading.


I think he does talk about the difficulties in starting/running a drop shipping store in some of his vids. But I do agree, it add any cred that he's still trying to sell a "dropshipping course". I definitely wouldn't recommend anyone start drophipping, be it following his course or any other.


I've been working on day trading now for just over 5 years. I even took a sabbatical for 1.5 years to fully dedicate myself to it. Still struggling to be consistently profitable. I figure it's going to take me another few years to have be in the place where I feel I can give up my other career entirely. Easily the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.

Definitely right, 99% of influencers about day trading are full of shit


As I understand day trading is a full time job. How do you work on that for 5 years without profits?

> I figure it's going to take me another few years

What are you planning to learn or what skills are you planning gain or sharpen during that period?


i don't know nothing about day trading but it sounds hard AF to be profitable. even if you by some miracle figure out the winning formula... it won't last. others will figure it out and the game will change again. sounds exhausting!


I don't understand how OP could take that seriously. I can't think of anyone who has built a successful business and can trace their origins back to "I was very inspired by people on Twitter". I thought it would have been obvious that real success takes real work. "Digital influencers" are nothing more than sad people craving for attention online. Their success relies on idiots trying to mimic their "success". It's an emotional Ponzi scheme. Don't get stuck swimming in their vomit.


And you're really almost hitting the point directly - but this guy just seems to "want" to be the owner of a tech-startup, rather then someone with a good tech idea who then turns it into a successful business.

Everyone is selling a dream, and people are willing to buy because they fall in love with the "idea" of the dream - I think unless I had some actually insane, never thought of tech, I would NEVER want to be a tech-startup. Everyone is trying to take advantage of you to fulfil their own dreams, ironically


Anyone who thinks working from a beach is possible has never tried.

The screen isn't always readable.

And many people who sit nearby aren't working and maybe living and making memories.


Lifeguards. Ice-cream salespeople. Pamela Anderson. FALSE!


Don’t forget about regular interruptions by the beach sales team network if you end up on a resort there part of the beach path is public access.

Having done enough of the travel to paradise to work to realize for me that it doesn’t provide either with enough depth, and if I like deep experiences I should consider that.


It sounds to me like your expectations are way out of whack.

I’ve seen friends, acquaintances, and colleagues become entrepreneurs. Without an exception, every one that has a serious social media presence is a fraud. They have a company that is either money losing or fed by their parents. They pretend to be entrepreneur geniuses on social media but really have done nothing but basically be instagram models.

The people I know who have successfully started companies are nothing like this. They usually have industry experience directly involved with or at least closely related to what they start (e.g “my company has to do this ourselves every time but we’d definitely hire it out if we could”).

My advice would be stick to climbing in whatever industry you think you’ll enjoy most and just keep your eyes open. Worst case scenario you’ll have a good career


Also one needs to keep in mind that many startup "successes" are actually either negative or neutral outcomes. I know several "acquisitions" where the end result was investors making negative returns (receiving back pennies-on-the-dollar, if anything.) Meanwhile, the former CEO gets a cushy job as an advisor at the new place, announcements all over social media, etc. The actual companies barely had any revenue.


This was the case with Rancher being acquired by SUSE. The financials were so out of whack for a normal acquisition but SUSE had a dire need to acquire a k8s company and Rancher wanted to exit and now the board has huge regrets over spending so much on something thats brought so little value to the business!


Yep so called firesales. One of the companies I worked at sold so low all employees options were worthless. But they were in the news and they had been on Deloitte’s fastest growing startups for a few years (never reached profit).


Agreed, expectations are everything or at least very important to keep sanity in this area.

Reality is that big majority of startup-s do fail to "make it" 90% of time to even be self sustaining. Financially meaning that you pay from your pocket overall and the resources have to come somewhere, day job or whatever, making it very much overwhelming and can break even a strong man. Only small percentage out of those 10% actually make it to sustainable enough to live by.

Percentages can begin to rise on your favour after learning from failures but there is of course no guarantees, some domains are inherently much less forgiving or have fierce competition. It is important to resarch and understand the landscape you're going into.

If you realise your odds then mindset starts to get clearer, you know what you risk losing and accept that loss is likely, you still put enough effort to win but don't set your mind so deep that everything collapses with the project.

It might be contrary to some suggestions that you have to put everything into startup to have a chance but that is also correct imo, you do have to be able to invest all your available time on the project. Keeping in mind that the project is not absolute everything in life and being able to walk away at right time as to not sunk endless resources to unfruitful endeavour keep you healthier.


Excellent advice


[flagged]


When can I buy your ebook?


There is no ebook. But there's my old email sequence I used to have back when I was writing to software developers. Contact me via email if you want me to put you on that list. It's got tons of amazing ideas.


I am so sorry you feel bad. Want some advice from an older engineer turned entrepreneur? Be proud of what you have done. Not many people take risks in life. You did. Being the 'man in the arena' is enough. I read this quote from Teddy Roosevelt often:

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."


To yours I add this from Teddy Roosevelt:

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."


I'm loving all these Teddy Roosevelt quotes -- I have one more, not from Roosevelt, but from the Dalai Lama, that I often think about.

For me it represents doing what you can and the effort spending towards a goal.

"If after trying to save the world, the world is lost, no regrets." - Dalai Lama


Thank you for this, this lifted me up.

I'm going through something similar to the OP, I haven't given up yet and don't really consider it either. But, it's really hard. My mental health certainly took a hit and I'm full of anxiety as my savings are not enough to cover the upcoming bills and couldn't find a contracting gig so far to support the cashflow. I've experienced severe panic attacks and bouts of depression. I sometimes dread the passing of days.

Hope I'll find a way.

It might be illogical to say this but I know we'll make it one way or another. I believe in what we are doing and what we built actually resonated with the customers as well. Just need to power through this last mile somehow.

Anyway, reading your comment gave me a little more strength. Much appreciated.


I have had anxiety/depression too my whole life. Took me years to understand it and figure out a path forward. Therapy, meds helped a lot. And it took me decades to get the skill and perspective to start a company. Life is pretty long, if you spend 5-10 years dealing with depression -- you still have a 30 years of work to try new things once you learn to deal with your biology!


TBH that's a perspective I did not have. At 27 years old I feel like I've been slow and like I'm late for some of the aspirations I've had. I tend to look at things from a daily perspective. Today and tomorrow.

Thinking in decades however, reframes and somewhat changes the problems. I'll keep this in mind.


What language do you use. I'm willing to help push for free if I know the language


"It is hard to fail, but it is worse to never have tried to succeed."

- Theodore Roosevelt


One of the original startup influencers of his time.


I've had this quote bookmarked for 7 years now.


A big fact of the entrepreneur world is that it is hugely based on luck. Luck of finding the right idea, the right market, the right timing, the right connections, the right customers, the right employees, the right financing. The basic fact is that most startups and most entrepreneurial dreams fail or get consumed by another for their talent/clients. And as an entrepreneur you fight against all odds. Most will fail and you have to be ok with that for yourself. Even how many times you try. It is ok, it does not make you a failure because you tried. It makes you a brave and daring person you tried.

It does not help that the media only celebrates the few lucky ones, and because they were lucky they will propagate all their steps of wonderful execution, but overlooking the fact that they were just with the right timing, market & people. That it was pure luck.

There are more journeys in life to be happy than being an entrepreneur. There are more paths towards personal fulfilment.


One of the privileges people don't often think about is being able to afford to fail.

If you don't risk destitution after your startup fails, you can try and fail many times, learn and try again.

It's like continuously rolling two dice, and you only need to get double sixes once, and after that it's private jets until you die.

One of the many reasons the rich get richer and the poor, well you know how it goes.


This is one of the underappreciated benefits of the Nordic-style welfare state: everybody can afford to fail.

Unfortunately it's rarely discussed in society as such. The political parties that built these welfare states have traditionally been associated with worker unions, and entrepreneurship isn't high on their agenda. The Nordic right-wing parties got ideologically married to Thatcher-style neoliberalism and prefer to yammer endlessly about tax cuts instead of thinking about how the welfare foundation can help entrepreneurship.

Fortunately there are some successful people who talk about this. For example in Finland the Supercell founders (gaming company with $10B exit) have been emphasizing the importance of the welfare structures for enabling entrepreneurship opportunities.


As someone living in Finland, I would argue the cons balance out the pros. The welfare state also creates massive disincentives for entrepreneurs. There is no free lunch.

In addition to the psychological aspects mentioned below (why try so hard when you’ll be fine either way), there are bigger reasons.

While the safety net makes it less dangerous to fail, it also makes it harder to succeed.

The barrier you need to clear before the business can be successful is much higher, due to:

- 15-20% higher taxes than the US at every level. Cut your profit margin by 15% and you need roughly double the amount of revenue you’d need in the US to pay yourself a good salary.

- high cost of living (like living in NYC/SF but without all the opportunities)

- inability to hire full time employees until you get much bigger (they literally cannot be fired and if one goes on maternity leave you can be stuck paying someone without getting their labor for a year+)

-lack of funding/financing and risk capital (Europe is starting to catch up, but nowhere near the US, especially at the small business levels). There’s nothing like the SBA loans the US has.

-more severe penalties for failure in the form of bankruptcy, you cannot walk away relatively unscathed in the same you can in the US

-impossibility of building wealth by working a job to fund the business yourself (salaries are extremely low due to the massive social benefits overhead)


I recently moved back to Finland after a couple of years in New York, and I strongly disagree with this:

> “high cost of living (like living in NYC/SF but without all the opportunities)”

My fixed monthly expenses were over 3x higher in Manhattan than in Helsinki. Housing, child care, etc.


Were the local salaries 3x higher in Manhattan?


In my experience, yes.


>less dangerous to fail [...] harder to succeed

Alternatively: Finland has a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling.


Unfortunately another component of the Nordic model that makes it work is that everybody trusts the government. This is what makes the Nordic model hard to translate to other settings in my opinion.


They're high trust societies in general, partially because they're small monocultures. As Robert Putnam's research shows, in multicultural societies, especially large ones, trust rapidly declines, surprisingly even within cultural groups. Trust in government falls even more rapidly as each group starts to perceive those in power as being more favorable to one group or another, even if those in power are from their own cultural group.


I've distinctly noticed this in my own life, being born and raised in the western US, but having lived throughout the US, my trust in my "fellow Americans" declines the further away from the mountain west I get. My spouse is Finnish, and we've lived in Finland for years, and have independently observed that their homogeneous society definitely makes their rosy politics possible. I bring this up when people try to compare US and Finnish domestic politics. There is often a "it works in <Finno/Scandinavia>!" rhetoric when discussing health care, schools, or whatever. Comparatively, Finnish politics are boring and uneventful.


"High trust" seems entirely contradictory to Danish society. Universal skepticism and a universal dislike for every other human in existence are the core ideologies here.

Maybe a tendency to not interfere with tasks assigned to others to avoid having to deal with people is being misinterpreted as trust?


No. My Norwegian colleagues trust that they will receive healthcare. They trust that their representatives in the government are acting more or less in good faith. They trust that money in the government is going towards protections and services and infrastructure. And if you look around in Norway, you can generally get the feeling that the government is taking care of things.

Go to America and it seems like the country is a decayed husk wrapped in gold. Roads are barely functional. Schools do not educate children. Each day there is a new story about a politician who is corrupt either through insider trading, being a pedo, or whatever. The government of America does not appear to do things for Americans.

Thus, it's easy to see why you can trust the government in Norway but not in America to me.


Americans really think their schools don't provide solid education, it's so weird. Look at your PISA scores, they're reasonable. Could be a lot better, sure, but so could almost everything. Especially if you take into account how most countries with better education systems have less than a 1/3 of the population, are mostly developed monocultural nation-states, so a lot more capable of standardizing public services nationwide.


Exactly... it's the mono-culture and relatively small population and distances that allow this to work relatively well. If the US actually reverted closer to the original Confederation it was started as, each state could possibly do these things, but as a whole, it's really hard... and becomes ever more divisive... At this point, largely, only corporate interests feeding both sides seem to get anything done.


But don't you know that the only reason people want to have more control over their own lives and influence state politics is to be racist? That is why we must entrust the federal government with more and more power to run everything (with the help of The Experts™, who all happen to go to the same few schools).


No it's not. Norway overall is 75% ethnic Norwegian with the rest being immigrants. Oslo the capital is only 50% ethnic Norwegian. It's very strange to me to identify Norway as monoculture. Usually i think the person has never been to Norway when they say that.


How many of those immigrants are allowed to vote? The US, by contrast has a massive amount of immigrant populations, multiple generations in with varied backgrounds, over a massively larger scale of both population and land mass. My high school didn't have a majority from any single racial group.


> No. My Norwegian colleagues trust that they will receive healthcare. They trust that their representatives in the government are acting more or less in good faith. They trust that money in the government is going towards protections and services and infrastructure.

This is not quite true in Denmark.

There's have been multiple cases in recent times with the government willingly taking illegal action. Trust in public health care is that it'll keep you alive, but that's getting a nurse to look at you takes half a workday and the majority of the staff is running away due to poor pay. Those needing psychological help have generally been neglected, and those with gender identity issues are borderline abused. Environmental policies are "revised" as we get close to the deadline and haven't made the progress needed.

So I would not say that there is trust in the government and its services - merely an understanding that as change is very slow, you can expect the same tomorrow as you do today. That the US is worse is somewhat of a different discussion to whether or not the Danish people is a "high trust" society.


The data suggest that the Danes are very trusting, but they may not be measuring what you experience: https://ourworldindata.org/trust


I don’t think you can describe at least Sweden and Norway as monocultural. They’ve had waves of immigration since the world wars and I think Sweden had the most immigration per capita in Europe during the Syrian refuge crisis.

That’s not to say it’s a rosy picture of multiculturalism, there has been at least a building up of angst in the minority parties over immigration (and islam).


Don't mistake trust for tacit consent. Trust is never valid in politics.


Rather, "trusting" a system which makes it so that you do not need to trust any government.

Having many large political parties and a trend of (almost) always having minority governments also help limit possible damage.


I don't really feel like there is a large number of parties in Norway when arbeiterpartiet wins 35% of the vote every time and Parliament switch between them and the conservative party. And this time around the farming party really decided to screw things up for the coalition. But I suppose this is better then the republicans and the democrats for (insert whatever reason you want here).


In Denmark, the biggest party "only" got 27% of the votes, and 12 parties ended up in parlament.

But yes, the comparison was mainly to the whacky US system with just two sides to pick from.


Don't forget the other reason: a homogenous society.


Absolutely, and this explains largely why most of the massively successful startups we all know comes from the Nordics and not from places with poor social security like the USA


Sarcasm noted. Seriously, though, this is somewhat easy to explain.

Much of America does have an amazing "safety net": generational wealth.

There's a reason why startups tend to spring from elite schools like Stanford, MIT, Yale, etc. Those kids have the brains, yes, but also the family connections and the parental safety nets and the connections to capital investment. These kids don't have to worry about food security or having healthcare.

If you're from that upper 10%/5%/1% or so of American society, that's GREAT!

It's an incredible primordial soup from which startups can spring. We are a big country, so we are still talking about perhaps 30,000,000+ people in this lucky category. That's more than all of Scandinavia's population combined. Goes a long way toward explaining why so many "big" startups come from the USA.

However, if you don't come from one of these blessed demographics in the USA, you have a much harder road. If you didn't go to an "elite" school and don't have a parental safety net it's very difficult... I fall into this category and simply didn't have access to healthcare for five years while I pursued my tiny indie business. It made money, but not enough to buy healthcare for a family, so I had to ditch it.


I grew up in a lower-middle class household and although my grandfather had money during his life, it wasn't passed down (swallowed by medical bills the last decades of his life). My parents were definitely working class. I'm doing okay, but that came from a lot of self-study and self-driven interests... I put my first computer together from parts scrownged up over the course of about a year... at a time where it was far more expensive to do than today (early-mid 90's), where today you can definitely find something usable for free.

Today it will largely come down to the investment of time... that doesn't mean you will succeed... I spent my time on knowledge growth, others will spend it on building a business. Most will simply waste it and complain that they spend too much time working.

I saw a lot of this when I was single in the last decade. So many people want a relationship, too few would actually take the time to make it happen. Most won't even take the time/effort to go out on a date on a work night.

No, it's not easy. There are no guarantees... but it's mostly laziness that stops people from getting things done in life.


But its not just an economic safety net that is required. (Although that's part of it). It's also the network of social connections, family connections and upbringing. A stable childhood and family life, I would argue, is probably even more important. In a lot of ways, welfare support (at least how its been done in USA) has driven a wedge into the stability of the family (by decreasing marriage incentives, removing the father from the home, removing incentives, etc.) Not everybody is born with the same ambitions as those that attend MIT.


Generational wealth doesn’t cover it. Stanford, MIT, Yale have lots of non-legacy attendees there based completely on academic performance.

> That's more than all of Scandinavia's population combined. Goes a long way toward explaining why so many "big" startups come from the USA.

Expand it to all of the European countries with free healthcare to match the populations and the outcome is the same.

There is some subset that has to bail because of healthcare, but it’s not relevant in the larger picture.


While this may be true for individual cases. Statistically the argument is worthless. Frankly, it's a comforting lie that encourages harmful inaction by instilling a false sense of the playing field being close to even.

The children of the top 1% make up 14.5% of the admissions to these schools. The chart of students by parental income[0] speaks for itself.

The children of the bottom 20% make up a mere 3.8% of the student body. I'm not sure how anyone can look at the current situation and suggest there's nothing wrong with it.

Perhaps these people are inherently inferior? Instead, I would suggest that we should do something about the talent that we're intentionally wasting.

[0] Chetty R. et al, Figure I. B, MOBILITY REPORT CARDS: THE ROLE OF COLLEGES IN INTERGENERATIONAL MOBILITY, Page 80. url: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23618/w236..., image: https://i.redd.it/tbh2qmozodv91.png


Your point isn’t coming out like you think. What you just said was 80% of the student body is middle class.


No, what was said is that ~15% of the student body is in the top 1%. The top 5% by income make up 42% of the student body. I'm not sure about your own definition but I wouldn't qualify that as middle class.

I don't view 95% of the population making up 58% of the student body as an indicator that we're doing things particularly well. Especially when you don't ignore the fact the bottom 20% make up only 3.8% of students and the bottom 60% of the population only account for 18%.

These statistics fly in the face of any belief in meritocracy, social mobility, access to education, academic achievement etc. They imply either the children of the top 5% are genetic superhumans or that, as a society, we're failing spectacularly at living up to those goals.


> There's a reason why startups tend to spring from elite schools like Stanford, MIT, Yale, etc. Those kids have the brains, yes, but also the family connections and the parental safety nets and the connections to capital investment. These kids don't have to worry about food security or having healthcare.

Yeah, and then go on to create things like Theranos, Alameda and FTX... never mind the obscene amount of these kids who end up in banks and hedge funds because of their connections that end up destroying the global economy thorough their grift.

I'm a former boot-strapped founder and a strong believer in entrepreneurialism, but you have to be brain-dead levels of naive to not know the odds are entirely against coming in you but to then think you're on the same playing field as the children of the privileged makes it clear one really doesn't have the slightest skill-set it takes to make it in that World: if your discernment is woefully inadequate to see the reality of being wealthy, how can you ever see, build and ultimately profit from market or paradigm shifts?

> However, if you don't come from one of these blessed demographics in the USA, you have a much harder road. If you didn't go to an "elite" school and don't have a parental safety net it's very difficult... I fall into this category and simply didn't have access to healthcare for five years while I pursued my tiny indie business. It made money, but not enough to buy healthcare for a family, so I had to ditch it.

I think these are the untold stories that really should be more widely known and perhaps even celebrated: when something doesn't reach unicorn level, but still does what it sought out to do but cannot grow/scale in order to justify it's immense effort is more honest and real to the reality of how most small startups go and end up.

Personally speaking my end-goal was to ultimately challenge Federal Law to make hemp legal in order to serve as a much needed cash crop to help offset climate change via carbon sequestration and possibly aid in the decrease use of opioids for pain and provide more usecases for something I feel incredibly passionate about: Bitcoin and Farmers.

After the Farm bill was passed in 2018, nearly 4 years since launch, I realized 'we won' as I saw all the signs in front of my face I saw no point in working 90+ hour work weeks and having no Life what so ever because I dissapointed my partners and family so I just leveraged my acquired skill-set in various private Industries and continued to travel the World for new opportunities.

Ultimately the money I made, in BTC, could have made me a millionaire several times if I never spent it and just held on to it over the years, but as mentioned before I was also not of the privileged class and needed those funds to ever rising rents, food, or the rainy day funds use in between jobs.

I don't regret it, but like JB I had to exit and focus on other priorities when I realized the reality that it was never going to be much more than it was, profitable but not b much, never mind ever being a unicorn.

I've since did corpo life and to be honest, their is a reason former startup founders are preferable over most candidates, the harder part is actually getting your foot in the door to be able to prove why that is.


I think it’s cultural. The US places a lot of value on striving out and doing new things. It’s a frontier culture. Older cultures tend to be more conservative.

You can see this effect inside the US. The most “business friendly” states often do not lead in entrepreneurship because they’re culturally more conservative.


I disagree. Texas has been one of the fastest growing economies in the states. With a lot of technology companies.


Texas isn't the lowest tax or lowest regulation state, though it's a bit lower than California.

I also think the cultural thing is obvious there. Texas is very pro-entrepreneurship generally.


Texas has no income tax, very little government owned land, no zoning in some places, etc. It’s laughable that you try to put it in the “bit lower than California” category. Texas is basically the opposite approach to governance than California.


Is that sarcastic?

I really cannot tell.


Missing the /s here mate


Flip side of the welfare state is the heavy tax burden.

Heavily progressive income tax makes it harder for individuals to accumulate capital for enterprenial endeavours, be it their own or investing in others'. This limits early stage investments and growth.

Also, there are limited incentives in investing in careers and productivity as net income is surprisingly similar in lowest 10% and highest 10% income earners.


Burden? If the substrate/infrastructure you're playing in is maintained by our tax money, count your blessings and work to build trust in a system that, as others in this thread have already said, helps set everyone up to more-safely fail and grow. No one person is so important that we need to cultivate philanthropists. I'd far rather we collectively decide what to do with wealth generated from natural resources (all the way up to human resources). We can do better than the relatively few wealthy people with the means and inclination to give back.

The question is, how do we build a stronger representative government in the United States (where I live) when we're so divided and distrusting? Having a common enemy might work, but it can't be another group of people to go to war with. Might need to be the metaphorical devil(s) on our shoulders, and for that we need good mental health training from a young age, which now, given how broken and dispersed so many family groups are, requires tax money guided by science and wisdom.

You and I are here but a moment. The bleeding edge of life will quickly pass us by, and the positive impact I am most proud of is the love and care I give to future generations, human and otherwise.


The taxation part is a burden no matter the outcome. It’s not optional, it’s a duty as a citizen to give a chunk of your money to the government. That is the load we are obligated to bear - a burden.

Also, you’re romanticizing what happens with tax money. When a major portion of it is going to a military I have no say in, I don’t get warm fuzzy feelings contributing my portion to the feds.

> how do we build a stronger representative government in the United States (where I live) when we're so divided and distrusting?

You’re assuming the conclusion here. Many people want a much weaker federal government and your question can be rephrased as “how do we make the anti-government people go away?”


He's saying the heavy tax burden drains capitol accumulation. Too generous benefits prohibits the filtering mechanism built into markets that stops a society's resources from being drained into unproductive resources. Not ideal, but advocates of near universal welfare support do not seem to have a good answer to this problem.


Their tax rates are only a few percentage points different from ours. I think the difference is that we funnel 20% of it to the military (2% for Norway) and their tax code probably has fewer loopholes for the rich to exploit.


Their total tax burdens are much higher than US citizens' tax burdens unless you're making 7 figures of W-2 income. The top marginal tax rate kicks in an order of magnitude lower in those countries, and hits most of the middle class. In the US, it hits very few people.

Also, the military is 20% of the discretionary budget, but 10% or less of the total budget.


When I at one point considered moving to the US, I did the numbers for UK and Norway, because I'm from Norway and live in the UK, and while Norway certainly came out higher in terms of tax than some US states, comparing with places I might be prepared to consider, like California, the difference was small enough it'd be more than eaten up by health insurance before considering the other costs of a reduced welfare system (e.g. needing a far bigger cushion in case of unemployment, far higher childcare costs etc.)

Your mileage will of course vary a lot depending on specifics, and especially which US states you compare with.


Yes, it is remarkably hard to come up with a US tax rate, because in single-payer healthcare countries your healthcare is covered. Here, how much do you pay? I couldn't even begin to guesstimate.

While you could probably find cheaper places to live in the US than California, and therefore find much more agreeable tax rates, it's not that easy. Culture varies a lot in the US. I love the South, but a some folks would rather drink poison than live there.

And you can't forget property taxes. These vary at the county or city level and can be quite significant. And, just for fun, they generally pay for the public schools, which depending on where you are may be abysmally awful, so now your "tax rate" includes stumping for private school, which could be the equivalent to a year's salary in some Nordic countries.


Health care in the US is effectively a corporate tax and should be labelled as such.

If you want to compare the real costs and benefits of starting a business you need to compare like for like, which includes all national, state, and privatised taxes and other indirect costs.

When you include those the reality-based answer is that the US fares relatively poorly.

Which is why the US has a more aggressive VC sector. Whether by accident or design start-ups are forced to look for outside funding far earlier, and bootstrapping is far harder.

The result is more of a monoculture that chases unicorns and less of a vibrant sector of independent small and medium businesses, some of which will grow into unicorns naturally.


For a full picture factor in outgoings for world class health and education per person (and other benefits that are free | much cheaper than US); these are very low cost for individuals and offset higher taxes by offering better value for money.


If this is indeed the case, shouldn't there be an influx of skilled professional and entrepreneur immigrants into all of these nordic welfare states?

Something doesn't quite add up, as there's appears to be a constant shortage of such talent.


Sweden actually is one of the favourite destinations for immigrants.

Perhaps high skilled ones would prefer a country with better climate ... :-)


"World class" health and education brings you some of the worst maternal mortality rates in the developed world[1]. Doubling Canada's rate and adding a bit more really screams world class.

You do pay out the ass for it though so good job making someone rich I guess? Shame about all the dead babies though[2].

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health... [1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality... [2] https://www.americashealthrankings.org/learn/reports/2019-an...


> "World class" health and education brings you some of the worst maternal mortality rates in the developed world ...

Just to be clear, I was referring to the Nordic countries, Australia, better performing OECD countries, etc and not referring to the US.

Your links bear out my position, that US "free market | low taxes" approach doesn't deliver good outcomes for the masses.


Indeed! Forgive me, I misinterpreted your earlier post to be claiming that the "low cost" of US healthcare offsets the "high taxes" of comparable countries.


US total government spending is officially 34% of total GDP, Germany is 43.7%. With much of that covering healthcare and collage education which more than makes up the difference for the median family. In the end, the US’s extreme defense spending and horrifically inefficient healthcare system is a massive drag on the economy.

What the US does differently from most of the EU is to hide as much spending as possible in the form of targeted tax breaks. From a cash flow perspective little changes but from a political standpoint it’s not spending.


US military spending is 4% of GDP. When a warmonger is president, that goes up to about 6% of GDP. The NATO commitment is 2% of GDP. It is not particularly extreme.

The real drag is the US healthcare system, which effectively finances most of the medical R&D for the US, India, South America, and Europe, and also provides ridiculous levels of treatment for people who are about to die (in comparison to other health systems). There is also the US social security system, which seems to be very inefficient at best...


Officially it’s $1.64 Trillion in 2022 on defense vs ~23.4 Trillion GDP or 7% GDP. https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=... You can see different numbers based on if you include stuff like the DoE spending on nuclear weapon ‘stewardship’ or only parts of the coast guard, national guard, VA etc.

US healthcare spending hardly subsidizes the rest of the world. Paperwork and insurance overhead don’t magically turn into R&D money. Litigation, malpractice insurance, excessive testing etc is just waste.

At best ~12% of US healthcare spending is for retail drugs, but it’s not that relevant globally when you consider how much US companies are spending on advertising vs R&D. Which is then compounded by how much more expensive US drug trials are.


That's the budget. The actual outlays are less than $1 billion. Around 3-4% for the last few years.


The only way outlays are under 1 Trillion is if you ignore a great deal of defense spending. A classic trick is to hide future obligations like pensions and other benefits from current spending numbers, but if you need to hand out a pension to get people to work for you then obviously you should include either current spending in past obligations or the amount of additional obligations your adding this year as spending.

So yes, you can get imaginary defense costs to ~4%, but I ask you where is the coast guard, national guard, DoE, or VA’s budget here? “The budget funds five branches of the U.S. military: the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Space Force.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_... Some might argue the national guard isn’t defense spending but we sent 250,000 guard members to Iraq and the guard is fielding F-35’s.

I will acknowledge some some outliers like the United States Border Patrol, while it’s job is literally defending the border it probably shouldn’t be included in defense spending.

PS: It gets even sillier, not that long ago we where hiding the cost of the Iraq war from defense spending numbers.


For comparable benefits per citizen, the US are prohibitively expensive.

The argument that other countries might be technically higher in taxes will remain moot so long as in the US, needing an ambulance could mean years of financial hardship if you're not sufficiently well off. The same goes for lodging, food safety, etc.


You haven’t accounted for health insurance, college education, and possibly retirement.

Once you add those in, the Nordics still pay a bit more, but not by the margin you might expect.


The US government provides retirement benefits, including healthcare at retirement. You are not required to pay for college, and you can go to a cheap school if you want.


Early stage investment is usually paying below-market salaries of entrepreneurs — that is, doing exactly what the government would, except the government doesn’t take a big cut of your startup.

Additionally, the government doesn’t require you to network with the right people, come from the right subculture, etc.

Do you want your “taxes” to go to the needy or the wealthy? Because in startups angel investors are capturing bigger percentages of the capital from your labor than the government.


In Finland, Denmark, The Netherlands, and Sweden, the income distribution ratio[0] of the total income earned by the top 20% of earners vs the bottom 20% of earners is about ~4x. Denmark has a personal income tax rate of 56% [1]

Best data I could find[2] after a quick google on USA puts income distribution ratio around 5.2x, so not much of a substantial difference in gross income disparity vs USA at the 20th/80th percentiles. Personal income tax rate is about 37%[3], so certainly USA lets you keep more of your paycheck than Denmark.

So high earners in US are making ~20% more than their peers in Denmark relative to the bottom 20% in their respective countries, and folks in the US pay ~20% less tax as well.

Certainly it's a notable difference but we're not talking orders of magnitude here, especially since the above math doesn't account for all of the benefits that higher tax rate brings, both tangible and intangible.

However, when we're talking in absolute numbers, most Danes out-earn most Americans. The median wage in the US is ~$52k [4] vs Denmark at ~$72k [5], which closes the gap even more.

I suspect there are significant differences and outliers at the extremes however, and that is likely where most of the VC money lives - whether we're talking about angel investors dropping >$100k or VCs spending millions on pre-revenue companies. I'd wager we're well into the top 1% of earners in the US doing the funding. This is the most likely explanation to account for the differences in early stage investments and growth opportunities you described above, imho.

[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/denmark/income-distribution-eur...

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/denmark/personal-income-tax-rat...

[2] https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-income-percen...

[3] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/personal-income-t...

[4] https://www.averagesalarysurvey.com/united-states

[5] https://www.averagesalarysurvey.com/denmark


I come from the game development world and this is one of the reasons (in my opinion) why there are so many solid independent game makers that come from the Nordics.


> This is one of the underappreciated benefits of the Nordic-style welfare state: everybody can afford to fail.

That is a false romantization. The reality is if you live in Copenhagen you need a full time job to to pay for expensive rent, food, and of course tax. That is not true in Berlin where rent, food, and taxes are cheaper. On average the price level in Berlin is half of that of Copenhagen.


Not to mention a social norm that prides work ethic.


I started my first couple of companies in Norway, and it certainly makes a difference to the feeling of risk to live in a place where the risk of failing just didn't enter my mind at all.

In fact, I'd almost certainly have gotten more a month in welfare support if I'd been unable to find a new job if we'd closed my first company down than what we paid ourselves.


There's a flip side to this argument in that more failing endeavors would be allowed to exist for longer, thus draining productive resources from more worthy endeavors.


I don't think so. It's not cheaper to run a company in Norway than the US, and cost of living is high, and the fact we could've shut the company down and get more money meant we only kept running it because we were hoping to make more money rather than out of fear of where we'd be if it failed.

The benefits if anything serves as an incentive to give up failing ventures sooner.


The problem with Nordic model is that they are too successful in taking care of the people.

Very few are “hungry” and “hunger” is an important ingredient to startups


Cool, I guess less hunger for less startups is a good deal.


I don't know that I agree. As much as I lean towards a Libertarian, anti-establishment PoV for the US, I do think social systems can work in smaller communities/countries. It's much harder with a more diverse (distance and politic) country because there's much more "other" that will disagree and see favoritism and corruption. It also becomes a cycle.

I've worked in/around govt that I'm not a no government mindset, but definitely feel that more government tends to be worse than a very limited one at the scale of the US... and would favor letting states/counties have more independent creativity in solutions.


https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/welfare...


And that is why, in the USA, health care is not a given (or at least extremely affordable). As long as that is then - especially if you have a family - taking risk that might lead to failure is a no go.

Instead, the no risk route is to assimilate into the status quo, become a cog in The System's wheel. Providing foundational First World "human rights" would allow more professional / career freedom.


> taking risk that might lead to failure is a no go.

For certain personality types. Let's say with some high conviction, the typical technology / engineering personality is already highly risk adverse.

Thus - they need all the risk avoidance as possible. Entrepreneurship is a risk game. It is defined by risk; those that won't start without safety nets will probably never start at all.

I know enough family men who built startups for years with young kids - earning nothing. It's not the situation, it's the person.


Not to get off-topic but startups are risky. On the other hand - at least in my book - entrepreneurs are actual risk-adverse. That is, where others see too much risk, entrepreneurs see opportunity. They are actually risk blind to some extent.

But like I said, this another discussion for another day :)


Interestingly, the US still ranks #1 in the world in Entrepreneurship and Switzerland is #2.

Source: https://thegedi.org/global-entrepreneurship-and-development-...

I think the reason why welfare is irrelevant here is because the people going into entrepreneurship tend to be skilled enough to find a good-paying job even if their startup fails. Suppose that you're a good product manager or a good developer that's going into the startup world and you don't get lucky with your startup, you'd still be able to find a good job as soon as you're done... in fact, you might even get a higher-paying job because of this experience you've had.


Except in years like 2022 when it seems harder than ever to get a job, even with a solid 10 year working history. I'm convinced it's a more competitive market than ever, and that means more rejections.

I'm being sort of picky, focused on quality over quantity of opportunities, but it doesn't mean your statement is true.


And you have the Federal Reserve right now with that as their stated objective to try to keep a lid on inflation. Not saying this is the right more or not, but that's the unfortunate position we are now in.


But those skills are still getting diverted from more productive means. Those pursuits are allowed to exist for longer for the dream that they will someday be massively productive. Look at the blockchain space to see all the companies that are about to go under, if they haven't already.


It's easy enough to get SMB loans in the US without risking anything. Banks are asking to sell $100,000 loans without people even applying! Not to mention grants, and yes, literally welfare is available in the US to pretty much everyone. What exactly are you afraid of? I think the bigger issue with entrepreneurship here is that most people aren't willing to put in the effort to solve a problem that people need solved. Instead they put in the effort to solve a problem that they feel like solving and then blame "the system" when their attempt at entrepreneurship doesn't pan out.


> This is one of the underappreciated benefits of the Nordic-style welfare state: everybody can afford to fail.

So then the Nordics are the startup capitals of the world, far surpassing all other countries, right? Right?


My intuition is that effective entrepreneurs generally have a strong conviction that they won't fail, and in any case wouldn't want to fall back on taxpayers if they did. They will also disproportionately be averse to paying social democratic tax rates once they, in their mind, inevitably succeed.


Travis Kalanick (Uber's founder) collected unemployment while working on his startup.


Oasis (and lots of other British bands) got dole money while honing their craft. I think it's one of the reasons Britain tended to hit above it's weight in the 80s/90s.


This doesn't strike me as something inherently part of entrepreneurship in a world-wide context, but rather something particular to anglo saxon countries, and especially Americans which are big on neoliberal ideology. Americans are also the most anti-government of any people I know.

The Netherlands is split in this I think, but the entrepreneurs I know are nothing like this. They appreciate the safety net and often happily pax taxes, its more that they hate the labour involved. And everybody I speak to has acutely aware of the possibility of failure. Maybe its my circle though, there are also more radical libertarians in my country, but they are a rarity.


My view, from the U.S., is that most founders want to make it on their own and keep the returns close to the vest (aka "low taxes).

The risks are too high to found a company for little payoff.... and most founders that exit already pay a significant tax on exits (even when they are structured to reduce tax). Entrepreneurship is too hard of a game to put up with the mental and work grinding for a decade for small returns. Everyone focuses on the "money" a founder may make (with heavy survivorship bias) - but don't focus on the high probability of losing years, or a decade, of lost revenue and social life if a company fails.

HN is filled with want-trapreneurs who are mis-guided about the game they're entering.


Is "my intuition" a euphemism for "I've read an Ayn Rand novel"?


It's funny, I read that as a retelling of John Steinbeck's "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" quote, not as a Randian Just So story. Being averse to paying tax isn't a desirable quality in a person.


I personally think being opposed to high rates of taxation is a desireable quality in a person but that was orthogonal to my hunch, which I was trying to present as neutrally as possible, with no value judgment. The parent comment is unnecessarily inflammatory.


It's also easier with a largely mono-culture in a relatively small population/area that is inclined, socially and historically, to work. Contrasted by say USSR, China or other communist societies where it's largely forced and the people are largely, effectively slaves. Although that work first culture is coming at the cost, to an extent, of a waning family unit.

It's a bit of a mixed bag that's much harder to implement at a larger scale. If the US split up into separate states, much more loosely joined like the EU or original confederate structure before the constitution, each state would stand a better chance at such a system.


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Conveniently forgetting some decently sized ones that actually came from the Nordics.

At least in Finland, most of the stuff that would be big is sold early, the founders take the 10M and retire to their cottages in the middle of nowhere (edit: I don't mean this the bad way, I'd probably do it too).


Not so much lately. There are a ton of success stories in the making. I was at Smartly and we didn't settle for 10M. Then you have the likes of Supermetrics, Yousician, Aiven, Eficode, Oura, Iceye, Varjo, Wolt, Supercell, Rovio, NextGame, Enfuce, Ultimate, Swappie, Singa, Sievo, Framery and many more...


Linux: Helsinki.

Without basic foundational creations/discoveries that we can all take for granted, there would be nothing for the vectoralists to build on top of.


All the Nordics combined have less population than California and have actually produced some decent startups.


San Jose has a population of 1m people and has produced companies with a bigger GDP than some Nordic countries


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This is ridiculous. If anything, California tends to be liberal - nothing to do with Socialism (let alone Communism). What does being a "woke" State (whatever that means) have to do with Socialism?

California has very little in common with Nordic social-democracy. Even when looked at relatively to the rest of the US. And this is particularly true when one looks at the subject at hand, which is social safety nets. The "relative" approach has its limits.


Sorry if I gave the wrong impression, that wasn’t my opinion, I was referring to how some other parts of the US perceive California.

You’re right it makes no sense but I think it’s undeniable California is used as an example of failed policies around social welfare and taxation by, say, Texas and Florida politicians.


you must be brazilian for having this take...


:)

But I do live in California for the last 10 years.


why if you hate it so much?


Nokia, Remarkable, Ericson, Spotify, Tidal


Consistently forgetting that giant majority putting US ahead in consumer software is large, single-language and culture target group.


Also consistently forgetting the 15 times larger population.


What's the population of Europe again?


Name a big UK startup?

Nordic countries have the safety net countered with a mentality that is borderline entrepreneur-hostile and the law of Jante on top of that so safety nets may be the few pro-entrepreneurship things they have. Finland of the lot is also capital poor so no huge investor funds or such.


Off the top of my head; UK startups that have grown and been successful (although many have now been bought out - which I guess is the exit plan for many founders anyway)

Just Eat, Deliveroo and The Hut Group; Monzo, Starling and Revolut, from another era, there's ARM.

I'm sure there's fintech ones (not a sector I know much about) and the guy who sits near me in the office, who has an AI-healthcare startup, says the Britain is very good at those too.


>I'm sure there's fintech ones (not a sector I know much about) and the guy who sits near me in the office, who has an AI-healthcare startup, says the Britain is very good at those too.

The UK has an advantage here over the US in that the tech and finance sectors are both based in London whereas in the US they are split between California and New York.


Just Eat was founded in Denmark.


Not to mention the Raspberry Pi foundation...


Spotify: Sweden


It is because USA actually has very strong Limited Liability and Bankruptcy protections for companies and even people.

In Europe, I heard that you have personao liability to your employees, libertarian-style.


The issue is who pays for the welfare state. Finland got a lot of its wealth through off sea oil I think. Not easy to replicate in almost every part of the world. If you make the population pay for the welfare state, you are essentially robbing Peter to pay Paul. The people you rob (the ones paying the bulk of taxes) have a lower incentive to produce.

This is one reason the energy Windfall taxes being proposed everywhere seem ludicrous to me. If you tax energy producers at a high marginal rate, they will actually be disincentivized from producing a lot of energy. This is basic economics/human nature.


That’s easy. The hugely successful entrepreneurs that have been able to start their business due to the welfare state contribute back by paying taxes on their success. I’m a decently successful saas-founder, and I don’t mind paying taxes on my profits. I don’t view it as being robbed. I view it as contributing back to the system that backed me.

Also, banks should chip in a lot more than they do. They’re basically printing money and should be taxed harder.


Norway, not Finland.

>The people you rob (the ones paying the bulk of taxes) have a lower incentive to produce.

Sure, the thought of being worth only 150 billion dollars rather than 300 would stop Bezos from starting Amazon.


Bezos would not have kept Amazon in the US if it adopted Nordic welfare levels of taxation.

The fact of the matter is that the EU has a staggeringly low output when it comes to tech innovation compared to the US. Their policies and regulations shape this.


Can confirm. Lived a very frugal early retirement lifestyle in Austria because it was practically impossible to build wealth (high taxes, comparatively very low tech salaries, little entrepreneurial support/incentives).

Moving to the US I was able to 5-6x my income (from what I could have realistically made) , while reducing my tax burden by 15 percentage points, and so I've been happily living a workaholics' lifestyle since.

Looking back, it really boggles my mind how much engineering potential is squandered in Europe. You'd have to be an idiot to want to work hard given how raw of a deal you are getting (work for almost 2 decades as an engineer just so you can afford the average one family home - what a joke!) and people understand that intuitively (hence pushing for ever fewer work hours or even days because what else is there if your salary is essentially capped and you quickly hit a 50 % tax rate (when combining income tax and social security) for every additional hour worked).

</rant>


> (work for almost 2 decades as an engineer just so you can afford the average one family home - what a joke!)

I really don't understand this take. Why so many engineers feel entitled to have more than the average working Joe? If you are employed, our work is not risky, doesn't consume all your energy or your time, and so on.

I fully understand the _economics_ behind our salaries, but I am more than happy to give 45% of it to the society as a whole, so also who cannot afford the economy of scale (e.g., nurses, teachers), can still have a decent life.

I really cannot grasp the individualism about "I know how to write code, I deserve a better life than 95% of the population".


> I really cannot grasp the individualism about "I know how to write code, I deserve a better life than 95% of the population".

You're missing something here. You can omit the first sentence. People already believe they deserve a better life than 95% of the population, even without being able to code specifically.


That's... illuminating. Really. It's a sad take, but could completely be true.

It's not "I am a engineer, thus I deserve to have more", it's "I deserve more, what part of my life can I use to say this?".


But I don't think it's sad. The desire to have more for ourselves and our children (why else would they be talking about buying a family home?) is a large part of the reason why living standards keep rising.

If everyone desires to be above average and strives to produce more, earn more, then over time the average will rise. This is good.


> I really cannot grasp the individualism about "I know how to write code, I deserve a better life than 95% of the population".

What if we worded this in a different way: "I have a skill which is more in demand than the skills of 95% of the population"


And this is why I say that I understand the economics behind it.

Still, it doesn't mean I _deserve_ a high salary: I totally get why I get it, but I don't work harder, or studied harder, or really did anything more special than 95% of the population.

So, while I am able to earn more, I am happy to share part of it with the society as a whole, and this is why I am happy about my level of taxes, compared to the services provided.

There are wastes? Of course there are! So many! But the solution to "governments waste money" is not "less money to the governments", is "more accountability".

This is of course my view of the world, but I still haven't found anybody that explains why my job deserves to be in the top 5% earner in my country, apart from being just a consequence of the fact that my job scales to billions of users due its very nature (that is completely inconsequential from the choices I have made), while other jobs have physical limits and they don't scale.


On a practical level you probably did work/study harder, do something more special, had more resources, been luckier than the vast majority of the population; that's why you're in the position you occupy.

On a more ideological level it feels like you're looking for some sort of moral or "greater truth" behind the economics, but I'm not sure it's there. You've shared your personal beliefs and motivations, and seem to have lots of conviction to guide yourself, so why ask someone else to convince you there's a deeper cause? Just use your results to act how YOU want to impact the outcomes of others.


>Still, it doesn't mean I _deserve_ a high salary: I totally get why I get it, but I don't work harder, or studied harder, or really did anything more special than 95% of the population.

I don't think any other (widely popular) work occupies so much of a one's mind as software engineering.


Because we are the gateway to exponential free work. Program once, run on x machines, supply all 8 billions with a service, for defacto nothing. From these hands flows cornucopia..

Just because the nano machinery is invisible, doesent mean it cant spin great things from nothing. Half the giants you see today, were nothing one generation ago.


Not OP but I think if you're gonna earn an average salary then tech is a pretty bad choice due to the constant shifting base of knowledge, lack of security (dot com type bubbles) and ageism prevalent in the industry. Being something like a government worker or teacher makes much more sense then. And unsurprisingly, in Europe a huge part of GDP is created by the government. Software developer roles in Europe are dominated by immigrants for much of the same reason - locals don't see these jobs as such a lucrative career path.


> Why so many engineers feel entitled to have more than the average working Joe ?

Above average investments (time , effort & money) have a natural feeling of entitlement for above average returns.

Cost of getting an engineering degree of value is nowhere near any "average" degree.

Recent years have driven the median cost up and the median returns down. Hence the laments about "college is not worth it"


The average Joe in American can earn many times more than an engineer in the EU


The average Joe in the US earns $60-70k, same as an average software engineer in the EU.

The difference is not that US workers earn more on average, but that being an engineer doesn’t make you automatically rich in Europe like it does in tbe USA.


I agree with your point about Europe squandering engineering talent.

Overall, it's a trade-off, though. You are right about the US opportunities, but there are downsides, too:

- crime (you get crime everywhere, but the US has a particularly and unnecessarily high level of serious crime like gun crime - e.g. school shootings happen pretty regularly);

- not everyone has good healthcare & social services (I am aware you will not personally be exposed to that, as you will have private healthcare; but it even bothers me if people around me are ill and cannot afford to get cured. I don't want to live somewhere where I can get a regular check at the Mayo clinic and my neighbor cannot afford their emergency dentist);

- low average education level (people generally don't know much of the world, history, literature).

- cultural life (theater, classical music etc.) is very uneven distributed.

Also, US taxation isn't that low in general, it dramatically depends on the state you live in (TX 0% state tax versus NY, MN etc. >40%).

There are places in Europe that have small tax rates (CH, LU), but they are not the best places to live for everybody. Everyone needs to weigh their priorities and match with the overall "package" (e.g. Canada is a good compromise: near-US salaries but Europe-like education of the general public) - and in any case, not everyone is free to leave where they currently reside.

Austria in particular has rather low salaries (but also low rents) - but places like Vienna have a magic feel to it that just doesn't exist on other continents. In comparison, in neighboring Switzerland are very high (anyone with a tech Master's degree would be on a six digits salary), but with a huge salary gap between locals and expats for doing the same job.

(I have lived in the UK, US, CH and DE.)


All the problems you listed as US-specific problems exist in my corner of Europe too, except gun violence. And on top of that we have fewer jobs, lower salaries, higher taxes and high unemployment.

I love Europe: its history, its music, its art, its architecture, its legacy - yes! the good and the bad -, its food, its cultures. But from my point of view we are killing ourselves, choked in an endless decay, metastasizing bureaucracy, and never-ending hopelessness.

I'm sure the Nordic Country are happy though, and that's the problem: American tend to compare the worst of their country with the best of our continent.


> American tend to compare the worst of their country with the best

Everyone does that. There seems to be a type of bragging that works by emphasizing how much more dangerous one's own country/state/town/village is than someone else's.


I'll be lucky if I can afford a single family home after 20 years of software engineering in the US. halfway there now, we'll see. Moving to a senior position has helped but I feel like a lot of people forget that the compensation in SV is not normal in other places.


SV is an outlier in both income and housing costs.

Here in DC metro, a mid-career developer should be able to afford a home without much trouble. Many of the best jobs are well outside the city (Tysons to Ashburn corridor) where housing costs aren’t terrible.


I feel like this is somewhat misguided

> and so o I've been happily living a workaholics' lifestyle since.

That is one key aspect. I'm not a workaholic and most other people aren't either. I do somewhat enjoy my work, but I work to pay for my live, not the other way around. I make a decent salary and work 35h/week with 36 days of vacation. I do pay a lot of taxes, but I live in a city with pretty good and affordable public transit, I got my university education for free (okay, I admit, I paid a total of 600€ for my bachelors), etc.

In a well governed country, you don't only pay taxes but also receive something in return.

> work for almost 2 decades as an engineer just so you can afford the average one family home - what a joke!

This isn't necessarily a result of high taxes, its also a result of Europe being much denser populated than the US (or Australia), limiting the supply side for construction land. The kind of the construction also plays a role, the average newly built European home is substantially more solidly constructed than the reference in the US.

> hence pushing for ever fewer work hours or even days because what else is there if your salary is essentially capped

Have you ever considered that many people would much rather have more free time than more money? Beyond a certain level, increased income doesn't correlate with increased happiness/wellbeing. Where this level is certainly depends, but it is much lower than many people anticipate.


Not all of Europe runs on a 50% tax rate though. My tax rate as company director in the United Kingdom is somewhere around 25%, and I can afford higher salaries than the rest of Europe while still enjoying the basic safety net of public health care.

But I'm originally from Italy, and the tax rate is exorbitant down there as well, with ridiculously low salaries.

You do you, but there is more to life than gross income from your employer. This is why I'd rather stay in this continent.


>work for almost 2 decades as an engineer just so you can afford the average one family home - what a joke!

If you're lucky. The salaries in my country are so abysmal that nobody in my generation can buy a house: the only one with houses inherited them or have rich parents.


>You'd have to be an idiot to want to work hard given how raw of a deal you are getting

Yeah sorry I can't fly to another country because I'm not satisfied with -only- a family home.


I looked up taxation in Norway, it looks very similar to ours. Personal marginal tax rates cap at 48% and corporate taxes are 23%. What am I missing?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Norway


It has nothing to do with taxation - or else the Arab Gulf or Cayman Islands would be entrepreneurial hubs, not California or the Toronto area. It’s all about the price of quality labour. It’s about access to long-term risk capital (aka venture funds) + high quality labour at affordable prices. As in, entrepreneurs having cash to fund projects and being able to actually hire people that will help build them. Try hiring a hundred software engineers in Norway: your hourly cost would probably blow up. The low-tax destinations are the place billionaires go to park their wealth, not create it (for example, outside of Tech Nordic billionaires move to Switzerland after they get rich)


Also you get really great engineers in norway, something about the lack of light, cold, snowy eternal night, produces excellent devs. Lots of fantastic open source projects exist due to the vikings no longer using boats..


> Try hiring a hundred software engineers in Norway: your hourly cost would probably blow up.

Depends what you’re comparing to. Total comp for great engineers in Oslo is lower than for their peers in Silicon Valley.


Total cost to the company may not be. Employees are costlier to the companies in Europe.


>" Try hiring a hundred software engineers in Norway"

They're not particularly cheap in the US either. Toronto might be better but hi-tech salaries are going up as well.


You can get 100s of SWE in Poland (or Ukraine pre-war) way cheaper than US, yet extreme cases of tech startups like FAANGs will never happen because market is too small.


You need to look at the entire spectrum of direct, indirect and near-taxes. A couple of examples: VAT of 15-25% on almost everything. With social security contributions a maximum marginal tax rate on labour of more than 50%. Norway is actually pretty efficient and by far the best of the region compared with other countries but also massively subsidized with north sea oil money.


You’re missing the wealth tax. 1.1% of global wealth, including unrealized gains of startup share positions.

https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/rates/wealth-tax/


I know a lot of founders whose companies are allegedly worth a lot on paper, but cash on hand is very limited.

I wonder how the wealth tax actually works. Do I want people to invest in my company if that's just going to increase the valuation and my tax bill? Surely there must be some exceptions...


This year, quite many have actually chosen to move from Norway to Switzerland, probably due to taxes


Not a problem for a startup surely, they have debts not wealth.


The US is prized because of its large market… not because it’s a tax dodge. The US dan cut off access to any company unwilling to pay local taxes just like how China forces any foreign company wanting to tap into its large market to give majority control to a local entity.


The US is absolutely a tax dodge because of low capital gains taxes and low corporate tax rates.

Marginal personal income tax rates, which is what others keep comparing here, are only relevant for wage earners.


It's all relative isn't it? Singapore is a tax dodge, but I would't characterize low corporate income taxes as a tax dodge. How does one get money out of a corporation if not via marginal personal income tax rates?


Long term capital gains.


Can you elaborate?


The EU is a large market too but startup founders aren't going there.


EU has a market on legislative base, however in language, culture, ... it is split. It is very hard to build a company serving larger parts of Europe.


Many American companies have done it. Instagram is very popular across the EU.


They started with an American focus, holding doors open for others and once things were running expanded more actively. Also they were acquired after 1.5 years when not even having a Android app, which is more spread in Europe than US compared to iphone


"Consumer tech" like social media. And the reason is 30+ different smaller markets, because this business makes little sense if you can't capture 100s of millions of users.


...and lots of other factors, like access to risk capital.


Your taxes shouldn’t be based on where your HQ is but rather where your customers are.


Please go file your taxes in 37 different countries with different regulations where your customers are.

You will bankrupt from your accountants’ bills.


Amazon doesn't make profits and thus doesn't pay taxes. Bezos doesn't sell much and thus doesn't pay taxes either. Changing rates wouldn't change anything. Tax rates only affect the middle class, and as @jliptzin has pointed out, those tax rates are quite similar.

The EU has a lower output because there are fewer investors. One successful startup creates wealth in the hand of knowledgeable people who can create the next startup. There are simply not thousands of millionaires and billionaires who can successfully pick the next round. There is also less of a network effect where venture capitalists can offer their portfolio as leads for the sales teams of their new investments.

The Nordic welfare levels can turn out to be the path to European success. It's easier to start an idea when failure doesn't end in an existential crisis.


the UK (used) to have a reasonably comprehensive welfare net, and has a larger number of companies per capita compared to the USA.

One of the things that are never really discussed in these kind of things is that you are already paying for welfare, its just not even. Poverty leads to crime, which costs you, either in lost property, crap neighbourhoods, or in insurance.


This comment distorts what is happening by using the word "robbing". Why not "supporting"?

Perhaps Peter has earned his cash by working really hard. But perhaps not, perhaps he just exploited other people to hustle his way up some corporate food chain.


This type of thinking is pure toxin because it essentially reinforces exactly what you don't want.

If Peter did in fact work hard and now he's stripped of the results of his labor while being told that probably he only managed to accumulate capital because he was just exploiting others, what incentive landscape does that create.

Is a lot of profit a function of factors much less commendable than creating value for others? Sure. But by lumping in the productive people with the parasites, you are undermining those people who deserve your protection the most.


Pure toxin is a bit harsh, no?

I can tell you what kind of incentives such a system promotes: different ones!

In particularly a welfare system gives incentives to people who want to create something out of intrinsic motivation, not because of financial motivation. Many of the things the most profitable companies use are actually but on tools and mathematics that were created without any financial freedom.

So I would rather reserve the word "toxic" rather for the current system consisting of purely financial motivation to hoard money that your are so vigorously defending.


Nobody, at least in the US system, gets very wealthy just by working hard.

At the very least, you have to start out with wealth or a strong support system (which is down to luck in your input conditions), or get fantastically lucky in your first(-ish) attempt at starting something.

Then, if you want to make the kind of money that, say, Bezos or Musk makes, you have to make the kinds of decisions that many of us simply would never make, because they're morally reprehensible. I wrote another comment about this [0] on an article about a week ago, but basically, in the very best case scenario, once you're past the point where more money would make no material difference in a healthy lifestyle (which is going to happen, at the very latest, somewhere in the millions), if you're using the excess to make yourself more money, rather than help improve other people's lives, you are being selfish at a level that makes you effectively indistinguishable from evil.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34013858


Nobody anywhere gets very wealthy just by working hard. Otherwise the world would be filled with millionaire janitors.

> if you're using the excess to make yourself more money, rather than help improve other people's lives, you are being selfish at a level that makes you effectively indistinguishable from evil.

If you're using your business to create value for millions of people, you are in fact improving millions of lives by the amount of value created. If you capture a little bit of that value for yourself and become fantastically rich, good for you and good for the system that enabled this whole thing. Even better for you if you decide to give some of it away, but to call you evil if you don't? I suppose your own belt could be tightened a bit more so that you could give more away?

Other than what arises from rent-seeking behavior, profit is not inherently immoral.


If you use your business to make life easier for millions of people, that's good.

If you take enough profit to make billions of dollars for yourself, that's bad.

Because no one person (or family) can ever realize anything resembling a proportionate benefit from that money, all you're doing is raising your dollar-denominated high score, at the expense of all the other people you could be helping more if you invested that money back in your business, or paid it in taxes, or invested in other local businesses, or any of a thousand other ways to make it work for the world instead of just being a selfish Number Go Up for you.


When someone becomes rich through this path, they aren't rolling around with a billion dollars in a vault Scrooge McDuck style. Almost all of their wealth that isn't taxed is already tied in their own business or in investments in other businesses, so they're already doing the things that you say will make it work for the world. Even the little bit of liquid money they keep in the bank is loaned out to other profit-seeking entrepreneurs.

Once again, profit is not immoral. It serves as an important signal for capital to be directed in the value-creation cycle that ends up producing wealth for everyone. In the words of Isabel Paterson: "Production is profit; and profit is production. They are not merely related; they are the same thing. When a man plants potatoes, if he does not get back more than he put in, he has produced nothing."

You are saying that if a man who planted potatoes harvests them and keeps some for himself above and beyond what he needs to subsist, he is evil. I'm really not sure how you justify that position.


> You are saying that if a man who planted potatoes harvests them and keeps some for himself above and beyond what he needs to subsist, he is evil. I'm really not sure how you justify that position.

I don't, because that's not what I'm saying.

If you actually read my post, I did not say that taking any profit was evil. I said taking enough profit to make you a billionaire was evil.

The scale of what it takes to become a billionaire is absolutely mind-boggling. I might, if I am lucky, make enough in my lifetime to have a million dollars saved up.

I would have to work a thousand of those lifetimes to get a billion dollars.

And yes; someone who is a billionaire keeps that money in stocks and things, and it's true that it's not just a pile of cash...but that doesn't actually mean that it's usefully "in the economy". It's still theirs. (And remember, unless you buy it as part of a direct issuance from the company, buying stock doesn't actually put more money in their pocket.)


Peter Thiel is a really good example of using a loophole in law, to make fantastic wealth using his Roth account.

Full story here: https://www.propublica.org/article/lord-of-the-roths-how-tec...


1. Finland doesn't have oil, you're mistaking it for Norway.

2. Progressive taxation is the basis on which the best places to live were built. This is an empirical observation, make of that what you will, but it's strange to give your gut feelings of "basic economics / human nature" more weight than objective reality.

3. Why do is the word "rob" applied to taxation? Without the state to at least enforce laws, enforce property rights, and physically protect you, there wouldn't even be any wealth creation. Your current life is only possible because you are inserted in a society, it's only far you have a debt to pay society back.


> Your current life is only possible because you are inserted in a society, it's only far you have a debt to pay society back.

Sure, but at some point it starts to sound abusive, like a narcissistic parent telling their child that they and not the little child owns their accomplishments, because without them the child would not have existed.

The state, at least in the US, is supposed to work for you, the people. The burden of proof is on the state if it wants to tax more and expand itself. It needs to justify every penny of the taxpayer's money it spends. It simply cannot take the position that everyone's output is by default a debt owed to it, and by its grace alone are the people allowed to keep some of it. That's the talk of the divine right of kings.


>!Without the state to at least enforce laws, enforce property rights, and physically protect you, there wouldn't even be any wealth creation.

This is the kind of minimalist state that libertarians would agree to. People talk about robbery when the state is spending money on arbitrary things.


Arbitrary? Or just things they don't agree with?


Arbitrary in the sense of non-essential things that governments spend other people’s money on.

The fact that most people don’t agree is why tax is taken by force.


That's not what arbitrary means. The fact that someone is spending on something non-essential doesn't make that spending arbitrary. Lipstick is non-essential but that doesn't mean the spending on it is arbitrary.

I'm quite confident that a lot of thought goes into pretty much all government spending, even if a proportion is misguided, counter productive, and non-essential.


You should visit Tokyo. Japan spends very low on welfare.


what is your definition of welfare?


Oh yeah the salaryman life sounds fantastic /s


whose issue is that??

unlike the US you can just leave and not pay.

it seems to me people outside countries with decent welfare have all of the issues?

something like give me private jets or let me starve by the side of the road, nothing in between must exist.

i actually enjoy paying for people playing video games all day while smoking weed and getting drunk while businesses scream how they cant find employees. Specially the combi self centered and assholes really cant find anyone anymore.

You have to pay what it costs to hire people. If the offer isn't competitive with not working you are going to have to pay more.

Long term employees are also leaving for better jobs.

ill gladly pay for the transition back to sanity.


Norway got rich off oil, Finland isn't especially rich afaik.


They pay for it by spending the money - which induces higher production, higher sales - and higher taxes without ever changing the tax percentage.

There isn't a fixed amount of stuff, nor a fixed amount of money. Otherwise turnover, ie GDP, would never rise.

Don't get your stocks and flows mixed up.


> The people you rob (the ones paying the bulk of taxes) have a lower incentive to produce.

And yet when the top tax rate was 96%, Americans still produced.

When I was 12, I was impressed by Atlas Shrugged, but by the time I was 17 I realized it was ludicrous.


Most wealthy Americans were never paying 96% in taxes, if any at all. There were many more loopholes during this time.

People are forgetting that the high tax countries are enjoying the fruits of lower-tax countries labor.

Technology and drugs are the big ones. Big, evil companies create life-saving drugs and generics are created and sold for pennies to these countries.

With no incentive to create (ie: large profits), humans will definitely not advance.

Money is also freedom. The less we are able to keep, the less free we become (and more dependent on the government/state).


[flagged]


If the likely financial outcome were the same between making music and writing software for banks or insurance companies, I sure as hell wouldn't go anywhere near a computer.

Do you think people do Office Space style work out of the goodness of their own hearts?

> That’s frankly ridiculous.

The feeling is mutual.


Uh, have you heard of open source software?

The world is full of software that people built because it’s interesting and/or useful. Linux for example was created as a hobby project during college.

People love to create. Just because YOU wouldn’t touch software doesn’t mean it’s true for everyone.


You are not fully arguing his point:

>writing software for banks or insurance companies

Look at Gimp. It's the software that people like to write but not the one designers like to use.

There was this submission: 'Ask HN: How might HN build a social network together?' [1]. With Mastodon, people create a social network, but one that is unnecessarily inefficient. Why hasn't that submission led to a better social network?

Ford is quoted with saying: 'People would have asked for faster horses'.

How do you give the people with new ideas the power to implement them?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33999296


You empower people by making sure their basic needs are taken care of so they have the freedom to fully pursue these projects.

It’s no wonder projects like GIMP don’t take off because these developers work on it in their spare time. They don’t have the time or energy to fully commit to it because they’re busy being forced to write someone else’s software.

Linux, for example, was built over the course of 8 years while Linus Torvalds was in college. He was able to do so because his college in Finland provided room and board and the freedom to pursue his interests alongside his studies.


>You empower people by making sure their basic needs are taken care of so they have the freedom to fully pursue these projects.

This is interesting because you look at the situation from a different point of view. I was wondering how somebody can influence others to create change and you focus on how to remove influence to create change.

I believe that you can never supply enough resources for people to feel free to implement change. What are the basic needs that have to be met? I would like to say that they are already met. Every software developer can reduce their working hours to a minimum and have ample time to pursue whatever they want.

People are already empowered but they lack motivation. Compared to the global south, the north has plenty of resources. But most citizens don't invest them. Instead they spend them on vacations, clothing, cars and houses because they want to match their peers.

With that perspective, what could incentivize people whose basic needs are met, to spend their time on innovations?


Most people spend the best part of their day pursuing their employers interests instead of their own. It's no wonder people want to relax during their time off! Clothing, cars, and houses become coping mechanisms for dealing with their situation. This is a very real reality for a lot of people.

Reducing your hours is a risky proposal. Even asking your boss about it can be a big risk. Becoming a contractor is a big risk too. The reality is that, for most people, their boss owns most of their lives, and trying to go off on their own is very risky. Plus you risk messing up your resume and having to explain yourself which is yet another thing working against you.

So yes, being employed might put food on your table and a roof over your head. If your a software developer it'll even let you buy gadgets and take vacations. However, the current system prevents people from reaching farther up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, because taking that next step to pursue your own interests in very risky and expensive.

So to answer your question, I don't think you need incentives. You need to enable people to pursue their intrinsic motivations.


How much can be accomplished by somebody who isn't willing to take as much risk for their idea as women take for having a child? Of course, paternity leave shows that most men need an incentive to take time off for their children.

But that's kind of the point. In a world where there is no majority to give people the space for their intrinsic motivation, who is going to pursue innovative ideas? People could make it socially acceptable to take time off or to work less, but they don't. If you have to nudge them to make that change, you are back at square one: 'How do you give the people with new ideas the power to implement them?'

If it is work itself that inhibits people from pursuing their intrinsic motivation, how could you make it economically viable to give everybody the space for their intrinsic motivations? If it is not viable, doesn't that leave us with incentives?


Ok. If I take care of your basic needs, will you come and write my insurance software?


Man, you really are fixated on getting people to do things for you.


I think you’re missing the point. I’m not interested in a business relationship with you. The point is that I need certain things to get done, and it’s not feasible to sit around and hope that enough people decide to take on my specific problems as their passion project. And if taking care of someone’s basic needs is sufficient, why would they work on my software when they could do anything else that is more enjoyable?


The fact that you think I have any interest in working with you is amazing. I have negative interest in that.

You proved my point again. Everything in your responses is about YOU and YOUR software and what people can do for YOU.

If you want someone to work on your project you should have to convince them that it’s worth their time. Instead they rely on you for insurance and a livelihood. If you think your employees would still work for you if they had the freedom to pursue their own interests then I have a bridge to sell you.


I wish you all the best.


Yeah, I've heard of it. I contribute to it. I pay people to write it. I run my business on it.

If you're so inclined to work on things for your own pleasure, please do give us a hand by solving some of these.

https://github.com/bitemyapp/esqueleto/issues


This response makes no sense. Why would I spend my time on your specific project?

And I do contribute to open source, but I prefer to work on stuff that isn’t connected to some company.


> Why would I spend my time on your specific project?

That's exactly my point.

I work in a field that is really very important, but it's not interesting enough for you to work on purely for your own amusement. That's why there needs to be a financial incentive.


Dude I don't know you, I don't know what you do. All you did is link a Haskell SQL library. Sorry I don't care about that particular project.

You seem to be under the impression that unless people are coerced they'll only work on projects that entertain them in some way, like a child playing with bubbles.

I feel sorry for you that you have such a poor opinion of humanity. Personally, I think humans are curious, collaborative, and like to build things. Yes they like to build things they find interesting but interesting is a wide concept. If my Mom got cancer then I'd probably be more likely to work on cancer software.

I want to live in a world where people can voluntarily work together to build things based on shared interests, whatever those interests might be. A world where people aren't forced to submit to business owners like you.


A business relationship is not coercion.

I’m aware that people like to create things, but that depends on what those things are. Your offer to work on cancer software to help cure your mother’s hypothetical cancer only comes with intrinsic motivation. If we relied on that, we would not have made the progress in that field that we have made, and many more people would be dead.

My mother has cancer. I’m quite glad the scientists working on researching better treatments are actually getting paid.

> A world where people aren't forced to submit to business owners like you.

It’s curious that you have such contempt for entrepreneurs on a website themed around entrepreneurship and published by a venture capital firm.

---

I get the feeling you’re no stranger to the words “anarchist”, “ancap”, and “communist”, so I’ll just leave this here:

https://youtu.be/fibDNwF8bjs


> I work in a field that is really very important

> "Esqueleto, a SQL DSL for Haskell"


Esqueleto is an open-source library that my company's software uses.

The code specific to the business is proprietary.

Obviously.


Sure, the rich have more advantages than the poor. Always been that way and always will.

In our culture there is an immense preoccupation with the unfairness of this but the reality is that if you don't come from wealth and privilege, you need a different playbook. Dwelling on the inequity neuters you. If you want to win you need to figure out what the playbook is and then do the right things.

I found a playbook that worked by reading all the self help and business books I could (preferably from the public library because that was free and I was poor). My playbook ended up being: move to a country with a lower cost of living, and get good enough at freelancing online that I essentially had a safety net and a long-term runway for other pursuits.

I then tried a few different business models, each failed a bit less than the last until I hit a winner which bankrolls about a dozen people on my payroll.

A rich guy wouldn't have had to go through all that but I don't care. It's totally irrelevant to the requirements for success in my reality. Which were build my own baseline from scratch and then fail until I succeeded.

People born into easier paths than mine have sneered at many many elements of what I did over the years (living in a "shithole" country, working with a "shitty" tech stack, taking "shitty" Elance gigs that didn't pay enough, etc. etc.). Other people who were able to tolerate remaining victims of the system tuned out my story and focused on other things, like bitching about politics. I'm worth more than most of the people in both categories now and I feel like this is just the beginning. I haven't had children yet but if I do they will have fewer disadvantages than I did.

There are different and easier playbooks than the one I used. If I was starting again I would probably go into a more conventionally profitable vocation and save for 15 years, studying business and coding on the side, and then start a business.

But either way the point is your playbook if you start poor needs to be different. It's not as easy as the one the rich guys have but that fact is a distraction. You should be too busy figuring out your plan to care.


Class mobility is generally regarded as a good thing for economies. It increases competition.

What you’re saying is that the only way for you to get ahead is by exporting your own lack of class mobility to another nation. This is akin to shipping trash to other shores so we don’t have to deal with the repercussions of landfills in wealthier nations.

If that’s considered a sane way to get ahead, home is not economically well.


You missed the point entirely.


Did you intend satire? Unfortunately, your post could’ve come straight from the mouth of more than one person I’ve met over the last few years.


>* move to a country …*

I understand and agree with your overall point, but the fact that this an option underpins a certain amount of privilege.


There is always someone more privileged than you and someone less privileged than you.

What you do with the cards in hand is what matters. Other paths lead to insanity.


No doubt, I’m just acknowledging the limitations of the OPs advice. It came across as a bit of a solipsistic perspective.


How much privilege does it take to move to Guatemala or Pakistan?


I dunno. What if they’re currently living in Bangladesh?


It's ironic you should mention Bangladesh because there's a guy on my payroll who lives in Bangladesh and I'm flying him to an international conference soon. It does indeed take more paperwork than usual, it will be a unique opportunity for him and probably not his last with me, he's a great employee.


Working remotely != moving for geo-arbitrage. If anything, it's the opposite, where the employer is taking advantage of geo-arbitrage.


In this model, people living in Bangladesh skip the “moving” part. They already live in a low cost locale.


So they have open doors to be wildly successful entrepreneurs?

My point is that the OPs “model” is a strategy for a limited population and not very generalizable. Within those caveats, I have no issue with their suggestion.


HN commenters are apparently privileged for having to move to Guatemala to get by, whereas Guatemalians are refugees when they move to the US.


This misses the point completely. One side is taking advantage of geo-arbitrage while the other is fleeing violence. It's a false equivalence.


The US has 18 large cities with a higher homicide rate than Guatemala. 50 with more than half of Guatemala's. The difference between the two countries from a violence perspective hardly constitutes "fleeing."

Edit: country level is 6.5 for the US vs 17.5 for Guatemala, which is also not a difference consistent with war vs peace. But since "refugees" end up mostly in cities, and hundreds of thousands end up in the very same cities that are more violent than Guatemala, the city data is perfectly sufficient to show they aren't all fleeing violence.

Edit 2: I would continue this discussion, but somehow my original reply to you got flagged and my commenting privileges suspended, even though I had net three upvotes at the time.

It's probably for the better, I shouldn't even be bothering with someone who complains that I "cherry pick" 50 city homicide data and then replies to me with El Paso.

It certainly shows how strong your facts are (i.e. "the data is wrong") that you get me suspended instead of engaging them.


This is the definition of cherry picking data. If you are comparing rates between countries, use the country data.

I have personal experience with refugees from Central America and Mexico. I can assure you, many are fleeing violence.

Edit: Dismissing 2.7x rate does not make for a strong point. You are jumping through hoops to not be wrong. E.g., one of the cities that receives the most refugees from Guatemala is El Paso, TX, which is consistently one of the safest cities in the U.S.

Your choice of metrics also does not paint a full picture. Many people are fleeing to avoid being conscripted by a cartel. That type of violence does not show up in homicide statistics. You're demonstrating a superficial understanding.

Edit 2: El Paso is the opposite of cherry picking; as I already pointed out, they are relevant because they take in a disproportionate amount of refugees. So, of the U.S. cities that you point to with higher per-capita homicides, can you point out if any absorb more refugees than El Paso? Because that was central to your point that refugees are jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

I did not get you "suspended". You got your own post removed because you weren't following HN guidelines. I tried to point that out to help, but you were too busy arguing to notice. Not everything is a personalized attack.


[flagged]


Please review the HN Guidelines before commenting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


I mean you're not wrong but you missed my point. There's always an angle. That's how everyone succeeds. You find your angle and you exploit it. Everybody has at least one.

You choose here to focus on the fact that some people have more angles available to them than others. You call them privilege and believe them to be unjust. If you do that too much, you'll defeat yourself and destroy your own agency.

Maybe you're right, maybe they are unjust, I do have opinions on that sort of thing, I also think the best places to indulge those opinions are at the ballot box and at my desk writing checks to nonprofits. I mean I do screw this up and focus my time/energy/attention on them at inappropriate times. But I know it is a screw-up when I do it. No one is serving the greater good by wasting time.


I acknowledged your point. I also agree that the individual should focus on what is in their power to exploit. But I think it's also important to recognize and work to fix systemic issues if we value a just system. Both can be true at the same time and I think it's sometimes a mistake of the hustle-porn mentality to focus exclusively on one while ignoring the other.


Says the person who attacked a commenter for being "privileged." I'm just helping defend him against your irrelevant accusations of privilege (even though you know nothing about him) while he's attempting to discuss ways to become successful without being a trust funder. He has given us a very helpful and insightful perspective, and since you cannot add to his useful discussion, you instead interrupt by him being the privilege police, because you think it will get you internet points.

He laid his heart and mind out for our benefit, and you rewarded it by attempting to bully him. Don't tell me I'm being uncivil.


Nobody was "attacked". Saying that having specific options that aren't afforded to everyone is an acknowledgement that neither negates their point or is an attack on a person. It is, as you say, adding to the perspective, based exclusively on what they said; I'm not jumping to conclusions as you allude. Contrast that to your snarky reply. The fact that you thought that comment was an attack demonstrates a lack of the HN guideline to read the strongest possible interpretation and avoid snark. Your approach is not conducive to discourse.


No, you absolutely bullied him. And now instead of apologizing, you're doubling down. He never claimed to be a starving African child. He told us what he had to do to make up for his limitations, and instead of working with that conversation, you chose to denigrate his efforts.

You're right that I'm not adding to his discourse. I'm just trying to hush the people who are attempting to bully him.


Honestly I’m probably more inclined to land on the same side as you regarding this particular case regarding the suggestion or assumption of privilege. That being said, no, you’re being ridiculous. There was no attacking or bullying.


It's hyperbole, sure. But if you were to put it in a productive-unproductive and bullying-kindness matrix, it's in the unproductive/bullying quadrant.


There's no better education than trying and failing.


This + its really dependent on location and context as you said.

If you are outside of US, your chances of liquidity event decrease even further.

I think people always divide into two camps here, its either hard work or luck but the truth is somewhere in between.

As a normal non-privileged person, I can't afford placing all-in bets. But I can go to a different table with different stakes and different strategy.


The average American watches 4 hours a day of TV.

Most startup founders work other jobs while building their project - if they can afford to fail, it's because they have that other job. But they're spending those four hours (and many, many more) on labors of love.

Sure, there are some trustfund kids who get to play founder and have the odds stacked in their favor, but that's neither the soul nor the joy of starting your own project. In my experience most of those types are miserable even in success.


The TV numbers are surely skewed by retirees?

Who built their billion dollar company while working a day job again?


Jeff Bezos, for example. Amazon was well on its way to product market fit and full validation that its gonna work by the time he quit his dayjob.

Same for Zuckerberg and school.

You don’t hit a billion dollars while having a dayjob. You validate the idea and approach work and can get you there.

Anthony Bourdain famously quit his job only when it had become absolutely impossible to keep alongside his public persona work because interviewers/journalists kept disrupting restaurant operations at his job.


If you have a billion dollar company there are better sources of entertainment than binge watching tv. I would assume half literate serfs are watching the most tv.


> if they can afford to fail, it's because they have that other job.

Citation needed. I’m quite sure that working a second job does not go down well with VCs. In most cases the networking required and high risk of failure is only achievable through having well-off parents.


Citation: I started two failed startups while working day jobs... and could afford for them to fail because I had solid work, despite the thousands of hours I had invested in them over years.

You can't really tell if something's possible if you begin by simply complaining it's impossible. Is the world rigged toward helping rich kids? Sure. But fools and their fortune are quickly separated. Using inequity as a basis for complaining and giving up before even trying is really the fastest road to bitterness... and it's not even a fair or knowledgeable take, since it doesn't come from true personal experience or personally failed attempts which are, if nothing else, highly educational.


I had a friend/colleague build a successful startup.

I didn't know him on day one of his startup, but I knew him from very early on. He had some initial customers, and was making progress, but slow.

Early on, through connections, he landed a remote contracting gig that paid a full 40 hours/week, but usually didn't consume more than 10-15 hours of his time per week, and that went down over time. It was supporting a legacy system, so there wasn't a whole lot of new dev/work, but it was seasonally important, and had to be up/maintained/etc. That was, IIRC, something like $60/hr. So, early on in his startup, he ended up having a 'side gig' that was paying $100k/year, but only taking up ~12 hrs/week most of the time.

That left plenty of time to focus on building out things the initial handful of customers wanted. It also gave him a lot of time to just... grow slow. Ended up getting to .... $30k/month in recurring revenue while employing just a couple of folks (part time, IIRC), and... then one of his larger competitors decided to close up. He had a few months of non-stop working building data migration tools to convert competitors to his platform. But that took him to another level.

Getting a remote consulting gig paying guaranteed base while not consuming much time was very... lucky. He didn't look for it, but knew it was a good deal when it arrived, and he jumped at it. This was crucial to the 'afford to fail' part referenced above (apologies for the long post here - that was the trigger phrase).

That second part was very 'luck' based as well, but he was prepared to capitalize on that luck. This was years in to the journey, and the startup was already comfortable with respect to revenue/profit/etc.

But... he built that over years, very slowly. No amount of 100 hour weeks could have landed him any of the competitors' clients early on, because he wasn't known.

During that build, he could 'afford to fail' because of that remote contract. And now... he can try new things and afford to fail for the rest of his life (assuming the gamble isn't too big!)

A lot of word of mouth, a lot of slow growth, a lot of initial luck, a lot of patience. It worked out for him over about ... 8-9 years, but any of those pieces missing early on would have resulted in much lower growth, or stalling, or he might have given up and moved to something else.


When people see "luck" they often miss "set up to capitalize on getting lucky." That is the component of skill (and background) in most entrepreneurial success stores. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and most other mega-entrepreneurs were very good at exploiting their lucky circumstances. People who don't notice this think it's all luck because they wouldn't be where they were without the luck - they notice that the luck was necessary. They don't notice that the luck wasn't sufficient. Lottery winners are a great example of the insufficiency of luck to create wealth.


It’s like a baseball game. Most people have no at-bats. They are stuck on the bench. They have no capital and no way to build up enough capital to try a business.

Some people have one at-bat. They save some capital, take their swing, and maybe get a base hit, maybe strike out. If they are lucky, they hit a home run and end up set for life.

The rich get an infinite number of at-bats. They can just swing and swing until they hit their home run, then swing again. Then they write books about how hard work and hustling can make anyone a millionaire.


When my wife started her business, we lived on my income for 5 years while she continually reinvested in growing it.

It was hard but worth it.


Congratulations (I mean it. No /s).

I understand that to mean that your income was enough to keep (at least) both of you fed, housed and clothed.

Maybe you also had some savings/family support to use as a Kickstarter for her business and possibly to help pay the bills but maybe you didn't.

If both of you had to work 40+ hours a week and there is still too much month left at the end of the money, it's really hard to afford so much as a car repair not to speak of starting a business.

Is it possible to be an entrepreneur in that case? Yes but it's an enormous gamble and needs for all the stars to align just right. The consequences of failure are immediate (there are no 5 years to get started) and dire (homelessness/ no ability to get to work).

It's a much worse bet than for someone from the middle class who might have to move in with their parents again. Not pleasant but endurable.

Someone well off suffers not even that and is, at worst, a little bit embarrassed in front of their family. They can also try again and again.


Yea. I was a programmer working for a stable telecom company at the time. We didn't have kids yet and lived in a low cost of living area where it was possible to live off of my income. It wasn't a huge sum of money by any stretch, but it was enough while we limited expenses.

There were a lot of trials. We were close to having to file for bankruptcy 6 different times during a particularly difficult 2 year stretch. Our exit plan was always that she just go back to work with the potential to have to sell our house to pay of debts or lease agreements.

Starting a business is hard with a lot of risks and that's before you actually hire staff. The moment that you have to consistently make payroll on time, your stress level goes through the roof with the combination of obligation to financial consistency and the knowledge that you are responsible for other people (and their families in many cases).


Thank you for going into detail.

I appreciate the insight.


What I have seen from others (I have not been able to do so) knowing that you can afford to fail beforehand is one of the biggest factors to succeed:

- Objectively is not an issue to fail and you know it

- It gives you the security to take risky decisions and at the end it is a matter of expectation, bet and see if you win. To me this goes along with the mantra that failing is not bad and you have to do so few times before you succeed. Obviously, the more you try the more chances you have. If you are not a casualty.


It also allows you not to give up on the last mile, when you still don't know it's the last mile.


This is why societies should strive for more “inequality” (as in, more families with large fortunes). The rich have a safety net that allows them to take risks that ultimately benefit all of society. Let’s say with the best execution, a startup still only has 10% chance of success - so then the only thing to do is have more and more people “roll the dice.” And no, a strong welfare state is not a substitute - the danger is not starvation, but loss of your life savings or comfortable lifestyle provided by a decent career. Welfare does nothing to mitigate that risk (except maybe for the people with no wealth or good employment prospects, but they are probably not the primary talent pool for startup founders).


You may be overestimating to what extent successful startups benefit everyone. And underestimating the dangers of failure for non-rich.


You really don't think there is already more than enough inequality?

I get the case for some capital accumulation. Capital does make for an amazing economic engine that we all benefit from. Capitalist countries are richer than non capitalist countries. Easy to understand. But there is a point where more capital accumulation and inequality just makes the rest of us become serfs to oligarchs.


I think we need more Elon Musks, yes.

Although, obviously, we don’t want more people who got rich by being politicians.


Funny, I’d cite Elon Musk level capital accumulation and his decisions on how to allocate his capital over the last year as a perfect case study of the theory that, while capital accumulation can be a good thing, we also don’t want all our eggs in too few baskets.


Actually it’s quite good - because he spent $40bln we got to see detailed evidence of government agencies working hand-on-glove with corporations to censor information and shape political outcomes (a few years ago it was trendy to refer to this as arrangement as “fascism”).


We got to see his curated version of that. Someone who has become a firmly entrenched partisan cultural warrior.


I have a suspicion that if Elon Musk types were given free reign we would end up with people working overtime for pennies.


…

  If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
  And lose, and start again at your beginnings
     And never breathe a word about your loss:
…

If—; Kipling, Rudyard; 1910


The yard sale model encapsulates a lot of what you said above.

This interactive website does a good job of explaining the model itself: https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/


> It's like continuously rolling two dice, and you only need to get double sixes once, and after that it's private jets until you die.

I’m stealing this. Fantastic analogy.


my living expenses in cancun were $700/month. How bad do you want it?


> A big fact of the entrepreneur world is that it is hugely based on luck.

And for anything with bigger ambitions than a lifestyle business, don’t forget connections. Most founders are still men from Ivies or Stanford. Just look at the “PayPal mafia” to see how inbred tech investing can be.

Not that most entrepreneurs need or should expect VC funding, but this is HN, run by a VC. You can totally run a business and be successful without it.


Personally, I have a problem with the term lifestyle business. Without plenty of VC money, building and running a business is hard. VC backed up start-ups fit the "lifestyle" business definition a lot better, IMHO. One can play CxO, or chief engineer or whatever fancy title one wants to hold without putting the effort and years in, without actually worrying about those nasty things like profitability, cash flow or actual products. And, with the right connections, if one start-up fails one can still just start a new one.


And there is absolutely nothing wrong with a life style business to begin with, the negative stigma is there only because certain VCs feel that you are a horrible person for not cutting them in on the action so they can diversify their portfolios.


This. I really dislike the term "lifestyle business". What's wrong with a stable long-term business that makes founders and customers happy? Why does every business need GROWTH GROWTH GROWTH at all costs, even if the result is a net negative for customers?

I sometimes explain to customers that if my business were VC-funded, it would grow and be developed much faster, but in the end there would need to be an exit and there is no exit scenario that is good for the customers. Think about it: there could be an IPO, in which case the business would need to start addressing a huge audience and increase growth (which always hurts existing customers), there could be a strategic acquisition or an acquihire, very few of which go right (this usually results in shutting down the service within 2-3 years), or the VCs could decide to fold the company, stopping the service outright. There is simply no good scenario.


> What's wrong with a stable long-term business that makes founders and customers happy?

And employees.


Last weekend I was talking to one of the initial employees of a relatively well-known monitoring SAAS here in the Netherlands. Apparently their founder/owner had just decided that ~30 employees was perhaps a few too many and that he would like to keep it more lifestyle-business-ish. Fair enough, he's the owner and is allowed to make decisions like that.

This early employee was doing some real heart-searching about what he was going to do though, now that any hopes of personal growth at this company had been dashed. He could probably stay a developer there forever, of course, but any career growth would not be in the cards for at least several years since all management positions were filled and he was already the most senior engineer around.

I don't mean to imply that stable businesses who make employees happy are impossible, but at some point you will just not be able to make everyone happy at the same time.


I own and run a lifestyle business of 5 people. I don’t want it to be any larger. My biggest fear - losing key staff due to lack of career growth.

Next year we’ll drop to 4 day weeks at some point to further reward the staff beyond ever growing comp.


Seriously curious -- what "career" growth do people imagine? Apart from learning new things (which that employee can still do), what would he be looking for? Managing people? More power? Different position on a business card?


Yes, true. I forgot to mention them because I don't have (or plan to have) any :-)


I've been more than happy to invest in a few of these 'lifestyle' businesses as angel investor. One of them is quite possibly going to be a breakout success anyway. We're all still amazed by it. Not a dollar of external capital beyond the friends-and-family round.


Seconded. I personally try to never use the phrase 'lifestyle business'. Instead I use the phrase 'bootstrapped business', because that is what it is. You have bootstrapped the business yourself organically over time instead of at a fast pace of growth with VC money.


My understanding is that bootstrapped and lifestyle are different things. A lifestyle business should be able to run on autopilot with minimal involvement from the founder (hence they can focus on living their life, rather than working). A bootstrapped business is one built with your own capital - it doesn’t necessarily have to become a lifestyle business.


This seems mostly correct to me. We wouldn't call 37signals a "lifestyle business" but a bootstrapped business.

I wouldn't say that a "able to run on autopilot" is necessarily the defining feature, but rather the attitude towards growth. The simply, the goal in starting and running the business is to support a work-life balance that is more strongly weighted towards life. As such, growing a lifestyle business beyond a certain point is counter productive since that leads to a more responsibility and less time for other stuff.

A bootstrapped business does still have growth as a primary goal and there is intention to reach a larger size and complexity.

While I'm not sure that I like the term "lifestyle" to describe it, I'm not sure what a better one is since "bootstrapped" means something different in this context.


> with minimal involvement from the founder (hence they can focus on living their life, rather than working).

I don't think this is right, most of the "lifestyle businesses" I've seen involve at least "normal" levels of work on their part, but are structured so that the work happens where & when suits other parts of their lives, or similar. At least the ones where that term made sense.

They are often located somewhere that causes some friction, or have opportunities to grow that they don't take on, etc.


Most problems in a Startup are product or distribution.

Most people who look down on lifestyle businesses often have the lifestyle to begin with, or are their… yet to be accomplished followers. It’s koolaid that can lose a decade of so many peoples lives. Anyone who looks down on lifestyle businesses should introspect on where it came from that it’s ok for them to look down kn another’s choices and personal formula. Not everyone has a safety net and building one for yourself let’s you really swing for the fences if you wanted. Or not.

Lots of business skills transfer from small business to big things.

All big things consist of small things.

Getting really good at small things is what makes you really good at big things instead of having the details to others.

Learning enough business skills before you need them means you can self fund though paid customer discoveries but being a well paid enough consultant. But that takes years to get really good at, and many times we don’t really consider if we’re going to love an area for the rest of our lives it’s going to be decades and not years. Having 5 figure monthly skills puts you on a very different and equal footing with investors who buy the time of people in their 20s like a toy. Others are much more conscientious. Anyone who wants to help you investment or not needs to bring more tot he table than money, specifically relationships that are meaningful to you.

How small, is there not just as much innovation and vision required to make an atom work compared to a molecule or something bigger?

Lots of things must be learned by learning to sit stand and walk before running. Entrepreneurship is a pretty harsh self development mirror.

Entrepreneurship is a marathon, as much as people feel it’s a sprint.

If founders take vc money save for angels, founders are almost guaranteed to be replaced as founder by a corporate type one day because founders usually don’t have or develop the business skills quickly enough.

Investment is not for the many, it is for the few. Most startups in all sectors are self funded. I feel this is one of the biggest sleights of hand for our time. Investment isn’t success either, it’s just a different kind of pressure to grow at any cost even if it’s not the right one or the one you might have picked had you waited a few months extra.

If you don’t want any investor to tell you when to go home, it’s often valuable to learn the difference between freelancing -> contracting -> consulting —> product. Lots of transferable skills the least of which is understanding jobs to be done.

You can benefit from a natural relentless curiousity and resourcefulness. Otherwise building a startup falls to being about tech and not learning how to build distribution.

Customers don’t care what you code in. Spending more time hanging around hanging out in online communities vs with customers and their pains is a red flag. Indiehackers is a great read, product hunt is nice too but none will replace doing the work that is hitting the streets and talking to elope face to face even if on video.

To the OP: It’s ok to go build other skills and often they will shed a more positive light on this time. You will discover you certainly have picked up a lot of valuable skills that others will pay for. That experience can uncover lots of needs that have no solution. Or, you may find something that you can do, and consider with a different perspective. You have value. You will add value. You will create value. You will continue becoming more well rounded.


This is a million dollar comment - there is a lot in here that is right and is quite literally an insight on the path to creating millions of dollars of value.

- It is about building solid product and distribution at this stage, other stuff can wait

- If you can self-fund customer discoveries (essentially get people to pay you while teaching you about the market) you are 80% of the way there

- If you have nothing else, business skills plus an enormous amount of elbow grease will go a long way

That's my own personal lens on it anyway


Aw, thanks. glad it was useful. I do wish I didn’t write it from my phone. So many typos. :)

About creating millions in value, it really does compound, and it’s about capturing the value too.

I have self-funded customer discovery regularly, if they won’t buy a discovery, they probably probably won’t buy a solution. It’s ok to educate them, let them try to solve it on their own and then the good ones come back.

Getting investment can be super helpful though. I like knowing how’s to get 2-10x value out of each dollar. It helps with growing fast. Current recession likely makes it easier for me to raise investment in some ways.

I sometimes go out of my way to recommend everything but my own solution. It’s better when they connect the dots, and if they can’t.

Most B2B saas in time need a professional services division of some kind - so why not get the customer to pay for the sales cycle, as long as it might be. It’s an easier form of seeming the breakthrough. I hang out in Academia and other slow industries though sometimes and have to pass the time. It’s changing though thankfully.

Many customers want to pay to learn and get comfortable and build buy in to become a 10-20y customer.

Business skills get you in the room for conversations at the level of strategy and direction, way better than selling in. It’s great leaving management consultants making way more than you adding no value to the convo because they don’t get the fundamental shift in the business is doing the change not studying it.

Lots of people will say that’s not advisable to go this deep, and they might be right. I’ve found going deep on things leads to warm introductions to other people’s problems. Demonstrating care about someone else’s business done right does open doors. Doing things that doesn’t scale gets you access that doesn’t scale to the many.

I’ve recently come across an author by the name of April Dunford that made my add value first and awesome approach fell a little less alone, and special which is awesome. She is amazingly well written and spoken. Going to read more of her stuff in the next few months.

I accidentally closed a paid pilot over a lunch by making fun of all the software in my space including my own as the reason to refused to put it in place for him even though it would get him forward in the short term. He is a pioneer and because the future needs to be built in his world his tools have to be as well instead of doubling down on tech anchored the past.

I find most sales are the byproduct of trust in showing people how to navigate the information overload out there. It’s good to get the bad fits out of your hair, the rest more than make up for it. I’m going to try to make 2023 more vocal about being very different and see how it goes.


> Customers don’t care what you code in.

Mostly true. I won’t be your customer if you use electron though.


Haha. I became a user of superhuman recently and have been thinking the same.

You’d might get stuck with Flutter instead :)


Even with VC money, running a business is hard. Just look at all the VC-funded startups that go bust! The term lifestyle business is useful because it frames and contrasts a VC-funded business that must have explosive growth and then IPO or be bought out or else die, and a business that's fine just existing with no need to take over the world, ever. A lifestyle business is one that can be trusted because it didn't take VC funding; it doesn't have the dying need to sell out to Apple or Amazon or Google or Microsoft or Adobe or IPO.


I think they meant was that if one of these VC backed lifestyle businesses fails, the CxO guys running the show just shrug and go sink an other one, who cares.


VC-backed is mutually exclusive with being a lifestyle business. I could see if they just generically said rich, because yeah it's easier to be rich than poor in this world, but that's not what they said.


A lifestyle business is one you can do on your own and fit it into your life. Its goal is profitability only to the point of satisfying your lifestyle’s income requirements.

Historically to the term, people would retire to vacation towns (the lifestyle) and run things like bike shops or an ice cream stand just to have some income, not to be CxO and get rich.


Couldn't agree more. I learned that the hard way. Building a business with a nice funding cushion and salary is way way way different than bootstrapping.

Edit: Timebox it. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work.


VC-backed startups have a very different "lifestyle" from bootstrapped startups. Building the business is harder but running the business is much easier since you don't have the weight of exit strategy bearing down on you. Those external pressures are now showing up thanks to rising interest rates and investors asking questions.

You can't be coerced to make business decisions like selling out to a competitor or aggressively raising prices if you own the company.


Even with VC money, running a business is very hard. Accepting VC money means you just sold a big chunk of your business to people who want to see it grow at maximum rate at any cost. Most won't blink an eye at burning out every single employee including the founders, for example.

Running a business is always hard and will always be hard, since it's a competitive activity against other humans who are also clever, hard-working and ambitious. Non-hardworking founders need an incredible niche or they will eventually be driven out by competitors who are just as smart but work harder.


You say this but but VCs are still quite limited in their control until about series C. Literally all the founders I know who have raised over $1m have pretty good lifestyles (house, car, frequent travel). It's worlds apart from the bootstrappers I know who remain frugal despite being profitable


> wihout plenty of VC money, building and running a business is hard

But..isn't that how it always worked?


I wasted a decade of my life on the notion that you can bootstrap a startup. It is hard mode and the folks that are so dismissive of VC funding should have that disclaimer.


It's worth noting that investment makes building a business wildly different to bootstrapping. You stop trying to build whatever a successful business looks like to you and have to build something other people believe in. That comes with a lot of compromises, different decisions, and 'selling out'. Some founders find that change in direction very hard to accept. Bootstrapping and investment are different journeys. Neither is easier.


As an example of a possible compromise, recall the risk/return efficient frontier.

If you are the principal investor in your venture, you may be willing to leave some potential return on the table, in exchange for dialling down risk to a comfortable level.

If funds are the principal investors, they have already dialled down their risk via diversification over the rest of their portfolios, and they will view any risk-adversity on your part as inefficient dead loss.

Solid base hit or swing for the bleachers? You may have the option to pick either strategy in the former case, but will not in the latter.


You can bootstrap a startup, but not every startup. And woe to you if you are bootstrapped and some VC funded club starts poaching your customers with a product subsidized by their financiers.

I wrote about these options long ago:

https://jacquesmattheij.com/three-roads-to-the-top-of-the-mo...


> if you get screwed, let it be, revenge is costly, you likely can't afford it

"Living well is the best revenge". And if you're someone who has the skills to turn their time into significant value-add, seeking revenge is an opportunity cost that undoubtedly counts as "living poorly".

[caveat: I have had to litigate on occasion, but (a) that is something where hours spent are indirect, via counsel, and (b) it's not exactly "living well", either]


> You can bootstrap a startup, but not every startup.

There are also a lot of products and services that can't be built by venture backed businesses. If you are bootstrapping, there is a big advantage in building something in this category, because then you can go at the pace that's organically the most efficient.


And I wasted a lot of my time thinking that a new company must be a startup and needs VC funding. The news is full of companies getting millions in funding, leading to that impression.


I like that you are not dismissing bootstrapping, but just wishing that people dismissive of VM should have that disclaimer.

I just wanted to provide a counter-example: Bootstrapping worked for me, but I was ready to live happily on 1800€ per month (France, where it’s reasonable), and remain small. It also required being able to part from anyone who would think 500€ a day for a consultant is reasonable, or that 20€/u/m is ok for a SAAS app.


It's hard, but it is possible. I know several bootstrapped tech companies who have pulled it off.

A common thread is the celebration of how far they've come. One from living in a shed (with his wife) in a friends backyard. Another in an unused room of a 100 year old building.

Even with funding there are no guarantees.


>Most founders are still men from Ivies or Stanford.

That's the key part of the "entrepreneur" story the OP missed. From Gates over Zuckerberg to Musk, all these people were born rich, into well-connected families. If you do not belong to this ultra-privileged class of people, your chances of doing what they did is practically zero.


Indeed, this has been a topic of many discussions in the past and I do believe that connections and privilege form a more important factor in success than many would like to admit.


Connections, privilege, but also it's about personal net capital invested. Entrepreneurs with ordinary net worth are underdiversified, with a concentration in their own business. If you have high net worth, you have less exposure so the stakes are lower and you require a lower rate of return to compensate you for the risk (CAPM).

There's no way I wanted the pressure to run a business in my 20s. A decade or so later with a cushy job gives me the financial freedom to do this without the high risk of failure, since if it tanks I'll still have other investments. Most entrepreneurs are in their 40s apparently according to research.


If this were true, wouldn't the other side of that statement be true? Since all startups seem to be privileged white males - shouldn't they all succeed and have funding?


where did the previous poster say "white males"?


I think i was replying to a different comment, and accidentally placed it under this one.


Connections, where you were born, and where you go to school are also luck.


> Most founders are still men from Ivies or Stanford

Is that also true for YC startups? I felt like YC (while still playing the capitalist's game) was providing a more equal opportunity to start-up "luck" by just looking at the numbers :)


No idea but I’d love to see data…

Eg - academic breakdown of founders

- % founders that already knew a YC grad personally

- founders that knew YC investors

- etc


Maybe, but to have good numbers to be in YC to begin with having the right connections helps a lot.


100% agree. In fact most all of the successful-in-business people I know owe a huge amount of their success to luck. They’re also the often last to acknowledge the part luck played in their story. This, coupled with survivorship bias of startups who win, leads to people thinking it’s more likely to build a successful company in tech than the reality.


Was going to say exactly this. People always discount luck in their own stories, but you can always find it there - even if you look at a societal level and it's just luck that the person in question was born here and now, rather than in Mao-era China or wherever.

There's a reason why a lot of businesses fail, and it's not that the people who start them are lazy, stupid or lacking in skills. Obviously some are, but there are a great many people with great ideas that never make it, just like there are brilliant musicians, artists, designers, and anything else you care to name that you'll never hear of but who are very good at what they do.


What’s unique about entrepreneurship is that, once you earn enough from it, it can fully replace your work.

“Hobbies”, relationships, family, etc don’t do that. If you can’t find fulfillment in your 9-5 you’re still stuck grinding through it everyday looking forward to get back to those things. 8 hours every weekday. A HUGE chunk of your life.


Identifying the right opportunity/connections/time etc. isn't just luck, like something that dropped out of the sky. It draws on skills, past experience, and calculated risk taking to know who, what, and when to seize on something and ignore what isn't important.


As I see it, you're both right, as in: all that you mention finds its relevance through shaping luck / increasing luck surface area.


I think you’re right there is a lot of luck, but as they say, luck is effort plus opportunity. You need to put in the effort and position yourself for unique opportunities.

OP: My personal advice is to stick with a part/full-time job and continuing to explore your business ideas on the side until they are generating enough revenue to cover your expenses. Focus on businesses that sell something practical and don’t need lots of marketing or engagement (at first).


For me I found the harder I worked the luckier I got. There are opportunities everywhere and it takes a long time of trial and error to get it right. It is not for everyone. Very few succeed in a linear or parabolic trajectory.

The OP should be proud of their efforts. This was a learning experience that will absolutely help them in the future. Think of this as finishing a super tough college course and passing. On to the next phase.


It's true that luck is a big factor. Every time you try something difficult, you're rolling the dice, and most outcomes are failure. However, there is a strategy you can apply to maximize your odds of success: position yourself so you can keep rolling the dice.


some luck is involved but just paying attention to trends will give you better odds of success and even if you fail you can still benefit. For example, learning to code is a much better time investment for success than learning blacksmithing. Even if your startup fails, you can make 6 figures as a software engineer and live a good life.

if you consider anything other than becoming a billionaire "failure" I guess that's a different matter.


The lucky ones also probably failed a couple, but in these lucky ones the real lucky ones are who don't fail in the beginning.

Once we gain our most desired possessions, we'll try and do everything not to lose them - and what comes fast goes fast. Keep grinding, I'm sure it won't go to waste.


Fortune plays a role, for sure. But you don't even get to petition fortune until you have some significant ability to identify and execute on a business.

Too many people focus so much on the luck they neglect the required positive talents and labors to even try.


And if you are lucky you can write books and give talks about how your luck was the result of your superior dexterity, work ethics, intelligence etc.


For all the talk of being "data driven", a somewhat solid but underappreciated data point is the super low success rates of startups.


"Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect."


Luck and connections. And PR, like, tons of it.


Everything in life is luck, including your comment being top voted. If everything is luck, then it probably isn’t worth saying.


Everything in life has different odds of happening, and when lower odds materialize, we call that "luck".

There are a number of comments saying very similar things to the top voted one: so it was indeed luck that their comment floated to the top among the many others. Perhaps they were there right when the story was posted (luck, right?) Perhaps they used exactly the trigger words that made others appreciate the comment (luck, right?).

The fact that there is a luck element to many things does not mean that those are unworthy pursuits. And it's ok to acknowledge the luck factor when it can dominate the results (i.e. you wouldn't talk about a lottery without considering luck).


It definitely is. Just because success mostly boils down to luck, doesn’t mean that people realize or acknowledge it, which leads to unhealthy obsession with “being successful” that permeates the society.


If everything being luck-based is generally acknowledged, I wonder if that generally leads to nihilism since there isn’t anything that could be done.


Maybe, but it might also help put things in perspective. Enjoy the things you have and help the ones that are not as lucky.


so true. and luck can be a big factor in any aspect of life..


Yes, 100%. Capitalism is like a gigantic genetic algorithm. 100 people try 100 slightly different business models, in slightly different places, with different customers, etc. and some combinations just hit that sweet spot that makes them successful.


Luck is winning the lottery.


Warren Buffet calls it "winning the ovarian lottery", yes.

https://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-on-the-ovaria...


Luck is an excuse.

One can choose to try a lot of different things, and another will choose to have a single few shots. One can choose to accept the “truth”, and the other will refuse to do so.

We get feedback from the world, and we choose how to analyze it and interact with it.

It’s easy to be fooled by the fact that we have only one choice. Or that the feedback reflects the absolute truth.


> A big fact of the entrepreneur world is that it is hugely based on luck. Luck of finding the right idea, the right market, the right timing, the right connections, the right customers, the right employees, the right financing.

This is not true!

I have seen successful business built from scratch by people who had no connections, no money and no privileged background (and no VC money). And I will say this for sure, it is lots of hard work and hustle. Luck comes to those who do these things first, it is not the other way round.


They were very lucky to succeed then. Entrepreneurship is so heavily weighted towards the wealthy, privileged, well-connected set.


> They were very lucky to succeed then.

The people I known are serial entrepreneurs, so this certainly is not luck. Yes, some ventures do not succeed, but then the company immediately pivots to things that are actually making money.

As I mentioned earlier, it is not easy. It is lot of hard work and hustle.


Completely agree. Am on my 3rd company, all of them have reached profitability fairly easily.

If you don't want to rely on luck, you have to work from the bottom. The VC, top down approach is very risky indeed, but a different game exists.

Finding people who have problems that could be solved through better software is not hard. Listen to them. Make their life easier. Generalize, improve, start selling to other people who have the same issues. Spot opportunities related to your market, your tech, your customers.

There is a ton of demand, especially at small/local scale. If you are efficient, a moderate amount of upfront work can provide ton of value to countless people. They will gladly pay for it, especially if they feel listened to.


How do you do that with no connections, no money and no privileged background ? Do you just cold message people asking what they need ?


Cold email is a hit and miss approach. Just go talk to people face to face. Initially it seems like a non-scalable approach but it works wonders. The silicon valley, VC preached mantra of hyper scale is what muddles the minds of most entrepreneurs. Everyone starts thinking of million of users rather than 100s of users. There is a very interesting presentation from YC startup school 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

You will recognise the speaker :)


I consider "just talk to people" to be in the "connections" category


Doesn't have to be. You can form connection with people who you don't know. But first you have to talk to them.


Where are you finding these customers?

May I ask what industries you’ve targeted?

Businesses or Customers?


> Where are you finding these customers?

Look around you. What problems do you see, for yourself or for others?

If you want to solve your own problem then that is easy. Then you have to look for other people in your circle (online and offline) who have this same problem and then charge them for that.

If you see someone else with a problem, then talk to them face to face to understand the real issue and whether they will pay. See if there are at least 5-10 people with this same problem, and you have some opening that will start a business.

After that you have to keep hustling to keep this growing. It is a hard slog, but that is how it actually works.


> May I ask what industries you’ve targeted?

Education and general SMEs.

> Businesses or Customers?

B2B, B2C and also B2B2C.


At the end of the day, you as a person are a combination of luck. Your intelligence, hard-working personality, physical and mental health that allows you to even try. Things that you might have some effect on, but are mostly a lottery.


You are both right: hard work is a requirement. To make it really big (and sometimes to just make it), luck is a requirement as well.

A simple "proof" using logic is finding someone who worked really hard and failed (called a proof by contradiction): this is not hard, many have worked really hard and don't have much to show for it. Thus, hard work does not lead to success. But it does enable it.

Similarly, there are plenty of cases where someone was lucky but still blew it up (FTX anyone?). So just like with hard work, luck does not mean guaranteed success. It does, however, enable it.


> A simple "proof" using logic is finding someone who worked really hard and failed (called a proof by contradiction): this is not hard, many have worked really hard and don't have much to show for it.

That "hard work" you describe is missing the component of "smart work". If people "have worked really hard and don't have much to show for it", then that is not smart work. When I used the words "hard work" it implicitly includes smart work. Otherwise the person should not be an entrepreneur. If I start digging a hole in the hope that some how I will build a castle is not smart work. Hard work, definitely but not smart work.


When I used "hard work", I also meant "smart, hard work". Doh.

You also used "hustle", which is usually unrelated to "smart", and actually has negative connotations as well (as in a "hustler") — I did not take it as such because that wouldn't make sense. Again: doh!

It helps nobody to be overly pedantic instead of looking for the most reasonable interpretation of what you read.


Luck doesn't mean you didn't work hard. It's just that intangible that explains why 2 people can work and hustle the same amount and have differences in results.


There is lots of hard work.

There is luck involved too.

It may not be obvious from the outside and may not require connections, coming from money.

Every successful startup and bootstrap story there are elements of being lucky.

The right idea at the right time has an element of luck.

Being featured in a major publication or website.

Meeting the right clients.

Hiring people with unknown connections or skills or just hiring the right people.

Even down too day to day operations, there are events that luckily happen. Catching a bug, calling a client at the right time, raising prices, choosing a new feature to roll out that brings product market fit.

There is definitely skills, planning, research and hard work.

But if you've worked for a startup you know there is an element of luck.

I've worked on/for dozens of indie/bootstrapped startups.

Currently employee #8, developer #2 at a funded startup.

Follow the dream, the journey is part of the fun, do it responsibly financially and take care of your mental health, take time for family and friends, have hobbies. It's not for everyone but most people can do it.

Don't become consumed by the entre-porn. This is a real problem. It's addicting and can easily affect your mental health.

I always recommend this talk for those interested in creating their own startup, still relevant today. Thanks @DHH. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY


"Luck favours the prepared mind" - Louis Pasteur


ive seen people that haven't so your point is invalid


See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106282


You got a lot of good advice here. So I'll keep it short. I'm 32 now. I spent my last 12 years building companies. They all failed; I didn't earn a penny, and I didn't even get venture capital, and it made me feel like a failure. And I'm talking serious attempts. 6 years, 2 years, 1 year and in between a lot of research & freelancing to evaluate other ideas.

I'm leading a 40 people team, and it's going well. How did I get there? By chance. Another hackathon resulted in the right industry at the right time.

But also 12 years of exercise in pitching, structuring information, data, setting up on organization, addressing all kinds of different technologies and all of that.

You are learning so much and you feel treated unfairly by not being able to show it off. Keep on going. Maybe go back to work for 10-12 months for some stability and to take a break, but then try again.


Same here. My first "startup" was dropshipping textbooks to fellow college students when I was a freshman 14 years ago. Learned a ton at a series B "startup" straight out of college in customer support and within 7 months, was fired. Spent 5 years as a founder at remarkhq where we couldn't figure out the business model to get paid while frame.io raised a massive amount of money to copy us and eventually led them to $1B acquisition with Adobe. Then went and joined a friend's stock market for real estate startup dynasty.com that pivoted and was subsequently acquired for $75M. Realized at said real estate startup that there was a massive industry wide problem that property managers suck so just started solo consulting to finally make real money for myself and future family I was told by my wife. I was 28 when I started my current startup (apmhelp.com) and never thought it would actually be something beyond a consulting business. Here I am 5 years later $5M ARR having just closed a $50M facility. It's still not all roses however as this year has been a rollercoaster. Literally today we layoff another 10% so that we can live to see another year. Startups are fucking hard and it takes everything to go at it again and again but I don't work a single day of my life. I wouldn't swap it for anything (long term). Best of luck! Don't give up either!!


Congrats, man!

We're also facing hard issues every now and then and then you face things like strong competition that can make you nervous at times (depending of the scale of your industry), but having suffered more personally in the past in this context, just helps to face these things today much easier.


How did you sustain yourself during periods of failure?


Freelancing and I had a co-founder (also technical) all along with whom I worked very closely in terms of survival. E.g. sometimes he was freelancing for the both of us while I was networking, researching, and evaluating opportunities.

Having a co-founder that is complementary to your personality and skill-set is highly valuable. We've been working together for 10 years now.


Another tip here: Upwork can help kickstarting this.


Thanks for sharing your story. Your experience is key—there may be a strong luck component to success, but with enough attempts, it seems that your luck increases. Often, hidden behind "overnight successes" is a trail of failures.


Yes, exactly. You'll be surrounded by succeeding and failing people, and you'll see patterns in decision making, execution and (in)valiations. It helps tremendously. Also, I'm feeling very confident in my position and execution because I've suffered enough over the past years. So current challenges feel much easier.


Thanks for sharing. Always encouraging to hear stories of someone grinding for years and finally making it.

Is your 40 person team for a venture of your own, or are you working with a larger org now?


No, my own company, started last year in April during a Hackathon and then got a first seed round started in July, closed in October. Currently even able to do a massive Series A, despite market conditions. From the 40 people, >50% are developers.


Having done several options -- entrepreneurship, job, internal entrepreneurship, and consulting, my advice:

- Entrepreneurship isn't a lifestyle. Stay in a job unless you have a good idea and are ready to execute.

- Try your idea internally. Starting a new product in a company is easier than outside. It doesn't have a $1B upside, but it has enough upside, in all respects (not just financial -- learning, credibility, etc.).

- If that doesn't pan out, go external only once you're pretty confident of success.

My experience is that entrepreneurship isn't so much hard or take luck, as it takes a lot of groundwork:

- You want a diverse set of skills. Management. Finance. Sales. Technical. Legal. Market research. Etc. It's not a place for specialists, and it takes time to develop those skills. You also ought to enjoy (or at least not hate) most of them.

- You want good market timing, which comes with experience.

- You want a good idea with traction. That's where nights / weekends fit in. Nights / weekends don't give enough time for a successful startup, but they give enough to do early prototyping.

Doing a (failed) startup as a student is a good learning experience. I wish I had done it. I don't wish I had done it three times, or as an adult.

Oh, and selling false dreams is part of being a successful entrepreneur. You'll get zero customers if people think you're on the verge of going broke. Every business I've seen takes a "fake it until you make it approach." If you rely on blogs for what entrepreneurship ought to look like, you're in for a nasty surprise. A better option to learn how to do a startup is a job at a startup; you'll see the process from the inside.


This is excellent advice.

I followed roughly this path until I was in my late 30s. Now have a startup that is growing because we put in essentially 5 years of groundwork, while working full time day jobs, building product in an industry that isn’t sexy, being “lucky” (patient/observant) enough to ride a new federal regulation, having go throw away an entire product after 2 years and starting a new product in the same space/customers, showing customers we were in it for the long haul FOR THEM, with a well rounded seasoned founding team, business model first, taking the right amount of investment from the right investors at the right time.

In that way I think entrepreneurship IS actually a lifestyle, but the behaviors are not what OP alludes to. The lifestyle is falling in love with a problem or a type of customer or both and just seeing what you can do to help while building a business along the way…SUSTAINABLY. If your version of lifestyle is somehow BEING caught up in acting a certain way based on influence (I have no idea what an indie hacker is), that seems destined for failure.

TLDR. Go live your life, get a normal job to build security, don’t try and start a company at all, wait for a problem/opportunity to find you.


This is the right model. The vast majority of successful startups I've seen in my extended circle of friends didn't target other programmers or programmer-like consumers.

Most startups try to build another database, web framework, or data service, or whatnot, because that's the problem programmers are familiar with. The next ones are consumer products, assuming consumers look like SFO. The competition is fierce, and very few succeed.

My experience is that in virtually any other industry -- I don't care if you're in construction, shipbuilding, or farming -- there will be many low-hanging fruit which people in that industry won't be competent to solve. If you:

- go into some (nearly random) industry;

- keep your head up enough to gain an understanding how it works; and

- build out a network of connections you trust and who trust you

entrepreneurship is easy.

I guess the other piece is keeping your toe deep enough in tech that you can pull together a good team and solve problems a typical IT department can't solve. But that should be the easy part for readers here.

You can even start consulting. In the same way as a tech company doesn't want to outsource its core competency but is happy to outsource legal, payroll, and similar, the opposite is true in most industry. I've seen industries on HN where you (the typical HN reader) could outperform a whole 20-person team because the tech they hire is so incompetent. That's not a tough sell.


I think one issue (for those of us who are the kind of people that read this site) is that "entrepreneurship" and "startup" are overloaded terms. Most of the discussion here is about "startups" with huge growth ambitions. But what you're describing here is just "starting a business". Both things are "entrepreneurship", but they are extremely different beasts, with different paths to and likelihoods of success.

The billion dollar "startup" narrative is so seductive, but most hard-working ambitious people who want to be their own boss should just be starting businesses in the more traditional sense, taking on smaller investment or debt more wisely, paying attention to costs and revenues, and growing organically. This is no different than business starts in any other era, it just happens that a lot of viable businesses now happen to benefit from focusing on software.


Perhaps. I have several friends who have started ventures in the multi-hundred-million to low single-digital-billion-dollar range in various industries. All of them brought technology into traditionally low-tech industries. Some took on a lot of VC, but some grew organically:

- In some contexts, consulting is an easy way to get started building a product, to avoid needing much external investment. In others, it's a trap and a distraction which will prevent you from focusing on building a product.

- An initial product can stagnate into a lifestyle business / living dead (a business which pays the bills, but never grows beyond a few $M), or it can have a pathway into a larger market.

Technology (and not just software) is eating the world, and those pathways do exist. A lot of industries are being disrupted by technology plays. The connection is strategy. You want a good beachhead which has a nice growth path to a larger market, and ideally one no one is targeting.

There are risks from point A to point B to point C, of course, with strategy, execution, timing, luck, etc., and plenty companies cap out at much less, but plenty of them make it too.

What I'm a bit surprised at, thinking through this, is the number of times I've seen this sort of play work. I know at least a half-dozen companies in the >>$100M range where I know the CEO pretty well as a friend. All of those did take external investment at some point, but a few, much less than you'd expect.


Totally disagree. We started a business in a market with huge TAM, venture backed, and have had meaningfully scaled customer and revenue growth…

But that market is seafood supply chain compliance, and I guarantee you no influencer gives a flying fuck about it or even knows it exists. It’s gross, it’s not sexy, the people working in it are absolutely not on this website.

If you get out of the echo chamber, there are loads of places that need help from software, can pay for it, but have no idea how to create it themselves.


How do you suggest getting out of the echo chamber without leaving my job? I need to continue in my current role because I don't have a big safety net, but I want to get exposure to non-tech industries and find out inefficiencies.

As an aside, how did you zero in on seafood supply chain compliance? Were you in that industry previously?


I don't think this is a disagreement...


How did your friends go about finding non-programmer markets? I can't leave my current role in tech because I don't have a big safety net, but I want to understand other markets and figure out inefficiencies. I've seen this advice about exploring non-tech industries pop up a lot and am interested in following through.


Easiest: Find a random industry. You'll see job openings for programmers. You'll probably be wildly overqualified. Get a job there. Make sure it's a job where you can keep your head up and learn to industry (and not be isolated in a cubicle).

Harder: Nerd out on something not computer science. Take classes in oddball topics. Go to industry conferences. Network and hang out in online forums.

I once hopped on a plane and went to a conference in a 90% unrelated industry that I had taken an interest in. Even gave a workshop there -- as an outsider looking in, around a relevant idea. Expensive, but I learned a ton and came out with a powerful network.

Have fun with it!


This is the best advice I've seen on this website in years!


Well yes and no. Innovating as an employee sucks because somebody else gets all the benefits.


Well yes and no. Most of the value created goes back to the shareholders, but it's just about the fastest and easiest way to move into management (or upper management). If you do internal entrepreneurship, and land leading a division with a VP title, a few things happens:

1) You learn a comprehensive set of skills needed to run a business end-to-end, and you have the benefit of corporate resources to teach you

2) You gain the credibility needed to be a successful entrepreneur

3) Your salary does go up (quite a bit). You're not making $1B, but you are unlikely to be below $300k, and $1M is within reach. That's a fraction of an exit, but it's enough.

4) You build a network which carries over past the current job.

.... and so on.

One of the upsides is that if you can manage internal risks, your odds of success go way up, and if you mess up, the downside is rather small compared to entrepreneurship. Adjusted for risk, expected returns can be greater (to me, $10M is worth only a little bit less than $10B, but $10M is worth a lot more than $100k).

At this point in my career, I'm in an organization that has supported my internal entrepreneurial efforts, and I much prefer that to being out there on my own. I'm also primarily motivated by impact, and I can have much greater impact from where I sit. That's motivating too. If and when the organization changes, I might jump back into independent entrepreneurship, but I'm very happy where I sit.


Somebody else also takes the loss when things go sideways. No free meal.


You can only get the benefits as a founder if you have the same lever as the company (which you usually don't).


I'm afraid the author has a very wrong attitude for entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is not about following someone's advice mechanically or a guaranteed get rich schema. It's about building competence and understanding something about the target market better than anyone else. The author didn't mention what kind of competence s/he has got from all those attempts, so I suppose it has never been the goal. The competence may or may not lead to a commercially successful enterprise. But even in the case of failure, the explanation should still be based on competence, e.g. "I understood that the product didn't provide much value to the target audience because of X, and also the audience turned out to be Y, and the competition was Z. So while I learned about the market a lot, I couldn't offer anything that would provide so much value that the target audience would be ready to pay for with amounts sufficient to maintain developing the product".

If the postmortem is "I tried to follow what influencers said, but it didn't work, so I'm tired, I give up" then, well, no surprise here.

And yes, startups are hard. Very hard.


This might sound a bit assholish, but I'm writing this to hopefully help others spot a crucial mistake:

Did you have anyone on your team with actual skill in sales or marketing?

Because from your post it seems you tried the same channels that everyone else does (writing blog, engaging on Twitter, setting up ProductHunt launch) without any specific strategy for how to succeed.

And this stuff is hard! There's a reason why good salespeople and marketers are paid so well!

You definitely can learn that, it's a skillset like any other. But treating it like a secondary concern is a death trap for your business.

If you are a tech founder, it's absolutely crucial you figure out a strategy for customer acquisition – find a sales co-founder, hire some good salespeople, get someone who can teach you how to do it – just do not treat it as something less important than tech, because then you are just counting on being lucky. And if you decide to sell yourself, expect that to be a difficult, time consuming job – don't be surprised if you spend more time chasing business rather than coding.


I 100% agree. I've been hacking away at my project for about 5 years, and it went absolutely nowhere until I found my co-founder. In a span of 4 months, she quadrupled the eyes on our product in comparison to what I was able to before our meeting.

Sales & Marketing is just as complex as the tech stack. Yes, we techs can learn that side of the fence, but it takes a bit of humility to recognize that it'll come at a cost.


What levers did she implement?


I think it's hard way before that. YC phrases it as "Build something people want" but all the words in that sentence are way harder to understand than it first seems.


In retrospect, I also feel that lack of experience in sales was a major issue wrt my skillset. How would you recommend someone like me (with a mostly technical and academia-oriented background) to approach learning sales from scratch?


Partner with someone who already has a leg or very obvious affinity in it. Don’t do everything by yourself.

That’s rule number 1 in life, in general, for everything: invite guests to bring something they like/manage to the table.


This is the realization that turned me off of very early stage entrepreneurship. That stuff is so boring, and also pretty much the only thing that matters in the very early stage of a startup.


Maybe a dumb question, but where do you find people who are skilled in sales/marketing like this? I'm learning this lesson the hard way right now.


Someone skilled at selling your product for a commission, would be stellar at selling their most valuable product - themselves.

Sales and marketing is about reach and incentives. Outright lying works against you. Choosing to only tell the truth keeps you right where you are, on the slippery slope of sunk cost.

Folks in the sales and marketing domain come across real crafty; its a side-effect. Cz you deal with people (i.e. emotions, psychology and incentives). People who get played, know somethings up. Once you figure out how the sales game works, then its about trial and error to find a suitable market, using well known techniques and experimenting with new tools, growing that network. It is an art, learned slowly, with expensive mistakes.

There's also that steep cost attached to even play around with serious tools, effective strategies are not scalable, consume labor and time, require frequent pivots without much evidence, effects are only visible at a high macro level without much granularity. A lot of it works against an engineering mindset. And for a malicious actor, sales is a good breeding ground.

I recall the exact moment where the doors to this rabbit hole opened up for me - a comment from a friend of mine, "Its amazing how Gordon Ramsey has people lining up at his restaurant on opening day"


Dude at least tell us what you were working on? I mean there is zero context to this post. How am I to process the fact your product got zero sign ups when you haven't even mentioned what it is. "Don't make the same mistakes I did", what mistakes have you even highlighted here (and I mean mistakes related to your product and not the fact that you fell for the honey trap posts' of social media influencers)????

257 comments to this post submitted by user whose account was only created 2-3 hours ago!! I feel this is a post that someone may have generated using ChatGPT.


Ye. This story would have been way more interesting with examples of the products. Otherwise there is not much to discuss of the posters specific situation or why he failed.


What an incredibly bad response. Plus it seems like your own account was created today? Please be kind.


> Dude at least tell us what you were working on?

Why doe sit matter? Jesus, he was just institutionalized, you people are cruel.

And who cares about how long ago the account was created?


I believe its because the person wants to gain a benefit from the post instead of being empathetic or giving his/her take on it.

Well, not everything is about you. Be kind and empathetic.

Merry Xmass everyone!


OP is not a delicate butterfly. Get off your high horse.


What does having psychiatric issues have to do with being a "delicate butterfly"? I have schizoaffective bipolar disorder, nothing delicate about me.


Exactly how I felt after reading the post lol.


It's not defeat, it is the expected outcome. Out of 20 or so of my projects two have been break-out successes and the rest (commercially) complete failures, and I'm very lucky to have two out of those 20, with very small variations in timing it would have been a big fat zero. So don't beat yourself up about it, some people win the lottery and the majority don't. There is absolutely no recipe that will work every time, not even one that will work most of the time or a significant fraction of the times you try to apply it. Luck, luck, luck and timing.

One problem is not just the influencers peddling their books and their bullshit, it's also the eco-system that sells the dream itself. This site is part of that and you should take the success stories with a large grain of salt, usually things are not as easy as they are made out to be and for every success there are 100 failures. And those are rarely talked about.

Best of luck with the recovery, I can see it weighs heavily on you.


I was an engineer at a successful startup.

We grew, we went bankrupt, we laid off most the company, the founders kicked in enough to keep us going and we restructured to give the remaining people larger shares. We became profitable and finally sold to another company.

My payday was about $70k, which was a nice bonus, I was happy to get it. I moved on to big tech. The company withered away, the company that bought it withered away too. I think the company that bought that company might also have disappeared. The domain keeps getting renewed, but has been broken for a couple of years, and for half a decade before that was just a WordPress site hosting a scrape of some of the content that used to be on the website.

And we were one of the lucky ones.


That sucks. I know quite a few stories like that. I'm more active as an investor these days than as an entrepreneur, the projects I still run are more for fun than for income (or even potential income) and I can't tell you how happy I am that that pressure has abated somewhat.

It's annoying that even the successes tend to screw over the employees and more often than not the founders as well. Typical dilution by the time you reach series 'A' (assuming that that's all that you need to take off) is terrible and if you need more capital you end up working for banks and VCs.

If I were to start another company (which I am trying very hard to avoid) I would try extremely hard to do it without outside capital and I would do it in some boring b2b field where nobody else wants to go because it isn't sexy enough to be able to attract capital. That way you avoid several of the risks of starting a new company at once: you have a relatively safe niche, no outsider is going to jump in giving away their product just to grow market share and the people that will receive your product are going to be super happy simply because there is no alternative.


> That sucks.

Don't get me wrong; it was a good experience, as well as being good experience. I got paid a decent salary throughout, the work was frequently interesting, and my coworkers were great, not that I've done a good job of keeping in touch.

But it wasn't a life-changing payday, and even the investors mostly broke even. It was a success in that it became profitable with a couple mil in revenue, not in the VC sense.

Besides the whole period where we ran out of money, laid off half the company, and were months away from going under, the only real downside was that, as a small company, I was basically on call 24/7 to deal with problems with my part of the world. It didn't come up often but when it did it sucked.


> no outsider is going to jump in giving away their product just to grow market share

I wonder how much innovation is being stifled by this practice. I know I have at least one very viable idea (I've shopped it around) that could result in substantial improvement to the overall Internet experience, and I'm doing nothing with it because the minute I make it available, a Big Tech company will either steal it, try to buy me out (and I don't like them so my answer will be no) and then copy/reverse engineer what I've done. So I've opted to spend my time/energy on something else.

Basically what's the opportunity cost of these uncompetitive practices for the industry and field of study as a whole?


I did have a similar concerns. My answer to this situation is to embrace it, make the idea open source with copyleft licence from the start. This gives opportunity to galvanize a community find early adopters and contributors.

If BigTech gets into it, that will be a positive signal which will make idea known and make a market of customers for it. I have no need to be the first, but just be in the game.


I hear you, and still:

How many Einsteins perished in the fields or trenches? How much innovation and genius is stifled through lack of access to food, water or education?

I think that would be an area where improvements would be more impactful than trying to prevent copycats.


Ironically, that's what I decided to spend my time on instead. I was trying to decide whether to do a PhD with said technical project/idea or to do one focusing on non-programming technical skills + history for early education precisely because I think improving the education level of the general public is also a good way to improve things.


That’s exactly what I started: https://gitlab.com/logotype/fixparser

It’s a quite boring project, but it is niche - and there is no alternative, at least not in the JS/TS ecosystem. Many startups/crypto/financial institutions (including YC startups) uses and are paying customers of my product.

I’ve tried finding an investor (including YC) to grow the project but no-one is interested. It doesn’t matter, I’ll keep going anyway. But if someone is interested reach me at info@fixparser.io


May I ask how you monetize this?


Hey, way to try to profit of another persons failure. Really sociopathic of you!


Unfortunately investors are now all over B2B startups because they're now keenly aware of just how stacked the odds are against you in consumer products. Even YC nowadays calls consumer facing ideas "tar pits". It's also way easier for investors to pump up B2B valuations through cross pollination between portfolio companies


Do opportunities like these still exist?


The corporate world is littered with them (esp. at medium-scale), but you can't magically discover them by reading on the internet.


Feels like most of the problems in that class I’ve stumbled upon were not viable. Not because there wasn’t a need but rather because the people suffering from the problem aren’t the ones signing the cheques, and the ones signing the cheques don’t really care about making the grunts’ work easier/more efficient since that’s what they’re being paid for: to toil.

What advice could you share for discovering this kind of problems that also can also be monetized?


Private equity is buying up as many as they can* but that proves they still exist!

* https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/why-private-equity-...


Yes, absolutely. Looking at one right now actually (NDA, so I can't tell you about it but it's a gem).


Thanks. Reading a thread like this is sobering on the one hand, but also gives the feeling of "it's all pointless and crowded" :)


> The domain keeps getting renewed

This is a funny thing with companies that get taken over.

My dad used to run an ISP, one of the first ones in my home country. I'm talking 28.8kbit modems. The company was sold and shut down more than 20 years ago. The company that bought them out got bought out, that company then got bought and, and this repeated a few times.

The domain still keeps getting renewed, and for a while redirected to the main page of the largest IT firm in the country. I assume that, along the way of all those acquisitions, domains just kept getting transferred, and nobody knows what those domains are, but it's cheaper to just renew than to find out.

Anyway, it's a fun little reminder of the impact my dad made in this world :)

https://web.archive.org/web/19970409101251/http://www.est.is...


Or it may be that the only asset of the company left is a brand and giving out the domain to the world would might make that brand unsellable in the future.


Thanks for the archive link. I was pumping myself up since you didn't seem to name-drop the company. I love these sort of anecdote stories.


It seems insane to me that the happy path involves you getting $70k. Working in finance, I would expect that amount as a bonus in any year where I perform well and the business isn't unprofitable.

When I've spoken to people about the finance/big tech/startup trade-offs, we've often talked about the upside from startup success (outside of the Google or Instagram case) being around an order of magnitude bigger than that - in the 'pay off your mortgage' ballpark. Is this unrealistic?


I've only got an N of one under my belt, but I'd also note I wasn't a founder or even a pre-series-A employee. I believe the former got more like what you're thinking, and the latter 2x or so what I did. Also I honestly can't recall if that was a pretax or post number at this point.

But on the other end of things... it was still a nice cap on my time there. And even if it's not quit-your-job money, it was still an Everest.

(An Everest being the amount of money it takes to climb Everest, buy a luxury car or a small cabin on a lake, or any other number of reasonably achievable dreams.)


You listed the less-important parts of that story. The important part was what your start-up offered, how it helps the world, and whether the product(s) and the technology went on to be used by many people/organizations or not...


Comparison shopping in the aughts.

There was interesting work on crawling and search, we went bankrupt trying to provide useful tools for people to find different products and the different places to buy them, then became profitable farming our content out for SEO.

We were then bought out by a domain parker who wanted to marry our monetization with his traffic; as far as I know it didn't work, but that was when I left.


I'm not sure defeat needs to be "expected" anymore...

I have friends with a string of successes under their belts. My own track record is ~half the companies I advise get from garage to series A, and I've had three IPOs and numerous acquisitions.

My rules of thumb:

- do something with big impact. "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will not themselves be realized." - Daniel Burnham: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Burnham

- answer this question honestly: "why now?" i.e. why couldn't this have been done last year or last decade.

- answer this question honestly: "why me?" i.e. am I really the best person in the world to do this?

- check that your competitive position or margins are strong enough you won't have a zillion competitors causing margins to compress. For example, 15 minute food delivery is tough. For example, don't launch a CPG product on Amazon without a strategy to deal with knockoffs!

- check that your regulatory position isn't so crazy that you'll get shutdown before demonstrating outrageous value.

- create an elevator pitch of one or two sentences and see if a majority of legit prospective buyers get excited.

hope this helps!


A few of my friends have done startups, and I have noticed something really important about the "why me" question: it seems to be THE determiner of how much you can actually capture from starting up a company. The questions of product/market fit and timing determine whether a company in the space ought to exist. The "why me" question tells you how much your startup can capture independent of the money and work of other people, and how much of that reward you will get.

Since then, I started up a company that I think I am uniquely qualified to run, but we'll see if we get there.


>One problem is not just the influencers peddling their books and their bullshit, it's also the eco-system that sells the dream itself.

The word 'influencer' is already a red flag. Personally wouldn't touch anything with that word in it with long pole. It won't be too long before that word is morphed into another buzz word.


What rate is the cutoff at which people give up entrepreneurship altogether? I wonder how big has the opportunity cost of monopolies been in the past decade


That depends on the person, really. When you are younger or have rich parents you can afford yourself larger risks and that in turn has a positive effect on your chances of success. When you get older and have more responsibilities unless you have a prior success you tend to become more risk averse and so less willing to start new companies and/or make the kind of decisions that would lead to either success or complete failure. Playing it safe is an excellent way to lose against a crowd of others that can afford to take risks: some of them will get lucky and beat you, even if most of them fail.

There are older, successful entrepreneurs, one guy I knew started his first company in his mid-50's and had a massive success but he's definitely the outlier. But most successful entrepreneurs I know started their first successful company in their 20's or 30's, rarely 40's. And most unsuccessful entrepreneurs have the exact same demographic...

A couple of things that I've seen really do help, but they still require a substantial investment in time and have an opportunity cost as well: work for one of the large, well paying companies for a while, save up a nest egg and use that as a jump off point if you weren't born into capital (though the risk of becoming addicted to that income stream is real and letting go of it will not be easy). Another is to first start a regular career in order to identify pain points in some industry or other and then later use that knowledge to create a product that addresses those pain points.

But that's not the kind of thing that you can spin out far enough for a book or a TED talk. I do believe that those two will increase your chances.


> But most successful entrepreneurs I know started their first successful company in their 20's or 30's, rarely 40's.

“Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45”

https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...

Discussion on HN here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18212409


Yes, I saw that when it first hit.

I'm sure they did a great job at researching that but it really does not match my experience at all. And I see a lot of start-ups (up to 50 / year) from the inside, at least a few hundred founders if not a 1000+ by now over the last 15 years. The bulk of the successful ones is late 20's to mid 30's.


There might be something interesting here.

- people in the VC entrepreneur world are seeing mostly 20s and 30s be successful

- VC world is, as one previous commenter put it, swing for the bleachers

- researchers are saying average age of success is 45, so more than half are 40+

This seems to perhaps indicate (though needs research) that

- those 40+ prefer bootstrapped businesses

- bootstrapped businesses are over half the successful entrepreneurs, so tend to be more successful

Many things could be wrong with this:

- different definitions of successful

- research bias

- geographical bias

However, it's something that seems to bear investigation.

And if true, what is it that is driving the budding entrepreneur to think that to be more successful they need to seek VC funding, when it may actually be the opposite. Would you rather take a 1 in 1m shot at 1m/yr, or a 1 in 10k shot at 300k/yr? Numbers made up in the question of course, research needed to figure out what they are.


This might be an illusion or a strong bias.

The younger ones are not alone ( the successful 45/50+ parents/mentors/etc are supporting them financially and more ).

Otherwise, without the experience of your 20s and 30s you cannot understand the world, you haven't build the network you need to succeed ( I am my own example), basically you cannot manufacture you "luck".


+1 on the nest egg. That's how I "bootstrapped", unsuccessfully, during Covid. And I got that close, some better timing and I might be running my own fleet of two leased feeder container vessels by now (seriously so, I already had offers for those). Bad timing kicked in, my prospective launch clients project fell through, and being bootstrapped meant I didn't have anything else in the pipeline. Which brought me to the single pivot I had budget for, and that resulted in, at most, a single person consulting business. I didn't want that, realized I like running operations much more than running a company running operations, burned the allocated nest egg and went back to employment. I am almost happy ever since!


Close call. And one other thing that nobody seems to mention either: success always comes at a price. Health, family & friendships, attitude, ethics. All of those can suffer when you're successful.


> But most successful entrepreneurs I know started their first successful company in their 20's or 30's, rarely 40's.

Jeff Bezos?

This is a myth. It is purported because most of the 30+ entrepreneurs are not vocal about their successes.


Bezos was 30.


38


Bezos was born in 64, he's a year older than I am and Amazon was started in 1993.

You can do the math for yourself.


Bezos once said in an interview that he was 38 when he started Amazon, after leaving DEShaw as a manager.


You really don't know when to give up do you? You're wrong, end of story.


> Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.

> Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.

> Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.

> Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.

-madaxe_again, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076


it's really not. There are all kinds of entrepreneurs and most are not making weird iphone apps, but more conventional businesses that do somewhat work or fail. Rich kids don't necessarily do many throws, as they have the money to push even an unsuccessful idea for a long time. VCs may be the ones throwing darts. And poor kids do go to the carnival, you don't often see rich people going there.


Yeah, some of this just feels like advice some folks are going to have to learn first-hand, the hard, raw way. "Don't fall for parasocial bs touted on social media" is the new "make backups, seriously!111".


I tried 10 years building numerous projects since 17 until i reached the $1mil one. I did it because I loved building stuff, it wasn't a burden for me like i see it's for so many people that want to become entrepreneurs because they see on Tiktok how good others have it.

If it becomes a burden, then it's a problem.

Also, luck may play a big role, but there's something you learn failing over and over again. You start to see what it's actually working and what path is closer to success. Patterns will emerge. You know that saying that sometimes you do your own luck.

The easiest path to success for a SaaS is getting a feature of a big product into a standalone specialized product and going after that niche. This simple thing so many indie hackers fail to realize, many try to build the next unicorn, the unique idea. If you keep trying like this, you'll likely fail 50 more times.


^^ +10000

I think a lot of us have been there.

There's a big difference whether your service:

- is B2B/B2C;

- uses product-led/marketing-led/sales-led growth;

- targets a broad market or a niche (the more niche it is, the better it speaks to your target market, f.e. coaching vs developer coaching vs coaching Java developers VS coaching Java developers in machine learning vs coaching Java developers that use machine learning in the agricultural world...)

- uses different pricing models;

- ...

I've been on this route for 8 years with some consulting stints in between to pay the bills, and it wasn't until this year that my sales pitch finally started to land. Refining my target audience has been a big part of this...

There's a lot of nuance in how to present your offer, and you need to get everything exactly right to convert someone. You have to make someone an offer so good it would feel stupid for them to refuse.

In my opinion a lot of the "snake oil sellers" try to pitch the universal product-led growth approach to a very broad market that works for everything and that you can do from your computer.

In reality, they are most likely optimized to sell as much courses as possible, coming with very generic advice, and don't really care about the results for their target audience.

Another point: unless your target audience is on indie hackers, you should not be spending your time there at all.

I feel for you, so if you want to have a short chat, I might be able to give you some pointers. Feel free to reach out.

In the end, there is a lot of survivorship bias going on, and as the world is in constant flux, what works today will probably not work tomorrow, so you have to find your own path...

And, there's no shame in having tried and failed; by trying you're already within the minority that took action.

By the way, in my experience, people pay way more for an IT consultant that has lived and experienced the bigger picture of running a business, so even if you failed, you should be better off that someone that didn't try...

Update: formatting


> uses product-led/marketing-led/sales-led growth

What exactly do you mean here? because I'd argue depending on the product, each of the 3 could be the way to go over the others. Are you trying to say one is the best way of growing? Curious to hear your thoughts.


Disclaimer: solo bootstrapper, currently growing reasonably, but still way below 1M ARR. I did start with a pilot / first customer and then started doing cold outreach, while trying SEO/ads/social without much success for a few years.

I tried combining both product-led and sales-led, and addressing a lot of different kinds of businesses, but this ended up making my go-to-market more complicated and resulted in almost zero sales.

Second half of this year I finally switched it to sales led targeting a very specific niche, and ended up with a very clear and simple offering for a very specific kind of customer.

This feels counterintuitive because you exclude a huge part of your TAM, but it allows you to be the perfect match for a very specific profile.

Instead of getting a lot of leads with a gazillion questions because they don't trust you, they now start thinking about if/how they can afford it after the first online session.

To get the path of the least resistance, you need to address the exact problems of a certain kind of prospect, conveying your value as easy as possible, and making it a no-brainer for them to commit.

But, don't take my word for it, just ask me again by the end of 2023 whether this all worked out of not.

(I did get some very positive feedback from somebody who bootstrapped, scaled up and sold his company, so I do have high hopes/expectations.)


Thanks for this. It seems to be clear enough: if you get in touch with your specific niche customer that matches your product the best, your conversion is sure to increase.

Perhaps since many broader (less niche) bases are covered by the innumerable products out there today, maybe this is a good way to go for solo people.


Looking to pivot to a similar approach, any chance I can reach out to you or follow you on Twitter?


Sure, just send an email to tom at the domain name mentioned in my profile.


Ditto


Like above, send an email to tom at the domain mentioned in my profile.


What you see on Tiktok rarely reflects reality.


The thing is you are not the minority. Those who are successful are a very small minority who just had the stars aligned at the right moment at the right moment with some luck. When you consider it, those promoters are selling you picks and shovels so that you can find your gold. But similar to the gold rush, we know that very small amount of people actually found gold and from those who found it, a smaller amount was able to sustain that.

I'm sorry that your enterprises have failed but this doesn't surprise me. I'm happy that you changed your direction (imho, it's not giving up) to something different. It's very hard to find the point where you let it go while success seems such a very short distance away like you can reach your hand and grab it. But it's so frustrating that even if you are approaching your goal, you can't just close the distance and it's still far away.

There will be people who will label you as a "loser" as you "gave up on your dreams", but you are not actually. You are just one of millions of people who were trying to make it but didn't. I doesn't matter if your idea was great or not, if your execution was perfect or not, if your audience was willing to pay or not, if the time was right or not, sometimes it just doesn't work. And it's still OK.

Best of luck to you.


Succeeding in the startup world reminds me of the funfair analogy:

The rich kid will have a go at throwing the dart at the balloon, and miss. But, because they're a rich kid, they just take out their wallet (or parents' wallet), get more stubs, and try again (and again) until they hit the balloon.

The middle class kid will have a go at throwing the dart at the balloon, and also miss. Then they will walk away, saying that was fun, and go hang out with their mates. But maybe the 10th or the 100th middle class kid will hit the balloon.

And the working class kids? They work at the funfair. They never get to throw darts.

Here's the kicker: those kids who hit the balloons? One or two of them might go off and start a blog/podcast, or write a book titled

- Zero To Plushy

- The Dart Thing About Dart Things: Plushy Hunting When There Are No Easy Answers

- Dart Throwers at Work: Stories of Plushy Hunters' Early Days

- You Are a Badass at Hunting Plushies: Master the Mindset of Throwing Darts

- The Lean Plushy Hunter

- &c

Hell, if it's the middle class kid writing the book, they might even throw a couple of anecdotes in there about how they didn't have an easy start (compared to the rich kid), and it might even be true for them.

That book is the catnip that folks like you and me base our life decisions on.

I had a go at 3 startups, only one of them quasi-full-time, as I self-funded with freelancing. (I spent years building a "turn PDFs into data" product, had a few paying customers, and then one day got made totally redundant by Google Vision.)

Needless to say, I got completely burned out on startup number 3.

I shuttered the business just as Covid hit. I spend more time with the family (wife, two daughters, 9 and 6), and we moved to the countryside to be closer to ageing parents and siblings with kids.

It's healing time, baby

I wish you all the best


> The rich kid will have a go at throwing the dart at the balloon, and miss. But, because they're a rich kid, they just take out their wallet (or parents' wallet), get more stubs, and try again (and again) until they hit the balloon

I get contacted for a lot of “rich kid” startups for consulting work. This notion that rich kids are succeeding at startups due to their perseverance and fallback options is almost the opposite of what I see in the real world. A lot of the “rich kid” startup founders I’ve followed or tried to work with have been only half committed to actual working on their startups. They often want to be the idea guy or the money/fundraiser person or the iconic CEO role holder, but when it comes time to do the work they’re not interested in grinding.

Those fallback options also become a liability when things get difficult or stop being fun. A lot of them dip out at the first signs of struggle and fall back to easy jobs in their parents’ network.

In theory they should have more runway to persevere at a startup. In practice, they often have too many easy options to fall back on to actually persevere at the execution required.


This makes intuitive sense to me. Startups are so hard that I know I wouldn’t persevere if I was sufficiently wealthy already. I’ve been failing at this game for twenty years straight. Like the OP, I quit last year and got a full time job again. But it always beckons me back somehow. It’s the failed startup attempts, the failed investments, the fraudsters who conned me out of my money, the career that could have been spectacular, but only ended up so-so because I’m not in the US. Somehow every knockdown from life makes me a little grittier, a little more determined when I get back up. How does a rich kid develop that?


Anon for the obvious reasons... I was involved in such a start-up. Two of the founders were smart, Ivy-educated, surprisingly well-connected for their youth, and lazy. Once there was funding and a professional team around them to grind out all the details and versions of the product and get it marketed and sold, you know, the hard stuff after the investor demos, they didn't want it anymore. One fucked off to party and couch-surf in warm vacation spots, the other meandered in and out before being shown the door by the board. I ran into one of them years later and they're both still kind of bouncing around doing influencer-things, writing, and being hustle advisors.


> I get contacted for a lot of “rich kid” startups for consulting work.

Aren't you proving the OP's point? The point was, precisely, that they have options, not that they "persevere". Contracting consulting work is one such option.

Poor people cannot contract anyone to help them.


I think he’s kind of making a case that the rich kids aren’t always the ones that succeed ultimately in startups because they leave at first sight of trouble.


I was curious what books you were making a play on words for (since it wasn't immediately obvious), so asking ChatGPT:

    What are the real names of the books? For instance, "Zero To Plushy" is play on "Zero To One". List out the names for the other books.


    "The Dart Thing About Dart Things: Plushy Hunting When There Are No Easy Answers" is a play on "The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers"
    "Dart Throwers at Work: Stories of Plushy Hunters' Early Days" is a play on "Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance"
    "You Are a Badass at Hunting Plushies: Master the Mindset of Throwing Darts" is a play on "You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life"
    "The Lean Plushy Hunter" is a play on "The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses"


> "Dart Throwers at Work: Stories of Plushy Hunters' Early Days" is a play on "Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance"

It missed this one, it's likely Founders at Work.

> "The Lean Plushy Hunter" is a play on "The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses"

Might be The Lean CEO instead.

I had to Google to get the right answers, I wasn't familiar with either book.


This seems objectively false given that the majority of extremely successful startups are founded by first or second generation immigrants, who are often not well off.

https://nfap.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/2022-BILLION-DOL...


It's always hard to figure out what exactly to look at...

I find both things plausible, both that the most successful startups are not started by the "rich kids" and that the "rich kids" start most successful startups.

The paper you linked is talking only about the first thing, by limiting its analysis to startups that surpass a $1B valuation. But you could choose some much more modest definition of "successful startup", like "all startups that reach series C or have an exit that returns at least 1.5x", and see totally different results.


Public charge rules mean immigration to the US takes privilege.


Yes, money maters.

Rich kids can conjure tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars from "friends and family" in a mater of days. Hours even, if they're really connected.

They can then pump all that money straight into advertisement, barely even need a working demo - just something that looks like a product. They can do this many times over.

If you're gonna bootstrap something with $0, then you need to win the algorithmic lottery, simple as that. And even if you have some life savings laying around, you only have one go at burning those - though most working class folks in their early 20s rarely have the substantial funds needed to promote a product.


The pyramid of loserdom goes all the way down, unless you're Elon Musk there is someone richer, and there's always someone poorer. Winners figure out how to make it with what they have. Losers always blame lack of resources, look at people who win the lottery, most return to the same standard of living within a few years.

Almost anyone can afford $5 a day in ads to test market.


This is the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" myth that the whole illusion is based on. Thanks for nothing for propagating it one more time.


would you be able to get meaningful tests for $5 though? i think most ad providers need more as a minimum


I fully agree with your message but some of the joke examples are misguided in my opinion :) Some of those you're making puns with (like Coders at Work) are not about startups or recipes for success, but interviews with early practitioners, and have historical value, much like interviewing scientists.

I also think that software engineering and methodology/best practices book fall in another category. What you want to mock is the startup success stories, "X successful habits of Y people", "How I built X in my kitchen and you can do it too" sort of stuff.


There is also a Founders at work. The funny at work title may have been a riff on that.


So…you’re a rich kid?


Heh, it's been a tumultuous ride for my family.

Paternal grandad was a civil servant, and they were comfortable, but grandad died when dad was 6. Granny married a drunk and lost everything. Step-grandad beat them. My dad grew up a rebel. His saving grace was a teacher who said: I don't care if you don't come back to school, but promise me one thing: you'll read a book a week.

Mum and dad meet quite young, and have me when mum was still a teen. We're dirt poor, and they borrow a lot of money from maternal grandad, who is a gold miner with 7 kids. He gets my dad a job at the mine. The 80s in South Africa were boom years for gold, and everyone does well. My dad pays maternal grandad back all their debts, and I distinctly remember how our lives changed as a young chap. Not rich by any stretch, but we're not hungry or shoddily dressed. My dad is smart enough to spend money on important things, like getting us a home PC, and paying for skills, like my Karate and scuba diving.

However, in my late teens, things start changing again. Jobs dry up for dad, mum leaves him, he falls into depression. Finances rise and fall as dad gets back into work, and makes a bit of money day trading. I drop out of uni, as we can't pay for it anymore.

He meets a nice new lady, who inherited a piece of land, and they scrape just about enough money and know-how together to start developing the first phase of a four-phase development. But, he gets fucked by the bank.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absa_Group_Limited#Mortgage_lo...

Three weeks after my wedding in 2014, he commits suicide. Either severely depressed, or so that the bank can't come after him. He leaves whatever they have left in a secure estate to the grandchildren, and stepmum can live in the house until she dies. The kids (me and sis, and 3 step sisters) inherit nothing.

Me? I was privileged enough to learn programming in school. The gold mines funded the schools well, and in 1990 already (when I was 11/12), our classroom had 20 Commodores in it. That was my saving grace: coding. I could earn good money, and self-fund most of my bad decisions.

(My first startup: we won Startup weekend, then got a £50K grant from Telefonica - all pure luck, and a little bit of tapping into the zeitgeist at the time: polling apps)


> That book is the catnip that folks like you and me base our life decisions on.

For sure, this was me in college and grad school. Little in the way of real-life experience, so I borrowed liberally from these business books, the details of which are often simplified or omitted for the sake of the narrative. Unfortunately in life, it is those omitted details that make up the pain of taking risks.


That’s a great analogy. It feels to me like we’re consuming so much “zero to plushy” content these days, and in very parasocial ways. Podcasts, talk shows, documentaries, YouTubers. We’re told over and over implicitly or explicitly that we can be successful like them.

The reality is, statistically most people will die in obscurity, and at some point we need to come to terms with that.

I know I’m just describing survivorship bias and we all know this already, but it feels especially prevalent in the last few years.


How about I'm Go - You're Go. Has any startup founder ever written a book about the mental health aspects of a startup?


While it is true that entrepreneurship is indeed an upper middle class game, you tell only half the story. I've met guys who went from poor to cushy big tech jobs and even then they are deathly afraid of risk. Probably some form of PTSD from their poor days makes them never want to risk going back


I don't think this way of looking at it is helpful either.

Sometimes the rich kid was abused by his dad and it ate him up inside and he turned to drugs and died of an overdose at 25 years old.

Sometimes the middle class kid came from a father that survived as a child in WW2 with undiagnosed metal scars to prove it.

Sometimes the poor kid learns plumbing from his dad then starts and scales a business up to millions in sales.

We don't live in North Korea. A great deal of your future in a country in the west is based on how hard you try and, yes, some intangibles that are beyond your control, but it's no where close to "the rich kid kept buying darts until he won while one in fifty middle class kids actually made it."

Furthermore, entrepreneurship is just one of many hard games. And yes, the rich have an advantage at this specific game and less so because of their access to money and more so their access to their parents that are often successful at navigating society for capital formation. But the rewards of being a successful founder are pretty limited. Slightly better tasting wine. Larger hotel rooms. Softer sheets.

When you actually add up all the real benefits of winning at forming a company, you'll find that they pale in comparison to other games, many of which are easier, but some of which are harder or MUCH harder.

People today barely remember who Rockefeller is. He's the name a fancy building near the middle of the city to most people. That will be Bill Gates. That will be Steve Jobs. That will be so many of our supposed HN heros. If humanity makes it a couple hundred years, more people will remember Putin and Biden. Their games are harder. They ultimately matter more. And if legacy is more important than threadcounts then their rewards are much larger.

I think it is more important to find out what is true and what is false and to embrace the truth and help others than it is to win at business. And if it matters at all to you, I've founded a couple of failed companies and one that was acquired and I still think tech entrepreneurship can be a good thing, but only to a point.


Judging by your website, you're very much the rich kid who simply resents the label.


“Sometimes the rich kid was abused by his dad and it ate him up inside and he turned to drugs and died of an overdose at 25 years old. Sometimes the middle class kid came from a father that survived as a child in WW2 with undiagnosed metal scars to prove it. Sometimes the poor kid learns plumbing from his dad then starts and scales a business up to millions in sales.“

That is adorable, and plumbers aren’t poor.


Nobody said plumbers are poor.


"the poor kid learns plumbing from his dad." ..........


That doesn't mean his dad's a plumber, it means his dad showed him some basic plumbing and he took an interest in it that later turned into a career. That's fairly basic reading comprehension so the "........." like I'm an idiot isn't necessary when you're the one adding a bunch of additional context that isn't there.

And let's not forget it's a made up example.


Yeah if we want to speculate on what was left unsaid the only limit is our imagination. Maybe the dad is a wizard or a ninja or something.

It is not just a made up example, it is an outlier, which is why it is so adorable.


undiagnosed metal scars

What are undiagnosed metal scars ?


Irrespective of what you think of Levels, he's shown me that it's a case of keep trying. He has 215k followers, has tried 70 different things, and only done well with 4 of them [1].

I'm in the same boat - I've tried many things, and most have failed. I currently have a side project with 1k users making no money, and I'm going to try monetise it - but I expect it to most likely fail. And I'm okay with it.

There's joy in being creative, making, growing, marketing, trying, learning. I can't remember where I read it, but once a founder makes their money, they often get lost in life. The common advice is then: "now do it again but this time enjoy the journey".

> They make it seem like building a successful startup is easy [...] [but] It's fucking hard and it takes more than just a positive attitude to make it.

Welcome to startups! Another great quote I read was "Bam! Overnight success story! It only took 7.5 years" [2].

[1] https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1457315274466594817 [2] https://siliconvict.com/articles/5-lessons-starting-a-500m-a...


You can bump that up with avatarai.me and interiorai.com added to the list[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1605391667959316481


KEEP GOING.


Why do "indiehackers" want attention from and create products for other "indiehackers"? As a group they seem the people with the least amount of money to spend on products, and are some of the most cheapskate people on the planet.

Here's some advice: if you want to make money selling a software product, sell to people who are able and willing to spend money on it.


This. It's the "developers trying to sell products to other developers" conundrum. You know the development workflow. You came up with a great tool to increase productivity for developers. You set a low price of $50. And yet no one is going to buy it because "lol I could do this in a weekend".

Developers are cheap bastards (I'm still fighting over whether I should shell our $99 for Panic's Nova editor or not - even though it would be the perfect fit for my editing needs. But I'm a cheap bastard and VIM is good enough so...)

I guess "indiehackers" aren't much different. Only maybe they have less disposable income that old fart developers?


Developers are also the kind of people who will refuse to pay money for or use proprietary software on principle - regardless of price! I constantly see people on HN suggesting (often highly immature) open-source alternatives to free or reasonably-priced proprietary software for no other reason than the fact that it's open-source.

Just like being an author, it's hard to make a living writing (books : software) unless you're either very skilled+lucky (Brandon Sanderson : Jetbrains) or sell to companies (HR/marketing position at a company : either making B2B software or working for a software company yourself).


Proprietary software risks lock in. Most developers experience the pain of that eventually.

You can use that stuff safely if you can survive losing it and continue reasonably (e.g., switch to Emacs or Jenkins). If you can't, it's a huge risk.


> Proprietary software risks lock in.

This has nothing to do with proprietary software. Sublime Text, for instance, is proprietary software, but there is zero lock-in because it operates on plain text files. This argument is invalid.


Furthermore, getting new software approved at a big corp can already be a hassle. But at all the places I've worked, seeking approvals for and opening up a funding line to pay for a license increases the hassle 10x.


This has nothing to do with selling to individual developer-users.


> Developers are cheap bastards

Am a developer and can confirm. I am a cheap bastard.


This made me chuckle.


Developers underestimate how much work it takes to build things. For large stuff like IDEs, developers buy them and pay good money.

But yeah many developers look at prices badly. Will it save you more time/effort than the price? That's the threshold. Not some abstract idea of "worth the money."


ya.. a lot of these things are no brainers when you do the math. let's say i believe myself to be worth $100/hr and the software costs $50. can i build this in 30 minutes? hmm, i might be able to set up an empty project in 30 minutes.


I actually totally disagree with this. Developer tools are probably one of the easier segments to tackle because technical people 1) like trying new things and 2) often have company credit cards that don’t have to justify expenses.


Having worked in a successful developer tool (Firebase) this is utter nonsense. Developers are super cheap. People are ringing their hands over the 10 dollar per month copilot price for the world beat ai to help you code for Christ' sake.


... wringing their hands...


yeah, and i plan on cancling my co-pilot subscription after the free trial


I'm not gonna do it! Someone else, please!8-))


Uh......

Dev tools is one of the hardest segments to tackle.

Developers are notoriously cheap and every one of your developer-customers (falsely) assumes they could build a better version of your product over the weekend.

Developers will always compare your fully-featured, supported product to a shitbag OSS "free" alternative they found on GitHub (abandoned by some dude who tried to build a clone to a real product over the weekend and then discovered that is actually not possible...)

Developers will take great pains to overstate the case for building internal tools as it gives them more control and embededness in an organization.

Selling to developers is not for the faint of heart -- and ironically, takes MORE* sales skill than, say, selling marketing automation tools to marketers. No sales/marketer will say to you on a sales call:

"You know, I could build that if I wanted to...."

First-time entrepreneurs who happen to be developers often attack devtools because that is all they know.

*This is a weird self-esteem insecurity tic.


Nova is fantastic, btw


I know. But their "$99 then $49/year" price is somehow off putting to me. Now I know this is stupid. Because before this model was en vogue I bought a lot of software (Omnifocus for example, or 1Password) and I bought paid upgrades every time there were some available. But this "you just pay $49/year to get upgrades" is somehow psychologically completely different for me. I know it's pretty much the same - but the subscription-feeling of it is off putting. Can't really explain it - just a dumb me thing I guess.


Honestly, I think Agenda [1] had a brilliant take on this - a free version with baseline features, and a continual improvement of "Pro" features. Pay for it once, get all the current pro features plus whatever they release as pro in the next year. Then your feature set freezes at that level, and whenever you feel like they've added something worth the pro price point, you pay for the catch-up and another year.

They get to maintain one version of the app, with a reasonable number of feature flags, and users get to pay when something adds value.

[1] https://agenda.com/


> Why do "indiehackers" want attention from and create products for other "indiehackers"?

They’re influencers. That’s why people want their attention.

I think it kinda has the look of a cool lifestyle from the outside (to some). They’re digital nomads and they travel to cool places and meeting cool people and tweeting big graphs that go up and to the right. They disavow lots of possessions (again a nomad) while professing being all tech all the time. Once upon a time tech-entrepreneurs might have rented a shack in Palo Alto, but now they tweet while couch surfing in Lisbon. Silicon Valley is too crowded when you’re solo.

I would take a house in Palo Alto over an airport lounge and an AirBnB du jour but the nomadic life is honestly cheaper and seems attainable, if only I can build that indie business.


Something worth thinking about in this context, is that businesses simply must exist in a community of some kind. When you start a small business in your local community, you have a pretty good idea of the appetite, and space for, the product you are selling, you just have to win the popularity contest and then make the financials work.

For digital nomads, that community has to be online, which is a difficult landscape. You are competing with every online business across the globe, and it's difficult to gauge the desire for what you're selling. Just being online won't do it, and even if you find some customers, have you found all of them? Maybe you missed a connection to a broader community that needs what you sell. You'd never know.

But from my thrown made of failed SaaS products, the biggest mistake I see solo-entrepreneurs make, often they don't know what they're selling. They know what they're building, and they conflate their solo-SaaS business with venture capitalist powered startup. VC startups aren't businesses yet, they're proto-businesses, they can afford to be a lofty idea and the money can happen later. Solo-entrepreneurs, you don't have that luxury. You have to have the "business" part, the money flow, figured out already.

My advice for someone who is trying to bootstrap a solo-business on the net: have a product that someone can buy as soon as you quit your paying job. If no one can give you money, you're just counting down the days until you can even begin being a business.


Great advice, thanks!


> they travel to cool places and meeting cool people

I was looking at some forums and it seems that the first question after someone arrives in a new place is "where do i meet you guys (digital nomads)". It seems to me that it's a closed group of people selling things to each other.

Tbc, I don't have anything against this kind of living, and in fact i d like it to be easier to work in other countries. Unfortunately, even within the EU you can't work in another country.


I thought digital nomads were mostly remote workers who just wanted to travel.

What is an indie business?


Something where you make a business that takes minimal commitment so you can spend your time on the beach.

The actual business seems to be taking photos of yourself on the beach and making money as an influencer, while telling people you made money from your startup though.

At least that’s my impression. Maybe there are counter examples.


This is mostly incorrect. Indie business are what the name says, independent bootstrapped businesses that does not take venture capital. They are usually SaaS but not always. Lots of examples on the IndieHackers podcast, including a guy who makes money doing cookie delivery.

You're more likely thinking of Instagram, Twitter or YouTube influencers.


An “indie hacker” is a solo entrepreneur who (may be a digital nomad and) builds small revenue generating projects. Typically building them in series and letting them grow passively while working on a new one. Often active on twitter sharing work in progress and success/failure stories.

A key theme for many is building lifestyle businesses that collectively provide “passive income” and financial independence. But unlike “FIRE” it’s “financial independence, casually work while enjoying life”

A common and well known person is Pieter Levels:

https://levels.io/projects/


> What is an indie business?

Mostly video courses, job board websites, affiliate link hustles.


that's because people that usually become indie hacker don't have much expertise outside of development and a few very saturated markets. Everything related to indie hackers, statups, etc are super crowded because it's easier for a newcomer to enter the market and build something familiar to them.

Most people that have expertise on agriculture, oil drilling, saw-milling etc where there are real opportunities don't know much about startups or know how to build an app.


Because they probably don't know another community. A lot of people are also inspired and copying what Nomadlist did, but that is a project aimed at precisely this type of wandering wannabee entrepreneurs.


> Here's some advice:

I strongly doubt OP wants advice.


> Why do "indiehackers" want attention from and create products for other "indiehackers"?

Two things come to my mind:

1) "indie hackers" are way easier to get a relation started with than companies or even start-ups. And forget about big enterprise if you don't have an angel investor or some other experienced and well-connected guidance.

2) With smaller users, you're more likely to get better testing and feedback. In companies of all sizes, it's rare to have a "we have an issue with vendor X's software" pipeline that goes straight from the affected user to the vendor, in most cases every report or feedback question will take six to seven steps in between.


While these things are true, I can't help but think the advantages are outweighed by the fact that tech savvy people are some of the cheapest people around when it comes to paying for software. How many of us expect to build an MVP entirely on the free tier of something?


That's what I asked myself reading the post. Business wise nobody cares about your product blog.


This is great point. Every idie hacker wants to scratch his own itch but doesn't realize nobody else will want to buy even if they have similar problems.


Well one of the indiehacker mottos is to solve problems you are familiar with. So...


I think programmers are often dismissive of business people. Most of us could probably do marketing or managerial jobs if we were interested since we're the ones who really build the product. How hard can the business side be right?

People who are serious about business study MBAs for several years, because there's a lot to learn. You're not just going to learn it by reading some influencer blog posts.

When you're preinvestment, the best skills for entrepreneurs aren't technical, they're strategic. If you can assess a business idea like an investor you'll stop wasting time on things that are hopeless prospects to begin with. You also won't need to listen to influencers.

Steve Jobs said he was as proud of the things Apple didn't do as the things they did. They only took forward 20% of ideas IIRC, and probably canned a load of those too.

I'm working on a rapid innovation pipeline. I want to be able to brainstorm ideas, filter out the strategically weak ones, run quick tests on more promising ones, dig deeper into the target market/problem/technology that enables the idea, and move quickly. I want to do as much as possible without writing a line of code. That's the only way to keep things fast and low cost so I can carry on working in my cushy job and do this on the side. If one takes off, I'll then decide to focus on it, but by then the business model will be well validated and I'll be more certain about the potential.


> strategic. If you can assess a business idea like an investor you'll stop wasting time on things that are hopeless prospects to begin with

Can you define this?


The main things are a huge (ideally uncontested) potential market and a sustainable competitive advantage (i.e. moat). This means it's VRINE - valuable, rare, inimitable (can't be copied), non-substitutable (nothing else will do), exploitable (people will pay for it).

What is VRINE may be proprietary technology (ideally patented), key strategic partners (e.g. suppliers, distributors, collaborators), or perhaps brand if you're first to market. You also need the relevant resources and capabilities (i.e. skills) to be able to make it happen or attract people who can help you.

You should be at the leading edge of a new trend before other people are aware of it so you can become the dominant product ("blue ocean") and become associated with the product category itself. However, this is easier said than done since innovation is often messy, with no clear end point, so agility and learning is key. Also, Apple were consistently second movers, in which case you need a clear differentiator (think Stripe focussing on ease of use, Apple on design, etc.).

You may also want to research value chain reconfiguration. This explains how you can avoid competing head-on in established industries in ways the incumbents just can't respond to rapidly because it cuts against the core of their business model. The classic example is low cost airlines.

These aren't hard and fast rules. But check out the Innovator's Dilemma to see why entrepreneurs will always be needed.


I don't know what an indie entrepreneur is but this startup scam really look off in 2011 when Eric Reis released the book Lean Startup. Within 4 months there were already Lean Startup Consultants on LinkedIn. Within 8 months people like Ash Maurya were releasing hardcovers on product market fit when all he had ever done was sell a rails app for 4 figures. The scene has obviously evolved since then but just as goldrushy as ever. At least we got uber and airbnb out of it.


I always knew there was something fishy about Eric Reis. An academia person who's never started a business all of a sudden is a business guru. The entire "startup" industry is basically an MLM scheme perpetuated by VC firms. The same goes for the "Indie" industry - a scheme initiated by Tim Ferriss, Eric Reis, IndieHackers, etc. I'm getting completely red-pilled over here. Fascinating thread


sir, not everything is a scam or a conspiracy. There have been hucksters since the beginning of time.

If you're the type of person who can't stand working in an authoritarian environment as an employee, starting your own business is worth it.


One thing that stood out for me is how much emphasis you put on having an online presence in a certain community as a driver of your business. I have next to zero information on how you actually spent your time, but it seems much of it was on chasing the social clout, hoping it would give you momentum. Online presence and social clout are not goals, they're side effects of successful directed effort - but of course you can also build a low-agency audience with startup porn.

In the long run, there aren't hacks in this business. You really do have to identify a real demand which meeting is both technically feasible and economically viable given the current interest curve and technological frontier. Making sure your product actually solves a problem and getting paid customers is non-negotiable, not something you can just try and see if it works. You make it sound like you put these requirements in the same relevance bracket as building an audience or getting noted on product hunt.

Anyway, hope you go through this moment in your life with lessons learned and experience you can put to good use wherever you see fit.


Congrats! You have found out that influencers are gaining money through promising impossible stuff to people who believe that the million comes easy. ;)

I am working in a startup's marketing team and we are constantly struggling to get some attention and customers.

In comparison, big corporations have big sales, marketing, product development teams and etc... And these are constant efforts of hundreds of people so that the company has a good position in the market.

So don't beat yourself up. It is not easy.

Entrepreneurship can often be a very ungrateful job to do. You sacrifice too much. But what do you actually get in the end?


As dumb as it sounds, good for you. There is this great podcast with Annie Duke about how quitting is a difficult skill and how easily we get trapped chained to not functioning approaches due to not looking at it rationally. Maybe the analogy of all the corpses on Mount Everest who ignored the turnaround time will make you feel a bit better about your decision.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jMLqcfX9dU

edit: For anyone not listening to it, the practical take away is the importance of setting kill criteria (to recognize something isnt working) upfront to combat cognitive biases and your emotions in the moment.