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?
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.
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.