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Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?

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Re: Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?

#131

Post by marcus_holmes »

jackgolding wrote: post #85
marcus_holmes wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, but do the numbers.... how many of you are there? People in that stage of learning Linux where they google the 5 most common things people get wrong? Let's be generous and say 1 million. That seems reasonable. It's certainly more than 100,000 and less than 10 million. Let's be more generous and say that all these people search for this once a week. At $1 per 1000 pageviews (the generous estimate) that caps incom…

This is where you upsell into ebooks, video courses and paid training. Also if you build an email list you can build partnerships which will lead to a much higher CPM.

yeah, but then your business model is selling ebooks, video courses and paid training, and this just becomes one of a number of avenues to reach your market. Which is all totally fine, of course, but the business is no longer "a website with the 5 answers to the most commonly asked Linux questions" :)

Re: Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?

#132

Post by com2kid »

jxub wrote: post #49
com2kid wrote: post #10

YCombinator Startup School heavily emphasizes leaving your day job and committing 100%. I'm trying to start something similar to your Come Dine With Me, but out in public instead of at people's house. (plug: https://www.thawd.net coming to Seattle soon!) Devoting 100% of my mental energy to it means I have been able to iterate on the idea itself quickly, spend time talking to people about it (which is itself exhausti…

Not relevant to the OP, but the thawd website has a really nice design (I'm not in Seattle though).

Thanks! I did the website myself. I had not touched anything in the web in ~12 years so it took me an embarrassingly long time to come up to speed on CSS and what can be done with it now. It's nice to receive positive feedback on it!

Re: Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?

#133

Post by milescrabill »

klein0891 wrote: post #15

I was in your same shoes until 4 years ago. I wanted to be an entrepreneur so desperately. I developed websites which solved technical problems imagining users would flock. I tell you it was heart breaking to see one or two hits every week. I tried 3-4 different applications and had zero revenue - docverifier (a document formatting and verification software for students), inqvest (a platform for angel investors) to n…

From what I can tell your site is only served via HTTP, including your login page. You're sending people's passwords in the clear - please fix!

Re: Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?

#134

Post by falco925 »

I am/was in a similar situation where I really wanted to start something on the side. I spent 6-mo trying out new ideas and experienced all the same problems you did (i.e., tired after work, can't devote enough time to build the product, sucked at marketing, etc).

After 2 years, I finally have a nice SaaS business that's giving me some passive income. What did it for me was that I created a solution that solved MY problem. If you're trying to solve your own problem, turns out you'll spend time on it and most likely many other people have the same problem.

My side project keeps me a bit busy (usually 5-10 hrs a week) but it's really not bad considering that I'm saving time by solving a problem I had.

Just my two cents, as it seems that coming up with the right idea is half the battle.

Re: Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?

#135

Post by someguydave »

saudioger wrote: post #130
someguydave wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s depressing. So Nikola Tesla was a loser poser but your local slimey used car salesman is the ideal entrepreneur?

I mean... how does history not already tell you this? Nearly every person we remember as a historical figure was able to "sell" something to get there. The typical exception to this is the person who did something interesting, but someone else sold it for them after they died. In the eyes of their lifetimes and most of history, Edison won the Tesla v Edison battle nearly 100%. Edison was a vastly better salesperson.…

I suppose the question at the root of it is: can you determine someone's "entrepreneurialness" completely by looking at their total profit (or maybe total revenue)? Or is there more to it than that?

For instance, Tesla's ideas were used extensively by others to make money. Is the fact that he personally didn't capture that revenue with is own account take away from his "entrepreneurialness" score?

Re: Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?

#136

Post by Regardsyjc »

sixhobbits wrote: post #42

The most important thing is consistency. Pick one idea and stick with it (I'm a hypocrite here), and work on it every day for years. It's hard to keep anything going only during weekends as you spend 90% of your energy just trying to find momentum. Re "But after one day of programming for my job, I am exhausted and I cannot extract any brain-juice any more. And if I try to work during the week-ends, I can't rewind en…

I struggle with consistency and I saw someone on HN recommend the writings of Barbara Sher.

I'm currently reading "Refuse to Choose! Use All of Your Interests, passions, and hobbies to create the life and career of your dreams". I haven't got too far in it yet but learning about "scanners" made me feel hopeful about my inconsistency.

I also read As a Man Thinketh by James Allen this morning which might be the complete opposite. That book recommends IDing your crazy dream and doing all it takes to make it a reality.

Re: Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?

#137

Post by dwild »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #68
john_moscow wrote: post #25

Just my 5 cents on making linux-commands-examples.com into an actual business: 1. Do a Google Trends research on the Linux commands people search for (and get trouble with/get confused with). Pick ~5 most popular ones. 2. Find 2-5 pages on the Internet for each command where people asked for help and didn't get a 100% satisfying reply. 3. Write a description page (or article) for each of those commands, explaining th…

My gut reaction is: - 1,000 views/day => ~$1/day => ~$30/month - 100,000 views/day => ~$100/day => ~$3,000/month - having blogged about something on a regular basis that I cared about, I think my blog got maybe 50,000 visitors in 3 years, although I wasn't trying to attract them per se, and then I ran out of things I wanted to talk about - you'd have to really like creating content to grind away for a long time to st…

> I wasn't trying to attract them per se

If you read his comment, it's actually what he tell him to do.

You can have the best content in the world, if no one know it exist, no one will read it. We all believe they will come by themselves and sure it may happens from time to time, but they are the exception, not the rule.

Re: Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?

#138

Post by dwild »

someguydave wrote: post #84
keeptrying wrote: post #9

I've seen Mark Cuban use "wannapreneur" many times on his show and I've heard others use this term. I spent a good week trying to figure out what they meant because the term never seemed to correlate to the size of the success of the pitch they were hearing. At one point someone came in who has built some kind of underwater propulsion device which was the culmination of 3 years of work. He had a pretty polished proto…

So, basically "real" entrepreneurs are salesmen?

A real entrepreneur is able to be or to get salesmen, engineer, finance guy, a marketing guy, etc...

An entrepreneur is someone able to start a company and in a company, you need more than an engineer to build a device, you also need a guy to sale theses devices, a guy to market it and a guy that able to get the capital and do the balance sheet.

Usually finance can be done with time or a mortgage, so we ignore that one pretty often but if you can only build, well if you don't learn the other skills or never find someone to fill theses skills for you, then you can't really start a company, can you?

Re: Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?

#139

Post by Skeletor »

Everyone is faking it until they make it. I think a deciding event is when someone takes on no other employment for 1 year at a time and works 110% all in on their startup, then they are definitely an entrepreneur and have made the leap from the sidelines.

One idea I didn't see listed elsewhere: Try to go and work for an early stage startup if you are having trouble getting a startup off of the ground yourself. You will learn a lot more as one of the first 10 employees as you do as one of the first 10k. If you tell startups founders you eventually want to do your own startup they respect that and will try to give you opportunities and can share a lot with you about their startup experience.

Also hopefully if you are part of a successful startup exit you will get some street cred and some money to live off of. If it's a failed startup even better as you will learn even more from that experience.

Re: Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?

#140

Post by Codesane »

Hello! I'm currently working with my own startup full-time and it is a lot of work. I feel like I resonate with what you have written here and would love to get in contact with you if you want, if only for moral comfort or maybe work together with something in the future. If this sounds appealing to you please let me know and we can exchange details :) It is always nice having someone likeminded to speak with.

On the context of one of your ideas: I'm going to move to Denmark for a while and I was actually recommended checking this facebook page out: https://facebook.com/copenhagenjumpingdinner/ to get to know people in the city. I'm sure that this could be made into a popular app if it is executed correctly, might be interesting for you to check it out in case it contains some valuable information that you can use for inspiration.

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