Ask HN: How did you start your business?

Neither. After getting my degree, I continued a student project for 1 year that went nowhere. Eventually, I realized it wasn't going anywhere, so I decided to look for a job.

I went to a hackathon, summarily said I was looking for a job on stage at the end. Instead, someone I already knew came talk to me about their startup idea (which had PoC already live, a solid business plan and good proofs the project could be viable), and I decided to give it a go.

That was 5 years ago, I'm still there, learned a lot, and now we are 12 employees (we started at 2 unpaid founders, and started paying ourselves a minimal salary after a year). While it's not up to SV standard, I do consider it a success that we are still alive, and did not sell our soul doing others people project at any time of the company (which happens a lot here, companies don't die, they become contractors).

Important note: I had the privilege of a nice parental cushion that let me do that instead of absolutely requiring an income. I couldn't have done it otherwise.

I started making video games as a teenager, and about ten years ago there was this golden age of Flash games where you could make a small video game, auction it off on a private website to various companies that ran Flash game arcades. You'd incorporate their branding, ads, links, and in exchange receive an upfront fee followed by a split of the ad revenue. Over the course of my three year degree I had five games published, which gave me a taste of the business side of game development. It was a weird, unique, fun time in game development! I don't think there's much like that now for hobbyists to transition into commercial work quite so naturally.

But I finished uni and went into the industry, writing Python/Django code for a startup. During this time I started work on the game that eventually let me go full-time, The Cat Machine (http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900). I'd work on it on Saturdays and towards the end of development I'd even get up early in the morning to get an hour or two in. I released it on Steam and a bunch of other places, where it did... better than a niche puzzle game about cats should do, I think! Other good things happened, it was featured for a number of months on the front page of the Apple Mac Store next to actually really good games like Braid and Mini Metro, so it turned out that cross-platform support was really worth it!

I've been working on my second downloadable title for the past two years (http://store.steampowered.com/app/654960/The_Eldritch_Zookee...), but that's the story so far!

> I'm not sure young people can take financial risks, unless they're already rich.

It's a lot easier to take a financial risk when you have no dependents and no mortgage.

I quit my job to start a business in my late 20s, when I was single and had no kids. I will say that another reply's statement is very true: "If I think back to the person I was in my mid-20s, I would not have had the dedication, confidence, people skills, or even the technical know-how to pull off anything approaching a successful business."

In my case, I just wanted to be in charge of my own destiny for awhile, with the freedom to screw up. (And I did screw up.) Although I wish I did things differently, the experience itself was worthwhile. Our modern upbringings are so structured that "starting our own business" really just turns into an outlet for avoiding authority for awhile.

Started it in 2012 while wrapping up my last year of school. Put my idea for a product I really believed in on Kickstarter, luckily Hacker News and the like really took to it, pushing it past 100% quickly. Been at it ever since.

I was and still am working full-time, but I try to put a new side mvp project out every roughly every 6 months which can (hopefully) generate revenue. Ive been doing this for about 2 years, and am launching hopefully my third "successful" project in April.

My most recent project ( https://projectpiglet.com/ ) is an AI financial predictor - I started with scripts in 2013 - 2014, I then rewrote it recently to launch as a web service. So you can say it started as a side project, made me money (100% yoy), then after I felt it was validated, I went to expand.

My first project ( https://easy-a.net/ ), was built as a weekend project to help some friends. It lets you know the grade distribution of every course, semester and professor of the universities in the system. Further, it provides estimated workload, probably exit grade for you, etc. My friends needed it because they couldn't get in to see a CS advisor at UIUC at the time, because they only had one advisor for ~ 1600 students.

The two I have today (aka the remaining "successful" MVPs) are gowing at an alright pace based on how much I put into it. And although I don't plan on leaving my job yet, I'm sure in the next couple years.

For reference, I did $3k the first year from my projects, $7k the second, and this year I'm on track for ~$25k+. I think I've heard it called the hockey stick of death.. where it isn't profitable enough to sustain itself, but it's growing... Slowly. It's a pain for SaaS. But I try to improve the products because they are both growing constistently.

The project I'm about to launch is built off my most recent platform ( https://projectpiglet.com/ ). I think I can build at least four apps off of it - which I why I built it. More MVPs to try for the market!

List of ideas that haven't made it (yet at least):

- http://synaptitude.me

- http://lettergram.github.io/AnyCrypt/

- thinksuite - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/synaptitude/thinksuite-...

- pearlywhiteparcels - toothbrush deliveries (similar to Dollar shave club), couldn't find enough partners with dentists (probably didn't want you to clean your own teeth lol)