Ask HN: How easy is it to become an entrepreneur in 2024?

If it were so easy to do so, people would be rushing to set up businesses in NZ. I don't see that happening though.

I'm a self taught swe so I have built all sorts of apps professionally. From social apps to e commerce to b2b saas. I've also done everything from web, mobile, infra, data, etc. I love tech!!

I'm also a big fan of optimizing processes, whether it was in my previous jobs like maintaining an office supply or cleaning. I like to help out my friends on their projects like building physical stuff or volunteering and then finding out their pain points and coming up with a plan and implementing it.

I'd like to build all sorts of businesses. It has been something I've always wanted to do eventually. I think everything is doable, but it needs capital. I want to put everything I've earned into my current business, and see how far I can take it before I try to raise VC (no idea how that works tbh).

I find that people who actually run businesses suffer from technology overwhelming them. They want a solution that works, but are forced to purchase multiple subscriptions and hardware solutions that don't work well. All the tools that do exist out there to solve these problems are really technical. Like think about Notion. Maybe you and I as tech workers can find it easy to use. Try getting an abuela or someone's abba who runs a shop to use it. Impossible. Even I find Notion hard to use at times and I consider myself a geek (definitely not at a Stanford level, but I try on my terms).

So I've got a few pilot customers hopefully who will use my software.

Through my software I hope people can build and sustain all sorts of businesses. Eventually I'd like to take a crack at the enterprise software behemoths. But that's way down the line, right now I'm just an ant :)

In my case I grew up not that well off, and I'm a first gen immigrant. I am trying to become an entrepreneur while balancing a full time swe job. I have no fallback at all, and while I have no family of my own yet, I do have parents who gave me a shot at life in US. I can't just go for broke because they rely on me to some extent. I'd say it isn't difficult, but requires persistence. I'm sure if I had a foothold in this country I'd be quitting my job already and living off my savings, but unfortunately not in this lifetime.

I'm hopeful that this year is a turning point for me. I'm in Bay Area for a while now, and hoping my hard work pays off. No revenue yet but I will get there :)

The stories that you hear with hard work, finding a niche, product market fit, build a great product are all lies.

The true secret is what I think of as "dirty business".

Think: spam, sex, gambling, money making, scraping data, connections (which are not dirty per se but often not mentioned in stories).

Examples:

LinkedIn: spam Snapchat: sex Google: money making Facebook: sex, spam Slack: connections Uber: connections, money making Airbnb: spam

I can go on and on and almost any large scale success (over $10 million ARR) have had these things.

The only time these can be broken is when a new paradigm starts:

Examples:

PC Internet Mobile LLM

These usually happen every decade or so and you have ~2 years to make it (Dirty business also helps here to go really fast).

The other key insight is the way the capitalism system works, if you achieve the initial growth, you almost always will succeed. To go from $10 million ARR to $100 million ARR is easy as pie.

So, the bottom line is if you are a normal, moral person, who is righteous and thinking I will make something to help others and disrupt the world, you will fail.

The alternative is small tech businesses which at the most you can sell for a few million dollars. That is still achievable and easy. You must hyper focus on a location and a niche and just sell to them. But I don't think of them as a startup. They are more like your local salons and restaurants. A mom and pop shop which is instead dealing in software.

For B2B software you need to have at least 3 - 5 customers willing to sign $10,000 and above contracts before you write a single line of code. This is still possible but you need the connections and the deep insight of the industry to make something meaningful.

I do not know why so much of the literature and teaching stuff discounts that initial spark which causes startups to grow. They are all lies. Focus on connections with local politicians (donate $10,000 to the up and coming politician?), movers and shakers, buying large amount of scraped data etc. Think dirty business and then maybe you will have a chance of succeeding.

Would love any counter arguments and comments. This is from a very long, over a decade research into why some businesses succeed and others fail.

>I’ve stopped looking for product opportunities. Now I look for distribution.

Can you elaborate?