I had a full-time job, and my side gig was only 10 hours per week that I was doing in addition to my FT job. Then I went full-time as a contractor for my side gig.
Ask HN: How did you start your business?
41–50 of 145 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#42I left my job. Or, more accurately, the startup I was doing contract work for went under, and I decided not to look for another contract afterwards. I worked on a few projects before starting my business, Indie Hackers, which I grew to just under $6k/mo in revenue (in 8 months) before joining Stripe. I've done interviews with close to 300 founders. Recently, I added a sortable, filterable directory that can help answ…
How is indiehackers generating revenues?
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#43I left my job, took some time out, and then started building my business ( https://dependabot.com ). Financially, it's been tough - after 10 months Dependabot makes $2,100 a month (although that's now growing quite fast). I know I'm the kind of personality that couldn't have started it at the same time as working a full time job, though - I need to be really focussed on one thing at a time.
Nice, Love that you offer to free for open source, $50/month seems super cheap for enterprise through?
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#44I left my job. Or, more accurately, the startup I was doing contract work for went under, and I decided not to look for another contract afterwards. I worked on a few projects before starting my business, Indie Hackers, which I grew to just under $6k/mo in revenue (in 8 months) before joining Stripe. I've done interviews with close to 300 founders. Recently, I added a sortable, filterable directory that can help answ…
How is indiehackers generating revenues?
It doesn't anymore, since I joined Stripe. Before that I sold ad space on the newsletter, website, and podcast, and I experimented with affiliate links when my interviewees would mention certain products or books. Selling ads was a pain, and the affiliate links weren't particularly effective.
If had to do it over again, I would've avoided most of the above and instead focused on charging for community memberships while simultaneously making the community more valuable to join.
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Recruiting and resume writing is what entrepreneurs call a "tie shop business." The product is already well-defined, the customers are already well-known, and how to operate the business is already well-known. Even a software consulting firm is a "tie shop business." Developing new technology is the polar opposite of a "tie shop business." The product is new, the customers are unknown, and how to sell the product is…
I expect most users of hacker news aren't creating any businesses at all ("tie shops" or otherwise) but are here for interesting stories and dialogue with others. YC's portfolio and team may be creating new tech, but HN is a bit of a bigger umbrella from what I've seen, and in my several years commenting here your comment is the closest thing to a "you don't belong here" or "stay in your lane" signal that I think I'v…
Exactly, was reading hacker news for a while before starting my "tie shop" web agency business. Don't mind that guy, nothing stated only fancy new stuff can be talked about, and yours was an interesting read nevertheless.
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#46I was contracting as an individual. I thought of myself as a a temp employee. The one of the executives at the company I was contracting for referred me to an executive at another business. In that moment I realized I could make the mental transition from temp to consultant, and my consulting business was born.
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is indiehackers generating revenues?
It doesn't anymore, since I joined Stripe. Before that I sold ad space on the newsletter, website, and podcast, and I experimented with affiliate links when my interviewees would mention certain products or books. Selling ads was a pain, and the affiliate links weren't particularly effective. If had to do it over again, I would've avoided most of the above and instead focused on charging for community memberships whi…
yup, that seems to be working well for nomadlist
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#48For many years I was switching between earning money from client projects for 6-8 months and then trying to build my own things for 3-4 months while living from savings.
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#49I left my job, took some time out, and then started building my business ( https://dependabot.com ). Financially, it's been tough - after 10 months Dependabot makes $2,100 a month (although that's now growing quite fast). I know I'm the kind of personality that couldn't have started it at the same time as working a full time job, though - I need to be really focussed on one thing at a time.
If you want those big money enterprise clients, add Maven and Nuget support.
Seems Maven is already supported, or at least in beta: https://dependabot.com/java.html
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#50I had been a recruiter for several years, starting off out of college with a ~200 person international firm for a couple years and then a founding member of a small boutique recruiting firm for about seven years. I eventually figured out that I wasn't getting any value from my partner, so I started my own recruiting firm. During my recruiting career I was always writing/editing resumes and giving job search advice to…
Recruiting and resume writing is what entrepreneurs call a "tie shop business." The product is already well-defined, the customers are already well-known, and how to operate the business is already well-known. Even a software consulting firm is a "tie shop business." Developing new technology is the polar opposite of a "tie shop business." The product is new, the customers are unknown, and how to sell the product is…
> Recruiting and resume writing is what entrepreneurs call a "tie shop business."
I'm a (successful) entrepreneur and I don't call any businesses "tie shop businesses." In a quick search, I can't even find a reference to that terminology. That's a pretty condescending label, whether you mean it to be or not. The polite way to make your point is to talk about how certain businesses are designed to scale up rapidly while others are designed to be profitable with steady growth. Ideally, you'd make this point while considering the tradeoffs of each and acknowledging that advice about each is going to be different. Hopefully you'd make this point 1) where it's actually relevant, and 2) without reducing all the considerable effort involved in building and maintaining any kind of business to selling ties.
In any case, it's not accurate as stated. What you're saying is a false dichotomy. Not all companies designed to scale with venture capital are legitimately developing novel technology. In fact, having spoken to many of Y Combinator's founders directly, I would say most of them aren't, and many actually have well-defined markets with which to sell their products. Most "tech startups" are something closer to the application of existing technology than they are to the development of new technology. In contrast, a machine learning consulting firm can absolutely be developing new technology, and it can absolutely have difficulty finding product-market fit.
That distinction doesn't matter much, because both sorts of businesses can encounter significant difficulties, and both types encounter difficulties not subsumed by the other. Most importantly, most users active on Hacker News have yet to build any business. The author of this post didn't specify what sort of company they were looking for advice about. Your "advice" seems utterly misplaced and discouraging.