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Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?
71–80 of 152 posts
Re: Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?
#72Get domain expertise in something other than programming and make things to solve real business problems for people that aren't technical. Alternatively, partner with people who aren't technical. There are a million developers working on programming tools / knowledge aggregators and very few are ever successful because the community wants everything to be FOSS and they won't pay you. Far fewer people are working on a…
Seconding the "learn a new expertise" bit. Many fields that aren't programming are full of untended problems that are ripe for automation; these opportunities stay un-taken because outsiders never realize they exist . Learn something new, the practice of some other profession or even hobby, and even if it looks cut-and-dry when you're starting out you'll find that there are complexities and difficulties that, potenti…
Or team up with a domain expert.
Re: Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?
#73You sound like me stuck in my wantrepreneur fase. Identify your entreporn: startup podcasts, hackernews posts, influencers on Twitter, meetups. Either turn it into a real relationship (which means become a producer, instead of a consumer, stop talking, start doing) or cut these bad habits entirely: Like people who obsess over lotery tickets, because they really want to be rich, but don't have the patience to set up a solid plan. They give their brain something related to occupy itself with (the minute potential of winning the big prize) and call it a day.
Also realize that the game is rigged and not fair at all. You think Zuckerberg had to worry about covering hosting costs?
Re: Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?
#74To me, "wantapreneur" is synonymous with the people who are big on talk or the trappings of startup life without actually making anything or are constantly looking for someone else to build out their big idea. At least you're building something on your own!
Of the many pieces of pg startup wisdom cited or linked to on HN, the one bit that sticks with me is just five simple words, from one of his early essays (1):
Make something that people want.
If you can figure that out, you'll be on the right track. You've made some mistakes; learn from them and make something better that customers truly want.
Re: Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?
#75There's an Alan Kay video out there, titled something like "How to Invent the Future" (or something close to that). It's in two parts, and it should be available on Youtube. In that video there's a part where he talks about good ways to come up with an idea for a new business. I'd try to describe the process to you, but I really can't do it justice. I'd say go find the videos and watch them and consider giving his ap…
I liked that video, too. Kay suggested that there is a very long list of human universals, that almost all of them can be translated into a human need or want, and that very few had yet been mined for their business potential. I went looking for the list when I first watched that video:
http://willsull.net/resources/HumanUniversals.pdf
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/afc6/be60ad8e6995e98dc77093...
Re: Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?
#76There's an Alan Kay video out there, titled something like "How to Invent the Future" (or something close to that). It's in two parts, and it should be available on Youtube. In that video there's a part where he talks about good ways to come up with an idea for a new business. I'd try to describe the process to you, but I really can't do it justice. I'd say go find the videos and watch them and consider giving his ap…
Link for the lazy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1WShzzMCQ
Re: Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?
#77YCombinator 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…
> YCombinator Startup School heavily emphasizes leaving your day job and committing 100%.
Is this true? I am participating in startup school now and nobody has encouraged me to quit my job.
Re: Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a great process for becoming a nice-cashflow side project, but I doubt there's enough people searching for linux commands for this to ever be huge. Not saying this isn't a great idea, just saying that it's wise to hedge expectations and not expect this to be a get rich quick scheme. I think if you wanted to turn it into a larger business, the next step would be to determine an adjacent niche that your readers…
I actually disagree with this. As someone who uses linux as the primary build OS for my software projects, i need to know just enough to make things work but I don't necessarily want to be an uber linux expert. This results in me constantly googling "command for ubuntu", which usually lands me on a stackoverflow page with something that points me in the right direction. Now, i'm not saying a linux example commands we…
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 income at $1K/week maximum.
That's a nice side-project, if it captures 100% of all the traffic and manage to monetise it (I'd like to see the percentages of Linux users/admins who also install an adblocker; I suspect it's high).
I do this all the time... "I want a service that does X". But I'm not typical, so the market always ends up being small. The standard startup advice of "solve a problem you have yourself" doesn't work for me. I call it my "Kardashian Problem": I don't understand why anyone would ever spend any time paying the Kardashians any attention whatsoever. This is clearly my problem, because the Kardashians are very popular, and the bajillions of people who do pay them attention seem very OK with it. So I am clearly not a very good judge of the market and should not trust my instincts about what will sell well.
Re: Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?
#79You're just not working and trying hard enough to get your ideas off the ground. It's s vast amount of work.
Yoda knows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_tYQRP4QWM
Re: Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?
#80Read The Magic of Thinking Big. You're not a wantrepreneur - you've tried something and been paid for it, and that's a big step that a lot of people don't get to.
Changing your mindset is the first step. Don't think that because you only have five hours a week to work on your project, that it is forever relegated to "side project" status and capped out at $100/month.
It sounds like you want to focus on web apps, many of which are heavily dependent on organic search traffic. The first thing that I'd do after reading the book is to get a SEMRush free trial - a lot of affiliate sites have 30-day free trials. Look at how many people are searching for your target keywords, the keyword difficulty score, what advertisers are bidding for the keywords, and traffic of comparable sites.
If everything checks out, look at how you can improve on the comparable sites. Everything has potential for improvement - even if your tool works exactly the same way as a competitor, just optimizing the website copy (do a ton of A/B tests and talk to your users) could yield impressive results.
Hope this helps. Good luck!