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Ask HN: How easy is it to become an entrepreneur in 2024?
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Re: Ask HN: How easy is it to become an entrepreneur in 2024?
#2It is incredibly easy to start a business in the USA.
In most areas, you can form an LLC for $200 or less. If your product is a service or delivery based (not a physical storefront with local customer traffic), you may be able to legally operate from a home office without a business license.
Getting started is easy, succeeding is a little more difficult. The single biggest hurdle most technical people face is probably marketing and/or customer relations --- finding paying customers and dealing with them in order to actually get paid.
Techies often have a glaring lack of real world experience in this area --- which may or may not be a significant problem depending on the nature of your business.
Re: Ask HN: How easy is it to become an entrepreneur in 2024?
#3I think you ask the wrong question. One does not “become” an entrepreneur. That word serves as shorthand for someone who starts and runs a business, usually incurring some risk to do so.
Anyone can start a business. Fewer can start and grow a business successfully. I think the challenges have little to do with the year.
Re: Ask HN: How easy is it to become an entrepreneur in 2024?
#4It’s never been easier. It’s basically as easy as filling out a simple form.
Entrepreneur by definition just means ”a person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so.”
Then the real question begins: can you hack it as an entrepreneur? Can you grow, and harvest, enough to eat? Can you do it for others?
These questions define the heart of entrepreneurship — succeeding at being an entrepreneur — which is so very much more than simply being an entrepreneur.
Becoming an entrepreneur vs succeeding as one is, and do forgive the metaphor, like the difference between being a pig or a chicken at breakfast: the chicken is involved; the pig is committed.
This word has become dilute. What even does “greater than normal risk” even mean? What is success as an entrepreneurship. But as many on this forum can attest, the hammer and forge or entrepreneurship remains a crucible for testing yourself against the world as great as any other.
So file paperwork. It’s easier than it has ever been. And then join us in building something great, and find out for yourself.
There’s never been a better time to start a company! Except for yesterday.
Edit: not gpt. And it appears I’m unpopular with entrepreneurs who are vegetarians.
Re: Ask HN: How easy is it to become an entrepreneur in 2024?
#5You don't need to say "non-entrepreneur" - by default everyone is a non-entrepreneur if you're not an entrepreneur.
Re: Ask HN: How easy is it to become an entrepreneur in 2024?
#6Re: Ask HN: How easy is it to become an entrepreneur in 2024?
#7In some ways it's easier than ever before, and in others it's much harder than it was 10 or 15 years ago, depending on your industry. For software, the barriers to entry have been decimated. Modern frameworks, libraries, PAAS, and now generative AI etc massively boost dev productivity. It's viable to build an MVP as a solo dev in weeks or months that used to take years.
However, it's easier for everyone else too, and the market is now so flooded with B2B SAAS apps that it's extremely difficult to find an untargeted niche, or even one with incompetent competition, and it's even worse in the B2C space. All the low hanging fruit has been picked.
I started my own company Grizzly Bulls (https://grizzlybulls.com), an algotrading platform, two years ago and the experience has highlighted the difficulty of the non tech aspects of running the business -> marketing, sales, support, etc. It's highly niche and my indicators and models and therefor value prop are entirely unique and unclonable, but the hardest part is reaching new audience. As a freemium SAAS, we have very strong free to paid conversion and even lower premium churn so customers must be content with the product and results, but I've found it very difficult to grow the top of the funnel exposure.
Re: Ask HN: How easy is it to become an entrepreneur in 2024?
#8It is incredibly easy to start a business in the USA. In most areas, you can form an LLC for $200 or less. If your product is a service or delivery based (not a physical storefront with local customer traffic), you may be able to legally operate from a home office without a business license. Getting started is easy, succeeding is a little more difficult. The single biggest hurdle most technical people face is probabl…
> In most areas, you can form an LLC for $200
Fuck me, it costs less than $20 in the UK to form a limited company.
Re: Ask HN: How easy is it to become an entrepreneur in 2024?
#9Easy and Entrepreneurship don't go together. Serious comment. But let's bite.
- Easy to "register" a business at least in USA ? Very easy. Could be done in 30 mins depending on the state you register in.
- Easy to "build" a product or service ? May be. If you have tons of experience in that product/service already. Usually not. In software world, I will concede that it is relatively easier to build things these days because of the ecosystem of libraries/open source/frameworks/tutorial/youtbe etc but easy doesn't mean simple and no guarantee for success.
- Easy to "sell" the product/service ? Very hard.
- Easy to "operate" the business ? people/customers/issues/tickets/hiring/legal/tax/accounting/ops/conflicts/lawsuits/contracts/govt bullshit blah blah. Not even close.
- Easy to "sustain" the business over a period of years ? (Read 7-10 years for anything real). hahahhah.
Re: Ask HN: How easy is it to become an entrepreneur in 2024?
#10I'm going to write about my own experience starting a B2C SaaS.
I think it is much easier to build something complex in a short amount of time now than before. For example, you can use something like modal.com and have a very powerfull AI backend very fast, and you only pay when your services are active so you don't need to have deep pockets at the start. It was much harder (and expensive) just a couple of years ago.
On the other hand, this means there are much more people building things now than before, so it's much harder to stand out.
But the most important thing, I think, has always been your personal situation: do you have the luxury to dedicate your time to something that might not even work out in the end?