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“Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

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Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#191

Post by bluefirebrand »

yieldcrv wrote: post #118
bluefirebrand wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly it just looks to me like the lottery you won is not "having a successful business", but "having the luxury and connections to try and fail 5-7 times with one success" Most people cannot afford to recover from failing once.

Play the cards you’re dealt For every trust funder with a garage but in Atherton, there are 10 other trust funder with substance abuse problems doing nothing with their life I can respect people that play their cards, I dont resent people that had a better hand

I try not to resent people that had a better hand, but when they pretend they just worked harder or are just better than me I tend to get annoyed.

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#192

Post by jollofricepeas »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #46
jollofricepeas wrote: post #20

This is stupid. Any of us who have had at least two “successful” businesses will tell you that this quote is ridiculous. What’s your ideal of being successful? If it’s exiting at a billion, then sorry. But you can use a lot of this entrepreneur advice to find some level of success. The problem is that non-entrepreneur or first timers always try to skip the small stuff. 1. have a good team and hire right. you need jus…

Honestly it just looks to me like the lottery you won is not "having a successful business", but "having the luxury and connections to try and fail 5-7 times with one success" Most people cannot afford to recover from failing once.

Just wow. This is not that hard.

How much money are people sinking into micro-SaaS in 2023?

If you live in a cheap place, get a decent job, then you can save money which you can use to start a business.

It costs literally $50 to get a LLC from your local Secretary of State or equivalent. You can do it yourself…like tomorrow.

Your chances of making it to Elon Musk status are slim, but there’s literally no excuse in America to not spin up an LLC by tomorrow, get a free EIN, open a bank account for FREE, throw up a landing page and start interacting with potential customers…

…in literally days.

That’s how you do it!

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#193

Post by jollofricepeas »

moralestapia wrote: post #70
SoftTalker wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Varies but mostly you go get a job for a while.

The secret is that sometimes you just have to ... sigh ... work.

Of course.

We work jobs and do our thing on the side like most traditional American entrepreneurs do until their business gets off the ground.

Who the hell is bootstrapping businesses without a job besides rich kids?

1. Get a cheap apartment in a slightly sketchy neighborhood

2. Work 7-8 hours at work and every other waking hour on your business. Take meetings during lunch.

3. Focus to the point of cutting out sports, video games, bars and other frivolous shit until you’ve made progress. Don’t date if you can.

Discipline wins the race.

And when you fail; which you will.

Do it all over again until you find success.

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#194

Post by yieldcrv »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #191
yieldcrv wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Play the cards you’re dealt For every trust funder with a garage but in Atherton, there are 10 other trust funder with substance abuse problems doing nothing with their life I can respect people that play their cards, I dont resent people that had a better hand

I try not to resent people that had a better hand, but when they pretend they just worked harder or are just better than me I tend to get annoyed.

Sure, yeah a lot of them are oblivious because of the conscious effort they still had to make. I don't think people need to make disclaimers about all the privilege they recognize they had, that's pretty performative.

I think it is up to everyone else to recognize the barriers to entry. In feudal society everyone knew that.

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#195

Post by acuozzo »

jollofricepeas wrote: post #192
bluefirebrand wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly it just looks to me like the lottery you won is not "having a successful business", but "having the luxury and connections to try and fail 5-7 times with one success" Most people cannot afford to recover from failing once.

Just wow. This is not that hard. How much money are people sinking into micro-SaaS in 2023? If you live in a cheap place, get a decent job, then you can save money which you can use to start a business. It costs literally $50 to get a LLC from your local Secretary of State or equivalent. You can do it yourself…like tomorrow. Your chances of making it to Elon Musk status are slim, but there’s literally no excuse in Am…

Sounds good, but who are my potential customers?

If I follow the "scratch your own itch" advice I ultimately fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. a better register allocation algorithm for 6502 C compilers.

If I follow the "put yourself in the future and build that" advice I fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. a library capable of guaranteed constant-time computation.

If I follow the "build products for your niche hobby community" advice I fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. a better than state-of-the-art comb filter designed for NTSC laserdiscs.

If I follow the "capitalize on new trends in tech" advice I fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. an ML model trained to invert audio cassette dub generational fidelity loss.

How do you figure out what people want when you're very, very, very different from most people?

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#196

Post by acuozzo »

JamesBarney wrote: post #107
AussieWog93 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've bootstrapped successfully three times, and have seen it from the other side. Some people just don't get it. They have ideas that are so bad someone who "gets it" wouldn't even conceive of it as a possibility - the way that someone with Asperger's does unimaginably dumb things in social situations. Unlike Asperger's, though, people that think this way aren't a tiny minority with a diagnosed disorder but ~70% of t…

Yeah, it's really insane the number of bad ideas people try to make work. All of the successful startups I've seen sounded like they could be successful. And every idea I've heard that sounded like it wouldn't be successful hasn't been. Having a good business plan is no guarantee of success, but having a bad one will guarantee failure.

But, don't you know? Ideas are cheap! It's all about execution! /s

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#197

Post by zamnos »

acuozzo wrote: post #195
jollofricepeas wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wow. This is not that hard. How much money are people sinking into micro-SaaS in 2023? If you live in a cheap place, get a decent job, then you can save money which you can use to start a business. It costs literally $50 to get a LLC from your local Secretary of State or equivalent. You can do it yourself…like tomorrow. Your chances of making it to Elon Musk status are slim, but there’s literally no excuse in Am…

Sounds good, but who are my potential customers? If I follow the "scratch your own itch" advice I ultimately fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. a better register allocation algorithm for 6502 C compilers. If I follow the "put yourself in the future and build that" advice I fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. a library capable of guaranteed constant-time computation. If I follow the "build products for yo…

Trying to form an entire business around some small bit of technology is a non-started, imo. Focus on one area (eg the 6052 uc), blog with passion about what you're doing, build a following, and start up a Patreon. The long tail of the Internet enables business models that target tiny niches, so the cassette heads can find each other, and subsidize the creator of an ML model trained to invert audio cassette dub generational fidelity loss.

It's a scary leap to make, but if you can pay some bills following your passion, making things you need to build, then I'd call that a win.

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#198

Post by riku_iki »

dmitriid wrote: post #44
dvt wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imo, this is completely false in the realm of software where anyone can launch a new app/project basically every other weekend and feel out what sticks & has traction.

That anyone at the very least needs access to a smartphone, powerful-enough computer, and internet. 18% of households in the US say they can't afford home internet service: https://ntia.gov/blog/2022/switched-why-are-one-five-us-hous...

> 18% of households in the US say they can't afford home internet service

very hardly believable, unless they are chronically unemployed.

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#199

Post by monocasa »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #132
bilqis wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He comes from emerald wealth in South Africa for christ sake. Maybe he cleaned manure, but not out of dire need

Given that the mine was worth 40,000 pounds and stopped producing in 1989 it wasn't exactly a great source of wealth.

It's more that he came from such wealth that his family could acquire a nontrivial share in an emerald mine on what amounted to a whim.

> Standing with the cash in his hand, Errol was made another offer he couldn't refuse: Would he like to buy half an emerald mine for half of his new riches?

> "I said, 'Oh, all right'. So I became a half owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years."

https://www.news24.com/news24/bi-archive/how-elon-musks-fami...

Re: “Here's the number I used to win the lottery“ –Entrepreneurs giving advice

#200

Post by bryanlarsen »

monocasa wrote: post #199
bryanlarsen wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that the mine was worth 40,000 pounds and stopped producing in 1989 it wasn't exactly a great source of wealth.

It's more that he came from such wealth that his family could acquire a nontrivial share in an emerald mine on what amounted to a whim. > Standing with the cash in his hand, Errol was made another offer he couldn't refuse: Would he like to buy half an emerald mine for half of his new riches? > "I said, 'Oh, all right'. So I became a half owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years." https://www.news…

Anybody who considers 80,000 pounds to be riches is not very wealthy.
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