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A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

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Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

#71

Post by s1artibartfast »

groby_b wrote: post #62
brigadier132 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can hit the $50/ target with small contract runs, which would cost about as much as a down payment on a house. I wasn't thinking of this from the perspective of a hardware startup but a software startup which doesn't require either of those things. I should qualify my original post with that. You don't need to be independently wealthy to launch a software business on your own provided you have the ability to buil…

Kind reminder that starting a software business still requires you to, you know, live and stuff :) Even if you can build it all by yourself, for most people runway is limited by savings. And that means that with a few exceptions, it's hard to stretch beyond a couple of months (or maybe one-two years) before you need to think about shutting down. If you can get to profit before that, awesome, your business might be a…

You can often found it as you go from a primary job and or a spouse's job. I have a friend who drops about 100K into his startup a year hoping for a big exit. Pretty much all startups or small businesses involve risk. Your other putting in time or money or both. The Only Exception is if you find deep pocket feces that are willing to pay you a good salary to work on your own project, which is especially rare

Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

#72

Post by incompatible »

tehsauce wrote: post #69

> If Bell Labs’ scientists invented the transistor, the laser, Unix, information theory, etc, then YC’s “economic research scientists” invented Stripe, AirBnB, Instacart, Doordash, Dropbox, Reddit… This comparison made me chuckle. It seems to highlight how yc is different from an organization focused on scientific research rather than how it is similar.

I know which inventions I'd rather have.

Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

#73

Post by anileated »

imilk wrote: post #48
anileated wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t because I need money to survive, and this will not provide that money for months until the thing is written, deployed, and has an established enough paying user base… And good luck me not getting seriously ill or get affected by whatever calamity in meantime!

If you have the ability to program you can find time around your day job to make a little progress each day until you have something ready to market. Because it just sounds like you're lazy and are throwing up random excuses.

Nah, no time at all. Can barely keep up. Recognize not everyone’s job is as easy as yours.

Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

#74

Post by anileated »

jstanley wrote: post #39
anileated wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t because I need money to survive, and this will not provide that money for months until the thing is written, deployed, and has an established enough paying user base… And good luck me not getting seriously ill or get affected by whatever calamity in meantime!

If it will be a matter of mere months until this thing is making enough money to pay for you to live, then it shouldn't take you too long to save up to start? Maybe a bank would even lend you the money? Maybe even a credit card would be enough?

Yes, saving is the way to go, but with my salary and life costs to save enough to last even 6 months will take me about 1 year without much other spending. Like probably with most people, my job and this project are not the only things I care about, I have other hobbies and interests too. I want to buy a camera and travel a bit in meantime for example.

Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

#75

Post by bagacrap »

timewasterthrow wrote: post #65
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #3

It sounds good. But it kind of reminds me of High School Football or Basketball Players (choose a high paying professional sport). Who bank their whole future on focusing on one thing that is Super-Low-Percentage-Of-Success-High-Paying-Job. How many football players skip their education, and then DON'T make it? Where do they end up. Now, think Joe Blow Computer Science Major, is NOT going to be a Millionaire, but a d…

Peoples say the odds are ultra low, and talk a lot of young people out of trying. I played freshman football. I was ok. I'm 6'4", smart enough to get into Cal MechE, decently capable physically and grow muscle easily and have never been injured in my life basically even though I ride dirtbikes. My dad got me to give up on football. Later I found out that if you look at all highschool players that play all 4 years, th…

You make it sound as if all you need to do is study, try hard, and roll a 50-sided die.

Obviously that is not sufficient. And anyone who's playing in the NFL today was far better than "ok" at all previous levels of competition.

Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

#76

Post by sonicshadow »

raincole wrote: post #61
sonicshadow wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until I joined HN I wasn't aware that all these tech companies deserve the same rareified air as core scientific research. The real world barely thinks about Airbnb and how it's "revolutionized the world for a narrow slice of remote tech workers that want to rent a house in Mexico for a month".

If anything "the real world" (read: average people) don't care about core scientific research either. Maybe when they or their parents get ill they care about medical research, but that's all. Try to pick any Nobel physics nominees in past 50 years and explain why their work is important to average people.

That really doesn’t sound hard, try taking the initial pitch for Reddit and explain why anyone should care about some internet link aggregator.

Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

#78

Post by anileated »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #43
anileated wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t because I need money to survive, and this will not provide that money for months until the thing is written, deployed, and has an established enough paying user base… And good luck me not getting seriously ill or get affected by whatever calamity in meantime!

Fwiw my web app costs like $80/mo in hosting fees, and could be done for even less. I forget how much we paid to register our company but it wasn't much. The startup costs aren't that much, it's mostly time. I wouldn't be so optimistic on a few months to start generating cash tho unless it's a simple yet novel idea.

I could spare that much, but the idea in question is a bit different. Without going into too much detail, each upload consumes some compute, equivalent of like 10 seconds on a M1 MBP with 16GB RAM when nothing else is heavy is running. So I think my costs will be a bit higher and I would need to start billing customers early on.

Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

#79

Post by boondoggle16 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #71
groby_b wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind reminder that starting a software business still requires you to, you know, live and stuff :) Even if you can build it all by yourself, for most people runway is limited by savings. And that means that with a few exceptions, it's hard to stretch beyond a couple of months (or maybe one-two years) before you need to think about shutting down. If you can get to profit before that, awesome, your business might be a…

You can often found it as you go from a primary job and or a spouse's job. I have a friend who drops about 100K into his startup a year hoping for a big exit. Pretty much all startups or small businesses involve risk. Your other putting in time or money or both. The Only Exception is if you find deep pocket feces that are willing to pay you a good salary to work on your own project, which is especially rare

If someone has 100k to drop on a startup annually, I'm sorry, but they are totally out of touch with normal people. That is not normal.

Re: A relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place

#80

Post by s1artibartfast »

boondoggle16 wrote: post #79
s1artibartfast wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can often found it as you go from a primary job and or a spouse's job. I have a friend who drops about 100K into his startup a year hoping for a big exit. Pretty much all startups or small businesses involve risk. Your other putting in time or money or both. The Only Exception is if you find deep pocket feces that are willing to pay you a good salary to work on your own project, which is especially rare

If someone has 100k to drop on a startup annually, I'm sorry, but they are totally out of touch with normal people. That is not normal.

That depends on what you mean by "having it to drop" . That's less than a median income in San Francisco. If you put 100% of your income into a startup, are you out of touch or do you just have skin in the game?

I don't think it's particularly in touch to dismiss someone who works 50 hours a week to make an income and then Works another 50 hours a week on a startup that spends that income

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