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Ask HN: Best resources on starting a lifestyle business?

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Re: Ask HN: Best resources on starting a lifestyle business?

#11

Not exactly a resource but more of an advice - learn software development. Unless you are familiar to some extent, you will always be dependent on a competent software engineer, and that will make it much harder to build a lifestyle business. Second advice, use Ruby on Rails or Django as a web framework and don't follow after the complexities of JS and other newcomers. Phoenix (Elixir) is awesome but that will requir…

Contrary view. Your success running a lifestyle software business is likely to be far more dependent on your marketing skills and efforts that what what tech stack you use.

Re: Ask HN: Best resources on starting a lifestyle business?

#13

Not exactly a resource but more of an advice - learn software development. Unless you are familiar to some extent, you will always be dependent on a competent software engineer, and that will make it much harder to build a lifestyle business. Second advice, use Ruby on Rails or Django as a web framework and don't follow after the complexities of JS and other newcomers. Phoenix (Elixir) is awesome but that will requir…

Exactly what part of it is a lifestyle business if you don't write the software yourself ?

That's a recipe for a very non-lifestyle business

Re: Ask HN: Best resources on starting a lifestyle business?

#14

Not exactly a resource but more of an advice - learn software development. Unless you are familiar to some extent, you will always be dependent on a competent software engineer, and that will make it much harder to build a lifestyle business. Second advice, use Ruby on Rails or Django as a web framework and don't follow after the complexities of JS and other newcomers. Phoenix (Elixir) is awesome but that will requir…

Contrary view. Your success running a lifestyle software business is likely to be far more dependent on your marketing skills and efforts that what what tech stack you use.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Best resources on starting a lifestyle business?

#15
post #5

a few years ago, there was this forum for bootstrapped founders running small-ish, profitable, and mature internet businesses -- a spiritual successor to the Joel on Software's forum. it's been offline for a while, but the read-only archive is still accessible: https://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/

discuss.bootstrapped.fm is well worth a look. I miss Joel's Business of Software forum (I was one of the moderators) - sadly I don't think that is still available.

That’s a shame! I was wondering why it wasn’t available when trying to link to it the other day.

Re: Ask HN: Best resources on starting a lifestyle business?

#16

Not exactly a resource but more of an advice - learn software development. Unless you are familiar to some extent, you will always be dependent on a competent software engineer, and that will make it much harder to build a lifestyle business. Second advice, use Ruby on Rails or Django as a web framework and don't follow after the complexities of JS and other newcomers. Phoenix (Elixir) is awesome but that will requir…

Phoenix is just as easy as Rails to get started and now with LiveView, easier than needing to know Ruby and JavaScript. It’s a secret weapon for indie hackers.

Re: Ask HN: Best resources on starting a lifestyle business?

#17
post #7

In case you don't already know, the indiehacker community is now quite mature with a few folks sharing their stories and lessons up to a few $M of ARR. Microconf is also very high quality with great talks out there, a podcast and a slack community. Focused on SAAS software. Rob Walling, the founder, wrote a book recently. Not my area, but I heard good things about it. I also like the Tropical MBA podcast. They get st…

Thanks for the kind words, Adrig! (about MicroConf, my book, etc). I really do appreciate it.

Some links to what Adrig mentioned:

- https://www.indiehackers.com

- https://microconf.com

- https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com (podcast)

- My new book is https://saasplaybook.com

- https://tropicalmba.com - the podcast for 7- and 8- figure founders

I think everything else is pretty easy to find via Amazon/book website of your choice.

Re: Ask HN: Best resources on starting a lifestyle business?

#19

Not exactly a resource but more of an advice - learn software development. Unless you are familiar to some extent, you will always be dependent on a competent software engineer, and that will make it much harder to build a lifestyle business. Second advice, use Ruby on Rails or Django as a web framework and don't follow after the complexities of JS and other newcomers. Phoenix (Elixir) is awesome but that will requir…

Contrary view. Your success running a lifestyle software business is likely to be far more dependent on your marketing skills and efforts that what what tech stack you use.

Yea, but once you’ve solved that you’re at the mercy of the whims of your software engineer.

Re: Ask HN: Best resources on starting a lifestyle business?

#20
What’s “lifestyle” in this context?

I can think of a couple of meanings, but the first thing I’d recommend is a lawyer to figure out your language, privacy policy, exposure if using certain terms.

For example results, quality, etc would need legal documents to basically say ‘results may vary’ based on jurisdiction.

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