Earlier quoted context omitted.
"highly paid" is relative. $10k/month in San Francisco is an average programmer's salary .. Once you deal with the realities of a business (unemployment insurance, health insurance, payroll taxes, franchise taxes, income taxes, cell phones, internet, hosting) it's not really a single FTE's salary in say SF, Seattle, or NYC.
If you want to live a programmer's lifestyle in San Francisco, then by all means keep your programming job. For my part, I decided that not having to enter comments into a spreadsheet marked 'Game Changers' was well worth a 75% pay cut. The 'realities of business' are not expensive for a sole proprietorship, if you are frugal. At $10/k a month, I could live like a king.
That's why I will never invest any money in your company
31–38 of 38 posts
Re: That's why I will never invest any money in your company
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to live a programmer's lifestyle in San Francisco, then by all means keep your programming job. For my part, I decided that not having to enter comments into a spreadsheet marked 'Game Changers' was well worth a 75% pay cut. The 'realities of business' are not expensive for a sole proprietorship, if you are frugal. At $10/k a month, I could live like a king.
And if you needed to scale? If you needed more servers, bandwidth, or staff? Then what?
At that point I don't think it would be hard to find an investor (other than the OP) to help out.
Re: That's why I will never invest any money in your company
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Barely making the salary of a really, really highly-paid person.
"highly paid" is relative. $10k/month in San Francisco is an average programmer's salary .. Once you deal with the realities of a business (unemployment insurance, health insurance, payroll taxes, franchise taxes, income taxes, cell phones, internet, hosting) it's not really a single FTE's salary in say SF, Seattle, or NYC.
Re: That's why I will never invest any money in your company
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
"highly paid" is relative. $10k/month in San Francisco is an average programmer's salary .. Once you deal with the realities of a business (unemployment insurance, health insurance, payroll taxes, franchise taxes, income taxes, cell phones, internet, hosting) it's not really a single FTE's salary in say SF, Seattle, or NYC.
It simply isn't true that $120k/year is the average programmer's salary in SF. That's near the high end of programmer salaries, especially if you're young (programmers in their 20s rarely get >$90k).
Re: That's why I will never invest any money in your company
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to live a programmer's lifestyle in San Francisco, then by all means keep your programming job. For my part, I decided that not having to enter comments into a spreadsheet marked 'Game Changers' was well worth a 75% pay cut. The 'realities of business' are not expensive for a sole proprietorship, if you are frugal. At $10/k a month, I could live like a king.
And if you needed to scale? If you needed more servers, bandwidth, or staff? Then what?
A) Borrowed money.
B) Rolling those profits back into the company.
Assuming lead time is less than a year and the profits are already significant both of these options can grow extremely fast. However, just because you can pay someone a reasonable wage to do what you do does not mean it's profitable. It's easy to throw a lot of time and money after a bad idea that only seems to be working.
Re: That's why I will never invest any money in your company
#36Re: That's why I will never invest any money in your company
#37What about twitter and youtube?
Re: That's why I will never invest any money in your company
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
So if the little website that takes text you type in and gives you a URL that has that text shown REALLY BIG is now defined as a Startup, what should the rest of us with real businesses call ourselves?
what should the rest of us with real businesses call ourselves If you were using traction , I would find more agreement with you. On feature, you can make a lot of startups look like POS. - twitter is an inputbox where you write some random crap about you - facebook is a freakin ugly looking profile page 1. If you couldn't tell, those are what facebook and twitter launched as. 2. May be you should be figuring out how…
The scale of a software business can be anything from "Hello World" to Microsoft. The little one-day "startups" that we see here every day exist in a tiny sliver all the way to the left of that spectrum, near zero. The "Real Business" part is everything to the right, on out to infinity.