Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Octopart, The Little Startup That Hung In There

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 55 posts

Re: Octopart, The Little Startup That Hung In There

#31

Post by Spyro7 »

mb21 wrote: post #27
jasonkester wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, this is exactly what it's like to bootstrap a company these days. You scrape along with no success and no money for a long time before it grows into something that can support you. Hitting the $1000/founder/month profit mark is a huge milestone since it means you can just barely squeak by without digging further into your personal savings. It means that if you can keep growing the business, you're going to…

Thanks for the comments - this was my first HN post. I hope you didn't see it as being pessimistic - As someone who has started companies in the past and wants to do it again, I am trying to understand this new movement. I love the thought of building a self-running business. Is that realistic? Is that realistic statistically? $12,000 profit per month after taxes is not livable in the US, and probably not Canada. Con…

Just for the record, I was not one of the people who down-voted your comment. I personally think that your perspective is interesting.

"$12,000 profit per month after taxes is not livable in the US, and probably not Canada."

It seems to me that $12,000 per month is an eminently livable wage. Did you mean to write $12,000 per year there instead of $12,000 per month?

(Just a quick HN related tip. Something that helps me is to review a post carefully after I've posted it. It has helped me to catch myself saying some strange things a few times.)

In reference to your original post, Octopart is currently getting half a million unique visitors per month - and still growing. Given that they have low overhead, it is reasonable to believe that they are probably profitable at this point (including hefty owner's salaries).

I am currently in the process of bootstrapping a company in a similar way to the process that they took. I am not doing it because I was "sold someone else's dream of \"starting a company is the best thing in the world to do\"".

I saw a potential market opportunity (and something that I would enjoy working on) and I took action to meet what I saw as a need. Some people are just pre-programmed to want to own their own business. I know that it is something that I have been trying to do for a little over a decade.

I've had a few rough starts and a few no starts, but then that is how the learning process often goes. I realize that I would probably have been further ahead at this point financially if I had just taken a "normal job", but how much would that financial "security" have been worth with that constant feeling nagging me in the back of my head that I should have started my own business.

Re: Octopart, The Little Startup That Hung In There

#32

Post by Evgeny »

Spyro7 wrote: post #31
mb21 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the comments - this was my first HN post. I hope you didn't see it as being pessimistic - As someone who has started companies in the past and wants to do it again, I am trying to understand this new movement. I love the thought of building a self-running business. Is that realistic? Is that realistic statistically? $12,000 profit per month after taxes is not livable in the US, and probably not Canada. Con…

Just for the record, I was not one of the people who down-voted your comment. I personally think that your perspective is interesting. "$12,000 profit per month after taxes is not livable in the US, and probably not Canada." It seems to me that $12,000 per month is an eminently livable wage. Did you mean to write $12,000 per year there instead of $12,000 per month? (Just a quick HN related tip. Something that helps m…

Did you mean to write $12,000 per year there instead of $12,000 per month

Looks obvious that it was just a typo - the parent mentioned $1000 per month per founder, $12000 would obviously be per year.

Re: Octopart, The Little Startup That Hung In There

#33

Post by pnathan »

jasonkester wrote: post #23
mb21 wrote: post #22

seriously not trying to be a downer, but doesn't this smack of starting a company just to start a company? they all took $0 in salary in 2008, I wonder if they are making live-able wages now in 2011. They took on their first employee and maybe had to again cut their salaries to afford it? YC worries me that it convinces everyone to start a company rather than go to school, work for another company as an employee or f…

Actually, this is exactly what it's like to bootstrap a company these days. You scrape along with no success and no money for a long time before it grows into something that can support you. Hitting the $1000/founder/month profit mark is a huge milestone since it means you can just barely squeak by without digging further into your personal savings. It means that if you can keep growing the business, you're going to…

I have to say, the kind of business you mention (20k/month & autopilot) would likely be my dream 'job'.

Re: Octopart, The Little Startup That Hung In There

#34

Post by padmanabhan01 »

pnathan wrote: post #33
jasonkester wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, this is exactly what it's like to bootstrap a company these days. You scrape along with no success and no money for a long time before it grows into something that can support you. Hitting the $1000/founder/month profit mark is a huge milestone since it means you can just barely squeak by without digging further into your personal savings. It means that if you can keep growing the business, you're going to…

I have to say, the kind of business you mention (20k/month & autopilot) would likely be my dream 'job'.

He said runs on auto pilot.

Re: Octopart, The Little Startup That Hung In There

#35

Post by andres »

sriramk wrote: post #17
jmtame wrote: post #6

Octopart was the first company that came to mind when I thought about writing Startups Open Sourced . Having not heard about them for a while, I wanted to know what they were up to and writing a book about it was a good excuse to talk to the founders firsthand. Here's an interesting part about their decision to drop out of the PhD program at UC Berkeley to do Octopart: Q: When did you decide to drop out? We wrote the…

He worked on Octopart in Antarctica? That is pretty awesome.

In grad school I worked on IceCube which is a neutrino telescope at the South Pole. The detector is an array of photomultiplier tubes embedded in the ice underneath the Pole. At the time I was mostly working on electronic devices for calibration and measuring ash layers in the ice.

When we got accepted to YC I thought I was going to finish my PhD and work on the startup at the same time (ha!) so I kept working on the experiment. I went down to Pole for a month before YC to deploy the devices I was working on. While I was there I also worked on Octopart around the clock. Sam was actually in Argentina at the time so we would both log into our server in Berkeley to ychat when the satellite link was up. Somehow the timing worked out really well and I flew back from the Pole just in time for the first YC dinner.

Re: Octopart, The Little Startup That Hung In There

#36

Post by mb21 »

ekidd wrote: post #30
mb21 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the comments - this was my first HN post. I hope you didn't see it as being pessimistic - As someone who has started companies in the past and wants to do it again, I am trying to understand this new movement. I love the thought of building a self-running business. Is that realistic? Is that realistic statistically? $12,000 profit per month after taxes is not livable in the US, and probably not Canada. Con…

$12,000/month after taxes is $144,000/year for a single founder company. U.S. median family income was $45,018/year before taxes in 2003. Even for programmers working in Silicon Valley, $144,000/year after taxes is pretty decent. For comparison purposes, if you sold your company for $3.6 million, invested the money at 4% above inflation, and lived off the real interest, you'd earn $144,000/year. Now, that's clearly n…

yes - typo. $1,000/month or 12k/year is not livable in the US.

Thanks for pointing this out. I actually did reread the post, but pre-coffee.

Re: Octopart, The Little Startup That Hung In There

#37

Post by mb21 »

pnathan wrote: post #33
jasonkester wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, this is exactly what it's like to bootstrap a company these days. You scrape along with no success and no money for a long time before it grows into something that can support you. Hitting the $1000/founder/month profit mark is a huge milestone since it means you can just barely squeak by without digging further into your personal savings. It means that if you can keep growing the business, you're going to…

I have to say, the kind of business you mention (20k/month & autopilot) would likely be my dream 'job'.

20k/month revenue or profit?

Re: Octopart, The Little Startup That Hung In There

#39

Post by pg »

mb21 wrote: post #22

seriously not trying to be a downer, but doesn't this smack of starting a company just to start a company? they all took $0 in salary in 2008, I wonder if they are making live-able wages now in 2011. They took on their first employee and maybe had to again cut their salaries to afford it? YC worries me that it convinces everyone to start a company rather than go to school, work for another company as an employee or f…

There's nowhere I say that "starting a company is the best thing in the world to do." I describe it as an efficient but intrinsically painful way to solve the money problem.

"Imagine the stress of working for the Post Office for fifty years. In a startup you compress all this stress into three or four years. You do tend to get a certain bulk discount if you buy the economy-size pain, but you can't evade the fundamental conservation law."

And far from trying to draw people out of school, we actually have a bias in the other direction. We're very reluctant to fund students unless they seem like they already want to quit.

Re: Octopart, The Little Startup That Hung In There

#40

Post by kerryfalk »

pg wrote: post #39
mb21 wrote: post #22

seriously not trying to be a downer, but doesn't this smack of starting a company just to start a company? they all took $0 in salary in 2008, I wonder if they are making live-able wages now in 2011. They took on their first employee and maybe had to again cut their salaries to afford it? YC worries me that it convinces everyone to start a company rather than go to school, work for another company as an employee or f…

There's nowhere I say that "starting a company is the best thing in the world to do." I describe it as an efficient but intrinsically painful way to solve the money problem. "Imagine the stress of working for the Post Office for fifty years. In a startup you compress all this stress into three or four years. You do tend to get a certain bulk discount if you buy the economy-size pain, but you can't evade the fundament…

I haven't read anywhere that you have said that, but would you agree that starting a company was the best thing in the world for you to do?

My network of company founders is much smaller than yours but I think if I were to ask them if starting their company was one of the best things they ever did, and I know it to be true for myself, they most certainly wouldn't say no.

I'm guessing that's also probably true of the majority, if not all, of the Y-Combinator backed founders. Whether their company is still alive or not.

To answer the parent, starting and running a company through the fight in the trenches is massively rewarding but also massively frustrating in many ways. I know I can't give it up and do anything else and am sure I'm not alone. I don't think anyone would try to sell you on the dream of diving into the fight. It's something you have to want, it can't be sold.

Regarding the talent pool: HN is just the squeaky wheel and doesn't represent the entire market so I would doubt that hackers starting companies is negatively affecting the available resources.

Post reply on HN