Comment by 44za12
3 days ago
I love how these stories always start with “I just wanted to scratch my own itch” and end with “...and now I’m running a company with a payroll bigger than my old day job.” It’s inspiring, but also a little bit intimidating. Makes you wonder how many potential seven-figure ideas are just sitting in people’s “maybe someday” folders. The real lesson here? Ship something, even if it’s ugly. You can’t optimize what doesn’t exist.
To me, a lesson is: If you keep chugging along on your idea then you might get lucky and be the one out of 10,000 for whom this single-entrepreneur-bootstrap project works out, you get to be your own boss, have a big payroll and it ends up as a success story on HN. Without that luck, you are among the other 9,999 where it just died. But without trying, you are guaranteed failure (though with less frustration perhaps).
Yeah, this resonates with me. My side project for 6 years was generating very, very little. Enough for a few pints a month.
Fun fact: The project survived a total destruction of the datacenter where it was hosted (remember the ovh incident?) which took it offline for maybe 4 months (no backups at the time). Luckily the server it was on didn't get melted.
Also at some point I started questioning why was I still working on it for so little. My wife convinced me to keep going and to be honest I still enjoyed working on it.
Then on year 7 things started to change, and on year 8 I was able to quit my daily job! I'm on year 10 now. It's not a 7 figure business, but I enjoy every single day. Also the flexibility it gives me is excellent.
That's an impressive number of years to stick with a product you questioned. Probably 2x longer than Google would have maintained it lol
(who says products by indie devs always have higher long-term support risk?!)
I'm really happy to hear it turned around for you. The 4 months of down time sound terrifying. Can you share more about how you navigated that, how it impacted customers, and what you were able to restore vs what you couldn't, and what processes you changed in the aftermath?
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Can't help thinking that your business is somehow tied to your username. Now I'm intrigued! :)
It’s also entirely possible to make something that just gives you a little extra cash, which can be a huge difference. I imagine an extra $2,000 a month of fun, self-made income feels pretty incredible.
I see it in layers: I can have fun, I can learn something, I can make some extra cash, I can start something big.
"But without trying, you are guaranteed failure" >> But without trying you are limited to a relatively safe and certain affluent paycheck from your day job.
Well, you are at least guaranteed to not get this kind of success.
True but if you are building it for yourself then you will still have something useful in the end. Chances are that you also probably enjoyed or took satisfaction in the process of building it. Also, if it is truly a passion project and not just attempt to make money, it’s probably more interesting than most of the stuff shared.
There are probably tones of ideas that would be viable businesses if executed. One problem though is between "scratching my own itch" and "payroll bigger than my old day job" is working "4-6 hours every night after work, entire weekends, holidays". And even that is no guarantee of getting to a big payroll (another thread is discussing persistence vs stubborn).
Not many people are even in a position to do this (family, health etc), or have the mental and physical energy to do this for years. This is one of the potential benefits of something like UBI. It allows people to pursue these ideas without having to work another 9-5.
For me the lesson is: ship the thing that makes you feel like you are playing Golf doing it (assuming someone who plays Golf enjoys it alot).
The golfer won't regret their day on the course. And if you fail on the passion project it won't feel like a fail.
I have another idea too. It's the win anyway system. Pick something that if you fail you use those skills at work and get ahead. E.g. the side project is also the training for the gap in your career.
This is my plan now, launch a free product and use it to promote myself as a contractor or consultant. Commit to some time spent on maintenance weekly and consider it as part of the marketing time. Maybe I will be able to monetize it in the long term, but in the short term, I need it to escape the bottom of the barrel I am currently at. You don't get to have a good resume when you are tinkering with products on your own... and I realized that especially in this job market, I can only make decent money on my own. It helps that the product is quite technically complex, gives me ideas for blog posts and the idea itself is already validated (as a free product), but the existing implementations are poor. And I absolutely love developing it.
The big lesson for me is know what you are getting into. Look at the OP - he spent every spare hour he had. This is no joke. I have done something similar in the past for a time and I ended up constantly running into conflicts of priorities between that and personal life. I ended up wasting a few years, in both personal life and professional life, although the former hurts much more. This is how I ended up in a scenario where I have nothing to show and nothing to lose. I just hope I can do it all at some 50 hours per week total, where the product is just a part of the day job (promotes the consulting offering) and lower the volume of paid work as I need, if I want to have more time to make a big move with the product.
Exactly! If you can get some exposure as a « specialist », build a network or just learn a ton of new skills (marketing, accounting, PR, devops) it tends to be a win/win. That’s what I’m currently doing and by no mean would I have better myself as much in any other way.
If you enjoy Charlie’s, you will definitely enjoy Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, especially the part about being an « expert »: a few talks in empty classrooms in a famous Uni, a radio show nobody knows and voila, you get some cred!
I don’t really like golf but I’d imagine that if I did, I might stop liking it once I had to do it professionally every day even when I didn’t feel like it.
Choose not to pursue CS because of that. I like coding a lot and can spend lots of brainpower and time coding things I am interested in. Once you start working as a programmer, coding becomes something else. Therefore I rather take a different career path and can keep enjoying my little projects.
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See to me the "running my own company with a payroll bigger than my old day job" isn't something I'd want - it actually sounds like a total nightmare to me.
The whole point to me is getting to a stage where you can work when and where you want and only if you want to. Having it set up in such a way where its small enough to manage but big enough to self sustain if you wanted to go off on vacation for a few weeks at the drop of a hat.
Tell that to my brain, it's always optimizing what does not exist!
Thanks for the reminder.