I'm not an enterpreneur, I'm a dirty hack

This story is a reflection of those of us without timing or luck, who grind it out day in day out. It is a nice counter balance to the inspirational, but largely unobtainable heights discussed in the stories normally posted here.

Maybe in the beginning you can take the high road, and find "more to life" than this guy does. But for those of us who left the high road long ago, and are raising families, and paying mortgages, and grinding out a living online, this guys approach is sage advice.

The truth gets up voted.

And the following part "No response, abandon. Complaints, improve" is just the concept of the minimal prototype; also used in "Discovery-driven planning". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_driven_planning

You seem to be speaking from a professional mind-set, which is perfectionistic. An entrepreneurial mind-set is a little different: why perfect something if no one wants it? Or, as pg says "build something people want". Find out what they want first, then perfect it.

The HTML and CSS they wrote were generated using Dreamweaver, and their PHP was a mess with tons of copying and pasting. It was impossible to get the company's higher level management team to understand why continuing to use these guys was bad idea, because they saw the front end 'just working', yet it was so hard for us to modify and understand any of their code.

If you intended to have a site that one day has skilled programmers working on it and is actually maintainable, be careful about things 'just working' with outsourced code.

I find I have to make myself care about those numbers. I tend to fall into a comfort zone, where my brain has decided, "Yes, we have enough money coming in to keep us in food and houses, so we're OK. Think about more important things, now." I've made myself stop dealing directly with our technology lately, and begun to focus more on the money side of things. I've only recently started doing regular bookkeeping and monthly revenue reports and such. And, it is satisfying to watch the numbers increase, but it's not as satisfying as building something new, to me.

>I stay 2-3 years behind the trend. After the early adopters have left, there is this gap that can be filled by people who are willing to learn from the failures of the early adopters

That sounds great in theory, but can anyone expand on that? What are some specific examples?

I understand your greater point but I think its misdirected in this case and not entirely fair to Max. What Max is doing in his post... how is that any different from making generalized statements about companies and the quality of products they churn out?

Though I agree that because we are dealing with actual people perhaps more tact should be used. That said, we do live in a global economy. Chances are that the clothes you're wearing now were made by some "slave" in a poor developing country.

That's not slavery. As far as classifying quality of work effort by country, try it yourself and in a short time you will learn that different cultures deliver different types of workers, and thinking, and creativity. I know that sounds strange, but it is true.

And here is the funny part of the entire deal. If you suddenly found yourself transported to Russia, Romania, India, the Philippines, or China, good luck getting work as Americans are mostly viewed as fat, lazy, complaining do nothings, who barely understand the concept of a hard days work for a fair wage.

Ask every foreign employee that works for me and not one of them would agree with your comment. They are grateful to have the work, to work at home, to raise their families well, and to do so by using their brains.

I don't feel the least bit bad for outsourcing either. Americans are the hardest employees to manage, and rarely deserve their high cost. There is a huge downside to working with the ME generation. Most think that a job is an entitlement. Ugh...

I'm REALLY suprised that there are not cheaper alternatives to DabbleDB - if there had been anything a bit cheaper or a bit more ajaxified, I'd have gone for it.

Also, the main reason I don't pay for dropbox is that you need to pay for EACH user! So at just 5 users I'm paying $50 a month. That's crazy wasted money!

There is the other way - just making money on the internet, and there is no grand plan behind it. It's more of a thing that just develops itself without some type of enterpreneurial drive or theory behind it.

basically, he gets things done and makes money, even though he is using old tech. he isn't buzz worthly, but he is successful in his own way.

for what it is worth, i really like working with people with this attitude. (except the next step is often looking for bigger markets)

But, the point of starting a company is usually to do better than contracting, eventually. You trade current comfort for a steadily rising income that, hopefully, some day far surpasses what you could make doing contract work, or working for a major corporation, and most importantly does not scale based on the number of hours you can work, but instead scales on how effectively you build your organization.

With taxes, health insurance, retirement savings, having a place big enough to work out of, etc. $12k/month is comfortable, but not particularly wealthy. It's a modest goal by most startup founders ("entrepreneurs") standards, I would think. I think most tech startup founders are at least looking for "fuck you" money, which is somewhere in the millions for most people. It'd take ~10 years at $12k/month to reach multiple millions.

So, yes, $12k/month isn't very much for the audience he's speaking to, though it's certainly respectable.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1014220

According to http://www.globalrichlist.com/ - an income of $144k per year on an international basis would put you in the top 0.37% earners in the world.. more people than that alone live in North Korea.