That's why I will never invest any money in your company | Hacker News Reader

That's why I will never invest any money in your company

fseek.me

32 pointsfossguy34 comments

"Even if you have 100,000 users and 1,000 pay for your paid account. If you charge $10 per month, you are still making only 10k per month, barely making the salary of one person. No one will invest in a company like that."

If I have a side project pulling in 10K a month, I don't really care if nobody wants to invest. I've already succeeded.

Barely making the salary of a really, really highly-paid person.

On the side of whatever you do normally, to boot.

With 10k/month, it's unlikely that it could be a side job, but it's also likely you could live on it and try to grow it.

"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.

And if you needed to scale? If you needed more servers, bandwidth, or staff? Then what?

If you're making $10k/month and feeling pressure to grow, that sounds like a problem worth having.

At that point I don't think it would be hard to find an investor (other than the OP) to help out.

Most company's grow from either:

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.

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).

There are plenty of programmers right out of college making low six figures. Of course, there are plenty of programmers in SF and SV; these are just the good ones.

While I agree that most of the "review my <whatever>" here are pretty Lame I must say that this post entirely misses the point.

So what if the authors of these project chooses to call them startups. Nobody has a right or the power to decide what is a startup or not.

Especially not some guy with a whiny attitude.

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?

I don't know, but I'd like to know how I can invest in your URL embiggener startup

Sounds like a perfectly cromulent investment idea.

http://newsyndicated.com/embiggen.cgi

Do you think I could get a tech crunch article out of this?

edit: (I misread the joke, nevermind)

re-edit: (Added support for saving messages..I wonder if twitter would buy this from me for a million dollars?)

Profitable?

Oh wait a lot of us fail in that regard, don't we?

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 to make your "real business" as big as twitter and facebook? Of course, you'd hate that and you'll claim you are happy to be running what you already have. So are the tiny startup dudes you seem to be railing against.

You have a very narrow sense of what constitutes a "real business" or a startup...which is totally okay because it's just semantics. It's just not worth getting bogged down on.

Narrow vision?

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.

The tone of your post smells of too much hate. You sound like someone who could write a cool-headed post explaining when you think startups should try to raise money and when they should just enjoy the passive income from a weekend project.

Also, don't forget the biggest hit of this decade(facebook) was a college kid's side project just some years ago. As was twitter. And many others.

"Also, don't forget the biggest hit of this decade(facebook) was a college kid's side project just some years ago. As was twitter. And many others."

Facebook was a weekend project long before it went to raise money. It wasn't merely a weekend project trying to raise money.

Twitter wasn't a college kid's side project. It was developed by Odeo.

Indeed, the "biggest hits of this decade" seem more to be weekend projects that evolve from that, and then seek funding, rather than weekend projects that remain that, and seek funding.

And while his tone does come off somewhat harsh, I think the message is still a good one.

If he is arguing that many or most weekend projects are seeking funding, he is setting up a strawman. I don't think most or many weekend projects seek funding, especially ones posted here.

Are the people who are making "weekend startups" asking for investment money? Post seems more against weekend projects as "startups" than investments.

So you've got this little website you run from your dorm room at college. Something to let all your little friends chat back and forth.

I not only don't want to invest in your little 'startup' but don't ever call me again young mister Zuckerberg.

That's ok, I probably don't want any money from you if you can't even keep your own website online ;)

Facebook was a dorm room project, which you could argue originally fell into the 'non-startup' category. There are many, many examples of how your vision at start may be entirely different than where you end up, and its often difficult to see how that path looks when you are standing at the starting line. "Stuff happens" when you execute.

Also, the quality of a start-up should not be measured against scale potential. How a VC sees the world is deeply influenced by their own goals of 10x returns. A cynic might say that VC's promoting this view do so to produce more fuel for their business model.

This raises an interesting question actually. What works better, scratching your own itch (hobby project) and then putting a business idea around it (e.g. http://www.couch.io/) or putting business first? I think some VCs might prefer putting business first.

I suspect the prior works better but may need some patience. I have a bunch of projects in various stages of completion and now I am working on (enjoying!) something new and hoping to make it useful.

IMO make-something-useful and then bother about business should work better, but then I haven't made much using this approach yet.

*A company to make money based on advertising has to be able to reach a very large audience. Do you think that your application that your geek friends like is going to be like that? If not, forget the “ads” model.8

Is this actually true? It would seem to me that ads could work for a small, but focused web site, because the ads could be targeted really well.

The weekend project is a good way to find out what it takes to work a project from start to finish. Then when you get a group together you have already been-there-done-that once before, just on a smaller scale.

> Real startups (companies) are in business to make money!

What about twitter and youtube?

mirror?

That's why i will never run my webpage on your server :)

In all seriousness, does anyone have a cache or mirror?

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