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Comment by codyzazulak1 | Hacker News Reader

This is one of my most favourite "start up" stories ever. It almost feels like the "millennial" way of starting any business nowadays.

Quitting your day-job, sitting in a co-op space, risking thousands of personal funds, building, and building, and building, and building, and then finally releasing something with no real idea of it's potential is an almost sure-fire way of failing, and risking your well being at the same time.

This "prove-everything-at-each-step" side hustle method is how most businesses should be started.

Take notes, well done.

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Back in the day we just called this "starting a small business". It was the normal way of doing things before VCs were willing to piss away millions on mostly dumb ideas.

It's funny how quickly phrases become parodies of themselves after being repeated enough times. I can already feel the sarcasm machine weaponizing "back in the day we just called this starting a small business".

I don't get the obsession americans have with reducing huge demographics into single buckets. (I think part of it is historical, but another part of it might just be because the country is so big that you have to develop some way of reducing all that complexity.) I don't want to be overly negative in response to your largely optimistic post, but the behaviour of millenials lie in a hugely diverse spectrum which needn't be reduced to a single canonical element. Maybe a first good step is to dehabit yourself from always saying "demographic X always seems to behave in Y manner".

> I don't get the obsession americans have with reducing huge demographics into single buckets.

The irony.

Baby boomers were/are a large economic force due to sheer numbers and similar age related needs as they progress down the histogram. But it probably doesn't often make sense to keep arbitrary grouping of generations after them, as you suggest.

Yup, and the process has been crystallized in a book called The Lean Startup.

This method is how many small businesses are started. It's just not glamorous so we don't hear stories about it.

I think it reflects different life phases. I did the "risk it all" approach when I was 19, when "risking it all" meant potentially being back to living at my parents and going back to university.

These days I wouldn't do that, because I have a kid and a mortgage, but I don't regret doing it at 19 - it taught me a hell of a lot of things that I'm not sure I would have if I'd only tried the cautious approach, and it still I think affects how I do things (e.g. it taught me that as much as testing and validating is important, sometimes it's better to just dive in, try, and fail fast - which is right depends how much you're risking and for what; you just need to actually assess your risks first).

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