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Comment by justboxing | Hacker News Reader

The story holds it's own, and doesn't really need the "Overnight Millionaire" click bait.

Also,

> He and a buddy from elementary school started RxBar in 2012... By the time RxBar became a business with revenues north of $100 million, with virtually no outside investment, Rahal was grinding at it from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m daily.

This is anything but "overnight". Reminds me of the "overnight success" quotes in many forms, but recently from Shopify founder.

> It took about 10 years' time for Shopify to be an overnight success. - Tobias Lutke

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He went from nothing to $600M in 5 years. It isn't "technically" overnight but 5 years is not that long.

And the 7-10 grind was probably only true of year 0-1. RxBar got a lot of traction well before they were sold, and so to believe he was grinding for the entire 5 years in the same way he was in the basement when they first started is a bit naive.

Worse than "overnight millionaire" porn is "hustle" porn. The truth is for businesses that are fortunate to find product market fit the market carries you more than anything you've personally done.

> "RxBar got a lot of traction well before they were sold, and so to believe he was grinding for the entire 5 years in the same way he was in the basement when they first started is a bit naive"

I would have the opposite perception. That it is naive of your part assuming that once a business gets good traction that its founders start working less hours.

If they kept working the same hours as when they just start up then it's because they want to and not because they need to. Your sales figures once you achieve product market fit is not a function of how many hours you can work in a day.

I don't know what area of sales you've worked in, but that absolutely doesn't hold in many industries. Founders need to keep promoting the product, feeding the pipeline, aligning the employees on strategy, etc.

Success is not a binary. It is relatively easy to build a small team that functions well. When you try to scale, it gets exponentially harder. This is why there are few successful startups, fewer successful scale ups, and even fewer unicorn success stories. This shit is hard and requires more investment from more people over time, not less.

This shouldn't be overlooked either:

"son of Lebanese American parents whose families were both in the juice business. His father’s family supplied ingredients, his mother’s sold consumer juice brands, and they met at the funeral of an industry executive. His father worked in the family juice business, too, and Rahal shaped himself after his father’s work ethic"

Upbringing and a significant degree of business and industry "in" couldn't have hurt. Nobody exists in a vacuum and I'm not saying this to take away from individual merit, but it often takes more than just hard work and talent to succeed like that.

Nice catch. It doesn’t totally invalidate the “self made” narrative but puts it in perspective. A lot of EntrepreneurPorn glosses over the entrepreneur’s pre-existing family wealth and connections and other advantages they started the game with.

>> RxBar got a lot of traction well before they were sold

And I'm not entirely sure why. The product is barely edible, and I'm pretty sure it's terrible for one's health, contrary to being marketed as a health food. This much sugar can't be good for you no matter what else you add. Seems like blind luck to me.

Well, they sold at the exact right time just as the Keto diet trend gained mass appeal.

Free startup idea: the market is lacking an edible Keto bar. There are some but no break out success yet. Instant unicorn (no joke) if you can get it right.

Keto? Their bars have 22-24g of carbs in a 52g bar. 12g of that is sugar, but still. Keto would be right out of the window after a couple of these.

Ha, I know. I said they sold in 2017 right as the keto trend was taking off in the mainstream, not that the bars are keto.

I'm saying there is a unicorn in developing a bar that is keto-friendly. There are a few I've tried, but nothing good yet and nothing that has hit it out of the park like RxBar did in its day.

I believe Land-O-Lakes, Plugra, and Kerrygold have all been making keto bars for decades. They just need to rebrand a bit

Obviously "barely edible" is subjective; I like many, although not all, of the flavors I've tried. Beyond that, RxBars are high in fiber -- something a lot of American diets are pretty low in -- and high in protein. Its fat is mostly unsaturated. And while it's certainly not low sugar, it has no added sugar -- the sugar in them comes from fruit, mostly dates.

So, no, they're probably not "health food," but they're no worse than much of their ostensible competition and arguably better than many, some of which are way closer to Snickers bars than RxBars.

Hang on though, you can be not an overnight success and still an overnight millionaire (even ignoring the pedantic 'at some point you tick into the 7th figure') - you can certainly spend years living off beans on toast while you work hard at building something that you then suddenly sell (at least a piece of) for >1M. The success took years, but the money came quickly.

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