Comment by throwaway21212 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway21212 | Hacker News Reader

I have a one-person lifestyle business. I like it primarily because it gives me the flexibility to live anywhere in the world. I hated my old desk job and the idea of 2 weeks vacation every year.

I run a SaaS product that integrates with ERPs. I pretend to my customers that I have a team (so much so that I have multiple email addresses to people that don't exist that actually just forward to me). One of our customers thinks they're paying for a team of 6, but it's actually just me.

My monthly billings last month was 73k USD. I am a tax resident of a tax haven although I do live 3-6 months at a time in a different country.

The only advice I'd give anyone looking to build a lifestyle business is to keep your ambitions and by extension- product feature set in check. I know several other people who operate like me, and the common thread is we have businesses that can easily take VC funds, hire, and expand. But for lifestyle priorities, we chose not to.

A lot of people I've met (particularly in Chiang Mai, Thailand) copy popular, common, and easy online businesses such as drop shipping, social media XYZ, or coding. Unless you live in a really low cost area, it's not a good life. The key is have a very specific niche that can be scaled upwards if you want, but you always have the option not to. Those the ideas and businesses that seems to provide the ideal balance in lifestyle.

EDIT: The product came about at my last job where I built it to make my own job easier. Essentially it did 95% of what job which at the time enabled me to be the "best performer" while not actually working that hard.

Don't you find that whole pretending part to be unethical? With those kind of revenues it shouldn't be hard to either hire 2 and make factual claims, or just drop the whole we're-a-team claim.

I can't imagine that building a foundation on these kind of lies towards your clients is going to be sustainable in the long run?

It is unethical, whether they find it that way or not. Nearly $1MM/year in revenue and they feel the need to email multiple times from different fake emails? Pathetic.

Pretending to be a bigger company than you are is not fraud, it's perception management. Whether justified or not, many potential customers will choose a seemingly bigger company over a smaller one (especially a one-person company).

Now if they were billing based on number of people working for a client, and they were charging for phantom people, that would be fraud.

This guy just has an optimized workflow that he presents as if it were a team of people. If the customer feels that's unreasonable, they wouldn't pay. There's nothing unethical about that.

Except one consideration that lead to paying what they are paying is that they also get the risk reduction and redundancy of a team and not a single person who could easily end up out of action taking all productivity with them.

These days, companies much larger than one person can shut down overnight, without warning. It happens.

Frankly, barring some accident, I'm betting the solo company is more motivated to keep things running than the larger company that might sell out to a larger rival and allow their service to be shut down or changed negatively (with little or no warning to customers).

> Pretending to be a bigger company than you are is not fraud, it's perception management.

That's some pretty fancy doublespeak right there.

No. I'm sorry, but this is flat out lying. You can rationalize it all you like, but if you are lying and inventing people that don't exist, it's fraud.

This isn't even lying by omission, but actively working to deceive.

Sure, the customer may be getting full value for their money, but then why is the lying necessary?

Now, wikipedia may not be right, but I imagine there's been plenty of effort by legally knowledgeable people to define "Fraud" well.

First statement in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud :

"In law, fraud is intentional deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right."

And later, a clarification:

"the requisite elements of fraud as a tort generally are the intentional misrepresentation or concealment of an important fact upon which the victim is meant to rely, and in fact does rely, to the harm of the victim."

By your definitions, most businesses would be committing "fraud". Many, many, many companies have multiple emails, multiple phone numbers, even multiple mailing boxes that may all be handled by one person but which serve to filter and separate incoming contacts and certainly also present a level of professionalism that some customers find comforting.

And what about companies that have the same service but present it differently (to look niche or specific) to different audiences via different websites? Are they being fraudulent by making their potential customers feel uniquely served?

There are so many more examples I could bring up related to marketing, presentation, etc.

Not really. Many companies do it with AI. Ziprecruiter is one...the emails you get are from "Phil" (phil@ziprecruiter.com) but Phil doesn't exist. Granted, if you reply to Phil you are explicitly told 1) Phil doesn't exist, it is AI, and 2) email replies to Phil are ignored. But making up people as a customer service interface is pretty common.

I agree with most of the other comments on your statement here. What's interesting is that your arguing from a factual point of view, while I was considering it from a social point of view. I can't imagine running an (imo) unethical company like this and feel comfortable with it.

Your last point isn't valid by the way, customer don't know whether it's reasonable or not, because they don't know. They are buying something else then what they are told they are buying, which is unethical by my standards.

I rather find it stupid that in B2B companies seem too only "trust" bigger companies than small startups. We also always have to claim how big we are and how successful just to build trust. Companies don't seem to understand that you can be good in what you're doing even if you're small or a one-man-show. This is the real unethical part imo.

>One of our customers thinks they're paying for a team of 6, but it's actually just me.

Isn't that fraud?

It is lying but not fraud. Fraud is you pay me to do X but I take your money with no intention of actually doing X. If I take your money and tell you my 6 partner and I are going to do X for you (for values of X that do not depend on the number of people actually involved eg send out invoices to your clients or post to your social media) but do all the work myself then it most certainly is not fraud.

I get the temptation to misrepresent yourself this way, but I would not do it. My experience is customers really don't care how many people are in your company as long as you deliver something valuable and are professional in your execution. That said, I would not, in the slightest, look down on anyone that employed this tactic

What happens if you get hit by the proverbial bus? Do you have contractually binding SLAs with your customers?

Contractually binding SLAs are usually not worth sewing someone over. And in fact the vendor may drop you making things worse if you insist on getting them.

So in many places they are routinely measured very conveniently for the vendor, or even completely ignored. Or the credits or whatever compensation mechanism is just complicated enought that you don't get money. Or worst case for the vendor they return up to 20% of the cost of the contract.. for the month in which the incident happened.

I really wish this wasn't the case..

Protip: never bet anything on an SLA.

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