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Comment by josephwegner | Hacker News Reader

Everytime I see these threads I end up feeling inadequate. For the rest of the folks like me, I will share a small tidbit of wisdom:

Starting a business is really hard and it's totally OK to just go work for Salesforce. You do you.

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It's not just really hard. I think the hard part most people can get by. It's the luck part that a lot of us are missing. You have to be lucky enough to be that 1 person who catches the train at the right time.

Imagine the odds of that. That's what gets me. It's not necessarily how hard you work. It's the window of opportunity that most people miss.

This, 100%.

  hard == difficult && unlikely

> You have to be lucky

This is simply not true. It's a myth. And the only time it is true is when you're born into an underprivileged background (I was born into a working class family with little money) or environment (in a rough part of England.)

Look, life is easy: we all have hopes and dreams, problems and pain points. We want to make the hopes and dreams come true whilst we resolve the problems and take away our pain points.

Business is easy: make or do something that helps people bring their hopes and dreams to life. Make or do something that solves a problem for someone. Make or do something that takes away a person's pain point(s).

Luck doesn't make or break your business: hard work does. Time. Patience. Persistence. Being smart with money. And yes, to a point, having some money that can be used to bootstrap, but for most people on this site, that's not an issue.

A year or so ago I had a choice: take home my daily contracting pay rate (which is a lot) and keep it in investments, or find some problems to solve and invest it in a business.

I now have two businesses: I continue to contract whilst building training and managed services around the technologies being used because businesses and people need those things. And I brought my brother in law onboard the business (made him a director) and invested in him building a VR workshop service that helps teachers deliver complex, hard-to-teach aspects of the Australia science curriculum.

Luck is a factor, for sure, but it's not the main ingredient in your success. Yes I do get that being in the right place at the right time can land you a big deal, investment, or something else that sets you off, but thinking along those lines is equivalent to thinking that the only way to get rich is to win the lottery.

Good luck.

Wow this is inspiring thanks for those words of wisdom.

You need luck to become a unicorn startup. You don’t need luck to build a one-person online business, only hard work.

Hard work itself means clearly nothing. You need to work hard into right direction. And getting into right direction requires certain amount of luck.

If you're relying on luck, you're headed in the wrong direction. I was very late in the game, at least 2 years past the big market boom in my area of expertise, but I saw that the momentum was there to keep carrying on. I was working during those two years to be ready to fully launch, and I'm now making a modest but comfortable $200k/yr in a place with moderate cost of living.

If this hadn't come along, I had several backup plans I could turn into a viable business. You have to learn to see the money and take the money, but that's a learnable skillset.

I also had an uncle that just had a nose for what the next big thing was going to be. He made more money than I do, but he knew what the next big thing was going to be because he learned everything he could about small reaches from his current operation and talked to everyone.

Successful solo entrepreneur here - I agree 100%. Owning a niche is based on experience. I could restart at 0 in my market and be back to profitable in a year.

My one-person business is teaching Salesforce online.

A decade ago, I made a living selling Snuggies online via affiliate marketing.

My career has had more pivots than Kobe Bryant.

Mike Wheeler!

Love your content, you helped me get where I am today as a successful salesforce dev, much love.

That's awesome. Congratulations and thanks for your kind words.

My #1 frustration is having ideas that are pretty good (I know this because I see them done by someone else within 1-5 years of me wanting to do it), but not yet knowing how to raise capital.

I see all the crazy shit like WeWork and other companies where people have millions thrown at them while never making a profit (and even actively cheating their investors). I don't want to be one of those guys, but I would like a shot at doing one of my ideas. Yes, I could work on it in my "garage" while doing my day job, but because I am so personally invested in whatever job I do, there's not a lot of me left over.

You're on a ycombinator website. They might be a good place to start.

You have to front-load the risk onto yourself and prove that your ideas are as good as you think.

Once you have some form of a track record (not employment, but the ability to produce a result on your own), then you have a little more leverage.

If you are struggling with being overly invested in your day job I suggest you go contracting. Get payed a day rate for a fixed number of hours a day, either work a day or don't no inbetween. Bill for the number of days you did at the end of the month (or week). Sick days and holidays cost you hundreds of dollars per day. You will learn to value your time (even if it costs a small amount of your soul). As an added bonus you will have money and a business in place already.

The problem with contracting is that you have to learn to sell. Which is also one of the main skills of raising money, something that the GP post struggles with.

I myself would love to have a more independent job but I suck terribly at selling myself.

Yeah, that is an absolutely essential skillset. If not that, you at least need to have an eye for other people's talents and how they could be best utilized, and know how to connect the dots for other people.

This is definitely something you can get a LOT better at with practice and study though!! You probably will never be ungodly talented, but you probably don't need to be either.

You have to sell yourself as an employee as well. For example I am able to sell my self to clients but can't get a real company to give me the time of day.

It mostly makes me sad that I can't come up with any good ideas, and when I do I find it's already a thing and they're charging so little I can't figure out how to even cover costs at twice the price.

So there's that.

I'm exactly in the same position. I'd love to do something on my own. But it seems, I'm just not the idea guy.

There's a lot of search engines before Google, maybe you could offer a better service than the existing ones?

It's not for everyone. I love working on complex systems and would probably get burned out doing the simple-but-necessary parts of building an entire product. :/

> Everytime I see these threads I end up feeling inadequate.

It is always good to see people with successes that granted them some amount of freedom. Though it looks daunting in a time/competition sense, it is one day at a time towards a goal, and compounding focus amounts to large efforts that look daunting.

These threads are great because they motivate and show you what is possible, should you choose to pursue.

Not everyone has success either, these are survivorship bias. However, the reality is the ability to succeed is there. Many of these ideas, big business would not pursue due to market size, but for one man/small teams these are perfect.

With enough time put towards something and smart tuning to niche/market/needs, efforts can be fruitful.

Feelings of inadequacy aren't worth being had. If it's useful, remember that this sample here is extremely biased. I've seen a somewhat more random sample of my friends, all talented, skillful and diligent, roll the dice of going independent; seeing the outcomes range from dream success-story to serial failure, I have a different appreciation for the level of risk that you need to be comfortable with.

A lot of folks would look at you and feel the same way. Count your blessings. You have a lot going for you! Salesforce today, side business tomorrow. Or not.

As I work on launching my own app, this thought is constantly in the back of my mind. I'm glad I'm not the only one

lol thanks for this. I felt like I was the only one. Being dirt poor doesn't help in the risk taking dept.

What's preventing from starting something small while at Salesforce that could eventually grow into something bigger?

Too busy tryna learn to play the damn piano

Desire. Priorities. Not wanting to spend 8-10 hours a day at the office plus another two hours every weeknight and most of your weekend programming. Being content making income in the top 2% nationally and not wanting to kill yourself to try to break into the top 1%. Wanting to have a family. Wanting to spend time with your family.

Lots of reasons.

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