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Comment by ivanstojic | Hacker News Reader

You may have spent $0, as in that's the amount that left your pocket. However, you invested your time, your skills and expertise.

While it's cool that you are making headway, a better question is: does this financially make sense in the long run.

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If you read the original post (linked from this one) he explains that his goals were to learn new skills and keep his existing programming ability sharp. He has a full time job paying the bills and this was a labor of love.

Given that context I think any paying customers / level of profitability is a success. Yes, you can do lots of math about cost of time and opportunity cost but that ignores the original intent behind the project.

I played around with the tool a bit and it's actually pretty impressive--really solid for for a one person team and I wouldn't be surprised if it gains more users.

Thank you Jontas for reading my previous article. What Success is may vary from one person to another. For me, this project is clearly a success but I understand if others do not feel that way.

Even if it ends up being a total waste of time, that's still better than a total waste of time and money.

I would also argue that getting 40 paying customers is pretty decent validation, and the author can now spend money on marketing if that's the direction they want to take it.

Exactly. I always find it amusing when people say they did something for 0$ by working in their spare time.

This calculation doesn't make any sense. Can you build the initial Google project in your spare-time? Probably, if you find enough qualified volunteers.

Does that mean it's a viable business?

Absolutely not.

You need to check how much you would have get paid when working in your last highest paying job... (Even when you do things in spare time)

I get your point, but taken to its logical conclusion, no one should ever stop working, because it costs them money to do so.

If my alternative is sitting in front of the TV, or reading a book, or gardening, or... whatever but I choose to do something like this, the cost of that time is effectively zero because that's what I would have been doing with it otherwise.

So, by "working" at something I enjoy and that I'm doing by choice, I'm basically being paid to entertain myself.

Many people are salaried and won't get paid any additional money for working more hours at their job.

However, there is a real difference how much you have spent in labour vs how much you have spent in capital. Although time is arguably more valuable than capital as a human, capital is often harder to come by. Whenever I read "I did X with only $Y", I don't think it actually cost $Y when taking into account labour and other externalities. I think it cost $Y of capital and that is a viable thing to talk about. Even in startups you hear that someone gets $1 million in seed money and works for a year receiving almost no salary -- just enough for a bed in a closet and ramen 3x a day. It's basically the same thing.

Yes, I invested time but I took a tremendous amount of pleasure building it and I learned a lot in the process. Even if I made no money as a result, I think I would still have considered the project a success. Success because I am proud of what I did and it brings me happiness anyway just to have users (even free one)

What would have been a stopping rule or failure condition that would have led you to abandon this approach?

You have to distinguish between a hobby that brings you pleasure and the beginning of a business that will earn a profit if you valued your time at its opportunity cost.

If they spent $$$ on gaining those customers instead they'd still have to spend time researching and monitoring where and how to spend those $$$ and that could easily require the same time investment. Few things are as simple as exchanging money to save time and most of those are already normalized.

Do things that don't scale [1]

[1] http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

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