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Comment by voidfunc | Hacker News Reader

This does not just apply to software..., tons of small and medium sized businesses and opportunities out there. For engineers you will most likely never notice them if you're caught up in the Silicon Valley / VC thing.

Of course it requires getting out of your comfort zone... a lot of dev's just want to exchange labor for cash and grind out code because it is comfortable and cozy (right now).

There are tons of small towns and cities with their own economies. And a lot of these places it means a lot if the people purchasing your product or service can get on a phone and talk with someone 20 or 30 minutes away max.

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It wasn’t until I got a job in consulting and started traveling to what are often dismissed as the “fly-over states” that I got to see billion-dollar B2B businesses that were basically unheard of outside of their market. The B2B e-commerce market alone is over a trillion dollars.

There’s a lot of opportunities for ERP developers and other tech roles that don’t exist in SV.

I spoke to a guy recently who works for a company doing $300 million revenue/year as a wholesale distributor of internet networking equipment (think finger optic cables and equipment for housing them underground). Their customers are the ISPs.

The company is privately owned and not venture backed so you'll never hear of them unless you are in that business.

> The company is privately owned and not venture backed so you'll never hear of them unless you are in that business.

Is the implication that venture backing needs growth so they get heavily involved in the media circus? I suppose that makes sense. I've always liked these "shadow industries", I've run into a few personally looking for things like special cut metal or wholesale pie crust or curtain rails.

Venture capitalists are often looking for billion dollar companies. If you found a company and grow it organically to where it's worth $25 million, then sure, you are no Bezos, but you are fairly successful (financially) by any standard. But venture capital doesn't care about $25 million companies, because their business model involves investing in so many companies that fail that a $25m success doesn't really move the needle for them. They want to see B's not M's in their companies' valuations.

Meanwhile, the media doesn't have much to work with when reporting on privately held, non-venture backed companies. There's no official valuation unless the company sells (sure, once you get to be the size of Cargill or Bloomberg, reporters will try to calculate some sort of valuation, but very few companies fall in this category), and the owners typically have no good reason to want publicity from the media, especially if they are selling B2B.

the types of opportunities that lead to SaaS businesses, are extroadinarily hard to find. I've gone to dozens of dozens of networking events and talked to dozens of people from a variety of industries. I've done informational interviews, etc. It's very difficult to find problems that don't have good enough solutions. Most of the time people are pretty happy to continue dealign with the problem the way they have been.

But that's why when you _do_ find a solution, it's worth money.

But i agree that it's fundamentally a people business - you're trying to convince a business owner to change their way of working for the better. You will need to present evidence that it is _indeed_ better - that's even harder than it sounds. And in most cases, SaaS providers are very biased on the value provided vs charged. I tend to think business owners as conservative, and therefore, the new SaaS product will have to provide extraordinary value to be considered.

That might be just the entry point for me, since I'm having a hard time at landing my 1st job as junior. I feel like I'll have a good time and lots of fun anyways. Any advice on how to approach clients? (I can do (full-stack) web development and solve problems/ optimize solutions with algorithms and meta-heuristics.)

If you can't land a job as a junior programmer, you don't want to go around to businesses and end up responsible for promises you can't keep.

What a lot of these businesses need is very simple stuff. Plenty of small businesses would have use for what would consider “toy” programs.

A friend of mine built a text message to email system for this rural delivery guy for the purpose of letting his office assistant manage invoices, but also allowing him to fulfill orders on the go without talking on the phone as his customers can just text him. Charges him $500 a month for that.

That kind of thing is trivial to do, but can still have a lot of value. Remember, the small businesses don’t automate anything. Excel is frequently beyond them.

I don't think that is often trivial and it wouldn't surprise me to see junior programmers struggle with things like that, but maybe the average junior programmer is better than I expect.

V1 skimped on many of the things we might consider requirements such as preventing SQL injection. For a long time the username and password for this service consisted of hard coded if statements for each client. Plenty of plaintext passwords. Default admin logins. Even seen a frontend password checker with jQuery.

So it isn't software we would consider production acceptable. The code quality is atrocious. None of these people I know who do this would ever get hired as a software engineer by any company that does a coding interview.

But you pair their can-do attitude with a willingness to sell and tell them to use Django so they can get away with not knowing a lot about key software concepts, and you can make a living off selling niche atrocious software.

Plus, 90% of what most small businesses need could be replicated in Wordpress with plugins.Plenty of money there too.

> in Wordpress with plugins

My first dev job we just crapped out WordPress sites, I mean WP was just a "headless CMS" pretty much, since it has auth/users/routing/editor out of the box. So we just built pretty pages/uis. It was interesting, in that level, the owners of the company were making bank. There was something I made that cost $30K and I was like wow... I was not paid anywhere near that. This other thing a single person developed was over 6 figures... I think that's an example of selling value over quantified time(within reason).

Oh and with WooCommerce you again had this "headless" shopping system and you could throw your own styles on it.

Oh yes.

My aunt paid $8000 for nothing more than a Wordpress gallery for her business and paid $100 for every change she wanted to make.

People who don't know tech will pay a lot for it.

Man whoever sold that sounds like they made bank. I'm not sure what upkeep you have to deal with regarding Wordpress security but yeah. Sounds like it's low-risk enough generally eg. just show pictures.

You periodically need to update the PHP version to keep up. I have a dormant personal website and maybe 1-2 years I have to go update the PHP when I get an email about it.

That sounds nice/convenient. I only recently started adding "down detectors" to some of my sites regarding the automated notification of any upkeep, cool stuff.

but how do you find these small businesses that need these types of things?

Lots of cases really are obvious.

One of my friends lives in a rural area where most businesses never got beyond the Church bulletin board and the phone book.

Suddenly they became cottage country and none of the local businesses were getting any business as they wanted to see websites or at least written down phone numbers and they don't use phonebook.

Take a walk through the small business section of your town and see who has a website. If they have a website, try to get them on Shopify. Lots of desperate closed businesses who will take a gamble on that right now.

The reason tech has not arrived is that there is no person standing in front of them making it extremely basic for them.

> If they have a website, try to get them on Shopify

So ... they then pay you for helping them get on Shopify? I can see how one might be able to convince a business owner that they could benefit from using Shopify, but is there room in there for a third party to sell configuration services?

Please forgive my being a noob with regard to Shopify. Their "getting started" page makes it seem like it's something the business owner just does on their own, so how does one come across as a _useful_ helper for that process?

> Their "getting started" page makes it seem like it's something the business owner just does on their own

You are vastly overestimating their computer savvy in many cases. Lots of small businesses barely have email. So even with the self onboarding option, many businesses need help.

But what I was thinking was more in line with this:

https://developers.shopify.com/custom-development

I am admittedly not a Shopify developer. I just have friends who make decent coin doing it while not being very good coders in general.

> a text message to email system ... letting his office assistant manage invoices ... fulfill orders on the go without talking on the phone as his customers can just text him

Oh man... that's what I'm after, problems like that. Would be so neat even if it's small to see it get used(users) and the analytics/small income.

It is due to the fact that I have no, at least professional, experience. Well, at least that's what recruiters have been saying to me in the end of the interviewing process, after I got their take-home projects done. Working for small business seems the way to make money, while getting the chance to leave some paper trail (if this, hopefully, counts as professional experience).

I'm only a couple of years down the road from where you are, currently looking for my third dev job, having started with a 5 month stint in testing, now doing full-stack web stuff.

If you're having trouble getting your foot in the door, like I did, I'd recommend looking at software developer in test jobs. Depending on the company, you'll get a chance to touch a few different codebases (in my case, I got to learn Swift and Objective-C, and sharpen my Java), and you'll get to work on a team, using common tools you might not have been exposed to yet (e.g. Jira). It's a great, relatively low-stakes way to get into the industry.

It was hard for me to start too(no degree). I freelanced first online, it was not easy/I did not make enough to live on(had to wash plates), but that was "proof" of paid work at the time then I got into an agency doing front end work. Now I'm a contractor SWE at a "local" corp, got picked up by a recruiter through Linked In.

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