Comment by LouisSayers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LouisSayers | Hacker News Reader

My advice: If you want to be an entrepreneur, then be an entrepreneur. Don’t “switch careers”, just be an entrepreneur.

Find and talk to people that have a problem, and come up with the simplest way possible of offering a solution in exchange for money. Ideally the v1 solution doesn’t involve creating any software.

Regardless of what you do you need to be able to cover food, rent etc. Whether that is living with your parents, working as a software dev etc you need some way to survive as you work on your business. Make sure you have that covered.

Find mentors for the areas you are lacking, get their feedback if you can, and learn as you go.

Optimise and prioritise your life for spending as much time as you can on your business. Only work as much as you need to survive, cut out Netflix and other less important things (yes even if it means limiting socialising), and work on your business. Don’t worry about automation or scale until you’ve started making money in your business.

Make progress every day no matter how small, and if you’re serious make adjustments when you need to but never give up.

Good luck!

What you describe sounds dangerous if overdone.

Acceleration is very important, but it's even more important to be able to keep going for a long time. If you cut down Life-Balance to hard, you might give up before you reach your goal.

This is well put and concise.

On the mentor note, even if you don't have a formal mentor relationship, most people are open to discussing their roles and responsibilities.

Depending on the firm, even more would be ecstatic to talk about a specific idea or side project to provide their input on marketing/strategy/finance. As long as you come from a place of genuine curiosity and not "tell me exactly what to do for free," almost everybody wants to help you.

This is correct, find a problem worth solving first and ideally know your first customer before you even start. The pitfall that I as a transitioning SW eng fell into was to build the most challenging and complex solution I could and then find a use case. Don't do this, find a problem and solve it with the simplest solution you can.

Great summary.

What are your ways to find people that have a problem?

How do you avoid potential burnout if you spend as much time as you can on your business.

1. Working in an industry will reveal all sorts of problems. Being a customer may also. If you've ever asked yourself "why is this so difficult/stupid" you may have a good problem to solve.

2. Burnout is a lack of discipline but is often thought about as a lack of motivation. Get clear on the differences:https://www.wisdomination.com/screw-motivation-what-you-need...

Great questions.

> What are your ways to find people that have a problem?

Below are some very generic ideas around how to find people. These same ways of finding people are going to help when it comes to actually marketing and selling products, so if you can't figure things out at this stage, it's going to be potentially difficult later down the track.

The key idea is to go through a problem solving process asking questions such as:

Are there places these people hang out? Forums / Facebook Groups / Events / Subreddits etc

What complementary products or services are these people using? Can you partner with them in order to reach your potential future clients?

When people have this problem, what do they do to try to solve it? Are there things they might do that can identify them as potentially having this problem?

When you can answer these questions it should become clear on how you could potentially reach out and get in touch with these people.

> How do you avoid potential burnout?

It pays to probably emphasise "as much time as you can". As you can without going insane, as you can while maintaining your mental and physical health. As you can while being able to survive and pay your bills.

It pays to solve a problem that resonates with you personally so that you will still have drive when times get tough.

Something I've been working on is cutting out as much unnecessary stuff as I can, dropping email subscriptions, dropping commitments to things I don't care so much about. You can tell when you're pushing your limits, you just need to keep an eye on it and manage yourself as is appropriate for you.

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