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Comment by _benj | Hacker News Reader

> I’d go so far as to say most entrepreneurial challenges that we hear being bemoaned are a direct result of your chosen path being incompatible with your business idea or life circumstances.

This! It seems that the loudest story being told is about the 18h work day, silicon valley VC, elevator pitch, market-fit, exit strategy.

But that is not the only story, the others seems barely told... (except in a few HN threads)

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I’ll tell mine.

- I do apps for businesses on the Atlassian Marketplace,

- First year was 3000€ (the whole year),

- Year 3 went over the engineer salary quite easily (we’re now a few employees and we gross ~200k€ for each worker).

- I’m a pretty hard worker, but I don’t believe I go over 40hrs/week in average if you count errands we run "exceptionally" the day (walks, meeting friends, etc) + 4 weeks holidays. Weekends may be at work, but I’m then less focussed during the week, so it evens out.

So it has been pretty easy bootstrapping. Of course life is hard, but it is hard for other jobs too.

I think the entrepreneurs’ biggest force is normal companies spend 50% of their workforce synchronizing with colleagues...

That comment was just to show there are happy stories. Big thanks to HN and especially Kalzumeus for teaching me how to do business. I’m forever indebted but, being extremely bitter with life, I’m currently bad at reimbursing. Currently. I still teach my experience to every school I can, though (but with more talks about the downsides of course).

Thanks for sharing! It's always great to hear about entrepreneurs that have found their way into an ideal work setup. Congrats to you!

Thanks a lot for sharing! If you don't mind me asking, how did you came up with Atlassian Marketplace?

I find that the hardest part for me is to figure out what to build and for whom

I was a fan of their products first; Once I was in a gig at a customer’s office (standard Java/Spring $350, nothing fancy) and I identify a typical problem that all companies have (Don’t really want to tell you, because I’ve said on this forum I vote Trump so I don’t want people to retaliate against my product) and I thought the best place to implement it would be a corporate tool, like the Atlassian products. Long story short, it really took employees a lot of time to do a task, « which I can automate in 2 days as a programmer » (that’s what every programmer says before they spend a year on it).

I finished the gig then I developed the solution alone, and indeed there was decent demand for it. And once it was well-designed, there was even more demand for it. And when we marketed for multi-node clusters... it seems we could charge anything we want as long as we have the enterprise features (cluster, performance reports, XML export, REST APIs, permissions, all those details that are important for companies).

nice, thx!

It makes me think of a particular problem that I have fixed for a client quite a few times already that could be automated.

Good luck in your endeavors!

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