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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I get that HN and startup culture glorifies one-hit-wonders and survivorship-biased unicorns, but articles like this just feel like pointless cynicism. It's not even that funny.

There are plenty of people out there that make a comfortable living with one-person online startups. The weird idea that only the "super-privileged" can do this is just flat-out wrong. In fact, the internet has allowed many people outside of typical Coastal/SV/yuppie bubbles to make much more than their immediate circumstances allow.

Instead of ragging on Slack, or AirBnB, or YC/pg for being proud of them -- yeah, yeah, with a lot of hyperbole and rosy hindsight -- just close your browser, open that terminal, and build something. Isn't that the whole point?

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> Instead of ragging on Slack, or AirBnB, or YC/pg for being proud of them -- yeah, yeah, with a lot of hyperbole and rosy hindsight -- just close your browser, open that terminal, and build something. Isn't that the whole point?

There are good lessons to be learned from both the successes and failures of other startups. It's worth taking some time to evaluate what others did right and wrong.

Most startup founders aren't dumb. They know that other companies succeeded or failed due to a mix of their own decisions and uncontrollable luck. Occasionally you see founders get obsessive about cargo culting in the footsteps of some company they idolize, but it's not really helpful. Most actual founders (not the wantrepreneurs) I know are reasonable about all of this.

What you're seeing in all of these articles and websites dedicated to success or failure stories is journalism. The authors want traffic, first and foremost, so they editorialize and glorify in ways that appeal to mass audiences. Writing strictly for actual startup founders is an extremely competitive niche because there are so few founders and they're all super busy. Instead, journalists target the broader startup community as a whole. That's how you get these articles designed to spark conversation and link sharing more so than conveying the most useful information.

> The weird idea that only the "super-privileged" can do this is just flat-out wrong.

It's not that YOU HAVE TO BE super-privileged to be able to quit your job and take a whack at the start-up lyfe, it's just that you are much more likely than the average person to be super-privileged.

That's how stereotypes work.

You don’t need to quit your job to start a online business. I make 30K a year from a website that takes me about 10 hours a year and took about 1000 hours to build during which I learned a lot and had a lot of fun.

Authority based affiliate website?

URL?

There’s a reason that when people have a good thing like this going they never tell anyone else about it. Don’t want competitors.

Fair enough.

Having a job doesn't disqualify a person from forming a separate, revenue generating business.

Because time grows on trees...

To start a business you need to invest a lot of time (and money), which most people simply don’t have. I have a regular job and no children, and there are so many things I’d love to do but simply don’t have the time for. This is true for most people.

Most job contracts have no-moonlighting terms, non-competes, or mandatory IP assignment clauses.

I think this is satirizing things like Failory rather than unicorns.

Baudrillard eat your heart out.

The almost innate human quality of seeking the relative (and modest) safety of what the middle class call "financial freedom", an escape from the hamster wheel of wagecuckery, is now accelerators filled with bullshit artists and financiers at odds with status-game playing success-shamers and the typical rent seekers found around any popular delusion.

People with honest sensible small business advice get treated like heretics or, worse yet, how the bullshit artists should be treated.

I've tried to share a few lessons learned, having moved from employed to self employed to business owner and most of it has not been received well, or even treated with hostility.

As Jack Napier once said, "you get what you f*ing deserve".

> There are plenty of people out there that make a comfortable living with one-person online startups. The weird idea that only the "super-privileged" can do this is just flat-out wrong. In fact, the internet has allowed many people outside of typical Coastal/SV/yuppie bubbles to make much more than their immediate circumstances allow.

Outside of anecdotes is there any data to really back up this claim?

https://www.indiehackers.com/products?founderCount=1&minReve...

And where's the list of everyone who spent hundreds/thousands of hours building an online business .... and in the end, got nothing?

I think there is a certain mindset necessary for success in this area. I believe it is a mindset where even 1,000 failures is not "nothing", it is 1,000 ways on how not to do something. More so than that it is also learnings, execution, and self expression.

The cross-section of people willing to spend "hundreds/thousands of hours building" just don't make it remotely close to that point perceiving their efforts as worthless.

> where's the list of everyone who... got nothing?

It's not nearly as big as the list of people who are afraid to try.

I’m not really sure what you are trying to argue. It’s a qualitative argument about the nature of starting online businesses.

I think the argument that it's anymore viable a reality than founding a Slack or an Airbnb relies on some statistics showing that profitable one-man-bands aren't just as rare.

I mean, maybe the takeaway from your comment is that being enough of a generalist that you can create a useful product and successfully market that makes you rare, but surely you don't think the amount of small teams making money off of services is even within 2 orders of magnitude of the amount of billion dollar IPOs...

Of course not, but the premise wasn't a 'small team' but a single person company. In any case, even if they were 3 or 4 orders of magnitude more likely, the odds are still terrible and therefore still not a viable alternative.

Really? I thought it was funny.

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