Startup vs. Lifestyle Business (A Short Comparison from a Guy Who's Done Both)

I wish we as a valley entrepreneur culture valued this more.

I quit my fulltime job at a startup recently, with the goal of starting my own company. I spent a bunch of time having fairly in depth conversations with potential cofounders. Really sharp people, many of which who had solid, well validated business ideas with significant investor interest.

But I couldn't fully commit. In the end, I realized it was because deep in my heart, I wanted to have a great life now, not at some unspecified (and uncertain) point way in the future. So I decided to focus on building a business that generates solid cash flow and which doesn't require a 60 hour workweek for me to maintain, once I get it up and running.

The process of going around and explaining my decision to everyone who I had been talking with awkward. If you liken the process of finding a cofounder to dating leading up to marriage, then the process of "breaking up" was akin to going around to all of the girls you're dating and telling them you're gay. "We're both attracted to different things", and, "I respect your lifestyle choice" were common phrases:) People were supportive in a "That's nice for you, I'm glad you're following your heart, but I would never choose that" sort of way.

It's a shame that the valley culture is so focused on big, home run hit businesses. We're now in an era of entrepreneurship where very solid cashflow businesses can be created with very little capital, and significantly lower risk than a big homerun hit business. Yet, as a community, we treat them like the uncle whose lifestyle everyone accepts but no one wants to talk about. A lot of the advising, incubators, and accepted best practices all center around taking funding and growing as big as possible as quickly as possible, above all else.

If any "lifestyle" entrepreneurs want to grab a cup of coffee sometime and swap advice and/or encouragement, drop me a line - my contact info is in my profile.

If I'd stuck in the startup mode, I'd be dead.

See, startups are very demanding. And if you don't have great health, or a tendency towards stress-related illnesses, that's a very bad situation to be in. I've seen a friend die of it (hypertension plus 90 hour work weeks are a bad combination) and I was on course for it myself before I got out.

It doesn't matter if the startup is going to make you rich at the IPO if it kills you first. And it won't do the startup any good if one of the founder dies in harness, either.

But going it alone in the real world has been a teacher of many new lessons. I am struggling everyday to balance working towards a goal while maintaining the present reality. I am not alone in my current startup (http://infostripe.com) but it's pretty much down to me right now to finance, develop, market, and support it. Developing and managing growth are tasks I actually crave to do and my goal right now is to build an idea slowly, work hard, refine and iterate the results until it begins to take on a life of its own and we can afford specialists and consider investment.

I would say for sure that until you do reach the point of stability in your code and business model that you are living a particular lifestyle. Any time you can find to get closer to profitability is your life. I've watched many small business owners go through the same startup cycles. Some make it and some don't. It just really comes down to the fact that if the thing you are going after is something that you Love to do it will ultimately get easier if it is a decent idea. The something whether code or knitting is the thing that you want to do so figuring out the rest just enables your passion.

I believe ultimately that being able to think up, program and execute technical and/or products and craft ideas for making coin online is an ever growing small business of the now and future.

I started looking into other options. From what I understand, startups are for people who want to run a business and a lifestyle business is for people who want to own a business with a focus on maintaining their preferred lifestyle.

I am choosing to go the lifestyle business route. We’ll see how it goes :)

but who cares? What I wanted was traveling and travel I did. The author is right to point out that there's an (easier?) alternative to make it big. Make it now.

Depending on your experience of either side (which I, too, have) another way of looking at the comparison is, respectively, an organisation that hopes to turn into a business in the future, or a profitable business now.

Naturally, both sides want to earn revenue and be profitable. Only, on the 'startup' side, you have to have a really good reason to be in the position to take that funding. You need to know, I think, the first market you will tackle, the first problem you will solve and the first ways you will begin building revenue and profitability, otherwise you are just wasting time with other people's cash.

If a startup is a medical company needing funding for R&D, fine. If a startup is a hardware company needing to fill inventory, fine. If the startup is a software company that has worked out a repeatable sales model and now wants to get boots on the floor peddling those wares, also fine.

I guess what I'm saying is that it feels to me in software that 'startup' is almost the default, when in reality it should be a special case, or a latter day option as you scale up an already proven sales model.

I strongly believe that the main reason the author claims he prefers a lifestyle business really boils down to financial reasons and freedom of time associated with running a simple lifestyle business. But if you're in a position where finances are no longer an issue, it boils down to what you really want to do. For me, having been through both and having both do well enough to financially secure me for life, the concept of doing a business to "allow me to live life now" doesn't really apply. I can technically not work by choice and just enjoy life to the maximum extent doing whatever (financially related or not) or do projects on the side to fill up time if that's my hobby.

Instead, I find that I have a tremendous passion in doing startups, where the lifestyle IS the life I want and I don't really care about doing all the other so called "living life now" junk because this is living life at its best in my definition. I am the type that would rather not travel, hit up happy hour, or do other leisurely things in lieu of running my startup doing something cool or what I want to do. I rather focus all my spare time building a startup anyway. So to me, to some extent, it seems like the authors decision is base on the fact that financial, no matter how small of a factor it currently plays, is still a determining factor nonetheless (read associate of time included). The OP can feel free to correct me if this isn't so.

It also doesn't help that it seems the OP only has one startup experience to relate to and its one that didn't succeed (not counting the experience portion; which can be considered success or not separately) and ended up making him and his cofounder split ways (which even on the best of terms and all could still have some influence). Just my two cents.

After all is said and done, it also reflects how many people consider getting into doing a startup under the notion of either not wanting to work for somebody else or because of financial wins, less so because they just have a strong passion for doing startups (similar to people who do open source projects that aren't commercialize to an extent). I'm not saying the OP is like that in any way, but as the old mantra goes, do what you love. And if you love doing startups, freedom/finances isn't going to change your love of the game.

Side Note: I lived in SF for over three years before moving down to the Valley (Mountain View) in favor or startup life over city living. While SF is still very tech centric, in my personal honest opinion, it doesn't hold much of a candle to the Valley itself and majority of the people I've ever talked to arguing in favor of living in SF, are to a large extent, arguing for a life outside of the startup world. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that but the distinction should be made for non-Bay Area residents who may not understand the difference. (Again, personal opinion)

It does outline the difference between a VC-backed startup and a regular business but I hope that distinction is clear to most of the people here.

There is Tim-Ferriss-esque hinting at "dream lifestyle" stuff that disturbs me.