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Comment by VRay | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention that working two jobs poorly is a lot more work and a lot less money than boostrapping a decent SaaS

EDIT: Pretty rich that I'm getting downvoted so much, despite multiple examples of successful SaaS creators showing up in the comments, and this being a forum started by a VC partly to promote and encourage tech startups. If you think that starting a tech business is so impossibly difficult that you're personally offended at the idea of someone recommending you do it, I'd say you should just go back to Reddit or Twitter.

If you're bristling at me calling SaaS "easy", I just meant it's easier than running a multi-year scam and probably committing fraud, depending on the details of your employment contracts.

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I actually agree with you over the other comments. I think the idea of industriously trying to be the worst worker you possibly can (while not being fired) is one of those self-defeating efforts to do less work where you actually do more work in a lot of ways. You've got to justify to yourself continually that you're not being a drain or a bad person. You've got to juggle context switching between two roles during an overlapping period, making both more difficult than they would be individually and leaving yourself worse able to focus generally. (I suppose you could probably block your schedule to make this work better but I can't see a silver bullet solution for all the time.) You've got to compartmentalize your jobs and your interaction with coworkers. I know that with my personality, these factors would be major drags on my mental and emotional well-being. I would feel like a fraud for a long time before getting used to something like this.

With a business, while you deal with some similar issues (compartmentalization, context-switching), I expect they'd feel far less invalidating (again, to me/those with similar personality types) because you'd know you were actually applying yourself to do the best you could.

Oh wow if only any old dev could bootstrap a $400k SaaS – way easier said than done

While it's not easy (and you should never trust anyone who says that it is), I do think that it's more feasible than most developers think it is. I'm not special, absolutely far from it, and I achieved it (in Australian dollars anyway, and focused on a B2B niche rather than B2C)

If you're going to engage in fraud anyway, you can make more than you'd pull in from working two jobs

Hell, with all the crypto madness going on right now, you could probably get ludicrously wealthy just doing freelance black hat security testing.

You aspiring fraudsters should actually read all the paperwork they put in front of you next time you start a job, and tell me if there's no exclusivity at all in it. Just because Jack Dorsey got away with running two companies doesn't mean it's right or just for you to weasel along and lie to two managers forever.

Get your life together and do something meaningful instead of stressing yourself out for the sake of whatever pair of pittances you can earn from this dumb scam.

Successfully boostrapping a decent SaaS sounds way more challenging in my eyes, got any tips on resources to read to make that be as obvious a task as it seems to be in your eyes?

There’s a ton of content out there, but the best advice I’ve seen is simple.

1. Find a (ideally large) group of people you care about

2. Find a problem they have

3. Solve it

Can you make it so obvious someone working 2 remote jobs could do it?

My favorite example is the Expat Software guy: https://expatsoftware.com/articles/

Another good one is Daedtech/Hit Subscribe

Absolutely it is not. Most decent bootstrapped SaaS will have trouble getting pure profit that matches the salary of two developer jobs, and it will be a lot of work, a lot more than just engineering.

Yeah, even matching one developer job is hard... you definitely get better at it and closer as you go, but that's alot of opportunity cost in the process, if you can even survive that long on peanuts

I'm on the fence on this one. Maybe running a freelancer business? Dunno. The thing is boosttraping a decent SaaS is pretty hard tho.

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