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Comment by lbriner | Hacker News Reader

I agree with a lot of the spirit in the article but I don't think learning to code from a book because you can't afford a dev is not a great example.

How many people lost their crypto-currency because the exchanges were written by people with no experience/training in development (or security specifically).

The counter-point is to buy in people who can do better than you can for less money. In other words, if a Developer can build what you need in 1 week for $1000 (in 90s money!) what would otherwise take you 6 weeks, are you saving money or wasting it? We don't always count our own time as money but it is if you could be much better placed to sell or market your business.

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Depends what you're doing.

I was selling CDs from my living room. Making $300 per month.

It was the appropriate solution for the situation.

Hi Derek, just wanted to say that your book Anything You Want had an outsized impact on me when I started my entrepreneurial journey many years ago. And, I used your "CD Baby Loves You" open rate learning to great affect many times for my own businesses :). Thank you for being so open and sharing your hard-earned wisdom!

Doing a financial product as a green self-trained dev is not a great idea. But it's also a straw man. There are many great products that don't need to handle millions of users, or are not handling bank connections, that can be bootstrapped by smart people willing to put some work into it.

If they are okay with slower growth, those people will learn a lot, may build a viable business, and will not have to deal with the stress of dealing with the board and constantly raising money.

There are many, many 5-10 person companies (or less!) that have been bootstrapped, that make a lot of money, and that have very happy founders with happy customers, and whose founders have no pressure to sell out or do things they don't want to do. The main cost is patience and willingness to not be a glitzy success story in the papers. Nobody is paid to encourage you to take this path, except for you.

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