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Comment by scubakid | Hacker News Reader

Another thing to be cautious about is folks who steer your idea in a new direction towards a larger TAM (with bigger encumbents) because they don't see how the current idea can 1000X.

Sometimes, intentionally going after a market niche can be a good thing; you don't always have to set your sights on being the next unicorn. Especially if you're starting out as a solo dev, building the best product out there for a very specific audience can be a good strategy that leaves you with enough breathing room to continue to innovate and grow incrementally.

That's the general approach I've been taking with ProjectionLab.com (the personal finance simulator I've been building on the side for a year now) and thus far, it's been a fun and modestly fruitful journey.

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> Sometimes, intentionally going after a market niche can be a good thing

Solo founder of a successful self-funded business here. A market niche is in my opinion the best place to be. A niche will be enough for a small business, but might be too small for the crazed GROWTH GROWTH GROWTH mindset of most companies. That's good! It means that you won't be competing with companies burning through VC money and selling at below cost (as in $19/month B2B SaaS) just to get GROWTH.

As to the main point of the article — pretty much all advice I was given turned out to be wrong. And nearly everything you read on HN (especially comments) is wrong. Or, more precisely, it's advice given by people who are not in your situation, have never experienced your situation, and likely never will. This applies to business strategy, but also to technology: your choices will be influenced by very different factors than those of people commenting here. You won't care about "industry-standard practices", fashions, trends, or "will it help my career" factors. You will care about line count, total cost of ownership, pace of changes (things that change quickly are expensive to use), reliability, and the ability to fix things when something breaks.

So, my advice would be to make your own choices and take all advice with a very critical mindset. Including this advice, obviously :-)

100%. Or actually maybe I should say 75%... I think you're spot on that industry veterans, seasoned entrepreneurs, and assorted commenters (myself included of course), often give advice that's not quite calibrated to one's specific scenario and constraints; and sometimes those calibration errors can lead to conclusions that are 180 degrees off the actual best path. But at the same time, I would also say that over the years I've read a lot of great commentary on HN that I'd like to think has improved my overall mental model of the world, technology, and business.

P.S. I also agree that when you hear stories of venture-backed startups trying similar product ideas but then needing to pivot due to insufficient growth, that should often be music to the ears of a solo bootstrapper ;)

When I talk to friends about what I'm working on, I call it a "small business", and not a "startup", even though its purely software and could scale without substantially growing costs. I think the word "startup" gives the wrong impression—I don't care about scaling aggressively, I don't want to grow the team, I don't want to raise outside capital, I'm happy to stay within the niche. I think this framing tends to generate less pushback (and focus the conversation more on how I can serve the niche better).

I suppose the more precise word for this is a "lifestyle business", but not as many people are familiar with that term, and it can have a bit of a different connotation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifestyle_business

I like the term lifestyle business... but I'd be hesitant to use it until the business actually supported my lifestyle.

To acquaintances, I'll often just say "I'm building an app". Small business is a decent alternative, but a lot of the time when I use that term I'll feel pressure to clarify that it's not like.. a lawn mowing business or something. (nothing against those though!)

I used the term lifestyle business for a while, when dating and on dating apps.

Women were mostly enamored because they thought it was like a Youtuber thing, or lifestyle in the fashion sense, or a Youtuber telling people about lifestyle fashion of some sort.

Very different from "any line of business, implied as passively w/ recurring revenue, that happens to supports your lifestyle"

(I pivoted away from that, I found other truthful things that hit pretty well.)

On the other hand, I was hired at a startup a few years ago that had never raised money, had been profitable for a decade, and was just minting money hand over fist. It was a tech company, though, so it qualified as a "startup". (It was EasyBib.com)

Just because you're a tech company does not mean you're a startup. Especially if you've been running for 10+ years...

yeah isn't it interesting how the unnecessary and easily harmful thing of raising capital is seen as validation?

it just gets you press, but if there isn't really a larger TAM then you can personally wind up making less money than just keeping full ownership of the company.

thinly held companies can be conduits for really decent sums of money completely privately.

I thought "startup" meant more along the lines of "quickly growing burning vc money with the goal of 1000x or perish" rather than "tech company"...

No -- it means everyone is 23 years old and you get free lunch.

I'm the founding CTO of a small startup, and I've been trying to find the business equivalent of your side project. Have you come across any modern tools for financial forecasting?

I've been shown a couple tools geared for startups that some of my users had been playing around with, but those didn't look modern or nuanced enough to me. I haven't done a formal search though, so perhaps there are good things out there I'm not aware of. Eventually, I'd like to add better support for business use cases to ProjectionLab; in some ways, it's already close, but I'll need to carefully think through a few things like more granular event timing/scheduling and short/near-term views.

https://usesummit.com/

Visual editor seems pretty cool. Can summit do probabilistic things like monte carlo simulation as well, or is it scoped to deterministic projection?

Creator here.

You can use fuzzy numbers to get varied output, and if you want to do MC you can use the API into your model to call it with whatever distributions you want and aggregate the output. But no, our UI doesn’t natively support doing a MC sim because the demand is frankly less than you’d expect. :)

What kind of forecasting are you looking for? I'm searching for something similar to calculate profits & planning expenses over time.

If I can't find something that works, this might be something I'm considering to build myself.

This seems exactly what you are looking for https://www.causal.app/

After looking through their landing page, I totally agree, this looks perfect. Thank you!

Causal, Pry, Finmark etc are good tools. Costs can vary, you'll need to be clear about your specific goals to stay price effective.

I’ve used a lot of financial forecasting software from Oracle/SAP to SaaS to all the startups. I do implementations and day to day CFO empowerment.

The new kid on the block I like is cubesoftware.com . It’s priced rather affordably for a small business but maybe not a solo sized one

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