Being a Solo Software Entrepreneur at 40 | Hacker News Reader

Being a Solo Software Entrepreneur at 40

medium.com

182 pointsalex_suzuki70 comments

I hope these articles and the number they say is something for you to cherish and prepare for your upcoming years of successes;

- The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45. https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...

- 45 is the median age of billion dollar start-up founders. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/27/super-founders-median-age-of...

- Entrepreneurs have successful exits have an average founding age of 47. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/average-age-successful-entrep...

- Research Shows Average Age Of Successful Founders Is Older Than You Think. https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhall/2018/10/16/age-of-succ...

> We found that the average age of entrepreneurs at the time they founded their companies is 42. But the vast majority of these new businesses are likely small businesses with no intentions to grow large (for example, dry cleaners and restaurants)

From your first link, this is the key passage.

People are conflating two data points (startup founder and average age of a business owner when they founded their company). The later is a bigger population than the former.

"Startup Founder" is synonymous with growing a business to be huge, so you should exclude founders from the calculation who are NOT attempting to grow a business to be huge.

I imagine when you exclude said individuals, the average age of a "startup" founder to be much younger.

https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...

The article also says:

> The average age of people who founded the highest growth startups (i.e. the startups in the top 1% by growth) is 45.

So contrary to your intuition (and mine!), the average high growth startup founder, at 45, is older, not younger, than the average "startup" founder, at 42.

This is not that surprising when you think about it. These are usually serial enterpreneurs so they learned from their previous companies and can somewhat evade the mistakes that were made there. In the startup world this usually comes with bigger check sizes too, which can help you grow faster.

Ten years to overnight success...

> "Startup Founder" is synonymous with growing a business to be huge, so you should exclude founders from the calculation who are NOT attempting to grow a business to be huge.

By the YC and VC definition. But we can also go by the indie hacker or bootstrapped definition, making enough money to replace your job and if it's even more, then great, but it's not expected to make billions.

Most people, not just VC's, would define a startup as a business which is geared for growth. How is a business that just pays the bills a startup? Isn't that just a small business?

isn't it that all businesses are for growth? apple is expected to grow too, but I would not call it as startup..

I have'nt seen any (except non-profit ones) company which would intentionally claim " we are aiming and loweri g our revenue" or "let's keep it as it is" :)

I‘m very interested in starting my own business, I’m not interested at all in making it huge, at least in terms of staff.

Same to both

I believe that in large it can be attributed to a large number of experienced invited/appointed executives who make an exit. Not necessarily being a founder.

I tried to do a startup in my early 30s. I'm in my late 30s now, and all I can say is having personal money and savings is HUGELY underrated. I had a LOT of stress from trying to live off a founder salary in my early 30s (AND with $8K+ of medical expenses every year), and I imagine that if I go at a startup again in my 40s it will be when I have a decent chunk of savings in the bank.

In contrast to the author, I find software development at 50 to be an amazing experience. I am more patient and have the mental flexibility to learn things which were much harder for me 10-20 years ago.

That was about the last time I developed in C++ and I found it excruciating then. Today, I find it exhilarating and intuitive. Also unexpected is I find there is a sense of more immediate gratification. Perhaps it is because I'm not dealing with layers of modern libraries or spending 80% of my time trying to sort through build errors caused by someone updating a dependency I didn't know I had. I can see visible progress every day. It reminds me very much of developing in the 90s and 2000s.

Being financially secure also plays a role. I don't have to work (and in fact, I took much of Covid off), but I do because I enjoy it so much. Consequently, I have zero stress over day-to-day matters. I have found that work, decoupled from finances, can be incredibly rewarding.

> In contrast to the author, I find software development at 50 to be an amazing experience. I am more patient and have the mental flexibility to learn things which were much harder for me 10-20 years ago.

I feel the same, but at 40 now.

During the pandemic, I left a position that I was in for almost a decade on a tech stack that I was using for almost a decade.

The first few months felt bewildering; yarn, NPM, Vite, React, Vue, Svelte, AWS, GCP, Azure, Functions, Containers, Docker, Kubernetes, on and on! But as I let go of any dogmatism, I quickly adapted to new tooling, new techniques, new languages, and new platforms. I went from building on-prem enterprise solutions deployed to VMWare to building cloud solutions in AWS, Azure, and GCP (yes, all of them) at various VC-backed startups (including a YC company).

I came out of the experience completely renewed with an incredible drive to just create software now.

Rather than seeing the complexity that the author sees in the current environment, I see options and there are definitely some options which, IMO, make it even easier and better than ever to be a developer [0]. If code is magic, we have more spells, ingredients, and tomes of magic at our disposal than ever. A hard part is navigating that landscape, but it has been so rewarding.

I've been writing prolifically over the last year as a side effect of that aggressive learning.

I feel more empowered now to create great software than I ever have.

[0] Google Cloud Run API from 0 to cloud in < 7 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlnEm7JyvyY

Thank you for this positive story from the other side of 50.

I was always worried that I'd lose my edge the older I got.

But with age comes financial independence, emotional stability, experience with the cost of a decision, and the authority to make them instead of always be subject to the decisions of others.

I'm 37 and have never worked harder. I look forward to having more time to do spare-time projects and go back to teaching, but there's just so much I'd rather do for other people right now. I can't imagine it changes the next 20 years, only that my role gets more organizational.

I really enjoyed watching the Handmade Hero (https://handmadehero.org/) series about creating a game from scratch without all of the external libraries and dependencies. There is something refreshing about having both the understanding and control of all the parts of your project. I feel your pain on constant library and dependency updates.

Not yet there, but I have the impression that older devs are vastly more popular with people outside of development. Customers for example, those tend to not take younger people that seriously. I believe it is different in the US though, but in my country you have to be older to have your ideas taken more seriously.

If you think you are old, I'd say you are already default dead and all the sympathy and palliative experiences in the world aren't going to change that. If you want to live, live, and any invitation to a pity party over being "40" won't make it even to the bottom of my stack.

The idea of 40 as old is a ridiculous artifact of early to mid-20th century life expectancies and an economy based on manual labour. Given today you are socially useless until at least about 20, after which most of that decade is spent either in school or in journeyman roles, and then your 30s are spent either raising children or cultivating taste and other affectations on the hedonic treadmill - it's very unlikely you will make something someone else wants. 40 is where one is finally capable of the skill and insight necessary to make something new and provide honest value to others. You get another two decades of prime momentum with an understanding of how the cycles rhyme, until the wisdom makes you too distant from validating the anxieties of younger people, whose struggles don't register for you anymore. Then at 60, give or take, you get another couple or so decades to really appreciate it, ideally with grandchildren, but more likely small dogs and other emotional support animals these days, and then you decide what you want to leave behind. Worry about being 40 is giving up way too early.

Author here. I’m sorry that my article came over as a „pity party“ to you. It is actually quite the opposite. 40 was just incidentally a round number coinciding with some changes happening in my life. Actually, I sincerely hope that you are right. :-)

And I've been backhandedly encouraging by admonishing you to challenge a percieved constraint by rejecting its legitimacy. I think we're aligned, and one hopes iron still sharpens iron. :)

cheers to that!

I disagree with this sentiment:

> It is harder to build something today than it used to be.

It's SO MUCH EASIER! Are you kidding me‽ 10 years ago it was much more expensive to stand up some service on the Internet and the de facto frameworks of the time did not scale very well. Now it's so cheap (and easy) to serve something up to millions of users it's practically free.

Not only that but if you're building something that uses hardware we're sooooo much better off today than 10 years ago it's like night and day. Getting a PCB prototype made 10 years ago was expensive (~$500-1500) and it took a lot longer. Today you can get bare PCBs for less than $10 (within 100x100mm) and get them fully assembled for less than $50 (depending on the components, of course). Not only that but you'll have it in your hands within a week! It's astounding.

The software available for doing hardware design 10 years ago was expensive and the open source stuff wasn't that great. Today we have Kicad 6 which is awesome. We also have embedded Rust which makes adapting your existing firmware to new hardware a bazillion times easier than with C (which is what we were stuck with for the most part forever and ever).

There are some things that are much harder today than before:

    * Chip (and hardware) availability.
    * Real estate is *much* more expensive.  Though there's great deals on office space!
    * Gas/energy is MUCH more expensive...  But that shouldn't matter much to a software developer.

Author here, thanks for the perspective.

I’m absolutely on board with it being easier to build something today than ever before. SaaS, public cloud providers, billing platforms etc. all exist and are awesome.

My viewpoint is that it’s harder to build something original or financially viable. Sometimes it feels that all the low-hanging fruit has been picked hundreds of times, and anything truly significant is out of reach.

I‘ve had dozens of ideas I didn’t pursue further after asking myself „if this is such a great idea, why hasn’t somebody else already done it?“.

Maybe that‘s a loser‘s mindset ;-)

> build something original or financially viable

> I‘ve had dozens of ideas I didn’t pursue further after asking myself „if this is such a great idea, why hasn’t somebody else already done it?“.

You're conflating the two ("original" and "financially viable"). In my opinion, your mindset is fundamentally flawed. I'm not saying this in a negative way, I just mean that I've seen it before in others, and I myself used to think like you, so I can understand what you mean.

The truth is, clones make money. You don't need an original idea to be financially successful, at the 4 to 8 figure range. Indeed, if you simply want to quit your job rather than make billions, you should be in a market with many competitors so you can carve out a small slice of it. If you instead are building a whole new market, like Airbnb or Uber, you can carve out a much larger slice but that requires a fundamentally different way of working, ie raising lots of money, teaching your audience (before Uber, who'd get in an unlicensed stranger's car?), and marketing the hell out of your startup.

Instead, find a nice, large market with lots of competitors, and start building something. As you build, you will naturally find competitive advantages that differentiate you from your competitors. I also thought I needed to find something totally unique and original, ie an all new market, but I realized that was not the way to have success. Instead, I use an already successful market but then build something in those spaces.

See https://indiehackers.com for more info.

The product I’m building right now, which I’m referring to at the end, indeed also exists in an existing, competitive space.

You’ve given me something to think about, thanks.

Read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31352108

It talks about how the author waiting too long to ship and regretted it.

I think you have to just pick an idea you're passionate about and build it.

I've had the same thought before yet even here on HN I've seen many startups shared that feel like rehashes of past ones. But those past ones got acquired...

Now I believe in just build a solid product and attract customers/users.

I think they're valid points. A lot of people argue that it's easier than ever before just because the costs are lower, without factoring in many other crucial aspects like timing, competition, and so on.

The tools and operational bits are better and more available but the bar for what constitutes a viable product is much higher today. The cost and complexity of engineering done today would have been beyond the realm of practicality not that many years ago.

Engineering complexity grows to consume the capabilities of our tools. Incremental improvements in operations and tools doesn't offset the large changes in engineering sophistication required to build software that isn't a mediocre re-hash of something that already exists. The definition of "state-of-the-art" in database engines, for example, has moved so much in the last 15 years that the level of technical know-how required has become a prohibitive barrier to new products.

I agree with the article sentiment. The threshold for what could be considered a viable business was much lower 20 years ago. My first tech job doesn't even exist anymore because Squarespace et al have consumed the lower end of web development.

Granted, certain things like game development are a lot easier now.

Are these hardware cheaper than before mainly due to outsourcing, where are you making PCB? if it's from China it might not last due to the tension these days.

Another huge factor is how many kids do you have and how old are they? Age-45-or-50 might also mean that the kids are easier to handle so the parents finally can pursue something. For people that are very successful without kids, they live in a different world most of the time.

> if it's from China it might not last due to the tension these days.

Sure, but that's the future. Don't create imaginary problems to worry about: you'll find plenty that already exist that need to be dealt with right now.

I strongly relate with this article. Being also in my 40s (but married with no kids) I am at a point in life where I am almost financially independent. I've got a bunch of equity from good startups (which will likely exit in the next year or two at about $500m to $1B mark, giving me a bit of cash) in my pocket and a job that gives me huge freedoms doing fun stuff (first time I do Machine Learning, Graph databases and neural networks for a straightforward application that is making people happy!).

But... I want to build my own startup. I don't really care about being solo, and actually I subscribe to Jack Ma's [1] ages' principles: I want to empower young people with my skills. So I joined a pair of young(er) guys building a startup, asked for some equity and cash comp, and next January will start building it. What I really wanted to do is get into Health Tech, but I've got a "curse" of having a strong background in FinTech. Although it pays very good, I am in a privileged position of not needing the money, and I'm in this age where "making a positive impact in the world" has way more weight (granted, I have this luxury given my current financial status). It also helps that I live in a cheap country with acceptable socialized health, so I don't have to worry about that (too much).

No point in my rambling sorry, I guess I just wanted to put it out there.

[1] https://www.knowol.com/knowledge/jack-mas-success-advice-all...

Another idea you may find interesting: InfoSec. Some of my friends who were looking beyond engineering said "Your Machine Learning is boring. But InfoSec is a very diverse landscape, hard to get bored".

I did InfoSec after my post-exit sabbatical and I found it too lonely. I was good at it (hobbyist decompiler my whole life), but the loneliness was a killer and I'm looking for team dynamics as my #1 factor for the next thing I do.

What kind of InfoSec role were you doing? I sometimes find team dynamics too draining :)

Vuln research - source and binary. Team meetings once a week and... nothing else.

I agree with your friends: machine learning is boring. At the ground level it is basically fancy ETL. I think it would be a gross mistake for schools to encourage undergrads to make a career out of ML (masters and PhD level stuff is hopefully better). InfoSec on the other hand is dynamic, even in the trenches, and is something that should continue to be in high demand for the coming decades.

Is it a good time to get into it now though? I would've thought InfoSec roles are first on the chopping block when budgets get squeezed in a tech downturn.

Maybe you're right, I'm not sure.

Healthcare money seems to be mostly around billing. Ways to increase billing mostly.

I’ve found that you need to get as much done as possible early on. Once you get to certain point HIPPA will drive all business decisions. Mostly by making people terrified of making changes and causing a violation.

Source. Been in industry off and on.

Would love to find a way to help regular people diagnosis problems better. If you go into any chronic illness forum. You see tons of people asking questions on symptoms, test results, doctors etc.

I constantly see people that have textbook perfect cases of some condition. But doctors routinely dismiss it. Or won’t order tests or ignore tests or don’t use correct tests.

> I’ve found that you need to get as much done as possible early on. Once you get to certain point HIPPA will drive all business decisions. Mostly by making people terrified of making changes and causing a violation.

Sounds pretty similar to my FinTech experience: PCI, SOC2 and ISO27001 or ISO37001 will drive companies into inaction.

Oh crud. Soc2 is horrific. All fun stops when company starts the process.

Currently a bit over 40.

Give exercise fitness and physical activities as much attention as absolutely possible from as early as possible. Same with good eating.

Your 20s will catch up to you.

Currently 37, and am soon reaching my 31 yo crossfit max. No 'roids. :-)

Only difference is: I build slowly, I wanna keep fit until 70+.

And yes, for the 20 year olds: Exercise every day!

6 seems a bit young to have a child.

But seriously, I turned 40 earlier this year and a) am in the best shape of my life, and b) need to be because my body can’t deal with dozens of hours of desk work every week without it.

I can’t speak for CrossFit, but doing group workout activities like yoga is a great way to meet folks from different walks of life, and I was very pleasantly surprised when I first started yoga by how welcoming it was. I had some anxiety around being terrible at it in front of a bunch of experienced strangers, but I found my fears were quickly allayed.

Am 24 and literally everything hurts. I try to work out but i feel it's just destroying myself. Also there is not even time since work and studying takes up so much. It's a privilege that people can do all that and work out.

A lot of people, when they hear exercise and physical fitness, imagine something like getting up at 5am and hitting the gym for an hour.

For folks in your situation, I typically advise looking at the overall structure of your life and figuring out what you can change so that you are inherently more active. Try a lunch time walk. Or, one of my favorites, is an after dinner walk to settle the stomach and get a fresh look at the neighborhood. Bike to work. Study less. You got options, you just need to think about what balance you personally want to strike

I was like that for many years. A workout would take me two weeks to recover.

As is common for mystery symptoms. Turned out to be an autoimmune condition.

If it's important you'll find the time. I used to exercise during WFH meetings. If I don't need to talk then I can do squats or burpees or something while listening.

> It is harder to build something today than it used to be.

I've build things in the 80s -> no distribution (games)

I've build things in the 90s -> no SaaS invented/accepted (wiki startup)

Today is easier than ever to build, distribute and get customers.

I'm 50 and starting something new as the sole developer.

Awesome! What are you making?

Just clone something that already exists. I did that all my life, still doing it. Try to clone a product with at least 20 fairly large players in the field. Make it slightly different and you might generate some income. Don't try to be the new Über or Facebook. Try that when your clones are successful. An example product which for sure can generate income is a dream station like product using stable diffusion. I am not gonna make it, but I am convinced that if you create a simple prototype you can easily make a few k per month.

> After all the doom and gloom, I sometimes need to remind myself that all is not lost after 40.

Oh good grief. 40 is young.

"40 is the old age of youth; 50 is the youth of old age."

"I'm a man, I'm 40!" - Mike Gundy

What is 45 then

middle-age

“Frontier technologies such as AI or ML are hard to get into if you’re not already sitting on a pile of data and cash. End users are accustomed to everything being free or cheap, sustained by a decade of advertising-based business models." Alex Suzuki

Building general AI model requires lot of capital but building niche models is less resource/data intensive.

But yeah, you need to understand the fundamentals.

I'm over 50 and still coding. I do feel I'm much easier to get tired and sleepy and less productive these days even though I jogging daily. Still having kids in the house did not help either.

I tried startup, working at a startup now, and plan to re-try startup later, but feeling tired really lowers my productivity these days, I do think age(50+) plays a role there at least to me.

Then the heavy stock loss this year made my finance situation shaky, that also impacts my efficiency of work though I don't think about it all the time.

I always wanted to be Internet entrepreneur, that is, start my own thing. I do run business and earn money, but it’s family business and highly un-scalable. I agree with most of the point present. I wish I could use the knowledge acquired till now that may somehow converted to a software that will benefit me and others. But If nothing, I guess, I’ll be happy if in the end, I can summarise everything with a good blog post.

> It is harder to build something today than it used to be.

Interesting viewpoint. I really want to a bootstrapped software business, but I find it so hard to come up with a financially-viable opportunity.

It is. So my advice is to build something that is interesting, and might have some value, and don't worry about it being financially viable. Then get it out there, iterate, pivot, learn and eventually you may find viability.

My point is, more often than not, there isn't a eureka moment when a fully fleshed out idea with financial viability just pops in your head. Oftentimes the best ideas start out small and boring. Use your day job as the de facto funder of your quest for viability.

Makes sense. I just can't find something that interests me so much that I'd want to work on it in the evenings/weekends. Maybe with time...

Do you mean finding product-market-fit? Job 1 of a startup?

Well, this just rips my excuses and tosses them out a window. Thanks for the motivation today!

Better later in life than earlier. (The right) experience is a secret weapon.

same boat ... it is a completely different ride.

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