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Comment by jliptzin | Hacker News Reader

I have started a number of businesses, even what I considered the unsuccessful ones still made me more money than I would have made at any 9-5 I could have had at the time. You just have to be willing to do something boring and compete against businesses that aren’t currently being run well. Starting the 7,000th craft beer company is gonna be really hard but (for example) being the #1 powerwashing company in your town is boring but way more lucrative

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You can start a business that you get an dopamine hit from telling people about, or you can start a business that makes real money. Pick one.

Or you can create a cryto scam and have the best of both worlds.

What makes you think being the #1 powerwashing company is going to be any easier than making an equivalent amount of money in the corporate world? Do you have any reason to believe you are better at powerwashing than the other 99 guys in your town?

The point is to pick a boring business where it’s easy to become #1 in a market based on current competition, clientele, skills, etc.

In the corporate world you are still trading your time for money. When you own a business you decide what and how much you want to do, up to and including nothing at all while still making an income. Boring businesses make it easy to hire people to do the stuff you don’t want to.

There’s no such thing as a business that’s both lucrative and trivial. To the extent that you need finesse, hard work and luck to build a successful business, the same combination of finesse, hard work and luck could land you an equally or more lucrative corporate job.

You can also make passive income by investing your large corporate salary and earn extra income without working. There’s no such thing truly passive, zero labor income when running a business, there’s always some managerial overhead even if you delegate as much as possible. Index funds are truly 100% passive.

Not true. You hire a CEO if you really don’t want to do anything. And it is a lot of work but usually nothing that difficult for straightforward businesses.

The average enterprise dev in any major city in the US can make twice the median household income with 3-5 years experience.

That’s still not that much

It’s not that much yet people making the median household income are not living on the street going hungry.

That's a pretty low bar, though. There are many different levels of struggling but I don't think it is productive to deny challenges of someone just because they are better off than some others.

Do you mean “struggling” as in “I can’t provide myself with food and shelter” or do you mean “I can’t put little Johny in private school and buy the 3500 square foot house in the burbs and go on nice vacations twice a year”?

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