Ask HN: Best resources on starting a lifestyle business? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best resources on starting a lifestyle business?

139 pointsAbstractH2477 comments

After working in RevOps and sales for VC-backed startups for a few years, I'm considering creating a SaaS business that helps solve problems for a particular niche industry that interests me.

What are some resources that are useful to look at while I consider embarking on this journey?

My experience in RevOps & sales the last few years has been that so many influencers are trying to pitch you their guides and resources for a fee. It's made me suspicious of pretty much anyone selling their insights and made it hard to determine which are of actual value.

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Not exactly a resource but more of an advice - learn software development. Unless you are familiar to some extent, you will always be dependent on a competent software engineer, and that will make it much harder to build a lifestyle business.

Second advice, use Ruby on Rails or Django as a web framework and don't follow after the complexities of JS and other newcomers. Phoenix (Elixir) is awesome but that will require much more efforts and expertise compared to the established and time-tested Rails and Django.

Good luck!

p.s. I'm writing this as a person managing a lifestyle business (LibHunt & SaaSHub).

p.p.s. I'd also recommend getting into the IndieHackers community for inspiration and shared experience.

Contrary view. Your success running a lifestyle software business is likely to be far more dependent on your marketing skills and efforts that what what tech stack you use.

True, but here lies thus the paradoxical thing about tools: a good tools is one that stays out of your way when you want to do something, while a bad tools is one that requires you to focus on itself instead of the underlying objective.

Thus, a tool is the least important part of a project, while choosing the right tools might be one of the most important decision of a project.

The OP isn’t making a point about the software stack insomuch as they are making the point that your developer has you by the short hairs if the stack is too specific or if you have no idea how anything works. Use something that someone else will have a fighting chance to take over when the day comes that your developer gives you two weeks notice. And be sure to document everything.

Yea, but once you’ve solved that you’re at the mercy of the whims of your software engineer.

The right tech stack will not bring success, the wrong one will doom it.

So wouldn't it follow that choosing a low effort stack translates to more time being available for the real task of marketing and business activities?

I was being a bit contrarian. Obviously choice of tech stack is important. But, in my experience, people obsess too much over that and sepnd way too little time thinking about marketing. Also, choose reliable 'devil you know' tech over the latest flashy framework.

I don't want to hijack this thread, but what does Django do?

I ask, cause I have a service that is a Rust backend (kind of specialized in what it does) + a SolidJS frontend... But I've seen a potential area for growth, I didn't imagine at first, and that would be stuff like user profiles, authentication, and managing stuff. And I really don't want to cut all this more "CRUD" like stuff in Rust and an SPA. I don't know Ruby, but have done some rather large Python projects in the past, just never ventured into Django land.

Out of the box Django offers: authentication, database management and migration, a web server, a template engine, URL routing, and probably more - pretty much everything an app needs in a single framework.

Django also has some GIS tools builtin if you need to do anything with geographic data. It has a solid library of error handling, messages, and web security tooling you will probably need, and, the third party ecosystem, both Djano specific modules and the wider Python ecosystem are very powerful.

Django has all that built in: auth, users, CRUD.

It comes with a built in admin portal that lets you work with all your data in list views and detail views, with sorting, filtering, and searching. For a lot of scenarios you can get away with just using the admin portal (like we have accounting people log in there and import CSV files, etc).

It’s great for managing a data model, setting up a database schema and managing the migrations for you. And once that is setup it’s pretty trivial to enable API endpoints to do all the CRUD-style stuff, if needed.

Nothing against Django, just suggesting another option: Laravel offers the same "out of the box" tools that Django does. Django is built with Python, Laravel with PHP. Someone will be along in a moment to start the flame wars about why one or the other or both totally suck, but for your purposes it's most important to choose the language and approach that will be most comfortable to you.

Yeah, these days I'd put Laravel and Rails pretty toe-to-toe on features and productivity. Django is good but it's not in the same tier, imo.

> Django is good but it's not in the same tier, imo.

In what ways does Django lag behind Rails or Laravel?

The ecosystems.

Laravel's first-party ecosystem, both paid and free, on top of the framework is quite widespread. This also brings a lot of people to the party on the third party side with excellent tools like Filament and Ploi. I don't see this nearly as much for Django. Have a look under the Ecosystem tab on the Laravel homepage. Within a few `composer install`s, you can get:

- Local dev environment (i.e. actually running the app): Herd, Sail

- Stripe/Paddle support: Cashier, Spark

- Starter kit scaffolds including all the usual auth goodies (e.g. 2FA): Breeze, Jetstream

- View layer alternatives to plain old HTML views: Livewire, Inertia

- API and Social logins: Passport, Sanctum (for SPAs), Socialite

- Fulltext search: Scout

- Robust APM: Pulse, and Telescope on dev

- Admin panels: Nova, and 3rd party Filament

- Websockets: Echo, Reverb (coming soon)

- Infrastructure, both traditional and serverless: Forge, Envoyer, Vapor, Ploi

- Completely alternative PHP runners to replace php-fpm: Octane with Roadrunner, Swoole, or FrankenPHP

- Automated browser testing: Dusk

You can find Django packages for these things too, but I struggle to see many of them coming from the actual Django team. I also think the Django Admin solution is very neat for getting off the ground, but doesn't seem as robust as Nova or Filament.

Lastly, call it my bias, but Python's overall lacklustre developer experience with package and environment management (compared to Composer and Ruby gems) also affects Django as a result.

Thanks so much for the thorough reply! Especially including ecosystem details.

Also PHP has Laravel Spark[0]. They basically bootstrapped a SaaS but for a price. Not sure if it's worth it, but it's from the guys who made Laravel, and everyone only has good things to say about that so...

[0] https://spark.laravel.com

Phoenix is just as easy as Rails to get started and now with LiveView, easier than needing to know Ruby and JavaScript. It’s a secret weapon for indie hackers.

I've tried it. I've built a few products as well. Production level. Again, it's amazing; however, you simply can't beat the usefulness of ActiveRecord (and a number of other gems) with Phoenix.

Again, I'm saying this within the context of data heavy web apps.

ActiveRecord is my least favorite part about Rails. And it’s such a foot(machine?)gun.

Come on. I am a huge phoenix/elixir fan - I am procrastinating from elixir dev writing this very comment - but this is not even close to true. It is a big learning curve. It's absolutely worth it, IMO, but there is no way it is as easy to get started with as rails. Not even close.

It's my framework of choice and a secret weapon indeed but let's not pretend it's rails-easy. It's just not.

Difficulty with Elixir is logarithmic, with Python is exponential. As the product accretes features, Python/JS tends to require much more expertise to deal with all the corner cases. Elixir keeps it long term maintainable. If you wanna explode and sell out, go for the early ease. If you plan on owning it forever, I'd say the upfront investment is more than worth it.

I don't disagree. I agree it's worth the extra effort up front if you're expecting the code base to last. And the exponential complexity you mentioned, well, that's basically why I left Rails. It can be designed well.. but you're going against the grain, and unless the rest of your team is totally on board, it's a struggle.

That wasn't the question though. The question was, which is easier? And let me tell you, you can't beat User.first. Even typing this comment I'm proving my point as I can't remember how to do that in ecto. User |> first() |> Repo.one()? after importing and aliasing a bunch of mysterious (to the beginner) things?

Right tool for the job. If i was building a temporary app, i'd use rails and make very very sure everyone was on board with the idea that it was temporary. I might even sabotage it so it couldn't be used long term (us evil old rails devs have.. tricks). Proper long term infra? elixir.

I also don't disagree with anything you said, except the idea that difficulty is not time dependent. Easy short term and easy long term are different things and that's the point I'm trying to make. Elixir land documentation is top notch and having to look things up is not a bad thing. Why would memorizing how to get started on something be good unless you're greenfielding projects every other week?

Why remember, between the Elixir language tooling and code copilot, that sort of thing writes itself. Or you can even add a helper “one” function to handle that for you.

As a JS developer, I second this. I love node, react and typescript, but they're great tools to build very complex web apps — think Figma or an in-browser IDE.

If you're building a typical CRUD app and don't have a VC-backed budget, just use a Django or Rails.

I’m a TypeScript developer. Don't understand why it requires complexity? You can just as easily build crud APIs in TypeScript.

Of course you could, but it doesn't mean you always should. Typescript doesn't have a kitchen sink framework like Django or Rails.

Exactly what part of it is a lifestyle business if you don't write the software yourself ?

That's a recipe for a very non-lifestyle business

I've been running a bootstrapped, lifestyle software business since 2005. I've linked to some articles you might find relevant here (for free!): https://successfulsoftware.net/starting-a-microisv/

I read you since the golden days in "The Business of Software" forums. Congrats for a successful career as a solo dev :-)

BTW, I have the feeling that nowadays is way harder to live from "traditional" software than some years ago, except for some system software that a SaaS can't replicate, of course.

Thanks.

The downloadable software has been shrinking for years. But there is still a market and all the 'cool kids' are doing SaaS, so less competition.

I nearly read your whole site after clicking this link. Thanks for creating/sharing.

Big fan of your articles! I have a few bookmarked that I like to read every now and then

Cool. I hope they are helpful.

Lifestyle businesses are underrated in my opinion. They are also more achievable than a multi-million exit, especially if a lifestyle business is the planned goal. A lifestyle business does have particular challenges however. Specifically, moving it from a stage two to stage three business as described in Scale by Finkel and Hoffman:

https://www.amazon.com/Scale-Seven-Proven-Principles-Busines...

A stage 1 business depends on the founder doing the work; a stage two business depends on specific people doing the work; a stage three business has enough systems and checks in place that people are interchangeable.

With a stage two business, a critical person leaving can threaten the entire business. This is a particular issue in the software field where people tend to job hop. Creating a stable lifestyle company that is more than a three or four person shop, thus requires a large and sustained effort to document all critical processes. Don’t underestimate this challenge.

I think life style businesses are fine, provided you’re the only one that’s not interchangeable.

For instance, if I run a business and hire workers to develop features for the website and have a few people in the factory assembling widgets. It’s fine so long as I can approve the PRs and train up the next folks as needed.

That would be a ~ three or four person shop in my experience. It’s small enough that you the founder know how to do everything themself. That’s a fine business, but often it’s tough to take a vacation and leave it on autopilot for a few weeks. And heaven help you if you ever come down ill.

Vacation for a few weeks? I never imagined taking weeks of vacation unless I’m between jobs or businesses. If you can take weeks, then you’re probably not needed at all or so sparingly an occasional email would do.

Wait till you’re a little older and have a family. The OP asked about a lifestyle business, that is, a business to build an actual life around, not an ‘I’m-in-my-early-thirties-and-still-single-so-burn-me-out-please’ business.

ugh … I won’t comment on exact numbers, but I have plenty of kids lol

If you get to the point you aren’t needed great; but everyone I know running lifestyle businesses tend to take only a few weeks off throughout the year — not all at once. Many take <1 week per year. They’d be considered “stage 2 businesses” by the metric mentioned. Imo that’s totally as far as most of these businesses can get, unless you have revenue to sustain overlapping roles.

If you get to the “I don’t need to work any more” phase of a business; typically it’s time to sell or hire someone to manage and do something else.

Which btw should be the goal, I’m just saying, you’re no longer running a business if you quite literally are leaving for weeks at a time lol. Someone is running it for you.

Sorry, not true at all. Good night.

I have run a lifestyle software business for 19 years and I'm still at what you call 'stage 1'. I can afford a decent lifestyle, can go on holiday for several weeks (with laptop) and (mostly) like the work I do day-to-day. I have no plans to progress to 'stage 2'.

In case you don't already know, the indiehacker community is now quite mature with a few folks sharing their stories and lessons up to a few $M of ARR.

Microconf is also very high quality with great talks out there, a podcast and a slack community. Focused on SAAS software. Rob Walling, the founder, wrote a book recently. Not my area, but I heard good things about it.

I also like the Tropical MBA podcast. They get stories from entrepreneurs outside the shiny bubble (agency owners, Amazon FBA, SEO software, affiliates, etc)

Books that might interest you : Company of one by Paul Jarvis ; Profit First by Mike Michalowicz ;

Other good resources for entrepreneurs: - Seth Godin & Robert Cialdini for marketing - The Mom Test (how to talk to your users) - Made to Stick (how to craft stories and narratives) - $100M offers & $100M leads by Hormozi (currently reading them, it's mainly common concepts put in a simple and actionable way)

Thanks for the kind words, Adrig! (about MicroConf, my book, etc). I really do appreciate it.

Some links to what Adrig mentioned:

- https://www.indiehackers.com

- https://microconf.com

- https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com (podcast)

- My new book is https://saasplaybook.com

- https://tropicalmba.com - the podcast for 7- and 8- figure founders

I think everything else is pretty easy to find via Amazon/book website of your choice.

Nice to see you here, Rob!

Thanks for the links, keep up the good work :)

This is one of the best resources I know for how to come up with good business ideas (which is probably one of the hardest parts if you've never done it before): https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-brainstorm-great-bu...

That was a great blog. Thanks for sharing!

I keep a regular blog of what I learn as I build my lifestyle business, if you're interested: https://maxrozen.com/articles?q=diaries

There is a book called The $100 Dollar Startup. I’ve heard good things about it from some folks but I wanted to inquire on HN if it fits the bill. Its targeted at this exact scenario OP is premised with

a few years ago, there was this forum for bootstrapped founders running small-ish, profitable, and mature internet businesses -- a spiritual successor to the Joel on Software's forum.

it's been offline for a while, but the read-only archive is still accessible: https://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/

discuss.bootstrapped.fm is well worth a look. I miss Joel's Business of Software forum (I was one of the moderators) - sadly I don't think that is still available.

That’s a shame! I was wondering why it wasn’t available when trying to link to it the other day.

I think they stopped supporting the software that the forum was running on. Maybe someone has some huge text dump somewhere?

Dane Maxwell has done this himself multiple times, and he's trained others to do it, too: https://startfromzero.com/

His method is based on focusing on the end-user and understanding them more than they understand themselves.

Your suspicion is a natural objection, and Dane can teach you how to overcome such objections.

Of course, Dane practices everything he preaches. If his marketing still leaves you suspicious, then maybe his method is not for you.

I've gone back to this comment so many times, it's not a clearcut guide as what to do but it has some valuable points in.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1447467

For ideas on what kind of saas to create and a community of builders.

https://microsaashq.com/index.html

While lifestyle businesses are the first step in their process to free your own time to swing for something bigger, check out the Microconf channel on YouTube.

Covers all the angles including for non technical founders.

Why would you have to 'swing for something bigger'? Having a low stress, enjoyable and profitable small business is enough for some of us. https://successfulsoftware.net/2013/11/06/lifestyle-programm...

You don’t have to swing for something bigger at all.

I promise you I’m on your side.

I made the reference as the channel presents 3 incrementally larger ways to go from lifestyle to solopreneur.

I’m enjoying being a member of Ramen Club https://ramenclub.so/

What do you like about it? It feels like a lot of money for potentially little value?

It's a great active online community of people actually building - all helping each other with their complimentary skillsets (product, designers, devs, growth)

I just rejoined after not working on side projects for a while and find it a great value - super easy to network/find a cofounder too

the value is the community - it's a bunch of low-ego high-motivation folk all building and sharing their own journeys. if you already have a large relevant community around you or don't value connecting with peers so much then it might not be for you (nothing wrong with either of those).

With no reason for successful founders to be there!

Friendly supportive community with a lot of knowledge. Had some very good answers to questions there

Wow this is definitely a grift

Why do you think that?

> It's made me suspicious of pretty much anyone selling their insights and made it hard to determine which are of actual value.

My experience from going down this road with trading financial markets, where there’s as much snake oil as anywhere, is: Try them.

At least, to the degree you can afford, i.e. don’t spend your last $5k on some course that you’re counting on to save the day (it won’t).

Basically none of them will be the silver bullet they claim to be. But you will learn. Even if it’s only learning how the grift works. That’s eye opening, and helps you to see who is offering real value and who is selling cognitive bias.

Take the view that from any resource, you’re only looking to get a nugget or two. Eventually you’ll piece things together. Everything is basically just “the basics”, but understanding the basics in a logical sense is different than knowing how to operate those basics well.

I don't know if its been mentioned already, but I thought the minimalist entrepreneur by Sahil Lavinga (gumroad founder) was good.

Just know though that gumroad originally took a bunch of VC money.

pretty sure he talks about that in the book, using his experience as a cautionary tale. i think that's part of the book's central argument IIRC

What’s “lifestyle” in this context?

I can think of a couple of meanings, but the first thing I’d recommend is a lawyer to figure out your language, privacy policy, exposure if using certain terms.

For example results, quality, etc would need legal documents to basically say ‘results may vary’ based on jurisdiction.

A lifestyle business is a small business that’s designed to support the owner with a steady cash flow, rather than focusing on growth like a VC-funded startup.

Thanks for that!

I was thinking of focusing on others lifestyles. Things like food, exercise, shakes, etc

Lawyers are very expensive and small startups generally don't have a lot of cash. Better to base EULA, privacy policy etc off boilerplate IMO. Unless maybe you are doing something unusual or potentially hazardous e.g. software controlling medical equipment.

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