America is in the midst of an extraordinary startup boom

Almost all the money in it comes from milking people who’ve been sold on the idea of launching their own life coaching business, not from people with other careers seeking life coaching.

Whatever tiny legitimate side of that market exists is very-obviously saturated to the tune of a large multiple over what’s sustainable, and it’s pretty clear the real money remaining is in selling people the idea that they too can launch their own coaching business (“be your own boss! You don’t want a boring corporate job forever, do you? That may be fine for some people, I guess, but not for you!”) and have an easy, lucrative career, then charging them money to (supposedly) teach them how (“well of course coaches need coaches, too!”).

And yet, despite all this being pretty damn obvious, lots of people get sucked into the scam-vortex anyway.

Similar things happen all over the place. Starting restaurants without a solid path to success even on paper, et c. Folks deceive themselves really well when dreams get involved.

So, lots of people waste both time and money on clearly-bad business ideas.

I think there are plenty of boring, sustainable businesses built on good, logical sounding ideas that have found their niche in the industries they find themselves in.

I suppose it's blindingly obvious to VCs the bad ideas that are bad vs the bad ideas that are good, which is why they never lose money.

Online dating maybe?

Certainly most big successful tech startups have pretty obvious businesses; they just executed them particularly well or at the right time or with the right connections.

People decry the "globalism" boogeyman but then immediately go shop at Walmart.

When that cost eventually has to be recouped I think the pricing will make it unsustainable for use in consumer products

There's definitely some people who'll become rich from it, but I think it's more likely going to be from acquisitions by a large corporation than from direct consumer sales

With that said, I think the main problem faced by these new businesses is not making people use the apps, but the cost of running the models themselves

Right now they're essentially being subsidised by Microsoft (in the case of ChatGPT at least). I think it's inevitable that there'll be a price hike and that it'll destroy the value proposition of these skins

ChatGPT is currently $20/month for a private user and from what I can gather from different news sources, OpenAI is still taking a loss on those sales. Most "skins" will probably have to charge at least the same for their service and I an app honestly has to be pretty amazing for me to fork over that amount of money every month

These are of course just back-of-the-envelope guestimates and I could be wrong about a lot of the assumptions I make here. Given the consequences it would have for the people running all these new businesses, I certainly hope I'm wrong

- scale, as in they think about it. Franchising your brand === entrepreneur. Buying a franchise - despite Entrepreneur mag's narrative - does not.

- exit, as in they don't lose sight of it

- hit by a bus (similar to exit). An entrepreneur's brand continues without them.

- innovation and/ uniqueness in product. Opening another cookie cutter lemonade stand don't cut it

- risk, their lens is not about risk, it's about opportunity. That is, where other see risk, the true entrepreneur sees opportunity.

I might have one or two others but that's the basic filter.

<edit>

One to add.

- upsetting - I don't like the word disruption. It's over used and it's the wrong goal. The goal is to identify a market and find fit. Disruption in and of itself is silly. That said, if you're not pissing some one(s) off then you're likely not an entrepreneur. Again, another lemonade stand isn't grounds enough to be considered an entrepreneur.

Nah. That trope is a all too common false assumption. Where others see risk, the true entrepreneur sees opportunity. The myth of Entrepreneurs being willing to embrace more risk is a false one. Rather they see things others do not and ultimately mitigate risk. They fact that others use risk as the metric proves my point.

You can also be a founder of a company that is effectively a knock-off of some other company / model. Sorry, but regardless of how you go about it, cookie cutter'ing it isn't good enough. That's not an entrepreneur.

I think going from nothing to something will always be that difficult.

They wouldn’t grow big. But there are plenty, from the neighbourhood plumber to the daycare to the modest insurance outfit that keeps being sold from person to person as they retire.

High demand, so little initial grinding for clients. High demand also means standards aren’t high. People can’t be that picky about daycare or plumbers these days.

Maybe one in ten vc backed startups will find a viable business model eventually.

If you don't take vc money maybe it's easier to find a smaller viable business, but then it's harder to pay yourself.

Do you have an example of a reasonably successful business that's a 9-5 job when getting started? Forget startups... let's say you want to open a dry cleaners, bakery or hardware store... none of those seem like they'd be 9-5 jobs. The one exception might be a consulting business if you already have lots of relationships in a space, although most independent consultants who I know tend to have periods of feast and famine.

The issue is that getting your first customers is hard. And then once you have traction, but don't have enough money to hire people, that's hard again. And then once you grow larger, you have more responsibility yet again. At some point, the gears start turning themselves and I've seen many owners who can take a step back, but at that point it's no longer a "startup" but a "business".

Took last week off from work. Just did nothing. Slacked off. This is the first vacation I've had for over a year. According to my fibit, my resting heart rate went down 12 points. I have so many new ideas and plans for what to do next. I feel more inspired and honestly like a new person.

I think a lot of small startups and entrepreneurs work too much. Working 12 hour days is strictly worse than 8 hour days over time. If you skimp on rest and recovery, you gradually transform into an idiot. Do you want an uninsipired idiot for a CEO for your tenuous new business? Because that's what you're turning yourself into.

If it's a business built to be sustainable, sure, you should be able to run it 9 to 5.

I can't actually see what the article is claiming, due to the paywall.

But here are the things that are different:

* Nobody is earning millions here. The salary is roughly at market rate, if not slightly below.

* The funding is a parent-corporation sort of relationship that plays the long game and doesn’t expect to sell after 5 years. But it also means people are paid entirely in real money.

* We only hire as many as we need and not entire divisions to simultaneously re-invent deep learning, target the whole world, and bleed billions of investor dollars in the process.

Finally, this startup (well, scale-up I suppose) is European, and not US-based, and I think the whole unicorn-based way of running things is slightly foreign around here.

So is it a “startup” or just a business growing its customer base with a successful product?

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

How many founders move to the Bay Area thinking "you know, what I really want to build is a small business?" And how many HN techies would enthusiastically join a project like that?

Think about it: if you can gain 1 customer through every 40 hours of work, then by working 80 hours per week you can essentially double the early size of your business. Hire twice as many employees, which can introduce exponential scaling opportunities. Make double the bets on new ideas. It’s a huge boost. After 1 month you could have sold just 4 customers working 40 per week, or closer to 10 and be writing job ads already by working extra.

It is a trap, though. Your health will suffer, your relationships will suffer, you’ll become completely self-absorbed. Some things just aren’t worth it in my opinion.

I've done five startups this way.

In order to support this life, I had to provide consulting services for other companies. Many of them are startups themselves. In any case, this meant I worked at least three full-time jobs. I would work to find clients, work to provide services to those clients, and work to build my startup.

In one case, the startup would take off and pay all of my bills so I could focus on it. In another case, we raised money from investors to focus on it.

In any case, if you want a 9-5 gig contract and don't want to find the work, you can try and use recruiters if you are a knowledge worker. If you aren't a knowledge worker, then you probably will be relying on gig work like Uber/DoorDash. In the case of the latter, you better have a lot of roommates since those pay so poorly.

I believe 37signals meets your criteria, or perhaps Mojang pre-Microsoft.

The reason most successful startups take tons of work is that they are competing against peers willing to put in tons of work. If the whole ecosystem decided 9 to 5, 5 days a week was the effort cap, then sure, but game theory tells us that won't happen.

Stealing removes something — nothing is removed here

But maybe this semantic battle is lost because most people make this equivocation

(Not saying piracy is necessarily OK)

Paywalled articles are generally against HN Guidelines actually, and dang has commented that the exception are articles that have a non-paywalled version available, and in that spirit dang has tacitly acknowledged that HN users do tend to post gift links and archive links and other workarounds in the comments, so that paywalled links that would otherwise be disallowed are then therefore acceptable under the guidelines.

So, you’re right personally to want to support journalism and publications that you enjoy, and please continue to do so. Try not to nerd snipe other HN users, cos we’re all on the same team, and we’re all trying to learn and by doing, to build and grow an open, collaborative community by being nice and good to each other.

I don’t represent HN in any capacity, just a user like you, so please take this as just one person’s opinion and perspective.