Comment by cryptozeus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cryptozeus | Hacker News Reader

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Slight off topic self rant: I tried this (dropshipping etc), went against all the good wisdom and rules of creating honest and passionate business. Failed miserably. Funny how brain works, I knew in 3 months that this is not honest, it feels spammy but then orders were coming in so I convinced myself that half the amazon products are doing the same thing. There is market for it then why should I not do this. This nagging voice in my head never went away and I paid for this later on. This matters when you have to work through night to get the marketing campaign out or you have double down the investment for certain product during holiday sale. Dealing with daily email of customers or tracking lost orders. I eventually lost energy and any sort of desire to grow my business. I was not making the kind of money I was promised by the field of dropshipping without adding way more money in spamy marketing and I had not passion to sell the product I Was selling. Certain folks who seems to be making 1m rev per year are also pivoting through spammy products every month and just dumping 100s and 1000s of dollars in facebook ads. It is more of a spammy marketing game then implementing any sort of creative or intellectual skillset. If anyone is thinking of doing this then I would encourage or first figure out how attached you are to money and the work you are doing. I was pulled into this because I thought I am smarter than rest and I can crack this because of my skills in technology and design so I dont to pay anyone to setup website, taxes, marketing etc however I missed out on how much soulless you have to be to run such a business. I dont mean soulless as a bad thing here, if you are robot or a you can setup a bot to do this then by all means try it but I just could not. This had a double impact on my life. Not only I failed to make money, wasted time but I also hate myself of even getting stuck into this. Lost my confidence and self respect which probably was unfounded anyway. Only thing I can tell myself is that hopefully this lifted some sort of delusion I had about myself and I learn and become better at life through this.

The lesson here is that there really is no free lunch. There is no secret, no-work way to make lots of money. If anyone can do it, there's little value in it so you won't make much money.

If you have thousands of dollars to invest and want to do no work, just buy index funds.

There are ways to make lots of money with no work and little investment. An example is buying lottery tickets.

The problem, though, is the risk goes up with the potential reward. Your chances of winning the lottery are indistinguishable from zero. But it's still there.

Other ways are writing a hit song, advertising jingle, a bestselling novel, a top selling video game. Ways not to get rich; a “better c” language and compiler?

Writing compilers is certainly not a probable path to getting rich. I do it for other reasons.

Those things sound like a lot of work to me. Perhaps enjoyable work, but work all the same.

Very true, I did exactly this.

My investments during the Covid dip attest to this. There will always be another dip.

> there really is no free

> just buy index funds

Sounds like your contradicting yourself. Sounds like index funds are in fact a free lunch.

You need free money first!

There may be some, but the people who find them have no incentive to tell others.

Sorry for you losing your confidence over this. To be frank, the idea itself of creating a company is spammy.

I created my company, but I knew the market from inside (it wasn’t a public company so it wasn’t insider trading, but clearly I had unfair advantage at start). I’ve witnessed many people on the same market as I was, trying to find something to sell, and failing at it. Everyone here is told that they can do it and the good idea will arrive as they work, well, that is spam. Truth is there are enough businesses in the world.

It’s not exactly just luck. It’s also accurately knowing when you have a chance. I’ve also witnessed a dozen startups succeed in my area, to the point of about $50m revenue, so I could also have succeeded better.

But really, it wasn’t your skills or your confidence. It’s that you didn’t have a good edge at start, maybe your only flaw is not judging against your initial idea, early enough, and waiting for the next opportunity in your professional life. But your implementation skills are visibly excellent, so if you don’t feel like restarting on your own, go help someone and help him scale. You’ll be excellent at it.

That is a great reframing! Thanks for saying this. This is what I am planing to do next, implement all these skills for meaningful business and help them grow.

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