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Comment by turnsout | Hacker News Reader

To me, $80k sounds like a very small amount of "F-You" money. I'm not criticizing the OP at all, but if I quit my job with 80k in the bank, I would immediately start researching the most painful B2B problem I could solve quickly using AI. Not to generate an income stream, but to build an asset (the business) to sell.

That's the quickest path to $1M. Software developers are too caught up on salary (or 73 different "income streams" that all make $0), and rarely think about building a valuable business.

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If you can just do that, then why are you not quitting your job and why don't you have $800k in the bank?

It's easy, just build a million dollar asset and sell it. Pssh, I am on my third one this week.

Something can be both conceptually simple yet difficult to execute. (The key to losing weight is "just" to eat less and exercise, piano is "just a bunch of keys," etc)

Personally I have a mortgage and a family, so I'm not eager to burn through savings to build a company 0-1, but if I had to, I described exactly what I would do.

Hehehe, you just described most normal people: a mortgage a family, cannot just wake up and say I am going all-in “this great idea”. Your idea is therefore only reachable for early age people or singles. I am trying to revive a project I believe strongly which is kind of ready to sale, but I cannot get a damn 4 hours to seat down and look at it without being interrupted by life’s chores or just being too tired Anyway I have similar fantasies to yours. It feels good to not be alone, both in circumstances as in fantasy.

I've been there! I recently released an app that has been 99% ready for sale for a full year, and the only way I got it over the finish line was to wake up every morning at 5am to get an hour or two of work in before my kid wakes up. :) I'd love to do something bigger, but this will have to scratch that entrepreneurial itch for now!

You inspired me and I am starting a calendar where i track my commitment to it.

I posted an idea for a proven business a few days ago based on an area why my employer has given up on (too "small" for a multi-billion dollar company) and yet customers still seem to like and want[1]. I'm pretty sure this would be worth a few million at least, and I'd even be qualified to do it. Why don't I do it? Because it would be dull as ditchwater and I'd hate every minute of it. There's more to life than that.

The point is that solving dull business problems like that might be lucrative, but not many of us are motivated enough to do them.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42305336

I can't find your email address, I'm interested in that idea :-)

Is there a way to contact you? I couldn't find it in your profile, unfortunately.

Believe me, I'm really not interested in taking part. For the product that was deprecated you can see here: https://www.ovirt.org/ https://access.redhat.com/products/red-hat-virtualization I wish you luck.

Yeah, Red Hat put a fair bit of money and investment into a direct VMware takeout using oVirt/RHV. Pretty much went nowhere. There's presumably some money int here post-Broadcom acquisition but Red Hat is mostly betting on Kubevirt and OpenShift. Some (presumably smaller-scale) customers will prefer more of a like-to-like lower-cost replacement but personally I wouldn't bet on it as a business.

Yeah, my feeling is that if you're a billion dollar business with associated high overheads, then a few million is not worth it. If you're a zero dollar start-up with focus and a tolerance for selling boring software to boring companies, then there's money in it.

I still remember something someone from IBM told me during my prior analyst gig. Don't remember the specific but something to do with Linux and Power I think. Basically, he said that if it's not a billion dollar opportunity it's not worth all the costs and distractions up and down the line to pursue.

You're right that the million dollar opportunity is a lot more interesting for a startup. Of course, it's also going to be a lot harder for that startup to displace VMware (which the potential customer probably is using). I'm not sure going after those crumbs is a terrible idea but there are already other option like Xen too.

I doubt doing oVirt is a million dollar idea. One of the biggest reasons for going with oVirt was redhat being behind it. rh will keep rhev on life support for its customers (thus staying in competition for a bit longer) and there are plenty other more popular opensource alternatives already. I mean, sure making millions isn't impossible, but you would not need good software so much, but good connections instead to make it work.

I dunno. That seems a pretty quick path to a 74th income stream that makes $0. Especially at the moment, I'm not seeing a lot of money trees around. Not that I needed them, but when I semi-retired a number of possible revenue streams sort of evaporated--not that I looked too hard.

But if you deliberately quit, that may be the thing to do. A more conservative person would probably counsel getting at least a part-time job that pays a salary though.

To be specific, I would quit the other 73 income streams and stop any extracurricular activities until I shipped something. Even though AI feels overhyped (it sort of is), we're still early in the game, and there's plenty of money to be made. Businesses still have a ton of time-consuming, expensive pain points. You just have to pick an industry and go talk to insiders to figure out what to build.

I won't argue if I had a bunch of other activities consuming most of my bandwidth that weren't bringing in any money. If you really need cash though, I might consider lower risk, lower reward options on at least a part-time basis as well though. Doing a startup isn't exactly a high ROI activity in general--especially in a max-hype area.

Very true—for a software developer, part-time consulting is probably the quickest path to making some money. It's a lower-risk, but much lower-leverage option than a 0-1 startup. Building a startup has a high risk of going to zero, but if you've chosen the right customer, the potential upside is dramatically higher than any other option.

I’m in business technology consulting. You’re right about tons of pain points and opportunity.

But the limiting factor is not AI or any kind of tech, it’s getting these businesses to trust you with fitting into their existing systems and giving you their time.

100%. Another reason to start by talking to customers. The product has to be more than useful—it has to fit into their current workflow. Most B2B startups underinvest in sales (which is not the same as sending 100,000 cold emails).

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