Running a business means contact with reality
fredkozlowski.com
fredkozlowski.com
I have a deep feeling that i can “do it myself”, yet i work for companies because deep down I like the anonymity and the safety of it; at a big company we get to be part of something established, we don’t have to show our own faces to the world.
I learned that lesson again with art. You have to frequently zoom out and see if the entire picture works, or otherwise you make highly detailed turds.
You can still blame the market. A good market makes everything easier, a bad market makes everything harder.
But here’s the catch: You choose the market.
To share an example: When I started my react teaching side business in 2015 it was so easy. Growing 2x year over year, I thought I was some kind of business genius. Then one day it stopped. React became old, no longer the exciting new thing, the market consolidated into 2 or 3 big players with The Default resources and my stuff wasn’t one of them. I totally missed the land grab aspect of the early market phase and didn’t go hard enough on pure growth. Not a business genius after all.
In 2020-2022 I had a repair side-hustle that became unexpectedly profitable, so I started scaling it up and thinking about quitting my job. Then interest rates went up, assets stopped appreciating, and I realized that most of the value I thought I was adding was actually just asset inflation and the common wisdom that repair is a miserable business niche was correct after all.
Maybe that's old-school. Youngsters seem to argue that they don't need to move out of their den, to start and run a business. And they were right some times.
Another biz lesson I learned luckily through observation (WP sites being down too often and a nightmare to configure and maintain).
Forget scaling, google ads, until your customer #10, probably more. All your early customers will be from your network, real people you talk to in real world.
It is a chicken and egg problem - you don’t know what product customers need until you have customers. So go find them, build and try to figure out what they have in common.
FYI - I tried to leave this comment on your blog, but I got a database connection error. HTH
examples... a large paying customer can kill a business... tiny or free users can be great for free marketing and product testing... a weird channel partner can make a business... obscure cashflow and accounting can make/break a business... product development or inventory can require fundraising which comes with wild "strings attached"... and and and...
(having started a number of both self-funded and venture-funded business, in tech small format retail and more...)
One click later, "Error establishing a database connection". HN seems to have hugged this guy's site to death.
Technologists want to change the world to be how they envision the world.
These are fundamentally at odds but modern business requires both to operate successfully.
Thing is, working as a cog in a larger machine is itself another form of reality check. Both situations force you to confront data and perspectives that aren't your own, and to adapt to them. Reading through the comments here, I find myself resonating with folks who very much enjoy being cogs or have a desire to run a smaller business for themselves, profit-motives and moat-building be damned. Almost as if there's a desire to return to a simpler market devoid of the complexities that computers have allowed to thrive (algorithmic pricing, big data analysis, surveillance capitalism, etc), where what mattered was running a good environment with fair pricing rather than grandiose plans for expansion or market monopolization. I empathize with those goals, given my "fuck you money" pie-in-the-sky plans of running a small makerspace/net cafe in a community and eating the modest loss through ROI elsewhere in my investments.
To get back to the (still-down) article, running a business absolutely means confronting the reality of the fickleness of the marketplace. It means dealing with customers who are ill-informed and also ill-suited to critique or correction. You have to make a product others want to buy, rather than one you believe is best. The pressure is there to capitalize on every avenue, every opportunity, never turning down business for fear of it reverberating into collapsing other opportunities. It's a really immediate reckoning over what's more important to you in terms of success vs ethics, in an environment incredibly hostile to the latter (and exploitative of those who reside on that side of the proverbial fence). It's stressful, and it's why I refuse to open my own shop despite my dissatisfaction with corporate life at present.
It’s just a trace, but the following paragraph (quoted in part) hits hard in this season of thanks and bounty. Thank you, Fred K, for writing it.
> The business has been a giant blackpill on Temu. Seeing people pay my mom to throw away bags full of internet purchases has been depressing. Bringing yet cheaper goods into the States hasn’t actually increased quality of life whatsoever over the already cheap goods on Amazon[. . . .] Unfortunately — despite the very real benefits that mass affluence and consumer culture have, it’s difficult in my position to not think that we’ve gone too far.
She cannot feel what should objectively cause her pain, but because pain is a subjective experience she can’t. However, truly subjective pain, that is pain derived from emotional connection, is literally the worst pain she can feel.
The guy couldn't emotionally recognise his mother after seeing her and started calling her imposter. But when he heard her voice over telephone, he felt emotional connection and said the person on other end was indeed his mother. Emotional pathways provide salience information in conjunction with sensory pathways. Any disruption to emotional pathways can override even correct sensory data.
Same idea with hunger and weight gain or loss. Hunger is a biological process. You can push through it, but people also experience it differently because their actual hunger mechanisms differ, not just because they "interpret" it differently.
Contact with curious internet traffic crippling a non cloudflared webserver might not be.
Concurrent connections per second is likely much more relevant, and in that case, one can put the most basic proxy or cache in front of the webpage to help a great deal, if not Cloudflare.
Concurrent connections is the number of simultaneous connections a server can handle, something little wordpress sites not behind anything to help often get slammed with on the regular.
The reason you need more than one concurrent connection (again, barring some kind of Comet) is that some clients take a significantly nonzero amount of time to finish receiving the response, at which point PHP has generally already finished executing but is still taking up RAM, which is what limits the number of concurrent connections you can handle with Wordpress. But really all you need to do is not go into swap when you hit an overload, and Bob's your uncle.
Depending on how it's configured, Wordpress may still not be able to answer new requests as soon as they come in, but that's not a problem of the number of concurrent connections; it's a problem of the number of hits per second.
You can decouple the number of concurrent connections from the amount of RAM you're burning in PHP by using FastCGI, or just plain old CGI, or nginx (with probably FastCGI), or putting a reverse proxy in front of Apache, or just about anything except mod_php, but you very rarely need to. There just aren't that many people on 14.4kbps modems any more, and your web server has literal gigabytes of RAM.
You don't need Cloudflare unless you're getting DDoSed.
Wordpress plugins can cache the site but really in 2025 it should be built in instead of the forced paid plugin route that has really made Wordpress a suboptimal experience.
If you're talking about non-tech people then sure but that would be a hypothetical. The author obviously has the skills. He just fell into the trap "my blog is not popular enough so WP is fine". Which is a common bug in our brain's algorithms: we never act until too late after an incident. Oh well. That's Homo Sapiens for you.
On one hand this is high praise for strangers assuming the best about them that they could learn.
Only, the vast majority don't know this, and even if they could learn, they aren't able to devote the time over years and decades to make it easy to learn, and if they can, they have other priorities that makes sure they won't be able to, or they choose not to.