Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldpie | Hacker News Reader

I suspect you did actually have a business plan, even if it was informal & just in your head. Something like "based on my experience in this line of work, I can charge about $X for Y service, if I get Z sales at that price, it's a viable business, otherwise I'll try to do ABC instead." It's light on details, but that's still a business plan, you had a plan to bring income in. That's fine.

Not having a business plan looks like "we'll release a free thing, have no way to generate income, lose money for a few years, and then beg for a million dollars." That's not a business plan. That's a waste of your time & your users' time.

> have you started a successful business?

Not yet, but I am actually working on it! Having a meeting with a local business tomorrow to discuss potential market pricing options so I have some idea of how much money I can expect to make. Business plan!

View on HN

> "we'll release a free thing, have no way to generate income, lose money for a few years, and then beg for a million dollars." That's not a business plan. That's a waste of your time & your users' time.

This is literally the foundation story of numerous billion-dollar businesses. In fact OpenAI managed to beg their way into a trillion dollars after losing money offering no kind of product for many years. It sounds like it's just a business plan that you don't like very much.

Off the top of my head, I believe Twitter, Youtube, Discord, Reddit, Imgur each had no monetization at all for the first 3~5 years of their existence. Or more recently there was uv, that write-it-in-Rust Python package manager that had no avenue for monetization but received millions in investment funding a team working on it full-time until successfully getting bought out by OpenAI.

Those are actually all pretty good examples of what I'm talking about, yeah. Investment money is not income, it is debt. It has to be paid back some time, or else your business will close. So the users who came to depend on the business will get boned when the business either closes or drastically changes as they find a business model.

OpenAI, for example, is not profitable as far as I know. I think the users they have now will be in for a rude awakening once they have to come up with a business model in order to pay back their investors. Startups that don't have a business model and get bought also regularly get shut down shortly later, leaving users stranded, look at Nest or Keybase for example off the top of my head.

Investment money is not debt. Equity and debt are different things.

> Investment money is not income, it is debt. It has to be paid back some time, or else your business will close.

It's pretty clear that you don't have the faintest idea of what you're talking about.

> I believe Twitter, Youtube, Discord, Reddit, Imgur each had no monetization at all for the first 3~5 years of their existence

yes, their business plans was always to engage a lot of users losing VC money until you are a platform with enough moat to add monetization. It was the plan all along

It is the plan for plenty of startups: when it works you become a tech giant, otherwise you fail and no one knows you

Reply on news.ycombinator.com