Comment by gacba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gacba | Hacker News Reader

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You might consider that "building the product" is not really "most of the work" here. There are three things:

- Product

- A Market for said product (solving a problem for a customer who has money)

- Getting your Product to that Market and convincing customers you solved their problem

In reality, you are probably doing about 33% of the hard stuff (and the other 66% is hard too, making sure you have the correct MVP and promoting it)

Until you've put a product out there, you don't really know how hard the other two are and how critical they are to the success of your venture. hmexx is offering to do that part for what I consider a reasonable cost to test the waters.

YMMV, of course, and you're free to take on 100% of it all, but reducing risk is how you get a product launched. I personally like hmexx's approach here.

You must not have read the rest of my comments...

That said, reducing risk isn't what hmexx is doing. Since the risk of quitting your job and starting on your own product is failure to create a good enough product and NOT have a job to go back to. He's not made any warranties about you being able to resume your previous job (nor could he, or should he.)

Again, look at my other comments, where I plainly state this is not for everyone, like people who already can market and recognize an MVP. And it's best for younger people who have crummy jobs and little marketing and/or business experience, and little to lose (like a nice good current job.)

>Since the risk of quitting your job and starting on your own product

Software developers who don't intend to go into management should not be permanent employees. You should be working as a contractor so you don't have to worry about things like this. As a contractor, you don't get paid for days you don't work so no one cares as much when you're gone (so long as it's not negatively impacting a project). I usually take 8-10 weeks off per year, so taking advantage of this offer would be easy for me and have no impact on my "day" job.

> the risk of quitting your job

Premise 3 was:

> Most freelancers will not build and/or follow-through with their ideas, because they perceive their opportunity cost to be too high.

I wouldn't quit my job for this (if I had a job), but as a freelancer I'd consider taking a month of no client work and building it at what amounts to a reduced hourly rate.

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