How To Go From $0 To $1,000,000 In Two Years | Hacker News Reader

How To Go From $0 To $1,000,000 In Two Years

techcrunch.com

81 pointsbtmills33 comments

While some of those are good points, I'm convinced that the successful entrepreneurs didn't start by reading a techcrunch article about how to make x amount of money. Sure some get inspired and try, but the real entrepreneurs just get out there and do it. No one has to tell them to take the leap, he (or she) has to tell others that it's perfectly normal for him to take the leap. He's convinced himself that taking a leap and doing it himself is the only way that he can be happy and successful. And that's how I am. I started working for startups as my first job out of high school, I learned a lot, and kept moving up. My parents and rest of my family and friends constantly said and even say now 'When are you going to get a real job with benefits and security?' and I politely say, never.

It's the resilience that is baked into my personality and how I work that I never give up and I always make things happen. It's quite a delusion I'm sure because I have this I can always make it work out mentality while everyone else around me says I'm crazy, but in one way or another I always manage to work it out. I haven't hit a 'home run' yet but I've always worked for myself and always managed to pay the bills. Just in the two years from being out of high school I've come pretty far by my own standards. I'm co-founding a startup now and we just launched two weeks ago at a local university, we gained 1,200 users in just under two weeks at this small college. It's a small victory in a long line of uphill battles along the way to success but it's the only thing I can imagine myself doing. And I'm going to keep doing it.

I would guess that the "successful entrepreneurs" category is sufficiently diverse to resist pigeon holing. I'm personally not a fan of anything that implies that you have to jump into a fast and loose market right out of high school to become an entrepreneur.

I'd wager there are plenty of folks that got fed up with their jobs after reading any number of self-help rags-to-riches articles or books and went on to have successful self-employed careers, some of which probably ended up in the millions of dollars.

Maybe it's because I'm corporately employed, thirty, sick of the grind and working to get out, but the "this is who I am; this is what works, and if you're not this, then you can't get it anywhere else" implication rubs me the wrong way.

On a different note, I can tell how little I've replied to this sort of article over the years by how many times I had to spell check entrepreneur (got it that time. boom. little victories, amirite?)

[edit: I also want to say that this isn't an attempt to try and slam the OP. Seriously, congrats on your success so far, and I hope you do just as well and better in the future. I just think there are a lot of paths and destinations in success, and even the cliche market of motivational memoirs and self-help guides can kick someone in the ass occasionally and get them to make the move they need to.]

Your guess is well-supported by facts.

> The average age of first-time entrepreneurs in all industries is 43; in tech industries, the average age is 39. Only 16 percent of the fastest-growing and most successful companies in the United States had venture investors. 11 percent had revenues of more than a million dollars.

http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/FactSheet/EntreAndEcon...

According to the US census bureau, about half a million new firms are established each year (where a new firm is defined as having at least 1 employee on payroll, so this doesn't count everyone starting a website in their spare time). 16%, 11%, these are of big numbers, bigger than the couple dozen companies you might read about on TechCrunch each year.

> The average age of first-time entrepreneurs in all industries is 43; in tech industries, the average age is 39.

This obviously doesn't mention how successful those older entrepreneurs go on to be.

I'd like to know if there is a significant difference in the success rates of tech companies started by 18 year olds and 28 year olds. Does it actually make empirical sense to start a company when you're 18, or do those 10 years of working drastically improve your chances such that you should hold off?

I'd be totally interested in (being spoonfed) research on that, just out of interest.

I think my bumper-sticker take away, though, would be "it's never too early to try and it's never to late to get started."

I remember reading a free years ago--I can't remember the source--that older entrepreneurs were, on average, more successful than younger ones.

I totally agree, and I think I didn't get the main point I was trying to make across clearly. It doesn't matter if you do my path, or your path, or the hundreds of thousands of other paths that people take for themselves, some people find their entrepreneurial spirit in other ways and after longer periods of time. You can be in your shoes, or my shoes, but the point I was trying to make is it's usually not a play by play post on how to make x that gets people motivated, it's exactly what you're talking about, being fed up or just wanting to do something different and for yourself.

I highly recommend James Altucher's book, I Was Blind But Now I See. You can get it for $.99 on Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Was-Blind-But-Now-ebook/dp/B005VPXXVM

Its the story of how he built a web design business, exited for ~$12 million, drank himself broke and nearly to death, and then built himself back up (he is a VC now). Its about learning to be happy even though you sometimes feel like you're broken. I drew a lot of lessons from it that help me daily.

"Everyone is always on the lookout for “the next big thing.” The next big thing is finding rare earth minerals on Mars. That’s HARD WORK. Don’t do it! " ..... I disagree.

It almost feels like techcrunch is stooping down to businessinsider style sensationalism.

That's how they justify posting every article to HN/Reddit/etc. "Online means relevant!"

I hope you're not insinuating that every internal memo that Kara Swisher gets BCC'd on isn't actually worthy of some smartass blog post.

Seriously though, it's funny to see Swisher post every lame email from Yahoo corporate and write about it like it's the second coming of investigative journalism.

It's hard to be a decent journalist, sometimes too hard.

No one finds the next big thing. People find little things and build them into the next big thing.

Maybe in the Internet web application business. Not true elsewhere.

for a long time, techcrunch has been on the same low level that gawker and allthingsd have been producing. they're all pretty much TMZ for tech, with various results.

i disagree with your disagreement. how big something is irrelevant. more relevant is your execution.

crap + well executed => big return

the next big thing + poorly execute => wait for someone else to get rich off of it

this is the only valid response to any techcrunch article on hn.

I really liked this quote:

"You don’t have to come up with the new, new thing. Just do the old, old thing slightly better than everyone else. And when you are nimble and smaller than the behemoths that are stuck with bureaucracy, you can often offer better sales and better service, and higher touch to your customers. Customers will switch to you."

Still, coming up with the new, new thing can be the most creative & fun.

Most of this advice is pretty terrible when taken generically. Really you could boil all of his success down to "be good at selling anything".

I find generic advice like "be good at marketing/sales/etc" to be really useless. HOW do you become good at marketing/sales/etc? Because each situation and company is different, the how can only be gleamed from details of stories. The meatier and more detailed the story, the more useful.

My experience is, people who are good enough at sales to turn nothing into major success, such as the subject of this story, aren't taught. They're natural. They've been hustlers since they learned to talk. So you can't just apply what they did if you aren't the same way.

I completely disagree. I've learned a lot from natural salesmen and marketers, and have improved on both fronts due to learning from their battlefield stories.

I don't mean you can't become a better salesman through learning. I'm saying you can't learn to be the kind of hustler who takes an idea you can't even personally execute and turn it into a million dollar salary in two years. That takes natural ability. The article frames it as if anyone can do it

Which I think is okay. The world needs less people who sell and more people who make.

I don't think the article makes the case that anyone can do it.

I follow Jame's blog and he definitely doesn't say anyone can do it. His own life story is an example of this.

One message that he does try to say is the simple act of hustling.

Just do it is so cliched but why can't we take baby steps? Why not go out and spend the next 3-6 months validating a business idea by talking to people, potential customers, etc. Or maybe spend 3-6 months really getting in-depth understanding of a niche and seeing if there are any gaps that technology can help?

This advice is for myself but I think its quite relevant. For me, I have the tendency to spend time just thinking through an idea without spending any real effort to do a litmus test for it. I have to take a more realistic approach which is to have mini-failures that don't cost too much in terms of time and money and hopefully one of them will click. If this means going through 5-6 iterations within a span of 5-6 years until I "make it" then so be it. I'm not looking to be the next anything. To me hustling is going out there and putting myself in front of people that can help shape the idea. It is not sitting in front of my computer and just building an MVP since I'm not looking to build a business based on eyeballs but something that provides more direct value.

Anyway, I would suggest a more relevant article that James wrote is the following:

http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/04/the-100-rules-for-being...

Altucher is kind of known for his sensationalist article titles. However, in this case the content of the article is solid and pragmatic, particularly the bit about "picking a boring business." If your main goal is to work for yourself, finding a not-so-sexy niche is the way to go. Potentially less competition, more room to breathe, and plenty of opportunity.

While this is a really nice article, I found this comment really funny:

How To Go From $0 To $1,000,000 In Two Years?

Start with $2,000,00

What was Braintree's value proposition? As in, why did everyone switch to his service? Was it lower fees? If so, how do they offer lower fees in such a mature, crowded market?

"Rule No. 6: Say YES!", aka. "Rule No. 6: Lie to customers."

That does not mean the same thing.
In my experience with running my business, when a customer asks for something it has to do with your business. Maybe at the time he was just processing transactions, but he was working with credit cards. So expanding his business beyond processing and into databasing makes a lot of sense.
Customers will often tell you what they want to pay for, and if you say no, you're going to fail.

Instead of "if you build it, they they will come." For Altucher it's actually, "if you pretend you can build it, they will come."
This is a common theme in some of Altucher's other stories. I think it would only be lying if you acted like you had already built it. However, selling your ability to build a future product is definitely not lying.

Hey, it worked for Larry Ellison of Oracle.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/01/larry-ellison-hearsay-we-ca...
---
Bruce Scott, the co-founder of Oracle says, “I remember him very distinctly telling me one time: Bruce, we can’t be successful unless we lie to customers.” And adds: “All the things that you would read in books of somebody being a leader, he wasn’t. But he was tenacious; he would never give up on anything.”

Will this work for me?

I love his writings!

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