Comment by noelwelsh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by noelwelsh | Hacker News Reader

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I am building a product product. It has customers. It is a heck of a lot of work. (I'm also building an info product.)

It may be surprising to you that my customers actually don't care how many hours I want to work, but only about the value I deliver to them. I don't get to wave a magic wand and work 10 hours a week and keep all my customers, though I'm sure my competitors would wish I tried.

The place I see "lifestyle businesses" working best is where the market is unattractive to larger competitors due to size, difficulty reaching clients or others. There only select markets where this is the case.

Look, I love all the lifestyle business stuff and I'm adopting some of the tactics myself, but the suggestion of this article and your comment that the hours you work is solely a matter of choice is bullshit. You have to give up something, normally money or proximity to family and friends. Or put it a lot of work upfront building a business that you can then coast on.

It may be surprising to you that my customers actually don't care how many hours I want to work, but only about the value I deliver to them. I don't get to wave a magic wand and work 10 hours a week and keep all my customers, though I'm sure my competitors would wish I tried.

I think the argument here is that "value delivered to customers" and "amount of work required to deliver that value" are completely unrelated to one-another. To give two examples:

1. The biggest possible improvement you can generally bestow upon a small services business is a website (not even a fancy one, just a five-page Wordpress shindig with acceptable SEO.) This takes approximately two hours and $50 (I'm being generous.)

2. Video games are one of the most difficult software products to produce in terms of sheer SLOC, expertise required, and resources needed, and yet the value most customers assign to them ranges between $0 and $60.

In what way?

What would happen to your business in you spent 20 minutes answering emails tomorrow morning then went fishing for the rest of the day? What would happen if you did that twice a week from here on out?

If the answer is yes, the business would implode within a day, is there not something you could do to change that?

In my case, I'd go broke. Consulting pays the bills while we get the product to profitability.

I agree with you on some points, it's a lot of work to earn passive income and during my first year trying to earn passive income on the side I lost money and incurred in a debt of around 50K USD... but last month I finally got the hang of it, and after putting 30 hours a week after my fulltime job during my first year of trial and error, last month I grossed 10K merely working about 10 hours a week after my fulltime job... That said, it's possible and it's not in its entirety bullshit.

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