Ask HN: Why aren't you working on a startup?
So many people get sucked into their jobs as developers for someone else's dream. Why are you?
I enjoy working with clients, and have been fortunate enough to cultivate a great client base. The clients I work with are involved in various public-interest areas. To me this is much more motivating and fulfilling than 98% of startup ideas. (That said, the other 2% are breathtaking).
The income side is quite nice. I'm consistently pulling down $30-$50k monthly. Much of what I don't spend gets invested and generates additional investment income. I have another muse business that I put some time into and I also invest in the businesses of a few friends.
Better still is that I took no outside money. I have complete control over the company and our decision-making.
I can be honest with the people around me about how things are going. I don't need to keep up appearances that "we're crushing it". When things are challenging I can share that with the people around me. I have an incredible group of mentors and people who provide support in various ways.
I have control over my time. I work a lot of hours, usually in the range of 70-90/week, but it's all of my own choosing. Nobody pressures me to pull all-nighters, or do death marches for deadlines. I can take time off during the days. It's great to be able to go for a hike or our for a drive on a Tuesday afternoon. I usually start my workday around noon, take a break in the evening and do another block of work in the night.
This lifestyle is much more compatible with having a fulfilling personal life. I'm able to spend more time with my family and friends, and really be present for the people that I care about when they need me. Dating and relationships are orders-of-magnitude easier.
I'm able to personally capture the value that I create. No fractional equity wing-and-a-prayer. No hoping that my work gets recognized come bonus time.
I have complete location independence. I was in 20 countries in 2012. So far this year (mid-august), I've been in 11. I'm writing this from São Paulo.
One of the most amusing things to me is that I still get contacted by recruiters telling me about "exciting opportunities" at "well-funded" startups with "competitive salaries" and such benefits as foosball tables and free snacks.
I have many friends in the startup scene. Once in a blue moon, I consult for startups. Mainly in the healthcare and knowledge management spaces. I respect the game, the hustle, and particularly the challenge of building something new and breaking into the market. I'm a big fan of Eric Ries, Steve Blank, and HN. I also find that many of the insights from lean startup, customer development thinking are equally applicable or adaptable to the world of consulting.
Maybe some day, I'll get the infection of a startup idea so inspiring that I decide to drop everything to pursue it. So far, I seem to be well-immunized against that.
Would you mind giving me a point by point summary?
When I was in middle school, we had a computer drafting class. In that computer lab, we had Photoshop v1.0 The first time I saw it, I knew it was something I wanted to learn. I started learning everything I could about this tool. This was pre-internet so it meant heavy books and bugging anyone I could find who knew about it.
My high school had a graphic arts program with photography, screen and offset printing. There I did a lot of Photoshop and learned Illustrator and QuarkXPress. This was in Southern California in the mid-90's. We did a lot of shirts and banners for 10k's, bike races, and marathons. Around that time I got my first internet connection. I spent a lot of time on newsgroups related to the tools I was working with.
I went to college in Northern California and worked a series of uninspiring student jobs while trying to launch a design business. I did a variety of basic computer consulting. Wiring people's offices and homes for ethernet, fixing windows machines, crawling around under desks plugging in cables. I remember talking to a friend of mine who worked at an ad agency about my challenges getting clients. He suggested doubling my rates (from $30/hr to $60). I thought that would never work. I tried it. It worked. I tried to do everything as professionally as possible. Writing proper estimates, weekly reports to my clients, responding as quickly as possible. I stopped fixing windows machines and crawling around under desks plugging in wires. At that time I had switched majors from pre-med to Economics.
I applied for a web design job with a small environmental consultancy. They emailed me back telling me that I didn't get the job because my qualifications weren't a good match. I emailed the owner back to ask why they thought that. He agreed to have coffee with me. He hired me on the spot. I worked there for a few years. A lot of our work was based around making websites to distribute documents for environmental planning and resource management groups. I wanted to build web software to better support this functionality. I lobbied my boss to let me manage that project. We started with PHP and MySQL. I had a tough time getting results. I had no management experience, and our developers seemed socially inept. Eventually a friend of mine turned me onto Python and I rewrote our application in it. Eventually I made it work with both MySQL and Postgres. Consulting around this application started to be the main source of income for our business. I made partner. Sometime around there I graduated with my Econ degree.
I was occasionally getting consulting inquiries from groups outside of our target niche. I wanted to take them on, but my partner (former boss) did not. As an economist, it worried me to be so non-diversified. About this point, I read the 4 Hour Workweek. After a while I went off on my own to start my own consultancy. This was right before the financial crisis.
The economic downturn made things very quiet. It was terrifying. Before this the clients had always found us. I had to learn about sales, marketing, content marketing, SEO, customer development. I was working nearly every waking moment. I was living very lean. Money was very tight. My biggest fear was that I would have to go work for someone else.
I had a clear picture of where I wanted to go. I was extremely hungry. Friends stopped calling me to go out for drinks. The few that stuck around got to hear me talk about this obsession. Not a lot of people could relate, but the true friends at least listened and offered positive words.
My marketing process looked something like this. Find organizations whose work I cared about. Research them rigorously. Call or email them. Tell them I cared about the issues they were working on. Tried to get meetings. Asked a lot of questions and when possible shared ideas about how web-based tools could help them.
I landed some good project with great clients. I was doing some of the best work of my life. The first taste of success was extremely seductive. I remember the first month where I cleared $10k. That seemed like a whole lot of money at the time. I rented an E350 for a weekend and drove around listening to Drake. At this point I knew I was onto something. I put everything I had into this work.
A few months later I booked a ticket to Europe. I went to an open source meetup there. I decided that I was going to book my first EU client. I repeated this intention to myself again and again. At the meeting I met a cool guy working with a great NGO there. I pitched a project to him. He asked me some tough questions about how it would work with the distance. I told him honestly that I had never done this before, but that I'd do everything in my power to make the project a success. He believed me and we started working together. We made it work. Sometimes it meant me waking up at odd hours, or him taking my calls after business hours.
I never bought a house. I did buy cars and motorbikes. Cars are not investments. I did put money in the market, mostly hand-picked growth stocks.
I never hired employees. When I needed to bring in someone I subcontracted rather than hiring. I am not a bank for my clients. They pay a deposit at the start of the project. Our contract has non-trivial late fees. If the account is not current, we stop work and roll-back unpaid code. Unsurprisingly, we almost never have problems in this area.
From this point, I felt I had the basic pieces in place. I stayed disciplined and put in the work. Usually 12 to 16 hour a day six days a week. I traveled all over the EU. I went to spend winters in South America. I keep my life pretty simple. A backpack, a macbook air, a pair of running shoes, and a nice bavarian car. I dated girls with names that were hard to pronounce. I fell asleep on planes and woke up in different time zones. I ate Kobe beef in Kobe, drove M cars and AMGs on the autobahn, watched the sun come up over Istanbul. Above all, I made sure that my discipline was the most important thing.
I'm tremendously grateful for the success I've experienced. As much as I enjoy the tangible rewards for my work, the personal growth and ability to make a difference are the greatest rewards.
A few takeaways:
Find clients whose work you care about, and tell them as much.
Find mentors and ask them for advice. Know when not to listen.
Choose your clients carefully. Then move mountains for them.
It's not just about being a good programmer. Cultivate a wider business skillset.
You can make a fine living as a programmer without a CS degree.
It may get harder to relate to your non-entrepreneur friends. Try to find a few entrepreneur friends.
Use subcontractors rather than hiring employees.
Don't be a bank for your clients. Make sure you have good contact language.
Writing is extremely important. Don't shy away from it. Consider a writing coach.
Be honest with your clients. Don't be afraid to tell them that you don't know an answer.
Enjoy life, but make sure that the things that you enjoy reinforce your discipline rather than interfering with it.
There's also a growing part of our work which does not involve programming. This includes things like strategic planning, training, and usability reviews.
If you think someone has a great idea that you want to happen, then join in. Your motivation shouldn't be making yourself famous.
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Too lazy to try and get out of comfort zone
Reasons I tell others
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- Family obligations (wife and kids)
- "Secure" "high" paying job
- No time
- No great revolutionary idea. If an idea does come, it gets shot down a few mins/hours/days later. Get worried that it is not the best idea. Next...
I continue to work on side-projects, hoping to build enough momentum to reduce the risk to the point where making the jump seems reasonable.
On my exchange, hopefully to a tier 1 US university, I hope to find people who inspire me and my future cofounder.
I am a business guy and have started two social business projects already, but I want to open an Internet start-up after my studies.
If someone here (Developers) is looking for an idea and a cofounder, write me.
I want to get back into working again, but I have this rare mental illness called schizoaffective disorder and it is misunderstood and has elements like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. I am also 45 years old now, and too old for anyone to seriously consider for a startup.
I can write apps, but I am all by myself. No help, no support, no funding, and living on a shoestring budget. I have no criminal history no drug abuse, I don't even smoke or drink alcohol. I try to live a clean life so I can recover and get healthier.
My local area, Saint Louis, has a startup community I have tried to join many times and been rejected for being mentally ill or too old. They claim to accept everyone, but that is not true. I've been programming since I was 12 on a Commodore 64, self taught. I've taken many classes on programming and also read countless books and know about 37 different programming languages, most of which are no longer used, but I can convert code from say COBOL into modern languages. I know Classic Visual BASIC for example, and there are still business apps in VB6 out there. Because I learned FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal, ADA, COBOL, C Language, 8088 Assembly, etc I know the root languages that modern languages are based on. It is much like knowing Latin and Greek to help with learning European languages better. It allowed me to learn C++, Java, Python, Ruby, Javascript, and many others. VB.Net was just VB6 modified with Java like syntax, and C# is basically Microsoft taking features from Java after they got sued over J++/J#.
I used to develop Windows CE, Blackberry, PalmOS, etc apps before Apple had the iPhone and before Android, Inc was formed in 2003. But those are obsolete.
I so much want to develop business apps for Linux and smartphones, but I know developing for Windows first is where you earn the bulk of your money. Apple has people thinking that business apps are creative content apps, but when I talk about business apps I mean apps that run a business with accounting, inventory, ledgers, accounts payable, accounts receivable, stuff that runs a business and does HR tracking of employees, and can be modified to suit a business' process like a glove and not a COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) solution that is inflexible.
I mean yeah, create free and open source business apps to help a small business run their business without paying tens of thousands of dollars for a Windows Server (Use Linux and save money) and then tens of thousands of dollars for the MS-Office license to use Sharepoint and other proprietary stuff. I want to use OpenOffice/LibreOffice and have apps that can run on Windows, Linux, Mac OSX, Android, iOS and can use a MySQL Database instead of MS-SQL Server, etc.
Unlike most startups I can write a working business plan, I have prior business experience (I ran two small business PC repair shops that also did database and software work) I have over 25+ years of real world experience, and of course a computer and business degree with a 3.91 GPA.
My mental illness has some things in common with asperger's syndrome like low social skills, so it is hard for me to network and make friends. It is hard to get social clues or jokes sometimes, so people discriminate against me for that.
In your life, you should focus on things that you are in control, such as your desire and goals. You can't do much about things that you don't have control like people's opinions.
Start building, show what you are doing and probably, this people at Saint Louis will change their attitude. If they don't, you should not care at all. Some people will not understand how you feel until they get in the same your situation some day. Smile them back and try harder in what you love to do.
Have a great day!
P.S:Join some events like Startup Weekend, pitch your ideas or join other teams. It is a easier way to improve your social skills.
Now I'm working in a uni project but I'm not happy in the job... too much bureocracy, and I don't get to write much software, which is what I thought I was going to do here...
My issue has been I don't know enough about the world to know where and can apply my skills to solve problems.
A lot of it had to do with having new babies and simply not having the energy to hold down a six figure day job and a work on something else after hours.
I am.