Hacker News Reader

Comment by 88e282102ae2e5b | Hacker News Reader

Because it requires almost no capital to do so. You can start a company with a single laptop. You don't need a bank loan, you don't need investors (at least for certain business models).

If you could magically will into existence a coffee shop for free, I'm certain the number of people starting coffee shop businesses would skyrocket. You'd just need to come up with a unique twist to differentiate your shop.

View on HN

Even more importantly, you can do the pre-startup stuff for (almost) free, and put your toe in the water for (almost) free. You can know that you will have some business before you officially launch your company.

I don't think the fraction of people wanting to become self-employed is much higher than in other businesses, though.

A somewhat similar situation exists for small-scale blue collar jobs: hair dressers and nail salons, gardeners, plumbers, and the like. There, too, many young professionals dream of running their own business (I don't have numbers, but it wouldn't surprise me if half the 20-year old employed hair dressers would say they want to run their own shop one day), and it is cheap to test the waters (that sometimes involves borrowing tools or a van from one's employer while working in the weekend 'for friends')

As to the fraction actually making the jump: I wouldn't dare say whether it is higher in software than elsewhere. My gut feeling would say it isn't, compared to the above. It will be different for people working in industries where a single-man business doesn't exist (I work at a shipyard/a post office, and dream of building oil tankers/doing mail delivery of my own one day), but software development isn't unique in that.

But what's the point of starting a business if it can't generate revenue? Getting to that point definitely takes capital; even if you've already built the product, the marketing and sales costs of introducing a new product in an existing large market are significant. Otherwise you're just gambling with the opportunity cost of your time on the hope of an effective word-of-mouth campaign.

That's all true, but the question is why is this more prevalent among programmers than any other group. That opportunity cost is really quite cheap for most programmers, especially if you just enjoy the work. Worst case scenario, you can add something to your resume.

With salaries of over $100k available to programmers, I'd say the opportunity cost of a startup venture is pretty high. It takes years of determination and time for a startup to pay off, and most do not.

> the marketing and sales costs of introducing a new product in an existing large market are significant

Many side projects don't target existing large markets. Bootstrapping is a real thing that people do too, even in large, existing markets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com