Welcome to the unfortunate reality of most internet businesses. The default outcome of a lifestyle business is a lot closer to this than a patio11 style runaway success. The lifestyle entrepreneur myth is so pervasive on HN that the common mindset of non startup people is "Oh, I don't want to do the startup thing, I'll just build a steady slow growth business and make $10K a month". The reality is that a side project making $10K a month is even less likely than a multi million dollar acquisition of a venture funded startup. The median outcome is not that you'll get 0.01% of a niche market, it's that you'll get 0%
If by "lifestyle business" you mean "something I stuck in a private Github repository, set up a web page for, tinkered with Google Adwords a bit, and hoped for the best", you are absolutely right.
Patrick's businesses aren't viable because he got lucky with the right lines of code and the right blog posts. He's viable for approximately the same reasons that a decent local bookkeeping firm are. It just happens that he generate value with small amounts of Ruby code instead of accounting services.
I have a good friend here in Padova who has started two of those, and they've been quite successful. He also works his ass off from morning til night running the things despite hiring some good people. Something like BCC, which seems to mostly run itself and generate some decent money, is, in some ways, far more "successful" than that, in my book. Generating even modest money without doing anything is a nice accomplishment.
This is an interesting conversation (the whole thread). I think people get really tripped up with these discussions because they're talking about different things. The first comment talks about "side projects" making $10k per month. I think 'patio11 and 'tptacek as well as yourself would all agree that $10k/month is impressive for a true side project (built and maintained entirely outside of normal working hours), but that it's completely normal (almost required) for even the smallest of "lifestyle businesses". (That term, to me, signifies a business which demands full time attention from its principals, at least to start.)
The "patio11 as runaway success" quote is probably what triggered the rest of this discussion--obviously 'patio11 is successful, but there's nothing "runaway" about it.
The default outcome of a lifestyle business is a lot closer to this than a patio11 style runaway success.
Maybe this is a matter of perspective, but I don't consider my business a runaway freight train. There exist many, many, many businesses in your town which make more than I do.
I know literally hundreds of people who have businesses which are roughly similar (consultancies / SaaS shops / infoproducts / etc, created without substantial non-founder investment), and believe me when I say this, I neither optimize for nor have achieved an unattainably high watermark.
Our business makes several times what patio11's does and we are not a runaway success, either, not by a long shot.
If you do not actually attempt to make a business — by selling something people need and already are willing to pay good money for — then yes, you don't tend to make any money. Just stabbing out in the dark with "good ideas" doesn't work.
I have helped my students gross more than $2 million in revenue from "lifestyle businesses." It is absolutely achievable and not rare.
This:
> The reality is that a side project making $10K a month is even less likely than a multi million dollar acquisition of a venture funded startup.
…is factually wrong. Multi-million acquisitions are rarer than being struck by lightning, some 400-500 a year. There are at least an order of magnitude times new bootstrappers every year making well over $10k a month than there are acquisitions.
Startup acquisitions seem more common because they get talked about. Your basic availability heuristic (aka cognitive error) at work.
"The median outcome is not that you'll get 0.01% of a niche market, it's that you'll get 0%"
There are so many assumptions in here that it's useful to unpack. What makes you think you need to aim for 0.01% of a niche? Why do you think you need a niche? What's a niche mean to you?
It's the unspoken "knowledge" about "how to do it" that holds people back. Everybody "knows" you have to "find a niche." Meanwhile there are millions of painful business problems all around you that get ignored in favor of looking for some weird little niche market.
It's logarithmic. But your time as a consultant is worth more than some number of 9's of people on the planet (99.99% for instance). You've got one business that runs itself, and another one ticking along pretty well. Maybe you haven't made all the money you want to make, but you're well on your way to financial freedom, appear to be doing something that makes you happy, and have a family (congrats!), friends, and seem to be fairly happy with the world.
If you look at things in absolute terms, rather than relative terms (someone always has more), you seem pretty successful to me in a way that not a lot of people manage. I wouldn't belittle it too much.
He's not belittling it, he's (politely and patio11-ly) saying: "Stop putting this huge space between me and you because it isn't there, and you're short-selling yourself by pretending it is."
If we were to look at the most quantitative, objective thing, consulting rates, there very certainly is a difference between patio11 and the average HN user (and most of us are better off than the population at large, I'm willing to bet).
I've met him, and you're right that he's very polite, generally humble and a good guy, and I can appreciate he's seen plenty of people making orders of magnitude more money than him. Still though, he's pretty successful.
It's a bit irrelevant to go down this road since patio11 has quit direct consulting, but from what I've read, patio11's path to (consulting) success goes like this: patio11 likes teachers, makes bingo card app, charges for it like a reasonable person; patio11 notices all these mistakes he's making while selling to teachers, blogs about it, blog gains popularity among like-minded individuals; patio11 falls into consulting, delivers a good service, and finds out how much he can charge for it.
There's nothing in this story that's dependent on being very lucky or being exceptionally smart; the only outstanding traits here are overcoming the fear of the unknown that plagues everyone and being a good teacher, but both of these can be learned. It mostly just comes down to spending your time doing the right things.
And now with AR, just by focusing on the major mistake from BCC (selling to teachers), patio11 has sort of proven my point for me: it doesn't take that long to bootstrap a successful business with all the resources available to you now. There are more than enough blog posts telling you what to do, what not to do, and there are more than enough open niches that are perfect for microbusinesses to supplant the dayjobs of everyone on HN who has the same restless ambition that makes staying in those dayjobs an impossibly depressing prospect. And from there, consulting for larger businesses with what you learn in your micro is just icing on the cake.
Thanks, in my experience that's basically true. I've never really wanted to go after funding or go for acquisition, but I can see how that path in some ways has a higher probability of success than hustling on side projects.
No, your second sentence is factually incorrect (except for the first clause, of course). Don't let the fact that you're not interested in building a business fool you into thinking that building a business is more difficult than it is.
You're not interested in building a business. That became clear when I read your sentence: "At the end of the day we aren't that driven by money, and we aren't really running a business." I didn't even need to glance at your "anti-sales page", though that page certainly hammers the point home, then jumps up and down on it for good measure.
It's not a radical act of rebellion to do good work at your day job, get paid, go home after work, and have fun building things in your spare time without any thought of profit. This is how most of my favorite people live their lives. This is all fine. What is not fine is trying to define this happy life as a "failed business" and trying to calculate the "ROI" of your fun, then lapsing into despair because the spreadsheet has a zero in it. That hasn't been doing your happiness any favors, it isn't doing your audience any favors, and it isn't leading you to draw sensible conclusions.
Stop being an uninspired businessperson and become an inspired maker of stuff. You're almost there.
I think you're right and I'm at my best when I'm an inspired maker of stuff.
My hope is that sharing our experiences, we transition to making awesome stuff and sharing it with other people that like what we do.
You're also right on trying to calculate the "ROI" on our fun is the wrong approach. At best revenue is a data point, not the goal in itself. If the goal was money for its own sake, we'd make much different choices.
Ouch. 3 years is a long time to go with nearly 0 revenue. If you're selling to businesses, the most important thing is you go talk to people who will be your customers. In person. Build it and they will come is a total myth, you need to actually get out there and sell! patio11 did the same with Appointment Reminder.
Yeah it's tough and if we didn't have the early small wins, we probably would have quit years ago.
In selling to businesses, I agree that we need to get out there and talk to businesses about what problems they need solved and are willing to pay for. I did a little bit of that before building v1 of Answer Customers, but we would have been better served by spending months interviewing business owners than by building software.
One thing I've learned is that being a builder is a bit of a curse. It's too easy to get excited about an idea, come up with reasons why it has to work, and then just build and ship. Fighting that urge is difficult, but necessary to find success.
Hopefully it doesn't take 3 years for other people to figure this out.
