Ask HN: Is it harder and harder to be an entrepreneur as time goes on?
In the late 90's and early 2000's seems like a golden era to be an software entrepreneur. Internet was still relatively new.
Nowadays, any cool idea or problem you want to solve already has multiple solutions. Now, that's not completely true but I feel that it is harder to be a solo entrepreneur or have a small, lean, and efficient team that does more with less.
Maybe a particular problem is already solved in the United States, but maybe it is not in Europe. So maybe that's a way to think about it. Maybe pick an existing problem and make it better.
Will we ever reach a point where a solo entrepreneur is just a pipe dream? Where every problem is saturated with several solutions.
My dream is to bootstrap a company and never have to rely on investors. Create something that nets me a decent passive income and then never have to worry (as much) about money as I do now. This seems possible for a pure software solution but anything non trivial that involves hardware or tangible things, one needs investment.
I wish I had the knowledge and mindset I do now 18 years ago. I am 29 years old. But I feel that nowadays I will have little choice to but to work for someone else and make that someone else rich.
I just wanted to see what you all think.
> Nowadays, any cool idea or problem you want to solve already has multiple solutions. Now, that's not completely true but I feel that it is harder to be a solo entrepreneur or have a small, lean, and efficient team that does more with less.
There was rarely a time when this wasn't the case. Hindsight might tell you otherwise, but consider that Wordpress was launched in 2003, long after blogging phenomenon started in 1997. Stripe was launched in 2010, long after Paypal, Authorize.net. Look around you, there isn't a lack of problems to be solved.
And I don't mean to cool-and-sexy stuff like VR and AI, but basic ones. Wordpress sucks. Why there isn't a CMS that combines static file generation with Wordpress' ease of customisability? Why is server administration still so hard? Why isn't there a programmer-friendly search engine that focuses of giving relevant examples (which constitute most of my Google queries)? Google Analytics shows too much stuff, why isn't there something simple for bloggers and publishers?
I accept, these ideas might be not be great, but these are problems I face frequently. Chances are even you (and people around you) would have frustrating problems that can be solved.
At 29 years old you grew up with the fact that the Internet is like electricity. It’s everywhere and part of our life. Same goes for mobile phones and Amazon Prime for 15-20 years old kids. At 50 years old you can’t seem to imagine life without a personal computer. New born babies may not have to work a day in their life thanks to AI and will never learn how to drive a vehicle ever. The list goes on and on.
If you want to be a successful “entrepreneur” you need to ask yourself this kind of questions. How can I make the world a better place? How can I improve our lives? What will we be doing in the next 50 years that we’re not doing at the moment?
Orherwise you’ll quickly fall into a world of sheep. People who take everything for granted and keep consuming until there’s nothing left. Then wait for producers to produce so they can consume everything. It’s been this way since the begining of our human race. If you simply create value, you’ll be fine.
"People who take everything for granted" so so true. Everything that is, was once not. And everything that is, will soon not be.
There is still a huge demand for b2b software and large swathes of industry that are in the very early stages of digitalisation. We work in an old fashioned industry (education) and are constantly asked to build x, y & z outside of our scope.
Get to know businesses and their problems and there are plenty of opportunities to build helpful software. You will constantly be battling to stay product-based vs service-based but if your building a small company this isn't as big a problem as it seems (Ive met more well off entrepreneurs with service-style businesses)
I think the best assistance you can give yourself is to reduce your personal expenses and save up a nest-egg that would allow you to work on this for quite a bit longer than you would think. While saving up, go out and talk to people about their problems. You'll find there are a million problems to which the current solutions aren't a perfect fit.
PS If you run a business you will be thinking about money far more than you are now!!
Yes, it get's harder. All I had to do was buy a domain names and I would have retired. Today I need to write 50,000 lines of code across 25 micro services, running a hybrid multi cloud cluster of kubernetes instance consumping 100 other APIs with a sharded and replicated DB cluster to have a chance. :-) But it's still easier than tomorrow, tomorrow you will need to train a deep learning model that runs on 10k GPUs and using all sorts of Phd level maths. So start today instead of over thinking it. :D
I think developing, while not trivial is the easy part. its finding the right product idea and opportunity, and then marketing it, that is harder than ever.
actualy AI development is a lot simpler and more pleasant than the abomination of modern javascript
I think its harder to some extent, but you can always find a niche to make significant improvements. If you think that everything is already done and there is nothing else left, that just means you're spending enough time on experimenting and researching.
As far as investment concerned, I'm personally a self-funded solo founder. This is a very hard and stressful path. I'd love to get an investment with a reasonable deal, but for me that's a little bit early. I probably start working in that area once I get few paying customers.
If you haven't yet already done so, read the "Lean Startup" book. I'm by no means associated with it. It was very useful to me, and I think this should the very first think for entrepreneurs to do. Will be probably best $15 spent on amazon.
Last year I met 4 people under 25 who each respectively built $1m+ businesses. One guy started by flipping video games. The other was a programmer who did $300k+ revenue within a few months of starting his Amazon business. Another built an 8 figure business within 2 years making software for Amazon sellers.
All of them bootstrapped their businesses. The first 3 were Amazon seller product businesses. It's possible and maybe even easier now than before.
I read your title a little differently. I have to say as we age it becomes harder to do entrepreneur stuff. Once you start a family and have more than one kid, you literally are strapped for time.
Take advantage of every minute you have if you really want it.
. Internet was still relatively new.
I mean, if your approach is "find problem, add Internet, equals solution" then yeah, you're probably going to find it a tough row to hoe these days. But I'd challenge you to broaden your thinking and be more imaginative. There's a lot more to creating solutions that "mix in some Internet".
Think about the staggering array of things you can do today, with almost no up-front investment at all, using AWS, GCE, Azure, etc., that would have cost millions 20 years ago. You can deploy a virtual super-computer running in AWS and throw it at a problem for crying out loud.
Consider too the range of awesome open-source / free software packages that are out there, and all the capabilities they enable. Consider cheap, small, embeddable single-board computers, inexpensive software-defined-radio, cheap webcams, accelerometers, gps chips, and other sensors. Consider all the Open Data that's out there already, and everything streaming in minute-by-minute (see, SDR and receiving satellite data right off the air in real-time).
Consider the 8+ billion people in the world who are mostly all potential customers given how interconnected we are with the internet and global payment systems. Look at how much easier it is now to get content in front of potential customers with Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, etc.
Consider that you can prototype a physical item with a cheap 3D printer, using Open Source OpenSCAD software, ship a prototype off to an injection molding outfit, sell your item on Amazon, using Amazon's warehouses and logistics infrastructure, and never touch the inventory.
Further consider how much more we know about the mechanics of starting and running a tech startup now. Ideas like "product market fit" have been formalized and are better understood, Steve Blank's Customer Development process is out there as guide, and there are tremendous resources like Startup School, etc. out there to consult.
One could go on and on and on... personally I think there's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur than right now. There is so much possibility and so much potential out there that it's staggering, IMO.
Here, try this on for size and see if maybe you can draw some inspiration from this guy (Alan Kay):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id1WShzzMCQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e8VZlPBx_0
Even better, go off somewhere and lock yourself in a room with a bunch of books by Philip K. Dick, Greg Egan, William Gibson, Charles Stross, and H.P. Lovecraft - and biographies of Nikola Tesla and Charles Proteus Steinmetz - and devour that stuff for a while. That's practically guaranteed to get your mind running in all sorts of interesting new directions.