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Comment by _zr37 | Hacker News Reader

I would agree. I built something people liked enough to pay me for, and it even gave me a basic income. But I was on call all the time and generally working a lot for like 1/4 what you get working for other people around here, and going home at six.

My experience was that I could slack off and work less than full time, but doing so would damage the business and then I would have to put in a lot more effort.

I mean, if I was better at business, it would have perhaps been different. As it was, it was full time work for about what I earned when I was 17, and on top of that, finding a job after working exclusively for my self was rather harder than doing so after sporadic contracting gigs.

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Nice.

May I ask what your project is/was?

What difficulties did you encounter?

http://prgmr.com/xen/ Xen-based VPS

Look forward to hearing Luke's answer - as a fellow sysadmin eneterpreneur, he's been a real inspiration (even though I'm in a different line - training).

I responded to parent; I am slowly moving towards that announcement that I've been talking about. I mean, the new folks (srn and adp) are not that different from me in terms of values, so I obviously don't want or need (and am not really competent with) corporate-speak, but I do want to come up with something that focuses more on the business and less on my own personal issues (and this note, well, focuses more on the personal issues. While I think it's probably appropriate within this thread, it's me whining on a personal level, working through my issues, not me making an announcement about the company.)

I like the idea of sort-of serializing the 'post-mortem' parts of the story; going through my diary and emails and writing up buisness-level and technical incident reports; enough time has passed for most of these that assuming I leave off names, it shouldn't be too embarrassing for anyone.

Totally got it, thanks, Luke! I would love to read that. =)

I don't hate it, but that's a really crowded and competitive market, uh?

:-)

This is something else I want to write about. Starting a really different service is a lot harder to sell, and I knew going in that selling is what I am worst at.

Also, when I started, most of the competition was using UML or OpenVZ. Xen was unquestionably superior to those technologies for multi tenant systems, so one could argue that this market wasn't as crowded in 2005

Of course, I was big into the idea of a commodity product. Like I said, competing as a commodity requires less marketing skill. Instead of talking someone into trying something new, you start with something they already are using and then just point out the advantages of your implementation, which can be as simple as the blog I posted in the other comment.

as someone else said, http://prgmr.com/xen/ - note, I've sold all but 5% to other people who are as enthusiastic as I was back when I was really into it, folks that are technically better than I am, so you shouldn't take the fact that I completely burnt out as a reason to not use them. I need to write up an announcement for them, and I haven't yet. I keep writing it and it keeps coming out sounding like a postmortem for my own failures. I mean, that's a reasonable way of looking at it, but the company is still a going concern, and I see no reason why the buyers oughtn't get another ten years out of the thing; I need to do a postmortem on my failures for me (and I need to whine about it some to my friends) - but the business needs something rather more upbeat, because the sale really isn't a bad thing for the business... really, it's a good thing. I am thoroughly burnt out, and having someone else who is enthusiastic in charge (and who mostly shares my values, too) is unambiguously good for the business.

Difficulties? Eh, I'm a really bad negotiator. I'm pretty good at picking engineers and technicians (I might reasonably say that I'm really good at doing so... almost everyone who worked for me at retail wages went on to get real jobs that pay real bay area level money.) - but I'm not a good leader. I don't think I got as much out of those excellent technicians and engineers as their next employers did. I really only have very vague ideas of why I'm a bad leader; it's one of those things where I'm bad at it largely because of a lack of wisdom. I actually just wrote another comment on the subject[1] and if that is correct, well, maybe I can become a leader someday, but there's a long journey for me between here and there. I need to become a lot more comfortable with what I refer to as nietzschean self-deception[3], and honestly, I'm not sure that doing so is worth it to me if I can be comfortable as an Engineer for the rest of my life.

It is also a market with a low barrier to entry, and lots of competition. If you can hire one pretty good, experienced Engineer and two smart, juniors you have most of the capital needs met, Of course if you want a good deal on packet and power, you end up buying a lot of that (for me, my power and packet was rather cheaper than a senior level engineer; I mean, it was less than $10K/month. Not a whole lot less. Much less scale than that and you'll have difficulty competing on price) - but the low barrier to entry is important because market opportunities are exploited pretty quickly.

I think I was also bad at strategy. At several points in time, I had overwhelming technology advantages over anyone in the same price range, (or I had dramatic price advantages over everyone with similar technology) and I mostly failed to capitalize. At one point, someone even noticed[2] and publicized this; I had a waiting list longer than my arm.

When you have a waiting list for a pre-paid, sticky, recurring revenue business? Do everything you can to get to the point where you can get capacity up fast enough that people don't need to wait. I'm fairly certain I would have been at least 3x larger at my peak, and I think there was a real chance of 10x, if I didn't run waiting lists for the six months where I had that price/technology advantage and people noticed. If I was 3x larger at my peak, that would be a $1m/year turnover, and I don't think it would have required a lot more power and packet or even labor, just because in this business the biggest problem is just having someone around to answer support often enough. I think that would have taken the business from something that paid me just enough to make rent to something that paid more than I could make as a IT contractor. And, because of me being congenitally bad at marketing, I didn't get another chance.

I think that's one of the key takeaways for me. Know your weaknesses (which I did) but then when something comes along that momentarily boosts that weakness? Jump on it with everything you have. That part was the part I missed. You can create opportunities in areas where you are strong all the time; that's what it means to be strong. But opportunities that negate your weaknesses don't come along very often at all; that's what it means to be weak. They should be treated as the very rare events they are.

I mean, I guess the key thing for OP, who wants something easy is just that running a small business is work - and for the money per effort input, it's really quite difficult to beat even mediocre contracting wages. I mean, certainly, it can be done, but it's not easy, and it's not nearly as certain as getting a consulting check. (Which isn't 100%, either, but it's much more certain)

There's a lot of risk in running a company. There's also a chance of a huge reward, but I think that running a product business is usually not that great of an idea for someone who just wants the minimum money with the minimum work. Running a business makes more sense if you want lottery tickets with better odds where you have some control (and want to feel like you had a lot of control if you win)

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14030580

[2]If you aren't good at marketing (and I'm not, I knew that setting out, and I knew that my values and my corporate values meant that I would always be bad at marketing) you need to jump when someone who is notices you. See https://uggedal.com/journal/vps-comparison-between-slicehost... - that was huge for me.

[3]By which I mean the lies we all must tell ourselves to continue to function as human beings. All of us need to come up with some sort of meaning - as the man points out, you can't stare too long into that abyss. The problem I have with Nietzsche in general is that while he feels right about self-deception and power, I personally find self-deception (well, deception in general) to be more uncomfortable than I find power (or more power than I have now) to be comfortable. In fact, I think I have a pretty comfortable level of power right now; I'm nobody's boss, but I have the power to walk out on my boss at any time, and I make more money than I need. (now, the last decade plus of what should have been my retirement fund was dumped into seeing if I could run a business, so I couldn't walk forever, but I've probably got a good year or so, and I've never had trouble finding work, so while I don't have "fuck you money" I don't need to deal with anything very unpleasant.) Frankly, my feelings on having more power than that are pretty mixed. (having less power than that is certainly unpleasant, of course, but I'm not sure that having more power than that is really a step up from where I am now.) - really, that might be another way I'm a bad leader. I really like being thought well of, and like most people, I do enjoy some parts of power, but I'm super uneasy, in other ways, with having significant power over other people.

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