Think of any idea. Think of your best idea.
I'd bet you money it's either been done, or is being worked on right now by someone else.
I think others share this understanding, and en masse it can lead to a more cautious approach to business development. If you know your business idea either exists, or will exist before you, then you should only take the leap if you have a really, really good product. It does not suffice to just be "first" nowadays (if you can even be first at all).
But what is interesting is that very few people are doing really ground-breaking, long-term projects, where everything is thrown out and started over from scratch. I think the reason is, one, it's not readily-profitable, and two, that technology has expanded so much that it's hard to see the big picture. You can't "throw it all out" unless you already know it all -- and nobody knows it all anymore.
Also, with the increase in consumption, there's a lack of creativity in newer generations and a lack of understanding that "if they don't like it they can make it themselves." Part of that is creation is so sophisticated that it seems daunting to start and the other part is that people are getting more accustomed to the idea that these things will just be handed to them, pre-packaged and complete.
In fact, I am the owner of a business in an industry which was heavily saturated. There were already companies doing exactly what we do, before we started. I just knew we could do it a lot better. We're making money already and haven't made a single sales call, or put a single advertisement out there. We're on schedule to be profitable this year. I'm not going to be the next Zuckerberg with this business, but I recognized there is plenty of opportunity in the software world despite it not being as flashy perhaps, as the last 10 years.
I'm just saying that this type of environment is going to be much less "hot" than when the playing field is wide open. The early days of iOS were a gold rush. That's cooled off significantly, yet who knows when the next Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat will appear.
What does that mean?
If I'm not getting rich, what the hell is the point? I can work half as hard doing bullshit for some big tech company.
Am I going to significantly increase my earnings by owning this business? Yes.
Am I going to be buying a penthouse on 5th Ave. and driving a Ferrari to the office? No.
I'll add this additional insight into why I have always wanted to a build a business:
A business is a machine. Built correctly, you can step away from this machine and it will continue to run, and create wealth for you. Even if that wealth is modest, it is wealth that can be provided to you at no cost of TIME. This gives you back your TIME, to either work a 9-5 or create another machine. Er, business.
(Obviously building the machine can take a lot of time. Not an insignificant point).
EDIT: I don’t doubt you, but i just can’t think of an example!
The other type of "autonomous" business is a SAAS business. The idea here is that you build a software service that generates revenue. This revenue should come in the form of monthly subscriptions to your service. If you can keep your costs down (i.e. do the work yourself, and don't hire full time employees), then once your system is stable, it should be able to generate income with relatively minor investments to your time. Obviously again with this case, a significant UPFRONT effort must be made to develop a system that provides enough value to customers, that they will pay for it.
I've been working on my business now for over 2 years. It's been a side project that has consumed a healthy majority of my spare time outside of my 9-5. I'm on track to break-even in revenue/costs in 3-4 months. Around that time frame, I also expect to be "feature complete" with version 1.0.
This should sustain at least a year, if not longer, of minimal time investment. Sure, I might need to fix a bug here or there, or investigate a connectivity issue or something that I simply can't 100% protect against... But the system has been developed from the ground up for long term stability, and reliability.
It's been running now for 2 years, and I've had basically no issues that I've needed to fix. It's been all feature development. By the end of this year I can pretty much guarantee I will be hands free, spending less than 3 hours a week, making more money than I spend.
That is the goal. Build something that can run (mostly) by itself, that generates more income than it costs to run.
p.s. Knowing myself, because I love what I do, I'll continue to work on it just for fun. But there's immense peace of mind knowing I don't have to.
I have worked on this business for the last 2.5 years, as a side project. In that time I have switched jobs (9-5) and learned 2 new programming languages, in completely different domains. It's meant a lot of evenings, and weekends, that I would have otherwise been doing something else, I ended up working on this business. So no, it didn't just magically create itself and start generating income. There was a very real time investment that has had to happen.
All in all, it's hard to put a total hourly estimate on it. I think the easiest way to think about it is like this:
If I could work on this full time, I would estimate it would take me 8 months of solid, full time work (50 hour weeks) to get where I am now (to a point where it's generating a healthy income, and I can step away from it because it's feature rich enough to support the client base). Possibly faster since, all the context switching I've been doing with my day job really does slow me down.
I am NOT saying that the income is enough to survive on. I'm saying after roughly 8 months of solid 50 hour weeks is how long it would take to create a product that has enough value that it can generate an income that matches it's recurring costs (hosting costs mostly). That's the "break even" point past which everything else is just profit.
I'm sure there are people on HN who have built something much faster, and made much more. This is just my experience.
By no means does it mean I will be making enough this year to quit my day job. My hope is that by the end of the year, I should be generating about $300-500 a month in pure, after expense, profit. I'll take that, and put it in an index fund.