Comment by katzgrau | Hacker News Reader

Comment by katzgrau | Hacker News Reader

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A few points:

* When I said, "I wasn't making any money," I meant not anything of significance. I wouldn't consider a thousand or two thousand per month significant, which is where I was at for a while. If I can't live on it and hire an assistant to delegate some work to, it's not significant. If I couldn't pay admin fees it would be a failure. But yes, I did redefine failure for bootstrapped startups because I think it's valid. VC-backed startups don't have this flexibility / time to learn the hard way.

* In regard to being determined, I know this sounds like survivorship bias but you really do get better at what you're attempting to do by sticking with it. Your product gets better. Your personal network grows. You're more yourself in more uncomfortable/growth situation. Your odds of failure drop the longer you work on achieving something — not surprising.

I'd guess 99% of the people who have taken at shot at learning a second language fail (or give up or get bored) before they become fluent. Does that mean the 1% who made it and say "practice every day" have some level of survivorship bias? It's kind of absurd. Bootstrapping a business to success is like anything that takes time and effort and is based far less on good fortune than people think.

You parsed what I said pretty deeply and I'm not that smart of guy, so if there are flaws in what I wrote here that's understood - but you might understand what Im trying to get at.

>In regard to being determined, I know this sounds like survivorship bias but you really do get better at what you're attempting to do by sticking with it

This is survivorship bias. You're a survivor and can look back on the set of decisions you've made in the past to rationalize your current success. I've seen countless businesses linger for years only to shutdown later and sell their assets.

I find learning a language a poor analog here as it's much simpler and generally within your control. More effort is more closely tied to more results. Language learners aren't typically affected by seasonality, fads, or market conditions.

It's all of these other factors that make analyzing business success factors tremendously difficult. Because it's so difficult, it's easier and more straightforward to assume "I'm successful, so my decisions were the right ones" than "I'm successful mostly due to luck".

>, I know this sounds like survivorship bias but you really do get better at what you're attempting to do by sticking with it.

Yes, I agree one can get better at something by continuing to practice it. But that's independent of what "survivorship bias" means. It seems like you're thinking of "survivorship bias" as a measure of honest self-reporting instead of an unemotional mathematical bias. Your "determined as hell" example is not the same as "language practice" in the next example:

>I'd guess 99% of the people who have taken at shot at learning a second language fail (or give up or get bored) before they become fluent. Does that mean the 1% who made it and say "practice every day" have some level of survivorship bias? It's kind of absurd.

Survivorship Bias means ignoring an uncounted population (counterexamples) when considering an attribute. Yes, your language example would be absurd since it includes both the successes who practiced every day _and_ the failures who didn't practice every day. This matches our intuition; my son doesn't practice Swahili language every day so he failed at knowing Swahili.

Your "determined as hell" anecdote isn't like that. To remove sampling bias of survivors from your advice, we have to count the _other_ entrepreneurs (not you) who were also "determined as hell" but still turned out to be business failures. The _other_ entrepreneurs can also create "better products" and "grow personal network" and still fail at the business.

>but you might understand what Im trying to get at.

I understand your positive advice for a successful bootstrap business. I took issue with _how_ you presented it because it copies the same logic flaws of survivor bias that the article is complaining about. It seemed like you were so passionate about your success anecdote that you overlooked what "survivor bias" actually means. Therefore, you didn't notice that it also applied to your comments of bootstrap being "not hard" if one is "determined as hell".

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