Hacker News Reader

Comment by anthony_franco | Hacker News Reader

The 4-Hour Workweek - made me quit my job and start a business. Since then I've been able to travel internationally for the first time in my life while working as much as I want.

View on HN

Interestingly, the biggest eye-opener of reading the 4HWW is the part when Ferriss defines the word muse. I used to only think that it was a dichotomy of 1) boring 9-5 selling out your soul for the rest of your life, or 2) VC-backed startup scaling like mad and ending in a 7+ figure acquisition, but never considered the option in between: lifestyle businesses that are "automated", so you can actually do other things with your life.

I would second the 4-Hour Workweek, yet I am still searching for a profitable idea. How long did it take you from reading the book to reaching the ability to quit your job?

It took me about four years. It would've been faster if I knew then what I know now.

Care to summarize what you know now that you didn't know then?

Go on...

I could write a whole book on what I’ve learned :) As can any other business owner I think. But I’d be happy to chat with anyone wanting advice.

Any tips on finding "automatable" problems?

Pretty much all businesses are automatable. Just hire good people and have good processes in place for them to follow.

For example, WP Curve was even able to automate the process of hiring dozens of developers. You would've that that it would require a very manual intervention by the owner: https://wpcurve.com/hiring-developers/

Same. The profitable idea is the hardest thing for me. It seems like everything I think of has already been done before.

With 7+ Billion people on the planet most people have done something similar to any idea. Isn't the point in the book that you can still succeed by creating your own flavor of an idea or selling that idea to a new market?

That might be the point. I didn't make it that far because after what seemed like 60 pages of the author talking about how he's naturally a world class performer at pretty much everything he's ever tried to do in his entire life I got tired of the bullshit time-share salesman style of writing.

Where does the actual advice start? This book is recommended pretty much every time someone asks a similar question, I might be willing to give it another shot if there's actual content somewhere in it.

Also, did this guy create a successful business outside of his self-help stuff before he started writing these books?

I think the book is worth reading. His inspiration for writing 4HWW was his experience running a supplement business, which he later sold - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Ferriss#Career

Prior to reading the book, I had a retire-early mindset. My idea was to work hard at high paying jobs and save a lot so I could retire early. After reading the book, I had the idea to create multiple streams of income in order to achieve the goal of retiring early.

Others have mentioned that it's not easy to find a lifestyle business that earns you enough income to live off of, and I've also had that problem. However, I've had partial success. I don't think I'd have ever pursued this path without reading 4HWW. It's not an instruction manual, though.

If you interview people about the type of problems they deal with day to day then you start to get tons of ideas. That’s how I started.

The problem isn't to find problem for which you can start a business. The problem is to find a problem for which you can start an automated business. That's much harder.

Every business can be automated. Just find good people to run it for you.

That's not the spirit of the 4HWW. The idea is to make a product that requires not much improvement, and people just buy it from your website, so essentially your 4 hours are spent doing accounting and basic customer support. You might have a part time guy to do server maintenance but that's about it. So essentially most of your revenue is profit for yourself, and you can run a "small" business with revenue in the 50-100K range.

If you start hiring full time workers, then your business has to scale a lot. Like revenue has to go to 500-1M range so you have enough to pay full time workers as well as money for yourself. That's just a completely different beast.

500-1M USD? If you hire full-time US workers then that's probably the case.

For me I hired a few remote part-timers around the world. So it costs me an order of magnitude less. And they're all awesome, so I barely have to lift a finger.

I think approaching an idea that already has existing solutions is better than trying to come up with a completely new idea. The existing solutions indicate that there is a market for it. Can you improve on those existing solutions, and deliver some value that is lacking in them?

In the book, Tim Ferris makes his money by selling phoney brain supplements to golfers. That's not a new idea, but it's a profitable one.

I think part of the reason I'll never have a great deal of money is that the idea of tricking someone into buying a useless product makes me uncomfortable. As does adding more plastic and trash into the world.

I read the 4 hour work week when we (wife and myself) were already travelling and working on our own companies (this was when it just came out first by the way); we both scaled down to working max 1 day a week, found that that made us create more and more projects. Found out we really do not like not working.

What kind of company did you start?

I started a SaaS company in the hospitality industry.

Could you elaborate on your lifestyle, please? What kind of job do you do on that max 1 day a week? How do you spend the rest of your time? How far do you travel? Do you stay long at one place or you'll constantly on the run? Do you have kids? If no - do you plan to have them? If yes - how do they manage with that lifestyle? Having your knowledge and experience, what would you have done differently? Thanks in advance!

Like I said; that 4hr workweek was like 10 years ago: since then the week is full again. But with multiple businesses (check my profile/linkedin). We hike a lot (few hours a day). When we worked less than a day we travelled through europe, now all over the world. We try to stay longer in one place when we can, but business meetings take us all over. No kids, consciously not ever.

I would not do a lot different but as you ask; I would have started real business networking far sooner. I am a tech guy and always surrounded myself with business guys so I would not have to. I think that was not so smart. I always thought I would be bad at it, but it just is not very hard. And with the right contacts, you can grow and achieve things much faster.

I have been trying this since the book came out...

I've never been able to get a successful low-maintenance business going, what kind of business did you start?

Start any business and just hire good people to run it for you.

I have a SaaS. I have a support person, product manager, and developer. Between them they handle 90% of the day to day tasks.

The 4-Hour Body is a great book too. I hesitated to mention it but if you mention the 4-Hour Workweek then I feel like it is to be mentioned as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com