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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

How is the cost of failure low? If you decide to go in business for yourself and it doesn’t make any money for 3 years, and you are just making non west coast salaries, you’re still potentially out of half a million dollars or more in total comp.

And any money that you invested in your company.

If you are talking about starting a business on the side and working full time, that means you are sacrificing some combination of time with your family, exercise, and time that you could be putting in getting ahead at your current job or acquiring skills that would help you get a better paying job.

It doesn’t make sense statistically to take on “one million times the risk” unless the upside is much higher. These days, a CS Major can spend a year learning “leetCode” and study “Cracking the Code” and easily get a job at a FAANG making a quarter million - not that I would personally want to.

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Let me be crystal clear: I'm talking about building up a side business in your spare time.

> If you are talking about starting a business on the side and working full time, that means you are sacrificing some combination of time with your family, exercise, and time that you could be putting in getting ahead at your current job or acquiring skills that would help you get a better paying job.

You think you somehow learn nothing attempting to build up a side project? I've yet to see an argument made successfully that you learn absolutely nothing marketable by working on a side project.

But let's say you manage to pull that off: all you've lost is a little bit of time. That's extremely low from a business perspective. Software is rather unique in that you don't need to spend tens of thousands of dollars setting up supply and manufacturing lines. And, the potential payoff is huge.

Now, maybe running a company isn't your thing. That's a fair argument. But fear of failure is a terrible way to go through life.

On a side note, why are you so relentlessly negative? Most of the comments you've made in this thread are needlessly hostile, sarcastic and bitter. Did a side project touch you inappropriately as a child?

That even lessens the chances by starting it on the “side”. You will be competing with people who are better funded and are able to commit to it full time.

What are the chances that a “side business” is going to make $150K to 200K a year?

The whole point of the article is about people who don’t want to be in management. It’s makes no sense to start a business if you don’t have any desire to be in management.

Also, one thing that I’ve learned over the years, is the easiest way to make money during a goal rush is to sell shovels. There are plenty of opportunities out there to make good money working for a consulting company that matters to well funded startups and corporations who want to outsource development/infrastructure. Guess what my two areas are?

Being in management is way different than running your own company.

One side project doesn’t have to earn 200k/yr. you can have 5 of them, each making 50k. Running them as single software company is way less management work than managing your team in big company environment.

So you’re going to run 5 $50K side projects by yourself, including maintenance, support, marketing, feature addition etc?

How much maintenance, support, marketing and feature addition is needed?

Let's say you need 1-2 hours a day for every of your product (all activities combined)

Being a manager means 5-8 hours a day managing people, not working on products.

So the time is similar, but your work on product, not manage people. Way different.

Some examples: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8844083

If I had to guess, I'd say that for every hacker news user that ships and markets an mvp, probably somewhere around 1-10% hit 150k/year from it. It's hard to find good data on this though.

I skimmed the articles from the link. Most of them made less than a $1000 a month.

One that made money was spreading malware and the author who seem to be making a decent return said.

It was really hard to write - took me 1.5 years, tons of research and re-writing. This isn't something I slapped together over a weekend. Far from passive income.

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