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Comment by aerovistae | Hacker News Reader

I have so many ideas and the path to reaching customers just seems impossible. I am constantly saying to myself, who could be persuaded to PAY for this? And yet so many people here have successful products that I NEVER would have thought could work (a color gradient on text?!?!). I do not know how people reach actual revenue on their side projects.

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Color-gradient-on-text guy here. For context, I didn't quit my day job until after I'd won a couple startup competitions, including one at Stanford. It's been 5 years since I went full-time on BeeLine, and I've only been able to survive thanks to my savings (I used to be a corporate lawyer) and my wife (whose steady earnings as a professor cover our day-to-day). It is definitely stressful and hard to bootstrap a company, but if you can make it work it can offer great benefits in terms of flexibility/family life and social impact.

I have a lot of ideas and the capability to build them all. I’m sure I’d be able to sell them as well. My problem is that I don’t have time, because I’m the sole income earner for a family of four. I’ve tried to get numerous projects off the ground, but it always required giving up sleep and putting my day job under threat. I don’t have runway because that money is earmarked (not by me) for a deposit on a house in one of the world’s most expensive markets.

Get a slower-paced job? I'm assuming you're in the Bay Area by the mention to world's most expensive market - there's plenty of very high paying jobs here where you don't exactly have to worry much, and it isn't particularly hard to get them.

You can also go a very long way by using a small portion of your income to pay someone in a cheaper location to code for you. You can literally pay a full time engineer somewhere else if you stop eating lunch + one starbucks out every day, for instance!

I am in the same situation. I had to stop burning the midnight oil on side projects. I just work on one now but over a much longer time horizon.

I am the same here, I am so useless at sales that when I see the things some people manage to sell I get angry somewhat.

Don't hate the player, man. Don't hate the game either. Realize that reaching people, both literally and figuratively, is a prerequisite to improving their lives with your product.

what kind of ideas about what audience? perhaps talk to other makers with overlapping audiences, and help each other. sadly, the main online media have become hostile to boostrapped sites.

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