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Comment by baz00 | Hacker News Reader

I've run a few businesses over the years and the return of investment of self sufficiency is barely worth it in the long run. It's very difficult to replicate the benefits of working for an SME (forget big tech) which it comes to security. You never have to worry about MRR because it's static and only increases.

Also some advice on hyper-optimising for cheap hardware. Don't. Buy something with a warranty from a respectable company. Or buy two of everything else. Downtime will cost you customers. I say that having spent most of those years running off cranky ex corporate thinkpads. They will let you down and you will need an exit plan. At this point I'd rather just buy an off the shelf MacBook config I can walk into the local Apple store and just buy another one if I break it or lose it. No waiting 4-5 days for another ebay thinkpad to turn up and hope it works ok. I run off a base model 14" M1 MacBook Pro now.

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>I've run a few businesses over the years and the return of investment of self sufficiency is barely worth it in the long run.

Most people aren't looking at it from the perspective of making a killing. They just want to get away from having a boss. For whatever reason they don't fit the corporate mould. Running their own show represents freedom.

http://reactionwheel.net/2019/01/schumpeter-on-strategy.html

Whoever is paying you is your boss. There is no escape, only a change in the illusion. If you're a sole trader, it's your customers. If you're a corporate wage slave, it's your line manager. If you're a startup it's whoever gave you capital. Even if you're CxO it's the other board members and investors.

The difference is that some bosses are more easy to say no to than others.

The real ease of saying no to bosses of any kind comes from financial security, no matter its origin. There are certainly plenty of small business owners who are struggling enough that they can barely afford to so "no" to any customer/ Conversely, there are plenty of employees who manage to tell their line manager "no" just fine. Whether you can afford to do so does not depends on the type of boss but on the ease with which you can bear the repercussions of doing so.

In a typical employment scenario, your line manager can cut off 100% of your revenue.

In an ideal SaaS scenario, your customer can cut off a tiny percentage of your revenue.

Comparing "typical" vs "ideal" is always going to tip in the direction of the "ideal" case.

There are plenty of companies, SaaS or otherwise, in which a single "whale" customer makes up so much revenue that losing them would instantly make the company unprofitable. Similarly there are plenty of employees who can handle being fired perfectly well, financially speaking.

If your SaaS can be killed by a single customer leaving, then you don't have a SaaS; you have a boss for whom you are developing bespoke software.

Multitude of customers as a “boss” is a much different situation than having one boss. So much that the analogy breaks up.

A customer firing you might affect 2% of your income. A real boss firing you will cut 100% of your income.

Also, if you are the founder and CEO of a startup you have to answer to the board and investors, but there is much less power imbalance. Sometimes a CEO being fired is financially better than continuing to work. Think of the founder of WeWork.

“You always have a boss” is a bland phrase that doesn’t account for all the very important nuances of the matter.

Definitely not an “illusion”. There are very practical differences between the different types of bosses.

Thinkpads are not cheap hardware.

If you’ve got a MacBook Pro budget you can buy 2 prev gen Thinkpads. Have the 2nd as a backup. I have a 7 year old Thinkpad as a backup and it’s great, more than good enough to last while main laptop is fixed or replaced. Was even able to upgrade RAM and storage vs everything is soldered on the mainboard like it’s on MacBooks.

Or buy latest gen thinkpad with 3 year warranty and optional on-site repair.

Really depends on what your needs are.

Cheers for the advice - not aiming for hyper-optimising for cheap hardware, it was just something I built out of personal interest.

His business seems to run on AWS Lambda, which is about as far away from running on cheap (unreliable) hardware as possible? The laptop he mentions is just for working.

That's the cheap hardware I'm talking about. What is in your hands is the most important thing of all because without it you can't serve your customers or increase ROI.

I can walk into a shop and have a device I can be productive in 1-2 hours.

I don't think it's a huge deal, just keep your secrets backed up in multiple ways you can retrieve

> That's the cheap hardware I'm talking about. What is in your hands is the most important thing of all because without it you can't serve your customers or increase ROI.

Yeah, but ... what is in my hands can be replaced in a matter of hours: just go out and get a new laptop at the nearest place!

It's even easier than that, because I primarily use Linux, there are times, in 2023, that I used a Core2 Duo with 2GB of RAM for days at a time on a particular project.

That's about 10m to pull the old laptop out of the cupboard, due `git pull`, and carry on working.

I think the parent is also speaking about working, not servers.

The downtime he speaks of is developer downtime. He isn't implying he served from used Thinkpads before, or that he serves off of MacBooks now.

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