Comment by pj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pj | Hacker News Reader

Funny how the last line of the article says,

Looking back, we (incredibly) should have heeded the advice of bad-boy chef Anthony Bourdain, who wrote our epitaph in Kitchen Confidential: "The most dangerous species of owner ... is the one who gets into the business for love."

This in spite of recent conversations here discussing "doing what you love": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=449295, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=449457

Why didn't doing it for love work for the author? I suppose if I were to answer the question myself, I'd say either a) they didn't love it enough. or b) They did some bad math.

Why not just sell the crossiants for $3? Why not sell the cold house coffee for $3 instead of $1? Raise the price, let your customers keep you alive. If they like what you have to offer, they will.

If their dream was to open a coffee shop, why /not/ work there full time? Why not make it work? Other coffee shops have figured out the formula and do survive. Maybe their owners loved it more?

Every business struggles in the beginning.

Do /not/ give up. Keep going. If your formula isn't working, tweak it. Don't close up shop. That's what you don't do if you love what you do. You don't give up on something you love. You can't.

"Why didn't doing it for love work for the author?"

"Do what you love" does not have a second clause. It's not an argument. It makes no promises.

One of my favorite people in this world was a saxophone instructor. He loved to play. He was good at it -- stunningly good. He did the New York club scene, did session work, played backup for some huge names. But he never became famous, and never achieved wealth. He also worked a dozen different jobs, died young from a heart attack, and left behind a widow and an infant son. His funeral was the largest I've ever attended.

You can do what you love, and you'll succeed. You can do what you love, and you'll fail. You can do what you love, and you'll never be anything more than mediocre. Doing what you love does not automatically make you successful. But it might let you become a better person.

Hmm... you could argue that point though.

It's one thing to have the dream of becomming a saxaphone player. It's another to have the dream of becomming a "famous" saxaphone player.

I honestly don't know if the man ever wanted to be famous. I just know that he did what he loved, and that the money didn't follow.

When people implicitly tack "...and the money will follow" onto the end of "do what you love", they're missing the point. Do you what you love, and you might be successful, or you might not. If you're doing what you love, it doesn't matter.

That's charmingly idealistic, but unfortunately it simply isn't true. There is more to life than what you do to earn a living. There's having a family, traveling, whatever you can imagine. At some point, you will need a sufficient quantity of money to do stuff unrelated to work. And if you can't make that money doing what you love, then you're going to have to make some choices about what you really want.

Don't shoot the messenger. I didn't come with the advice, and I realize that it has limitations.

That said, if your family/travel/something else is so important to you that you'll work a job you don't like to make it possible, them perhaps those other things are what you love. Nobody said that you have to define yourself by what you do for a living.

> There is more to life than what you do to earn a living. There's having a family, traveling, whatever you can imagine.

I think here's the major disagreement between the practical and the idealistic. To the true "amateur" in the original sense, there is no family, traveling, whatever to compete with the ideal or loved interest. Marriages do break-up (or never occur in the first place), people do stay in one place their entire lives, and so on if they love what they do enough. But for people that don't "do what they love," what they DON'T do is what they love, hence the disagreement.

There are only two reasons to do anything:

1. because you like doing it.

2. in order to do activities in the first category.

It may be that you can earn money doing what you love, but it may not. If not, you may have to spend time doing category 2 activities in order to do category 1 activities.

Raise the price, let your customers keep you alive.

I nominate this advice for being tattooed onto the forehead of web startups. I heard something about a spot of trouble in the market, CPMs in freefall, waily waily waily? What if we stopped trying to be all things to all people for nothing and instead tried being pain relief to people who are familiar with the notion of paying money for that?

(I, for one, am raising prices in February, because I've been undercharging for years now. Silly me.)

One problem: coffee shops are a competitive business. This makes their owners what economists call "price takers". It makes them what the rest of us call "bankrupt".

Depends. There's often a fair degree of brand loyalty in coffee shops - people have their favorite cafe and don't really check out other places, because they like the atmosphere and want to support the owners. It's not like gas stations, where the price is posted prominently and you can just drive elsewhere.

Unfortunately, much of that brand loyalty seems to be to Starbucks, so the little guys don't get much of it.

That's why differentiation and probably, not competing in a commodity business to start with, are so important.

There is more than one axis on which coffee shops compete, though. Price is one of the least-critical, IMHO -- ambiance, service, and "extras" like a decent menu or late-night hours will earn you a lot more loyal customers than a $0.25 price cut on coffee. Remember, if cost was the major deciding factor, people would be making their coffee at home. Going to a coffee shop is a social act, so the "scene" matters at least as much as the product.

The problems (and attempted solutions) the article's author described sound to me like they all stemmed from a lack of interest in paying any attention to the market. He admits that the most prominent and loyal types of coffee shop customers (commuters who just want to grab a cup for the road, and laptop warriors who want to sit tight and work for several hours) weren't interested in his business, and then seems surprised that he failed to make a profit? Color me unsurprised.

You can make money in the service industry, eventually -- but you have to provide something that people want. Simply being in love with your own clever ideas is seldom a good path to profitability.

There is more than one axis on which coffee shops compete,

Absolutely. I live about 7 miles from the nearest town, 30 miles or so from the nearest big city (Minneapolis). I would love a quiet, sit-down coffeeshop that had good coffee, tea, (and yes, cocoa :-) and pastries along with WiFi. I have no problem paying a small hourly fee for the WiFi or better yet an hourly drink minimum.

It's nice living on a farm in the middle of nature, but sometimes I want a different environment and I don't want to go all the way into the city or large suburb to find it. I'm sure there are many around here with a similar wish.

Is this true? The article mentions that the markups on coffee would be ridiculous for most other industries. And the market pretty much accepts this.

I know I'm not considering all the other business costs here. But, shouldn't someone be able to "Wal-Mart" Starbucks and copy their product but cut the margins to put them out of business?

Another example is the people with laptops who are buying $5 tickets in the form of cups of coffee to rent a few hours of de-facto office space. Are they going to quibble if it's $6? If the ambiance is a little cooler, or the coffee a little hipper, or the wait-staff a little cuter, an extra dollar might not matter to them, or might not be enough to chase them to the Starbucks across the street.

In short, part of the point of going to a coffee shop is to get away from seeing yourself as a "price taker." Otherwise, you can get your caffeine cheaper at McDonalds.

Do those of you reading this pass up one coffee shop over another for $1 difference in price? $0.50? $0.25? I'm honestly curious.

web startups.

Well, we're not talking web startups. The demand/supply curve is omnipresent and sometimes lowering the price is the ticket:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=M&t=my&l=on&z=m&...

I think he loved the idea of owning a coffee shop, not actually doing it.

As I sit in my cubicle day in and day out practically forcing myself to do work that I don't really care about, I often wonder if I merely love the idea of being an engineer rather than the actual practice of it.

I think you love the idea of being an engineer working on things you like, doing them the way you want instead of forcing yourself to do what other people want, doing them the way they insist upon.

Everyone likes making cool new stuff. No-one likes deathmarches and debugging race conditions and writing documentation and sitting in meetings and dealing with incomplete or ambiguous specs or having their project cancelled after working on it for a year or having an idiot for a boss who doesn't understand what you do. But that's what engineering is really like for most people, most of the time.

Yeah. It's kinda sad when you have a romantic idea of something, but reality paints a totally different picture.

I'm learning a new language at the moment. The romantic idea I had in my head was being able to speak it fluently with friends from that culture, read books, etc. The reality is that learning a language is difficult and and takes a lot of effort and patience.

Thankfully, I love studying it. But then if I didn't and then gave up I'd still be painting that romantic image in my head thinking i "shoulda, coulda, woulda..".

I kinda forgot where I was going with this... sorry :-(

With languages, my experience has usually been that it's easy and gratifying at first. Then it gets tough and demoralizing. And then you sort of break through that wall and it becomes quite gratifying again. So hang in there. :)

Oh, and to get past the level where you can hold a simple conversation I have found immersion necessary. My Hebrew improved as much in a month in Israel this past summer as it had in the previous year.

"I have found immersion necessary."

This is the only practical way to learn a language. There is an oft repeated cliche about playing quarterback in the NFL, that no matter how much you practice or try to simulate game conditions, the speed and chaos of actual game conditions is something you can't understand, really, until you experience it.

Well, learning a foreign language does not involve 300 pound men coming at you at high velocity, but the real experience of trying to communicate something you really want to say to a real human being is a very different experience than learning words or even grammar structure from a book, audio, video, or lecture. Even interacting with classmates is somewhat contrived, because you are probably trying to say something your teacher prepared for you, instead of getting own ideas across.

So, to summarize: learning a language with out immersion (or something close to it) will likely never amount to anything more than an academic experience.

Well, most of what you say is true, but doesn't require immersion. For example, I have Israeli friends here in the States, and I keep in touch with a couple cousins in Israel. So it's possible for me to have real conversations (as opposed to contrived conversations with classmates or workbook exercises etc.) without actually going to Israel.

I found immersion useful because when you hear a language all day, every day, it seems to seep into your subconscious. Also, I think that language learning is a function of density rather than just volume, so to speak. That is to say, spending ten hours speaking a language every day for a month is more effective than speaking it for half an hour a day for 600 days.

kentosi, I wanted to talk to you about language learning. I am working on a site to help people learn foreign languages and am trying to find people to give me feedback. Would you be interested? I couldn't find your contact info. My email is my name at gmail.

Perl is the programming language that's closest to a natural language that I've seen.

It's very aggravating knowing that there are 20+ ways to say the exact same thing, and in order to understand most people you need to learn all 20+ ways and completely memorize them.

Along with immersion, which is crucial, I've found it's useful to color-code as much textual information as you can, and aim for a "lossy" understanding of the language. Read a passage or listen to someone and just try to get some vague meaning from it, don't get caught up on particular words or grammar.

Also, if you are just starting, I find the traditional method of flinging a few phrases and a bunch of completely random vocabulary is inane. Learn those phrases, sure, but try to learn pronouns and modal verbs as soon as possible, followed by the most common form of past tense. Pulling figures out of thin air, I'd say 90% of the time people talk about what they need, want, should do, or can do, or about things that have already occurred.

Some languages are handy in that you get a free "immediate future" tense by learning the present tense; if you ask a question like 'Are you eating?' it's understood as 'Are you about to eat?' in the right context.

Once you have this framework of expressing most of your thoughts, you can start to dump in all the vocabulary and extra grammar. Eventually, after learning all the grammar and other random bits of knowledge, the learning game plateaus and you are basically just learning vocabulary, idioms, and slang.

Doing something professionally often takes the joy out of it. Especially when you are doing it for someone else.

"Amateur" comes from the Latin word for "lover" - amator.

-eur seems French. The meaning is the same anyway.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Amateur

Aha, "replaced by F -teur"

There's a reason French, Spanish, Italian, and others are called 'Latin languages'.

Oh, I know, maybe because Spanish is my first language and I took three years of Latin at high school :-)

There's that old quote (don't know where from) that when your hobby becomes your job, you need to find a new hobby.

Just like some people love the idea of being an author, whereas other like writing books.

I love writing, I don't necessarily love the concept of being an author. Book tours, having to pay 100% of everything from my own benefits to my own pension, etc.

I want to get published, not because I love the job but because I love writing. I spend hours a day writing, and then when I'm doing other things it's still running through my mind and I'll end up writing notes down or grabbing a pad at 2am and writing down an idea I had while sat on the toilet.

I'm sure most coders on here do their job because they love to code not necessarily because they love their job.

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