Hacker News Reader

Comment by elwell | Hacker News Reader

Having your own business is much more demanding than a full-time job.

that's bullshit. Having your own business lets you decide yourself how much you work. You can spend 80 hours a week on your business, or you can spend 30 hours a week on your business. I chose the latter, and it works just fine. (but I don't have any employees, maybe that would change things)

On top of that, I have the freedom to just stay at home and take the kids to the zoo when I don't feel like working.

Having employees make the difference. If you don't have employees you're more or less like a freelancer, which is significantly different from carrying the responsibility for a whole bunch of people.

I employ between 5 and 12 people depending on my workload. I just don't have to provide an office because they're all remote.

Depends on what you call a business. A business can be a bakery or an international software publisher.

You're right when you hint that having employees might change everything: it does.

Don't forget that remote work also exists when being employed so I would not say flexibility is "be your own boss" related.

Exactly. We're going down the Freelance/Consultant route whilst working on our own products in the downtime, growing those products until they outpace the consultancy.

We'll use a shared platform for the products which will allow us to amortize the development costs over all of the products. Hopefully we can grow them to the point where we can hire people to manage the products day-to-day whilst we focus on new ventures.

We've got an end-game in mind, which involves leveraging the fact that a vast swathe of industries have only scratched the surface of what is possible with automation. "In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is King".

But I'm getting ahead of myself now :)

Not necessarily. Having your own business might take the same number of hours as a full-time job, but you have much less commute time. Also you can decide when to work a lot of the time.

If you set things up right, sometimes you don't have to work at all.

The old adage "work smart, not hard" has become trite and meaningless, and when I first started out in business I thought it was scammy bullshit.

But now I work 3 days per week and take care of my kids every Tuesday and Thursday. I work from home and see them all the time. Sure I don't make much money but we get by and I'd rather live on less money now while I watch my kids grow up than spend all my time working.

I guess what having your own business gives you more than anything is choice: choice about when and how you work, choice about who you work with and choice about how much money you want to make.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com