I'm 31, have a great job etc., but have always wanted to start a company.

The problem is, I've never encountered a problem big enough that would want me to do this and rather than start a company for the hell of it, I've just stayed put.

What is the right move in this scenario? Start a shitty company, or keep the nice job and potentially regret never starting a company?

Viewed from this perspective, it's not as clear.

>"I've never encountered a problem big enough that would want me to do this and rather than start a company for the hell of it, I've just stayed put"

Fuck[1] those who make you feel bad that way. It is RIDICULOUS that working reasonable hours a week, doing a challenging (or not), but stable job, great benefits, and being rewarded for loyalty is now LOOKED DOWN UPON! Your entire life is not a challenge to see who can push the hardest, 'solve' the most problems, start many companies, etcetera. You should do what makes you happy. Honestly. And if that means starting a company, go for it. If you're not so inclined, don't fret over it.

I have realized that the problems will come to you if you look for them. Like, random ideas. For example, you will see in my comment history that I often suggest ridiculous business ideas as solutions to my problems/something I want. If you want something/aren't satisfied with some kind of stuff, maybe you should work on a solution, and try to sell it to people with problems you faced? You may not make a lot of money, or any profit, but might make yeah happy, and give you the satisfaction of having started something.

In a related note, in one of my previous comments I mention JuJu Dhau, this awesome/incredible yogurt from Bhaktapur, Nepal. If you/anyone wants to start a yogurt business to make that (I'm assuming U.S), I'd be a sleeping/reasonably active partner for a little bit of money. Just throwing ideas out there... : )

1. Does HN have a swearing policy? In either case, I mean in the figurative sense anyway.

I don't think so. I think as long as you aren't cussing "at" someone, you are probably fine. Personal attacks are not okay. That is not what you are doing here.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8897764

Just don't attack people personally and you'll be fine, though a user that excessively swears without purpose would likely be chided (is there a keyboard version of Tourette's?)

There is no official policy on this to my knowledge. But my feeling is that expletives indicate and incite strong emotions that can cloud insight into the complexities of an issue.

I think I'm not alone in that.

Three years, a lot of personal cost, false starts, finding co-founders, and other headaches later, and I'm finally getting to where this year, it should start making money. I can't even begin to describe what a difficult experience it's been. Someone once told me the only emotions founders experience are elation and terror. What they didn't tell me is that they are often at the same time, and often for the same reason, and sometimes are indistinguishable from one another.

I'm a founder because I couldn't live with myself if I wasn't. Doesn't mean it's easy, or it's going well all the time.

So that being said... if you want to be a founder, and you're a good software engineer (I'm assuming you're tech, that's why you're here), don't even bother coming up with an idea! Instead, go looking for experienced business people who have a real business idea and the knowledge to pull it off - except for the technical skill. Become their tech co-founder. Because there are so many of them, and so few of us, you can afford to be choosy.

If it's someone who has successfully started businesses before, all the better! There are lots of really smart, driven, reliable business people out there with great ideas, but without the technical skill to implement. Find one, and make something great.

There are a lot of ways for it to go wrong, eg business competitions, hackathons, etc.

But yes, thanks for the confidence! :)

The best part of it is when I talk to the target users about it and their eyes light up and they get so excited. The problem is huge, and the current solutions are terrible. If we can't make money at this, it's an execution problem, not a market problem.

Second, it is minimally invasive. You don't have to change your process in order to use it.

Third, it shows relationships between systems. An application isn't just source code. It's compiled binaries, OS patches, user security, databases, firewalls, message queues, apis, and more. Here's a common failure pattern - System A changes, System B breaks. System A might actually be perfectly fine and correct, and B as well, but the relationship between A and B is broken. Change the database schema, and the app can no longer read it. Change the dns, and the UI can no longer find the API. For any decently complex application, the potential sources of failure are in the thousands, and potential interactions effectively infinite. Now scale this up to the enterprise, to organizations so large that your app can be broken by departments you didn't know existed...

https://congruence.io

And yes, once it's working, it will be able to detect such issues.

To develop that sense of taste you have to go deep (usually) into the thing.

Using the Henry Ford example, he went deep into engineering and gasoline powered engines.

Maybe people did want faster horses, maybe the limitations of horse-based transportation was a huge problem of the day... Either way Ford was able to say:

1) Horses are a hack and transportation could be done better 2) Cars are the answer but current manufacturing practices are a hack and could be done better 3) Employer-employee relationships are a hack -- turnover is way too high and must be done better. Profit sharing and high wages for factory workers are the way.

What's unfortunate is that that regret comes almost 100% from the fact that you spend your time at places like HN or Tech Blogs or business press that are brainwashing breeding grounds for having that type of regret. You feel that you would have regret because you think it's on the dartboard to achieve the type of (gambling I might say) success that you read and hear about. (As opposed to playing in the Super Bowl). Because while the founders are smart they don't seem smart in such a way that you think you couldn't achieve the same success if given the chance, right? But what you have to realize is that there are so many things that go into this oversized success that it's a complete crapshoot even with an idea that is good. Bottom line is if you are going to spend your time reading about something like this you will inevitably wrestle with that regret. Which is really unfortunate.

Then I started to think about all the things that are broken at my current company or which are frustrating and why. Within a few hours I had a dozen solid ideas that could be more broadly applied.

If I wanted to start a company again at this stage (not ready for another couple of years at least) I would rank these ideas by ones I could start on the side at first, or which justified leaving my job. The ideas that could be started in my situation and met my passion + other factors I felt important would be the one I would actually work on.

In the meantime I'm saving my pennies, learning as much as possible and having a blast.

Generally you would want to give this "experiment" a realistic timeline (ideally, multi years). Set goals on when you think this is or is not working, so that you can bail. This is very similar to making bets on the stock market, except that you are investing in yourself.

Now, look at your worst case scenario (failed startup). Things you will MOST definitely learn:

- How to start a company?

- What does being your own boss mean?

- Independent thinking

- Make some new friends/contacts and meet other people.

Things you will lose:

- Time

- Money

- Balanced lifestyle, perhaps

If you think, you, as a person, are the same or better, then you've won half the battle.

You need to be sure that years down, knowing the worst case scenario you dont have a new set of regrets. Also, ideas are a dime-a-dozen, its all in the execution.

So, if it helps at all, when you feel the pangs of regret at not starting a company, you can think, "Hey! I'm doing OK. I mean, I'm doing better than that one smart guy on HN (everyone on HN is smart)."

Grass is greener, etc.

In other words, truly master something, then write about it well, to where you have a reputation. That's far more than darn near anyone does and you don't have those long nights while your baby is in a potentially fatal fever.

Still not sure if it's an amazing idea missed because most people who start startups are in a particular demographic or I'm completely insane.

I think I'm going to have to build this one to actually find out...

So, I'm not pushing you to start a company at all. But if you do, don't limit yourself to "unsolved" problems!

It depends on the details but maybe stay till you see an opportunity that seems a no brainer? I probably helps if you have a job where you interact with customers - then you may meet some saying we really need an x and would be willing to pay but can't find anything. Then jump ship and build x.

Slightly different but I know a couple of guys who were head of something at smallish companies and then when they were taken over / fell apart they spun off their own businesses. It's low risk because they know the market, have personal contacts with the customers and so on. Not very tech startup though - travel and marketing. But maybe try to get in to that sort of situation where you are effectively running a small business within a larger company.

To start a business, you really have to enjoy the product you are building enough to cover the work you don't want to do and enough to no longer do some things you enjoy doing in your life, as you may no longer have time for it.

Starting a real business is a challenge. I would suggest, if you do have an idea, try to build it. If you can build the idea, you might want to consider starting a business around it.

It also conditions you for the fact that you'll need to spend at least 50% of your time on squishy marketing stuff to get anywhere. You can't just code your way to getting customers.

Look at this as "preparation". Far far better than following the herd coz it's the thing to do "to start a startup" and ending up with nothing after few failed attempts.

Are you happy with a $2million revenue a year business, or do you want to be the next unicorn?

You might find a large problem to solve, but is it some thing your are passionate about? Or perhaps you love selling antique nail clippers for example, which is probably a very small market, but you love doing it and supplementing your day job income.

Find a problem, decide if you are passionate about solving it, can you make money from it or not, then build a solution.

What I'd suggest is start working on side projects. Scripts that make something easier. A tool. Side projects like todo lists and note taking apps turn into billion dollar companies.

I meet very few technical-type hackers who aren't absolute cheapskates with any products and services that they can just clobber together with a shell script or two.

Therefore it may be often more helpful to ask "What would my friends pay to have solved?"

If your investors have indicated that they will bankroll the massive legal and regulatory issues that your company will provoke, and you believe them, then you can ignore that rule. If you're a normal person trying to start a business on your own, you shouldn't.

IMHO, the key success factor for Uber is their ability to spin every setback into an advantage. So, the fact that they were sued for operating like a taxi cab company means that the taxi cab industry views them as a threat. They could then take this to investors and say "We're about to disrupt a $16B market. The market opportunity is there, and the lawsuit against us is proof of that. The product is there. People are choosing our product over the competition. We need your help to roll back protectionist legislation that is hurting consumers. Are you in?"

And then many investors won't be, but they just keep trying new ones until they find folks who buy in.

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/uber/funding-rounds

[2] http://techcrunch.com/gallery/a-brief-history-of-uber/slide/...

[3] http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/15/ubercab-closes-uber-angel-r...

How the hell did Uber manage to convince investors to fund them so before they showed success?

Of course a bunch of twenty somethings gravitate repeatedly to social apps; one of the core focuses of their lives to that point, whether they know it or not, is to learn how to be a social creature.

As you get older and more experienced, you start to unearth the "real" problems in the world oftentimes in some niche you could have never predicted you'd be involved in your younger years.

I could be completely wrong, just something I've always pondered when seeing so many of these ridiculous startups that keep churning out of VC land.

I suspect this is why younger entrepreneurs tend to build bigger companies, but have a lower chance of success. The size of an eventual company comes from the size of the market it's serving. Basic needs - food, socializing, sex, information, transportation - are shared by nearly everyone, and so the markets are huge. But everyone can see any problems that arise in those areas, and so the competition to win the market is intense.

Building something like software for petroleum geologists working in undersea basins is a much tinier market, but many fewer people have the requisite domain knowledge to even understand what the problems are. So your chances of success are higher, but you aren't going to strike it big like Facebook.

Even better startups come from deep business knowledge. Not necessarily unicorns, but great lifestyle and niche businesses that make the founders rich. And really, do you need to buy two Lear jets?

There's always been silly startup ideas, but that's mainly because a lot of people are silly. The "playing house" thing seems to be a different phenomenon: over the last few years I came across people who were very smart, very driven, but completely focused on other people's opinions. They like winning contests and climbing ladders. Now that startups are becoming a respectable career path, more and more of these people are trying to start startups.

In the corporate world, you can always focus on the next presentation, the next interview, the next hurdle, and gradually iterate upwards. To build a company you need to think in terms of fundamentals, to think long-term, and to think independently: members of this type can be very good at producing polished and sensible-sounding market analyses but distinctly bad at those three.

I've used the phrase cargo cult startup to describe this phenomenon (after Feynman's phrase "cargo cult science"): going through the motions in the hopes that your intended result will happen, without understanding cause and effect.

[1] This is from long back, when the mag was extremely good, with those stunning photos and great write-ups of places and things and people of all over the world. Later it became thinner, with shorter articles, less photos, etc.

In fact when he started experimenting trying to building cars in 1893 it was eight years after Benz had started producing his Motorwagens in Germany. If he'd asked his customers what they wanted they probably would have said a cheaper and better Benz which is kind of what he produced with the Model T fifteen years later.

The Model T was a great hit, costing about $22k in modern money, much less than his competition. He continued driving the price down and by 1916 it was about $7k in modern money and took 2/3 of the market. However in the 20s General Motors started offering more luxurious cars with deluxe features like a roof and it turned out customers were happy to pay a bit more for that. It wrong footed Ford and their share dropped to 15% by the time they reacted.

So he took the market by building what customers wanted at the time - a reasonably priced car and lost a lot by ignoring what they wanted later - a reasonably priced and comfortable car.

https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast

There is still a ton of potential out there for faster and more efficient horses. You won't be a billionaire or on the cover of Time, but you can become insanely rich and seriously contribute to a better world.

The last job I left was at a medical diagnostics company focused in a niche oncology market, it started out trying to invent a crazy new diagnostics tool, failed, and pivoted to a somewhat traditional medical lab. We didn't invent new technology, we didn't have some insane research advantage, we heavily focused on customer service. We bent over backwards for our clients and remade traditional lab reports so they were much easier to read and 10x more visually appealing (our CEO's approach was "we are Neiman Marcus, Lab Corp and Quest are Walmart). The cofounder and CEO made close to 9 figures between IPO and later selling to a large multinational.

Yap saw that first hand. Someone read too much HN, wanted to run a startup. They didn't even have a good idea, but that didn't stop them. However, the was a minor problem and that was they needed investors.

Well as it turns out, if there are investors who are even more stupid than the founders and are willing to bankroll that, it's not all bad. Just take their money. Convince them you could be the next Facebook, look at the billions Facebook made!

So the startup is just a proxy to take investors' money, and play CEO for a while, and then when it fails it becomes a resume line "CEO at Uber For Dogs inc."

And yeah they didn't really have an idea, they just sort of came up with on, basically what they thought investors would like. For example, say, investors liked dogs, so the idea he came up with was Uber for dogs.

First off I'll need to move to San Fran then rent an open floor office, preferably in a warehouse-like building with red brick walls. Then I'll hire 20 young people, preferably hipsters, with lots of energy. Experience not imporant, as long as they look good in hoodies and jeans, and know how to look busy typing and pretend to collaborate with each other all the time (because it looks good in pictures). Also must know how to correctly use latest memes. The tech stack will be all Go with reactive interfaces. Mostly microservices, nested inside lightweight Docker containers.

So there, welcome to the future (I'll send a link soon where to wire the funds).

Well played, sir.

In a world where people like Dixon advocate having ideas that "look stupid"[1], it's no surprise that even the ones who don't want to cash out but genuinely want to build something useful follow the stupid path.

Because, let's face it, for any startup with VC money plans, the primary goal is not building a good product, but convincing VCs they're building a good product. The appearance of a good product is more important than the reality of a good product.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/the-secret-is-to-have-a-stupi...

Not to mention, the idea wasn't necessarily worthless. It wasn't any worse than, say, Instagram. We only remember it that way because Instagram succeeded and Color failed.

I'm not sure that's true. For angel investors maybe but come VC time most companies already have traction and the VC money is to go from $10m value to $1bn. If the product's bad the founders get wiped out so it's not so helpful.

Good ideas may look good, but good-looking ideas capable of creating huge companies (thus great) are almost certainly tested already, so you are either wrong or late to the game.

Of course, YMMV. Nobody ever agrees on what an idea looks like.

The product I want to build next is a niche product for a very specific (but quite large in absolute) terms demographic, profit per user (after tax/VAT/Hosting minus staff) is approx $6 per month, at 500 users I'd be doubling my current income, at a 1000 I'd be able to work on it full time, at 2000 I'd be very comfortable, anymore than that would just be gravy.

It's not even a difficult build (I've built much more complex projects for clients) but the market doesn't exist at all (which means it's either a really good idea (unlikely) or a terrible idea (more likely)).

In either case I'm gonna give it a shot since it's a product I'd have bought if it existed immediately and happily.

The good bizarre ones could wipe out an existing industry. That's what makes them interesting.

You can be a massive chunk of crap that only works 10-20% of the time and still get 90% market penetration based solely on the robustness of your marketing/image management teams. The key, therefore, is to look substantive and important, even if you're not, and trip the correct biases in your target audience.

This acts against good founders and good products, because they usually spend a lot of time thinking about how to fix something and improve their product instead of worrying about their PR.

Define real valuable problems.

Curing Malaria is a real valuable problem. Sending your friends pictures (Instagram, Snapchat) is inane crap comparatively.

I'm not defending or attacking these by the way, I am just saying that "value" is totally subjective.

The majority of Startups aren't solving anything that the rest of the world would consider "real valuable problems" but that doesn't mean they wont use them.

I completely agree that value doesn't necessarily translate into money, or may do so in such a diffuse way that it can't be turned into profit. Large, expensive projects that do good for society but can't be done "profitably" are why we should have nice, modern governments.

Nailed it. Part of the issue is, starting without enough exposure to worthwhile problems. When you hear about success stories of Tinder / Facebook / Snapchat, all you want to make is the next "social" app which is almost in all cases is a lottery but try working with people outside your circle / industry, and you will so tons of unsolved problems with people ready to pay a lot for even a little solution that adds business value.

Where to meet people with problems that can be scaled and paid for solutions?

Again, this quote at least to me, means that you listen to people and give them what they really want. People wanted to get places quickly, at the time, they thought that meant faster horses.

You listen to what your users are saying to you, not doing what they say. People propose solutions before porblems.

The other piece, is that you have a concrete idea and you develop it, and think about it enough, that you then validate by asking people. In a fragmented world like this many people want different things than other people, even from themselves day to day.

So, on second read, if I am hearing you correctly, I think we are all saying the same thing. I don't think many people would suggest google ask a bunch of users how they should implement a distributed network architecture, but ask you every time you log in what you are looking for.