I think this is a good example of how sometimes we sit in the VC space where you go from $0 MRR to THE MOON or it really doesn't mater. There are a lot of avenues to really significant lifestyle businesses outside of 4 Hour Work Week SaaS Solo Ventures, It is important to remember that sometimes taking the risk back a notch, applying all the same principles, leveraging less, and working hard -- maybe even making a tangible product, like food, say -- can be just as rewarding.

Not with just a single truck, probably, but a fleet of them with prime locations (like outside major tourist attractions on a hot day) and selling a premium offering for $8 per ice cream? You could probably make pretty good money doing that, especially if you have some kind of secret recipe (sprinkle some crack in every pint!).

You can become a millionaire by scaling up almost any business. I doubt you’d become a billionaire but who cares?

I believe some of these very small businesses rely on that the owner (and/or his family) is working below minimum wage; so if this is the case, it cannot scale up.

I'm not so sure about your example.

Get a self-driving truck, and add some sort of people-sensing system that allows potential customers to intuitively flag it down. Then add a self-serve ice cream vending machine.

Now you can build a fleet of ice cream trucks that don't need human operators. I think you could make a few millionaires with that.

My point is not that automated ice cream trucks are the future. My point is that "small" improvements amortized across enough units can be significant.

Now, there's probably a pretty hard ceiling to the amount of income one of these trucks can bring in, so investing in business intelligence or a snazzy customer experience probably isn't a good investment. (Which is probably what parent was imagining.)

But don't underestimate the power of shrinking costs. If you sell a billion screws a year, a one-tenth of a cent improvement in unit manufacturing cost is a million dollars a year.

> Or, some businesses are just not worth it. > You can throw as much business intelligence and automation to, let's say, an Ice Cream truck. It will still be an Ice Cream truck. Nobody is becoming a millionaire with it.

That's probably what people said about coffee and cafes prior to Starbucks.

Starbucks is an essentially American phenomenon. e.g., nobody in Europe ever thought coffee shops needed to become branded chains that set a single product quality expectation, because almost nobody who'd ever visited an Italian/mediterranean-style cafe ever thought they lacked a quality or sociability option to begin with. Sure, some chains exist, but the quality delta between them and the average cafe isn't great enough to scale fast.

Only in a place where coffee is generally awful, and VC money easy, could the concept that became Starbucks ever come into existence.

There's a whole lot factually wrong about your comment (Starbucks started as a single cafe, it wasn't funded by VC, and it started in the 70s/80s when money was far from cheap, and 1/3 of its total outlets are in Asia).

But that's all beside the point. I'm not saying an Italian would be able to replicate Starbucks in Italy. What I'm saying is that there are countless opportunities staring us right in the face, every day, and 99% of people see a cafe and think "it can't scale, it's local demand only, there's no point, why bother", the remaining 1% see Starbucks.

Just to follow up on that: I'm sure we agree that Starbucks metagame is about selling more than just beverages. It's about selling a middle-class aspiration -- using concepts like a "third place", "Italy", etc. This is why Starbucks is a $24b revenue company and Dunkin is a $1.4b revenue company.

Luigi Zingales, an economist at UChicago, once said, "the fact that Starbucks is not Italian is hurtful. The extreme agency problems of Italy make it difficult to scale firms.".

You could have a gamified app which tells kids when the ice cream truck is getting close.

Take good photos of product, grow IG following, give tips on how to grow your own ice cream truck business, dev and sell course on how to quit the 9/5 and start your own food truck niche

depends on your def of millionaire, but to make 1M you only need to convince 2,000 people that your 500 dollar course will set them free ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What if the end goal for the business owner isn't to be a millionaire? Maybe he's totally cool with just having a couple of ice cream trucks and clearing 150K in income every year?

Would THAT be worth it then? Maybe not to you, but to the guy who came from a third world country and built his company from nothing and now he's living an upper middle class lifestyle? To that guy it's the essence of the American Dream.

Or somebody who's been COVID'd out of corporate life and wants a clean start. Sounds viable to me.

Pretty sure there are quite a few millionnaires who own ice cream trucks.

All startups either fail or succeed mostly because of management.