When you repeatedly make sales and profit, you’re past the hurdle of not losing money on the operation. It’s a nice milestone on the entrepreneurship journey and worthy of a bit of celebration.
The IRS has an opinion [1], and its a really good list! Make a copy of it and put a recurring appointment in your calendar to revisit it, think about it, and write down your comments.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/faqs/small-business-self-employed-other-...
If you scroll down just a few paragraphs from the sentence fragment you quoted, the author says:
> "My main goal for the next six months of Tiny Projects is to learn how to get better at making money on the internet from my projects.
A Product Hunt launch can easily get you a spike in traffic, but afterwards I really don't know what I'm doing. There's this whole other level afterwards called "sales & marketing" that I want to master."
The author is extremely explicit throughout the piece that these are not built to become large businesses—hence the constant use modifiers like "tiny" and "micro." He also makes it clear that he treats this as a training routine for getting better at idea generation, shipping products, etc.
The narrative would change and it wouldn't be getting called a "micro-bet" anymore if it did though, no? ;-) We used to just call these "side projects" which I prefer as a term for any sort of cheap experiment you throw at the wall to see if it sticks. I've had several, had two acquired for non-negligible amounts, and another has been my full time business for 10 years now.
I applaud this initiative, instead. It's commendable that someone decided to build not just one, but several things; for fun, and perhaps some profit.
Then, if one of those ideas turns out to be very promising, the rest of the "business" can be quite trivial to setup, at least initially.
They were tiny like the projects listed here, so it's possible it could work out for the author, and I'm still sticking to the same approach now.
Launch something quick with little self-criticism, then double down on anything that seems to have traction.
But well, it's a perfectly fine ratio here.
Incorrect. The word business is defined simply as "the practice of making one's living by engaging in commerce." or "a person's regular occupation, profession, or trade."
A kid with a lemonade stand has a business. My dad ran a plumbing business that did zero marketing or advertising and had no regular lawyer. According to your definition neither of these are businesses.
Gee, you know come to think of it - Knowing who your customers are is marketing, talking/blogging about your business (however small it is) is advertising, accepting cash and knowing what's in your bank account is cash flow management and avoiding breaking any laws is legal. So, whichever way you look at it - you're wrong.
Rob Walling has some good stuff on building micro-SaaS businesses https://robwalling.com/
I disagree. There is no point in setting up legal and marketing and advertising if the business is not functional. This is a perfectly suitable path to a successful web business. Obviously he would need to expand on those areas you mentioned if he wanted to make one of these his career but this is the first step on that path.
> I believe there's a big advantage to this "micro-bet" approach of launching many tiny businesses, and then sticking with the ones that become successful.
The full quote changes the context. From what I understand, he sees it as a way to validate business ideas with small amount of effort.
The most projects mentions involved at least a few of hese things, and the last one, Earlyname[0], had them all and has been more profitable than many many "businesses" in SV right now...
This is the best approach starting out to see what the audience responds to, but the next critical step is to stick with what works for at least 5 full years doing all the things you've mentioned plus SEO (which is a big big).
That's the whole point of micro-bets. You acknowledge the fact that a small % of them will generate any meaningful $, so you deliberately minimize your losses by making the bets small.
Just because you are a good engineer, does not mean you are a good entrepreneur. Most engineers think it's just about building a good product. This is not true.
These aren’t businesses. These are websites. Most people on HN can build a website. It takes some coding and some tech knowledge. Not everyone can build a business. That involves marketing, advertising, customer acquisition, cash flow management, legal, on and on.
While what the author did was neat and fun for him, let’s not pretend this is the path to a successful web business. I’d bet there’s few “micro-bets” that are generating any meaningful amount of money.