I agree... one of my relatives hates programming and used to tell me learning to code was a waste of time. Now I get a bigger check at the end of the month despite the fact he's an overworked doctor, and I'm sitting on my arse at home building some CRUD. Pick carefully who you listen to.

Sure mom, but I make more than you and dad ever did doing less, and it's feeding your grandchildren. What do you want from me?

Stopped paying real attention years ago, but it's usually a story where she knows a person who makes however many dollars a year and I could have too. I don't think this discussion would have been any different if I was in one of those jobs.

That person usually works 60-80 hours a week. She leaves out the times when it isn't a great year in that area and they were laid off for 8 months. She misses the toll on your body working like that takes. She doesn't realize the cost of the trucks and the tools, if you need them.

I guess it is easier when you simplify down to $X a year for your best year.

If you were a plumber, she'd have an easy answer when talking to her friends about what doubled112 does. Plumber is a job everyone understands at a basic level; most of the trades are because you can point to a finished product. "He builds things like that."

Sometimes an analogy can help; I've definitely told people I'm an internet plumber and that seems to satisfy their curiosity.

I'm not sure you come out as the winner here...

Edit for spelling.

Even without the inevitable new ideas, I probably have a year or two's unrealized ideas littered around on post-it notes. Dunno if that is a measure of success as it is a measure of actually doing something interesting.

In all seriousness I know what you mean.

A lot of entrepreneurs come from well off families because they can afford to say no, or spend time on a bunch of middling ideas until they strike it rich on a single one.

I'm finally getting to the point where I might feel comfortable going off on my own venture (I have a bit of a safety net built up, but no family to count on still if things go awry). It's nice, but at the back of my head I'm still struggling to let go of what's providing me stability. That and being American I'm about one health problem away from losing it all so...

I would love for the stability that allows others to "self actualize", so to speak.

and THEN they will start a nice side business where they brag about their success and what they did to ensure it - re-emphasising the survivorship bias.

Or the "self made" success story who got just a "minor" cash injection of $500k from their parents' slush fund and then could afford to not generate any income for 5 years.

Unfortunately the stats on all these (and on this site in particular) are going to be extremely skewed. I'd hazard a guess that just the viewership of HN already heavily skews the sample towards a very privileged %ile of the total population.

Jesus, almost sprayed coffee all over my monitor on that one...

But yea, I know the feel. I worked in tech for a long time and didn't have any connections. Its frustrating hearing stories of people getting funding jsut by knowing teh right people and being able to secure hundreds of thousands for a seed round. While I'm strong in tech, I am complete trash when it comes to design or sales.

Luckily I met my cofounders thoughts. mutual friend. they get me funding and I can focus on building our startup. Since I worked in a few other startups previously, I was able to benefit from watching and avoiding the mistakes they made that caused them, to fail. Now get to call the shots when it comes to engineering and we've been growing steadily and getting traction despite the bad economy.

Before you bother building the product, call up your VC friends and see if you get any nibbles.

Most of Europe.

This sounds like part of the problem. Lucky people tend to think they are lucky. Because when an opportunity arrives, they assume it's lucky and look for the reason why.

If you assume you have bad luck, you could, for example, get invited to an exclusive 1:1 meeting with a high powered VC investor, who has a ton of wisdom, many connections, and access to resources, and somehow think it was a waste of time.

For 30 days in a row, come up with and write down a million dollar idea per day. It's hard at first, but gets much easier, and after awhile you'll see that there is so much real opportunity around you that the challenge is deciding what to go after. But as long as you are convinced that good ideas and opportunities are few and far between, then you are probably going to be stuck.

Get into the habit of looking for weaknesses and inefficiencies in everything around you, for example. Or look in niche industries that are too small for the Googles of the world to care about. An idea can be worth more money than you'll ever use and still be way too small to be interesting for Google. When you find something that can work, don't wait for somebody to hand you money or invite you to join them, but go bootstrap it yourself. Maybe just do it as a side gig, but choose something with the potential to be far bigger.

For example: I noticed that the nearest dry cleaning company appears to be using a DOS-based system, they seem to be somewhat disorganized, and they have to manually notify me (phone call) when my clothes are ready. Odd are, there are lots of other dry cleaning companies like them. It probably wouldn't take much time talking to them to figure out a number of ways to dramatically improve things with some better software and maybe some RFID tags or something. Their customers will love that, on your system, they automatically get notified when their clothes are ready. The companies will love that, on your system, they can handle more orders per day, they never lose track of stuff, and the software is much easier to use. Plus, your system lets them send out coupon codes and reminders ("It's been 6 months since you got your suit cleaned - bring it in this week and we'll give you a 25% discount!") and so they see people taking stuff to them more often. Google is never going to compete with you there, but you could probably demonstrate that a company could save $10k/yr and/or increase revenue by $10k/yr using your system, and you'd "only" charge them $3k/yr (or whatever). There are about 14k dry cleaning companies in the U.S., so converting a small segment of the market would be enough to be self-sustaining, with a much higher upside if you got to, say, 10% of the market.

The above is just a random example off the top of my head, but I guarantee you are swimming in opportunities like this, so if that one isn't appealing or the numbers don't hold up under scrutiny, then look around and find something else.