Completely agree. Am on my 3rd company, all of them have reached profitability fairly easily.

If you don't want to rely on luck, you have to work from the bottom. The VC, top down approach is very risky indeed, but a different game exists.

Finding people who have problems that could be solved through better software is not hard. Listen to them. Make their life easier. Generalize, improve, start selling to other people who have the same issues. Spot opportunities related to your market, your tech, your customers.

There is a ton of demand, especially at small/local scale. If you are efficient, a moderate amount of upfront work can provide ton of value to countless people. They will gladly pay for it, especially if they feel listened to.

How do you do that with no connections, no money and no privileged background ? Do you just cold message people asking what they need ?

Cold email is a hit and miss approach. Just go talk to people face to face. Initially it seems like a non-scalable approach but it works wonders. The silicon valley, VC preached mantra of hyper scale is what muddles the minds of most entrepreneurs. Everyone starts thinking of million of users rather than 100s of users. There is a very interesting presentation at YC startup school 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

You will recognise the speaker :)

I consider "just talk to people" to be in the "connections" category

Doesn't have to be. You can form connection with people who you don't know. But first you have to talk to them.

Where are you finding these customers?

May I ask what industries you’ve targeted?

Businesses or Customers?

> Where are you finding these customers?

Look around you. What problems do you see, for yourself or for others?

If you want to solve your own problem then that is easy. Then you have to look for other people in your circle (online and offline) who have this same problem and then charge them for that.

If you see someone else with a problem, then talk to them face to face to understand the real issue and whether they will pay. See if there are at least 5-10 people with this same problem, and you have some opening that will start a business.

After that you have to keep hustling to keep this growing. It is a hard slog, but that is how it actually works.

> May I ask what industries you’ve targeted?

Education and general SMEs.

> Businesses or Customers?

B2B, B2C and also B2B2C.

There is lots of hard work.

There is luck involved too.

It may not be obvious from the outside and may not require connections, coming from money.

Every successful startup and bootstrap story there are elements of being lucky.

The right idea at the right time has an element of luck.

Being featured in a major publication or website.

Meeting the right clients.

Hiring people with unknown connections or skills or just hiring the right people.

Even down too day to day operations, there are events that luckily happen. Catching a bug, calling a client at the right time, raising prices, choosing a new feature to roll out that brings product market fit.

There is definitely skills, planning, research and hard work.

But if you've worked for a startup you know there is an element of luck.

I've worked on/for dozens of indie/bootstrapped startups.

Currently employee #8, developer #2 at a funded startup.

Follow the dream, the journey is part of the fun, do it responsibly financially and take care of your mental health, take time for family and friends, have hobbies. It's not for everyone but most people can do it.

Don't become consumed by the entre-porn. This is a real problem. It's addicting and can easily affect your mental health.

I always recommend this talk for those interested in creating their own startup, still relevant today. Thanks @DHH. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY

ive seen people that haven't so your point is invalid

See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106282

They were very lucky to succeed then. Entrepreneurship is so heavily weighted towards the wealthy, privileged, well-connected set.

> They were very lucky to succeed then.

The people I known are serial entrepreneurs, so this certainly is not luck. Yes, some ventures do not succeed, but then the company immediately pivots to things that are actually making money.

As I mentioned earlier, it is not easy. It is lot of hard work and hustle.

You are both right: hard work is a requirement. To make it really big (and sometimes to just make it), luck is a requirement as well.

A simple "proof" using logic is finding someone who worked really hard and failed (called a proof by contradiction): this is not hard, many have worked really hard and don't have much to show for it. Thus, hard work does not lead to success. But it does enable it.

Similarly, there are plenty of cases where someone was lucky but still blew it up (FTX anyone?). So just like with hard work, luck does not mean guaranteed success. It does, however, enable it.

> A simple "proof" using logic is finding someone who worked really hard and failed (called a proof by contradiction): this is not hard, many have worked really hard and don't have much to show for it.

That "hard work" you describe is missing the component of "smart work". If people "have worked really hard and don't have much to show for it", then that is not smart work. When I used the words "hard work" it implicitly includes smart work. Otherwise the person should not be an entrepreneur. If I start digging a hole in the hope that some how I will build a castle is not smart work. Hard work, definitely but not smart work.

When I used "hard work", I also meant "smart, hard work". Doh.

You also used "hustle", which is usually unrelated to "smart", and actually has negative connotations as well (as in a "hustler") — I did not take it as such because that wouldn't make sense. Again: doh!

It helps nobody to be overly pedantic instead of looking for the most reasonable interpretation of what you read.

At the end of the day, you as a person are a combination of luck. Your intelligence, hard-working personality, physical and mental health that allows you to even try. Things that you might have some effect on, but are mostly a lottery.

"Luck favours the prepared mind" - Louis Pasteur

Luck doesn't mean you didn't work hard. It's just that intangible that explains why 2 people can work and hustle the same amount and have differences in results.