Yeah, this is one of the things that drives me nuts about these "inspirational" stories where some millionaire/billionaire talks proudly about how their first business failed, their car was repo'd, bank foreclosed on them, etc... but I've never heard one talk about what they did between that and the successful business. Where did they sleep? How did they afford food?

Varies but mostly you go get a job for a while.

Indeed. I’m not an entrepreneur or anything but liken it a bit to having a good initial poker hand - you can win with one good card but it is helpful and gives one more options to have two good cards.

So in the context of bootstrapping a company it’s helpful to have a legit fallback (way to suck it up and find an OK job) when things don’t pan out.

Edit: maybe this is obvious for CS/software folks but the extracurricular work I’m involved with is not exactly tech related, though my day job is coding

The secret is that sometimes you just have to ... sigh ... work.

Of course.

We work jobs and do our thing on the side like most traditional American entrepreneurs do until their business gets off the ground.

Who the hell is bootstrapping businesses without a job besides rich kids?

1. Get a cheap apartment in a slightly sketchy neighborhood

2. Work 7-8 hours at work and every other waking hour on your business. Take meetings during lunch.

3. Focus to the point of cutting out sports, video games, bars and other frivolous shit until you’ve made progress. Don’t date if you can.

Discipline wins the race.

And when you fail; which you will.

Do it all over again until you find success.

There is a parable I can't remember. The gist is as follows.

A man/woman has a nice life, a cheap apartment in an okay neighbourhood. Their 9-5 job isn't particularly exciting or well-paid; however, at the weekend, it allows them to enjoy sports, video games and other frivolous activities, such as dating and hanging out with their partner or children.

A stranger approaches them and says they make a much better life for themselves. He tells them they just need to get a cheap apartment in a sketchy neighbourhood, work all waking hours of the day, and give up any fun until they make it. They may fail five times until they succeed and may be declared bankrupt.

After listening, they ask what their life looks like after they make it. He answers it allows them to have an okay apartment in a more expensive neighbourhood, and they can enjoy sports, video games and other frivolous activities, such as dating and hanging out with their partner or children.

They smile at the stranger, and say "But I already have most of this right now". The stranger walks off wearily.

The parable is about a fisher

Do you happen to have an URL to the parable?

I was confusing it with a man sitting below an olive tree, maybe a variant of the fisher one.

…And that is the difference my friend.

This is life.

Life is inequality.

Not everyone is meant to be an entrepreneur or has the desire to do what it takes to become one.

Trying to convince someone to become an entrepreneur is like trying to convince someone to become a professional athlete or musician.

You must sacrifice frivolity for excellence.

But excellence can always dabble in frivolity.

The choice is ours to make.

It is a misconception you need to sacrifice frivolity for excellence.

Sounds like fun?

> Do it all over again until you find success.

For which you may have to be somewhat lucky

> Where did they sleep?

Maybe at least one of their parents had a sofa.

The trick is to have parents who aren't homeless.

Having a strong support group in your life is probably one of the most important things to success.

Few paths go straight from a to b without a misstep.

> Having a strong support group in your life is probably one of the most important things to success.

This. “It's not what you know its who you know.” Though often the people who give that advice privately are the most invested in maintaining the illusion of meritocracy publicly.

Here's how I fare on that. Each checked box is something I have.

[X] "The trick is to have parents",

[ ] who are alive,

[ ] "who aren't homeless",

[ ] who have housing that is safe and functional,

[ ] who have room for you not already occupied by other family members in greater need,

[ ] who "had a sofa",

[ ] or if they're dead, at least left you with enough money as an equivalent

Who live nearby. If you're an immigrant and your parents live another continent, hard to live on their sofa and then get a new visa to come back.

I'm never sure what to do with this class of comment - it reminds me of guys who say they can't get a girlfriend because they're 5'8".

(Also, you forgot people whose parents are able-but-unwilling. This also sometimes makes some things harder than they would be, compared to, say, being given fistfulls of cash each weekend by your rich parents who have a sofa AND a bed.)

This works a lot better if you have parents that live in Palo Alto or SF compared to Tulsa, OK.

To the original post, I generally agree. There are some fundamental lessons about business you can learn, and if you follow them, have a better chance of success. But the magnitude of that success largely comes down to luck. There's plenty of thought leaders out there that just happened to join the right company at the right time. Much of their success is "beta" rather than "alpha", but they are treated like they have unique insight to drive amazing outcomes.

They do talk about that.

Elon Musk cleaned out manure tanks for a while in Canada if I'm not mistaking. There are some interviews where he talks about this (and showering at the gym across the street and sleeping under a desk and having no money) in quite some detail.

If you believe this, you'll believe anything. This site is a dumpster-fire of billionaire simping rubes. An absolute Dunning-Kruger hall of mirrors.

There are lots of people from wealthy backgrounds who'll slum it for a while. There's not usually a reason to doubt that. The thing to keep in mind is that voluntary/temporary poverty is very different from poverty you can't get out of with an embarrassing phone call.

I lived in relative poverty for a while when doing my first business, and while my parents were not particularly wealthy, knowing they provided an escape hatch took a lot of pressure off (living somewhere with a highly functional welfare system provided additional comfort). Things could have crashed and burned at any time, and I'd likely have been better off financially.

Doesn’t he come from a South-African diamond family or something?

If Wikipedia or Snopes are to be believed on the matter (and I really don’t know anymore), this is way overblown. Mines (emerald, not diamond btw) are cheaper than you think. If my dad buys half of a tiny mine in his retirement I’ll start walking around claiming I’m from a mine owning family!

The story of how he even got to own the mine sounds pretty wild:

“According to the story, in the mid-1980s, Errol and a copilot landed their plane near Lake Tanganyika in Zambia, where "a group of Italians" offered them 80,000 pounds in British currency in order to buy the plane.

Standing with the cash in his hand, Errol was made another offer he couldn't refuse: Would he like to buy half an emerald mine for half of his new riches?

"I said, 'Oh, all right'. So I became a half owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years."”

It proceeds to say he made about $400000 from the mine in total - hardly a billionaire villain level money.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...

I think the null hypothesis that Musk got lucky in the dotcom era is pretty reasonable, lots of people did. I don’t get all the conspiracy theories.

> It proceeds to say he made about $400000 from the mine in total - hardly a billionaire villain level money.

Just to clarify for anyone else wondering, that’s 400,000USD inflation adjusted for 2021. Converted to South African rand, it’s about 7.2 million.

To put that in context, the average home price in South Africa is about a million rand. So at most they would have been able to buy 7 properties. If they bought in an expensive area, they likely would have only been able to afford 4 or 5.

> Converted to South African rand, it’s about 7.2 million.

> To put that in context, the average home price in South Africa is about a million rand. So at most they would have been able to buy 7 properties

That’s... not how averages work.

If a house costs a million rand, and you have 7 million, then you can buy 7 of them, right? What am I missing?

If an average house costs a million rand, and you have 7 million rand, 7 properties is not the maximum you could buy.

(If the minimum price was a million rand, then 7 would be the maximum.)

Oh, I didn’t realise I wrote “at most”. You’re right, that was incorrect.

He also had substantially wealthy parents if I'm not mistaken. Same with Gates and others. This is the ultimate safety net.

It's easier to take risks when you have an out when it all goes really wrong. Doubt he'd still be cleaning manure today if he hadn't had a success...

I'm reminded of the song Common People by Pulp:

"But still you'll never get it right/'Cause when you're laying in bed at night/Watching roaches climb the wall/If you called your dad he could stop it all."

The album in general holds up well, good stuff.

This was basically Memnoch The Devil's [0] argument against the legitimacy of Jesus Christ's sacrifice - it didn't count, because he did it with full knowledge of his own immortality. Through crucifixion he suffered and died, but he never faced the existential dread that plagues humankind, and therefore giving up his own life was an inauthentic act.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memnoch_the_Devil

His family was rich he is as self made as Trump.

He comes from emerald wealth in South Africa for christ sake. Maybe he cleaned manure, but not out of dire need

Given that the mine was worth 40,000 pounds and stopped producing in 1989 it wasn't exactly a great source of wealth.

It's more that he came from such wealth that his family could acquire a nontrivial share in an emerald mine on what amounted to a whim.

> Standing with the cash in his hand, Errol was made another offer he couldn't refuse: Would he like to buy half an emerald mine for half of his new riches?

> "I said, 'Oh, all right'. So I became a half owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years."

https://www.news24.com/news24/bi-archive/how-elon-musks-fami...

Anybody who considers 80,000 pounds to be riches is not very wealthy.

It's 80,000 pounds dropped on a whim, not that they simply had 80k total. That is wealthy.

It's not on a whim, it's how Errol lived his entire life. Chasing "Get Rich Quick" schemes is not typically a sign of wealth.

The ability to move non trivial amounts of capital on a whim is the very definition of wealth.

> Chasing "Get Rich Quick" schemes is not typically a sign of wealth.

I've found it to be pretty common. The amount of dumb money seeking 'easy' ways to multiply flowing around silicon valley kind of defines the place.

right, also we don't like hearing stories about all the entrepreneurs who failed to find success, and slipped into impoverished obscurity. How many kids are sitting in the back seat of the car, lamenting "I could have been a contender" you know? You don't hang out with the ones who failed to keep their heads above water, because you're afraid they're going to drown you too.

This is a little pessimistic.

Just take smaller risks. I built my first business over nights and weekends and didn’t quit my day job for 5 years.

If you want something bad enough you just have to take the chance.

Yes “because wanting something bad enough” is the key to success…

It is a necessary but insufficient step.

Not if you have the connections and funding to start on third base where you can afford not to work and start your business on the side and hire enough people where you don’t have to work hard.

I worked for a startup before my current job where the founders - two brothers - had connections with the governor of a state in the Midwest to get a grant to start a small health care company. Neither of them were technical. They hired a few people in the state as basically QA and then hired a full stack consulting company that did the design, the project management and the development by hiring cheaper labor from India.

Then when they started getting enough revenue, they started bringing the technical skills in house including hiring a very good CTO.

The CTO then hired me as his third technical hire to oversee the “cloud application modernization” initiatives because they wanted to sell access to their micro services to large health care providers.

They sold the company three years after I was hired for 10x revenue. It was only $30 million. But the founders and the CTO I assumed made out well.

I think the people who had been there the longest made in the low six figures. I left ten months earlier and didn’t exercise my options. I might have left about $60K on the table.

Please play the worlds smallest fiddle for me. My next job after leaving the 60 person company was a remote job working at $BigTech in the cloud consulting department where my two year prorated signing bonus was $nice.

Yes some people have it easy. We have all seen this tons of times in life.

So stop comparing yourself to other people. Nobody starts at the same place.

And that’s the entire purpose of the article. “I pulled myself by own bootstraps by calling my parents and asking them to write me a very large check and to put me in contact with someone who could give me a path in”

That sort of depends whether they cost a lot of money to start or just cost time (e.g. software written on the weekends).

What website do you think you're on? Anybody who is a competent software developer can.

Play the cards you’re dealt

For every trust funder with a garage but in Atherton, there are 10 other trust funder with substance abuse problems doing nothing with their life

I can respect people that play their cards, I dont resent people that had a better hand

I try not to resent people that had a better hand, but when they pretend they just worked harder or are just better than me I tend to get annoyed.

Sure, yeah a lot of them are oblivious because of the conscious effort they still had to make. I don't think people need to make disclaimers about all the privilege they recognize they had, that's pretty performative.

I think it is up to everyone else to recognize the barriers to entry. In feudal society everyone knew that.

My Digital Ocean cost is about $25 plus another $20(?) for mail provider.

If $45 per month is unachievable then what on Earth are you doing with your money?!

>Most people cannot afford to recover from failing once.

That’s not true in my experience. I’m a similar case, have started 8 businesses in 30 years. Most have had some level of success: enough pay my employees and provide good healthcare while also making a (often small) profit. I’ve also had 2 exits, one of which generatied a life-changing amount of money for my co-founder and myself. Of the 6 business that did not exit, 2 failed to start, 2 achieved multi-million dollar revenue levels then failed, 2 somewhere in the middle.

In between startups I worked for other companies. I tried to optimize $/hr while I did, rebuilding my reserves and even my credit (lost everything once)

Working for others after a failed startup has many benefits. You look at company leadership differently. You observe. You learn. You make more connections. You see more market opportunities. You get inspired. You try again.

Probably key in being able to do this cycle well is to not let the businesses get over leveraged. I’ve had both funded and non-funded businesses. I’ve gone nearly broke a couple of times but a big part of learning to be an entrepreneur is learning to manage money.

I'd assume "most people" refers to the average (assuming American) person that likely has tens of thousands of dollars of debt and works a job (or three) that can sustain them only by not fully servicing that debt. Putting time and money into a business venture means putting all they have on the line; failure means "skin of the teeth" living for some decades, if they can survive some winters outside.

Just a comment on this. Congratulations on exiting with "life-changing money". But I think germane to this comment would be the order in which these companies were tried and succeeded or failed would be relevant.

I assume your first venture was not the "life-changing money" venture, and the impact of when that did happen certainly can change the narrative of the rest of the businesses in regards to risk taking, particularly if it was not the last venture that was greatly successful.

It’s called survivorship bias

There's also a lot of survivorship bias. We don't hear about the entrepreneurs who had X failures and no successful exits. There must be some (a lot?)

Yes, there are surprisingly few people here owning up they failed trying and are now working in a Mcdonalds' or Wendy's

This! And also. Going to the right schools. Not having trouble with school. Being from a stable wealthy family etc etc.

Just wow. This is not that hard.

How much money are people sinking into micro-SaaS in 2023?

If you live in a cheap place, get a decent job, then you can save money which you can use to start a business.

It costs literally $50 to get a LLC from your local Secretary of State or equivalent. You can do it yourself…like tomorrow.

Your chances of making it to Elon Musk status are slim, but there’s literally no excuse in America to not spin up an LLC by tomorrow, get a free EIN, open a bank account for FREE, throw up a landing page and start interacting with potential customers…

…in literally days.

That’s how you do it!

Sounds good, but who are my potential customers?

If I follow the "scratch your own itch" advice I ultimately fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. a better register allocation algorithm for 6502 C compilers.

If I follow the "put yourself in the future and build that" advice I fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. a library capable of guaranteed constant-time computation.

If I follow the "build products for your niche hobby community" advice I fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. a better than state-of-the-art comb filter designed for NTSC laserdiscs.

If I follow the "capitalize on new trends in tech" advice I fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. an ML model trained to invert audio cassette dub generational fidelity loss.

How do you figure out what people want when you're very, very, very different from most people?

Trying to form an entire business around some small bit of technology is a non-started, imo. Focus on one area (eg the 6052 uc), blog with passion about what you're doing, build a following, and start up a Patreon. The long tail of the Internet enables business models that target tiny niches, so the cassette heads can find each other, and subsidize the creator of an ML model trained to invert audio cassette dub generational fidelity loss.

It's a scary leap to make, but if you can pay some bills following your passion, making things you need to build, then I'd call that a win.

I failed and survived. Charged up $70k on my HELOC and paid it all back.