Some real honest and actionable advice here. I think the natural course for intelligent people that enjoy crafting things is very much in conflict with the real world. We care about the things we are building because we see them as an extension of ourselves. Anxiously perfecting our creations in a safe place, obsessing over ever smaller details of finished portions; working on detailing while ignoring the missing half of the ship. Its an ego thing. We see these things as pieces of ourselves, we’re afraid that the world won’t accept them, and by extension us. It’s not real though; nothing and nobody is perfect, and its okay.
I have a deep feeling that i can “do it myself”, yet i work for companies because deep down I like the anonymity and the safety of it; at a big company we get to be part of something established, we don’t have to show our own faces to the world.
It's a thing I had to get over, because in the end, people were quite content with what I released and no one minded if I shipped an extra 25kb to the browser or did not have consistently rounded corners.
I learned that lesson again with art. You have to frequently zoom out and see if the entire picture works, or otherwise you make highly detailed turds.
After 20 years building software for other companies, I started my own thing a few weeks ago. The reality check hit fast. When you're an employee, you can hide behind process and blame the market. When it's yours, every signup or lack of one is direct feedback. No buffer.
> When you're an employee, you can hide behind process and blame the market.
You can still blame the market. A good market makes everything easier, a bad market makes everything harder.
But here’s the catch: You choose the market.
To share an example: When I started my react teaching side business in 2015 it was so easy. Growing 2x year over year, I thought I was some kind of business genius. Then one day it stopped. React became old, no longer the exciting new thing, the market consolidated into 2 or 3 big players with The Default resources and my stuff wasn’t one of them. I totally missed the land grab aspect of the early market phase and didn’t go hard enough on pure growth. Not a business genius after all.
Seems the page is down. So, yes, Reality is where money is. For money to reach you, you need to setup the pipelines, or poke a hole in an existing pipeline.
Maybe that's old-school. Youngsters seem to argue that they don't need to move out of their den, to start and run a business. And they were right some times.
The gold nugget here is: your number one job as the business owner is: find new customers. Forget everything else. You must find ways how to talk to them, get them to trust you and tell you about their problems.
Forget scaling, google ads, until your customer #10, probably more. All your early customers will be from your network, real people you talk to in real world.
It is a chicken and egg problem - you don’t know what product customers need until you have customers. So go find them, build and try to figure out what they have in common.
Thank you for sharing. My wife and I have been down this road in physical retail, SaaS, consulting, and real estate. It always feels like the first time when you learn slowly, and you’ve done a Good Thing by helping us all learn faster.
FYI - I tried to leave this comment on your blog, but I got a database connection error. HTH
well... it's a certain KIND of reality... one where numbers fight with "common sense"...
examples... a large paying customer can kill a business... tiny or free users can be great for free marketing and product testing... a weird channel partner can make a business... obscure cashflow and accounting can make/break a business... product development or inventory can require fundraising which comes with wild "strings attached"... and and and...
(having started a number of both self-funded and venture-funded business, in tech small format retail and more...)
Reality is subjective. There is no singular objective "reality" that everyone shares, so we get by with objective, repeatable measurements instead. Business in particular means contact with realities that are not your own, and that can be a real gut check to some people.
Thing is, working as a cog in a larger machine is itself another form of reality check. Both situations force you to confront data and perspectives that aren't your own, and to adapt to them. Reading through the comments here, I find myself resonating with folks who very much enjoy being cogs or have a desire to run a smaller business for themselves, profit-motives and moat-building be damned. Almost as if there's a desire to return to a simpler market devoid of the complexities that computers have allowed to thrive (algorithmic pricing, big data analysis, surveillance capitalism, etc), where what mattered was running a good environment with fair pricing rather than grandiose plans for expansion or market monopolization. I empathize with those goals, given my "fuck you money" pie-in-the-sky plans of running a small makerspace/net cafe in a community and eating the modest loss through ROI elsewhere in my investments.
To get back to the (still-down) article, running a business absolutely means confronting the reality of the fickleness of the marketplace. It means dealing with customers who are ill-informed and also ill-suited to critique or correction. You have to make a product others want to buy, rather than one you believe is best. The pressure is there to capitalize on every avenue, every opportunity, never turning down business for fear of it reverberating into collapsing other opportunities. It's a really immediate reckoning over what's more important to you in terms of success vs ethics, in an environment incredibly hostile to the latter (and exploitative of those who reside on that side of the proverbial fence). It's stressful, and it's why I refuse to open my own shop despite my dissatisfaction with corporate life at present.
Thoughtful piece with a different and engaging tack to the “Developers don’t understand marketing” commonplace. Kozlowski describes indirectly his mother’s professional organizing business, which indirectness asks readers to consider the churn of consumer culture and the goals (if any) of capitalism.
It’s just a trace, but the following paragraph (quoted in part) hits hard in this season of thanks and bounty. Thank you, Fred K, for writing it.
> The business has been a giant blackpill on Temu. Seeing people pay my mom to throw away bags full of internet purchases has been depressing. Bringing yet cheaper goods into the States hasn’t actually increased quality of life whatsoever over the already cheap goods on Amazon[. . . .] Unfortunately — despite the very real benefits that mass affluence and consumer culture have, it’s difficult in my position to not think that we’ve gone too far.
jmogly|3 months ago
I have a deep feeling that i can “do it myself”, yet i work for companies because deep down I like the anonymity and the safety of it; at a big company we get to be part of something established, we don’t have to show our own faces to the world.
nicbou|3 months ago
I learned that lesson again with art. You have to frequently zoom out and see if the entire picture works, or otherwise you make highly detailed turds.
victorbuilds|3 months ago
Swizec|3 months ago
You can still blame the market. A good market makes everything easier, a bad market makes everything harder.
But here’s the catch: You choose the market.
To share an example: When I started my react teaching side business in 2015 it was so easy. Growing 2x year over year, I thought I was some kind of business genius. Then one day it stopped. React became old, no longer the exciting new thing, the market consolidated into 2 or 3 big players with The Default resources and my stuff wasn’t one of them. I totally missed the land grab aspect of the early market phase and didn’t go hard enough on pure growth. Not a business genius after all.
mlhpdx|3 months ago
zkmon|3 months ago
Maybe that's old-school. Youngsters seem to argue that they don't need to move out of their den, to start and run a business. And they were right some times.
cpursley|3 months ago
Another biz lesson I learned luckily through observation (WP sites being down too often and a nightmare to configure and maintain).
chuliomartinez|3 months ago
Forget scaling, google ads, until your customer #10, probably more. All your early customers will be from your network, real people you talk to in real world.
It is a chicken and egg problem - you don’t know what product customers need until you have customers. So go find them, build and try to figure out what they have in common.
Brajeshwar|3 months ago
jazzejeff1|3 months ago
FYI - I tried to leave this comment on your blog, but I got a database connection error. HTH
fkozlowski|3 months ago
asah|3 months ago
examples... a large paying customer can kill a business... tiny or free users can be great for free marketing and product testing... a weird channel partner can make a business... obscure cashflow and accounting can make/break a business... product development or inventory can require fundraising which comes with wild "strings attached"... and and and...
(having started a number of both self-funded and venture-funded business, in tech small format retail and more...)
usrnm|3 months ago
mmaunder|3 months ago
asciii|3 months ago
inglor_cz|3 months ago
One click later, "Error establishing a database connection". HN seems to have hugged this guy's site to death.
raw_anon_1111|3 months ago
AndrewKemendo|3 months ago
Technologists want to change the world to be how they envision the world.
These are fundamentally at odds but modern business requires both to operate successfully.
pdimitar|2 months ago
jaynate|3 months ago
dwa3592|3 months ago
spking|3 months ago
stego-tech|3 months ago
Thing is, working as a cog in a larger machine is itself another form of reality check. Both situations force you to confront data and perspectives that aren't your own, and to adapt to them. Reading through the comments here, I find myself resonating with folks who very much enjoy being cogs or have a desire to run a smaller business for themselves, profit-motives and moat-building be damned. Almost as if there's a desire to return to a simpler market devoid of the complexities that computers have allowed to thrive (algorithmic pricing, big data analysis, surveillance capitalism, etc), where what mattered was running a good environment with fair pricing rather than grandiose plans for expansion or market monopolization. I empathize with those goals, given my "fuck you money" pie-in-the-sky plans of running a small makerspace/net cafe in a community and eating the modest loss through ROI elsewhere in my investments.
To get back to the (still-down) article, running a business absolutely means confronting the reality of the fickleness of the marketplace. It means dealing with customers who are ill-informed and also ill-suited to critique or correction. You have to make a product others want to buy, rather than one you believe is best. The pressure is there to capitalize on every avenue, every opportunity, never turning down business for fear of it reverberating into collapsing other opportunities. It's a really immediate reckoning over what's more important to you in terms of success vs ethics, in an environment incredibly hostile to the latter (and exploitative of those who reside on that side of the proverbial fence). It's stressful, and it's why I refuse to open my own shop despite my dissatisfaction with corporate life at present.
mistersquid|3 months ago
It’s just a trace, but the following paragraph (quoted in part) hits hard in this season of thanks and bounty. Thank you, Fred K, for writing it.
> The business has been a giant blackpill on Temu. Seeing people pay my mom to throw away bags full of internet purchases has been depressing. Bringing yet cheaper goods into the States hasn’t actually increased quality of life whatsoever over the already cheap goods on Amazon[. . . .] Unfortunately — despite the very real benefits that mass affluence and consumer culture have, it’s difficult in my position to not think that we’ve gone too far.
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
kragen|3 months ago
j45|3 months ago
Contact with curious internet traffic crippling a non cloudflared webserver might not be.
monarchwadia|3 months ago
t3hprofit|3 months ago
vanschelven|3 months ago