Ask IH: Why did you start your company?
Hey IHers,
It might seem like a futile question, but I think that without a reason it's almost impossible to keep going.
For me, it was honestly not about ego, necessity, or extreme passion.
I was getting tired of seeing companies I worked with face the same old problems every single day. It was something really bugging me inside. So, little by little, I started fixing these tiny issues, and the solutions ended up building the stair (company) we currently have.
What about yourself? Why did you buy your domain or wrote the first line of code?
For me, the 10,000 feet reason is the ability to control how I spend my life whatever time I may have for it. If you break it down, a few reasons:
I always had that itch to do something of my own. The idea of creating something of real value excited me. Corporate job was not going anywhere (good money, horrible feeling that life is sinking away)
Location Independence (even though I recently got a small office close to home but I still have the freedom to decide when to go, when to not go to office)
Ability to take time off whenever the heck I want. I don't need no paid vacations. Note that this is possible with bootstrapped business where I have full control. For venture backed, I understand it may be a bit different. Funny thing is that I hardly take time off now because of my passion for the business but man I love it. However, with corporate jobs where I had tons of vacation, it felt empty.
I wanted to create something of real value which impacts people's lives. Sounds flashy but the feeling that my business is directly impacting people's lives even if in a small way is so satisfying.
I want to make shit load of money. Notice that this is listed after the previous items because money is not everything but I sure will be lying if I said I wanted to not make money. But money not at the cost of freedom of how I want to m ake that money (Am I still making sense lol). In a job, you start getting maxed out at 250K tops unless you are talking about the big guns like Google etc and even at those companies, making over 250K salary is not that common even though possible. Yes, bankers can make a lot too but god I hate their life. A reasonably successful business of your own and you could make that cash. Of course, I make shit money right now for myself because I re-invest back in business. Irony I guess of being an entrepreneur.
More than money as income, I want to create wealth for myself and my family. With a good business that is setup, it won't go to zero if I decide not to work in it actively after a while when I have setup a good team. With a high paying job, you are back to 0 the moment you quit.
I LOVE the feeling of waking up and going to do my own thing every day. Yes, some days are low as crap and some days I feel like I am on top of the world. Rollercoaster baby. But I love that.
Why have 1 boss when you can have many a.k.a. customers. Haha ok joking about the boss part but what I really mean is that if you have a bad customer, you can always fire them and move on. Your business ideally should not depend on one customer. With a job, you depend on your boss. I started the business so that I could diversify that risk of just depending on one boss/customer.
Did I mention I always had that itch ? The itch is not something you can learn to have. You have it in you. Yes, you can learn the skills that are needed to be successful in a business but the will and desire to put everything on the line is not something you learn. You either have that itch or you don't. period.
I couldn't relate more.
Sometimes, close friends try to understand why I do the things I do, the crazy schedule, the risks I take , and they never get it.
That itch. It's unfathomable. It's priceless. Indeed impossible to be explained or taught.
Amazing answer. Care to share what your business is?
I'm 20 and I never had a real "job".
I had internships in the past but I realized that working 8h/day on something that didn't benefit my future self financially made me depressed despite being around nice people.
I figured I'd rather work 18h/day and grind & sweat rather than working 8h/day, live comfortably and have a stable income.
I started doing freelancing last year to pay my bills and am working on some stuff now.
Especially, in our generation, you'll rarely compete against real hustlers who grind all day and hence it's easier to win in the long run. Everybody tries to get rich but nobody is willing to sacrifice and eat shit.
I prefer delayed gratification. I have nothing to lose.
Good luck to my fellow hustlers, cheers
For freedom.
I love my job and I have a lot of freedom there. I can run errands, start work late or even not work one day catch up on weekend. I can decide a lot of tech we use.
It is high stress job but I don't mind that. What I want is to work on my schedule. I can put in 60 hours work week for a month or two.
But I don't have freedom to take a month off to decompress afterwards. Not even 20 hours work week to make up for extra hours I put in.
Then I can choose what techs to use within a limit but I cannot choose my projects. I don't mind working on what is needed but I also need some fun projects to satisfy my curiosity and desire to learn.
That is why I work on side projects to escape corporate world and have more freedom to choose when and where to work from. What to use and what to build.
Part necessity (living in a country where finding a proper job is nearly impossible) plus a character trait of massive dislike of any form of authority (yeah I know, I've got major personality issues) and the urge to maximize my personal freedom. These three were (and still are) the main drivers which make me venture out on my own many years ago.
I somewhat feel this at day job, can't deny there are programming/coding principles to follow and what not. But it sucks when you're limited to some answer/approach based on a person/a few people's knowledge that isn't significantly higher than yours... I don't know. I don't have a business yet, still a full time dev(thankfully, just got here), freelancer, financially not free, not selling the solution/value yet(at least not me directly).
The pursuit of personal freedom is ultimately the one common denominator =)
My startup, Plutio.com was born out of frustration of trying to run a freelance business using multiple apps.
I've started freelancing aged 15, with Dubai International Airport as my very first paying client.
However fun and satisfying freelancing can be, I had to constantly jump between apps, duplicate data between apps, pay multiple subscriptions and then use even more apps to “connect” them all together - I was sunk in a productivity maze, which pulled me back from growing the business.
Soon after, I’ve come to realise that freelancers all over the world faced similar barriers, and so I decided to build Plutio. With a mission to support the under-served community of freelancers and small businesses worldwide.
Really cool story, and I totally relate to that.
That itch to fix a problem can be the greatest motivation.
I started my blog for this very reason; to ask founders of early-stage startups and side-projects why they built their projects and where they're heading
earlystageblog.com
There are a couple of things that lead me to start teaching the Elixir programming language.
First, was my very grueling experience of working on a startup as a solo founder last year. I was targeting a market with huge numbers of people and very little money. This lead me to discover Elixir because nothing else was both:
performant enough on the server to be cheap enough to make the business model work and
productive enough for me to write all the code myself while also dealing with content production and everything else the startup needed
The second part of what lead me to creating my screencasts was that the most popular option had very out of date screencasts (for the more basic things) since they only produced one per week and started before the language features were that stable. The maker did a kickstarter for an open source project that included several months of subscription to the Elixir screencasts. I bought it and the maker almost immediately stopped making the screencasts and started funneling everyone to a new site! The new site had more languages but not really the content I wanted and it had a really annoying card-based design that only showed a handful of episodes per page made it much harder to skim. I hated it.
So after running out of money and putting my startup in zombie mode, I thought, "Why not teach this fantastic programming language and make the kind of site I want?" And that's what I did. Everything in all of the videos works on the current version of Elixir, and I put the entire listing of all the episodes in one old-school reddit-like, information-dense listing page.
Watched your first video and I like how you iterated through each option and what you thought were the strengths and weaknesses of each. It would also help if you linked some studies for people to see tangible numbers. Overall, good teaching style.
I had tried learning Elixir some time ago, but didn't continue on since it seemed more esoteric and wasn't sure if it would be a good investment of time in terms of career at that time. Do you think the market for Elixir skills is better now? For those of us, who may want to try and leverage the skill to build things as well as possibly in a future job.
Aside from learning opportunities, I think Elixir is a fantastic opportunity for both solo entrepreneurs and small teams. There's a bit of a learning curve (probably more than Ruby, PHP or Python, less than JS, Scala or Rust), but once you have the skills you can build fantastic things.
Much as was the case with Ruby in 2005, there are a lot of really smart people who would willing take a pay cut to work with Elixir instead of whichever
blub_langthey use at their day jobs. The ability to recruit some of those people over the next few years is a huge benefit to building in Elixir. As more Elixir shops win in the market, the number of developers needed will grow, but they'll still probably be a highly skilled, self-selected group. As far as a developer wanting to get a job using Elixir right now, but having the experience will likely become more valuable as time goes on.This dynamic is part of why I hang out here so much. Elixir and Phoenix are a much clearer win for technical entrepreneurs and indiehackers than for 9 to 5ers. Another language I put in this category is Rust, though it's a systems language.
This is something I have struggled with lately. I've been working on http://fourthwavestudios.com for almost 1.5 years. I know I'm on the right path but in the last two weeks I've been questioning if this is really the project I want to be spending all my time on. I've been frustrated recently by my progress seeming slower than I want. I started Fourth Wave because I want it to exist. But am I really the best person to do this? Am I applying my skills in the best possible way? It's hard
I wanted to support the creation of great science fiction, because I think it's important. Most of the modern world was inspired in one way or another by science fiction of earlier times, and I think continuing to inspire people is crucial to moving forward as a society.
I only have side projects, but my motivation to try to be self-sufficient is:
Freedom.
You will never be rich working for someone else. They're only going to give you just enough, and they can take it away just as easily as they give it to you.
Creativity. I have a lot of ideas that I would never get to try working for someone else.
I can't remember where I read it, but I came across a quote in the last half year, "Be too complex to categorize". That quote sums up how I've lived my life. I have so many interests, skills, and hobbies that there is not a single company in the world that I will ever be truly satisfied working for.
New challenges!
It is very easy to become a "lifer" at some big companies, where everything is take care of for you. After few years, if you like new challenges, you'll get bored.
I started one of my companies (Emberfuel Coworking) because I wanted to try and help create the kind of community where I wanted to live. (I was really close to just moving somewhere else that already had a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem.)
The reasons, for us, are in two categories: the actual product reasons, and the life reasons.
We were aware of the product reasons for a while: existing geocoders on the market were too expensive and inflexible for what we needed to do. Google, for example, would give you 2,500 free per day, or 100,000 a day for a $20K enterprise license. No pay-as-you-go at the time, and you couldn't store the data in the database. So we decided to build a "hassle-free geocoder" that's easy-to-use, affordable, and without annoying restrictions.
But the life reason that prompted us to get our sh&t together and actually launch was the coming birth of our child and the astronomical cost of daycare. It lit a fire under us that resulted in us shipping, shipping, shipping until we had the extra income going. Forbes interviewed me about it recently: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahkathleenpeck/2018/08/21/how-day-care-costs-motivated-this-mom-to-be-to-start-a-side-hustle/
Three main reasons:
Control how I spend my life
I was tired of trading hours for money. I needed something bigger.
My engagement with some projects is huge because I love what I do. And I feel that others were taking advantage of that. I realized that if being a workaholic was my fate, at least I need to work for my own projects, not for others' projects.
I started www.StripTogether.co because as an artist myself, I grew increasingly tired by the isolating nature of honing my skill. That, combined with the competition of getting one's art out there in the public (Instagram, etc.) left me feeling disconnected and cynical.
So much about social media today is about consumption. In fact, that's the only part about social media that is social. This focus on one to many relationships I think has made internet communities more concerned with publishing than any real relationship building.
On StripTogether, nobody can publish content without collaborating with other artists on the website. Comic Strips are made in a improv, comic jam, style where they are drawn one panel at a time, with each panel contributed by a different artist.
This focus on collaboration aims to improve the quality of relationships that can be built through social media. It's my hope that a stronger sense of community can be fostered than you would see in traditional social media.
And so, StripTogether manages to kill two birds with one stone - I can practice art while building relationships. I know I can't be the only artist out there who has experienced such isolation while pursuing skills, thus...my burning desire to grow a collaborative community where artists can practice, play, connect, and grow.
This looks really good. Kudos!
I started my company because I wanted to get a job but was too young to hire (14 years old at the time). After doing freelance/consulting for awhile, I found a problem worth solving and focused the company on that.
My company, Filiosoft, builds tools for conferences. We started with conference apps but we are expanding the tooling. We just finished our registration MVP last week. I decided to focus on that because I had done consulting for a few conferences and found that they weren't utilizing technology as much as they could.