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.
Running a business means contact with people's opinions. Having your server fall over when you post it to Hacker News means contact with reality.
I suppose one could argue that both are equally real.
I remember one time at summer camp in the teen dorm I claimed that pain was an illusion, because it was subjective. A girl named Lisa picked up a wooden block and threw it at me. It hit my lip, which started bleeding, and she was immediately horrified at what she had done; but I had to acknowledge that subjective "reality" has an importance to me that objective reality does not.
She objectively caused you to transition to an objective state which you both experienced subjectively!
Interestingly I had just re-watched the House episode with the CIPA patient in S3, and it touched on this if you squint. The girl, having CIPA, effectively can’t feel pain. She can’t even feel getting 2nd degree burns and it’s questionable if she even felt them poking around in her head or if she used that to escape (and fall down a 2nd story balcony). The only time she felt actual pain was seeing her mother relapse and be wheeled off for more surgery.
She cannot feel what should objectively cause her pain, but because pain is a subjective experience she can’t. However, truly subjective pain, that is pain derived from emotional connection, is literally the worst pain she can feel.
I think you will like this Capgras Syndrome story.
The guy couldn't emotionally recognise his mother after seeing her and started calling her imposter. But when he heard her voice over telephone, he felt emotional connection and said the person on other end was indeed his mother. Emotional pathways provide salience information in conjunction with sensory pathways. Any disruption to emotional pathways can override even correct sensory data.
This is a very deep story. Thank you.
Contact with paying customers, or eyeballs who refuse to pay is reality.
Contact with curious internet traffic crippling a non cloudflared webserver might not be.
Computers are fast now. You can serve five million hits a day with a webserver that's a shell script running from inetd. You don't need Cloudflare unless you're getting DDoSed.
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.
Those tides are really something.
In 2020-2022 I had a repair side-hustle that became unexpectedly profitable, so I started scaling it up and thinking about quitting my job. Then interest rates went up, assets stopped appreciating, and I realized that most of the value I thought I was adding was actually just asset inflation and the common wisdom that repair is a miserable business niche was correct after all.
Bad business people have been blaming outside forces for their failings forever. Taxes! Regulations! China! The Algorithm! It’s a symphony out there.
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
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.
This is why I build static astro sites now for marketing and blog type pages. Cheaper to run, too - it's just html/css with optional js/ts sprinkles.
Another biz lesson I learned luckily through observation (WP sites being down too often and a nightmare to configure and maintain).
Getting hacker news'd is also contact w/ reality for your website/hosting platform :-D
Crazy... 15 years after nginx solving the c10k problem...
The reality of the HN effect. I really want to read this. Can someone post a mirror?
I read the article but didn't understand what kind of business this person is in particularly.
Sounds like a personal organizing business, i.e. decluttering and home storage solutions.
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.
[deleted]
I haven't been someone else's employee for 20 years, so the title immediately drew my attention.
One click later, "Error establishing a database connection". HN seems to have hugged this guy's site to death.
Reality - a simple blog should hardly ever need a database server for content.
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.
Running a business means contact with people's opinions. Having your server fall over when you post it to Hacker News means contact with reality.
I suppose one could argue that both are equally real.
I remember one time at summer camp in the teen dorm I claimed that pain was an illusion, because it was subjective. A girl named Lisa picked up a wooden block and threw it at me. It hit my lip, which started bleeding, and she was immediately horrified at what she had done; but I had to acknowledge that subjective "reality" has an importance to me that objective reality does not.
She objectively caused you to transition to an objective state which you both experienced subjectively!
Interestingly I had just re-watched the House episode with the CIPA patient in S3, and it touched on this if you squint. The girl, having CIPA, effectively can’t feel pain. She can’t even feel getting 2nd degree burns and it’s questionable if she even felt them poking around in her head or if she used that to escape (and fall down a 2nd story balcony). The only time she felt actual pain was seeing her mother relapse and be wheeled off for more surgery.
She cannot feel what should objectively cause her pain, but because pain is a subjective experience she can’t. However, truly subjective pain, that is pain derived from emotional connection, is literally the worst pain she can feel.
I think you will like this Capgras Syndrome story.
https://youtu.be/dqBGzkz1oDU
The guy couldn't emotionally recognise his mother after seeing her and started calling her imposter. But when he heard her voice over telephone, he felt emotional connection and said the person on other end was indeed his mother. Emotional pathways provide salience information in conjunction with sensory pathways. Any disruption to emotional pathways can override even correct sensory data.
This is a very deep story. Thank you.
Contact with paying customers, or eyeballs who refuse to pay is reality.
Contact with curious internet traffic crippling a non cloudflared webserver might not be.
Computers are fast now. You can serve five million hits a day with a webserver that's a shell script running from inetd. You don't need Cloudflare unless you're getting DDoSed.
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.
Those tides are really something.
In 2020-2022 I had a repair side-hustle that became unexpectedly profitable, so I started scaling it up and thinking about quitting my job. Then interest rates went up, assets stopped appreciating, and I realized that most of the value I thought I was adding was actually just asset inflation and the common wisdom that repair is a miserable business niche was correct after all.
Bad business people have been blaming outside forces for their failings forever. Taxes! Regulations! China! The Algorithm! It’s a symphony out there.
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
Archived Copy https://archive.is/3scj5
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.
This is why I build static astro sites now for marketing and blog type pages. Cheaper to run, too - it's just html/css with optional js/ts sprinkles.
Another biz lesson I learned luckily through observation (WP sites being down too often and a nightmare to configure and maintain).
Getting hacker news'd is also contact w/ reality for your website/hosting platform :-D
Crazy... 15 years after nginx solving the c10k problem...
The reality of the HN effect. I really want to read this. Can someone post a mirror?
I read the article but didn't understand what kind of business this person is in particularly.
Sounds like a personal organizing business, i.e. decluttering and home storage solutions.
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...)
https://youtu.be/tO5sxLapAts?si=C5IvWbJjlpr3Icvo
Unless it's an AI business
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.
I haven't been someone else's employee for 20 years, so the title immediately drew my attention.
One click later, "Error establishing a database connection". HN seems to have hugged this guy's site to death.
Reality - a simple blog should hardly ever need a database server for content.