[chii]

but one must also temper the idea that you can be self-made, just as long as you put in the hard yards. Wasn't there a recent ask HN front-page thread about how the poster was ready to give up being an indiehacker and an entrepreneur?

it is indeed much safer to min/max wage & work-life balance, and spend that time improving yourself. Then, use the capital to invest. But you will not reach billionaire status doing this - but you can make enough to be comfortable.

[raiyu]

Hard work alone will not garauntee success, but I think there is also a tremendous amount of knowledge that you can pick up that a lot of entrepreneurs seem to ignore, that greatly increases their likelihood for success and also reduces how much time they spend going in the wrong direction.

Likewise there are also so many great mentors out there now, and many of them are happy to give a helping hand, expecting nothing in return, because they recognize how much others have helped them, that if you aren't reaching out to those folks and finding them, then you are doing yourself a disservice.

Don't build in a vacuum. And by that I don't mean simply get customer/user feedback, but I mean have mentors, both active, and inactive - that are constantly reviewing your ideas with you. The inactive ones come from reading books like innovators dilemma, and the active ones, you need to find and reach out to and get them on-board, just like you would reach out to VCs and pitch for funding.