[persnickety]

> My pulling back started in ~2023 after 8 years of thinking, 24/7, "what's the next thing I'm gonna write about?". I was tired and the biz wasn't sparking joy like it once used to. Burnout is grind with no reward.

> The business stopped being profitable almost immediately. That's the strongest sign I have that this is a bad business. It's more like owning a job than running a business.

Did I get that right? Having to work to earn money makes a business bad?

And I thought extracting money without creating value was the bad thing to do.

[zamadatix]

A sound business should have solid inertia to still create value to people for quite a while when an individual takes a short break from putting in 100% (voluntarily or not). A business which immediately become unprofitable the second you stop working is, like the author describes, acting more like a contract job than a healthy business (especially if it's only at 500k of revenue in that time with a small team of people - not much buffer to be made out of that revenue regardless of the margin).

Usually the main goal is to create value doing something you like to do. Of course there are far more than one bad or one good thing to do with a business so that doesn't exclude other things from being on either side of the scale.

[persnickety]

Does inertia matter? Or is it just another way of saying that the revenue is low?

I'd rather have X in my pocket instantly after creating the value rather than have half instantly and get the rest as an inertial trickle over the next year.

[zamadatix]

If you can make the assumption the total amounts will be equal then sure, better to just want it no and pocket it for later. Almost always they won't be equal though, even if you can convince everyone to buy immediately (which is a feat in itself).

More likely you'll reach some percentage of your target market in your first month while some other percentage still won't have heard of you or won't have the interest/money/time (depending what you sell) at that exact moment (and for them it's the opposite - better to wait until they expect to use it than buy early). In a year there might be a significant new group to sell to (say you're selling intro to python material and now you've got a new years worth of people to sell to).

None of that really matters if nobody buys your content after 6 months. You get those initial ones and you're done. It's a tough environment to build a business in because you can't just flick a switch that says "anyone who can possibly want to buy my stuff will do so this week", you have to battle to get as many as you can before it dies out and you need the new thing (or at least an updated thing).

[persnickety]

Assuming that the amount of value you create corresponds to the amount of money you are rewarded with - within the same market, then it's just about revenue.

In your examples, you open up new markets, and doing that changes the other side of the equation: you need more work to get that extra income later.

In the end, that example changes all three: the amount of work, the amount of reward, and the time distribution, so I don't think it really shows that inertia is so common.

[vidarh]

"Bad" in the sense that it's not a business that is much different from being in a job.

It is reasonable for someone to think that a business isn't a good business if it relies so much on any single person that the revenue craters the moment one person is pulling away.

It's at the very least not a solid business, and it is a high-risk one. What if you get sick?

[lazide]

The idea with most businesses is that you invest in creating the machine, so eventually it doesn’t require 100% of your attention to get paid every day. Either because you hired and trained someone to do parts of it, or automated parts of it, or invested enough capital that it doesn’t require as much ‘sweat’ every day.

Something that requires you show up and do the same work every day to make the same money is generally referred to as ‘a job’. In this case, one with no real job security or safety net either.

[ghaff]

Admittedly, $500k revenue over almost ten years with a “small team” probably isn’t something to get too excited about.

[persnickety]

I'd have kept my keyboard shut if the implication presented was "work and little revenue is bad business", but here I'm seeing "no work and no profit is bad business".

[ghaff]

I’m not seeing the no work part. He has other people working for him. It’s one thing to have a passion project you enjoy. Having something that seems to be at least aspirational in terms of being a business that is burning you out? Seems time to move on.

[persnickety]

Admittedly, the paragraph is not very upfront about it, but to me:

> My pulling back started in ~2023

this sounds like significantly reducing the amount of work.

Okay, this could also be read as a complaint that the revenue is not enough for profit with any scaling down.

[chrisweekly]

It's his side hustle, not his only form of income. With that context, it's way more impressive.

[eddyzh]

I think you confirm his distinction between having a job and owning a business (implicitly of the type) that might Create recurring income.

[Vegenoid]

> Did I get that right? Having to work to earn money makes a business bad?

Having to work too much for not enough return is what makes the business bad.

[elzbardico]

500k in 8 years for a software engineer is not that much money. Unless you live in a LCOL location, you'd probably would have to juggle between a day job and your side hustle.

Most people would think, ok, but once the content is ready, it'd pay itself. But things are not that easy. You have to answer questions, need to update your content for it to continue attracting customers.

There comes a time when you're fucking tired, and you put down every hour you worked on your content vs how much you got, and you find out that you're making 2x, 3x dollars an hour in your day job than you're making on hustle hours.

But not only that, those hours have a higher marginal cost for you, any additional hour after a full work day is increasingly more painful.