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by thirdacc 601 days ago
How can I do it without capital, straight out of college, with only around 2 years of real-world experience and no network? Honest question.

The only play that occurs to me is surviving off of gig work, building the business as a sidehustle. But I've seen so many people who seem to be permanently stuck there, with no real business to grow and no way to explain their resume gap to employers.

From what I've seen lurking here, successful bootstrapped businesses come from experienced people who know what they're doing and have savings to fall back on.
2 comments
freefaler 601 days ago
Find a good local problem that you have connections with people who'd buy it. Doesn't need to be a software, many small businesses start as sole proprietor working for himself and slowly growing the company by hiring help.

No cheap programmer would copy your "fixes-fences-in-Boston.com" idea. A lot of local services aren't sold properly on the internet, so if you combine the two you can get something out of your time and labour.

Also local bureaucrats love to "regulate" and automating local compliance is also a good niche. Now with all LLMs around the scope of what is possible has grown, thus the niches where it could be applied have grown too.

Don't drink the VC/YC combinator cool-aid, that you "go big or go home". It's better to own 100% of your comany, than 3% of a VC based startup most of the time. You see outliers like Facebook, Airbnb & etc... but as 37Signals has proved for the majority of startup founders the risk/reward ratio is skewed not in their favor.

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gitt67887yt7bg 600 days ago
Local services are not tech jobs. The second you decide to go tech, you have to be prepared to complete globally.
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freefaler 600 days ago
There are many local problems that require local knowledge and serving local customers. I have a friend with a business for California vehicle compliance reports. Some stupid paperwork that needs to be updated yearly when the rules change. It's super local and he has 10 employees supporting clients remote and on site. It grew very slowly but it's in 11th year now and revenue is not bad at all. Nothing to compete globally, knowledge is local, clients need local services.
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p3rls 601 days ago
Figure out what you want to build. Figure out how much you will need to build it. Now cut that in half and only build the most important parts.

-Dropped out, no connections, still built stuff.

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