[jasonkester]

The cool thing about starting your own business is that you can build it however you like.

You can work 80 hour weeks or 10 hour weeks. Your choice. You can neglect your friends, family and health, and work yourself into the ground. Or not. Again, entirely up to you.

Surprisingly, the end result will probably be roughly the same. If you're good at building software, and work in bursts like most of us do, then a few good deep sessions a week will get your thing built plenty fast. And since so much of the other 90% of building a successful business is measured in "calendar time", it really doesn't hurt much if you don't get in 60 good hours one week.

Naturally, if you take VC money, they might prefer you do things the "normal" way. Fortunately, that's another thing you get to decide whether you want to do.

[jacquesm]

The freedom is indeed one of the biggest draws but I've found that with any degree of success there is also an automatic reduction in freedom because your responsibilities go up. Hard to balance that.

[kghose]

This is a pretty insightful statement. I would modify that a little bit from 'success' to advancement. In academia you non-academic duties increase as you advance. I've seen a handful of people pull things off such that they have a small lab and don't put in for promotion (they stay associate or instructor). They trade pay for less management duties.

[mindcrime]

The freedom is indeed one of the biggest draws but I've found that with any degree of success there is also an automatic reduction in freedom because your responsibilities go up. Hard to balance that.

That is SO true. Just to illustrate in a bit more depth... as a developer / founder, here are some things I have to do as a founder that I never had to do as a developer:

1. do market research. Browse US census data, find SIC/NAIC codes, look up demographic information on businesses that we want to target.

2. Scour LinkedIn, Hoovers, etc. for contacts at companies we want to sell to.

3. Compile lists of contacts, cold email / cold call those contacts and try to get meetings.

4. Read sales books, try to develop a sales process for our company.

5. Go out and meet customers, try to identify their problems, then either sell them something and/or plug that feedback back into our product roadmap.

6. Go take sales training.

7. Read marketing books and blogs and articles, put together a marketing plan.

8. Write content specific to out "content marketing" strategy, post on our website, blog, etc.

9. recruit co-founder(s), intern(s), etc.

10. Go to startup related events to get to know the local VCs and angels, just in case we decide to raise a round of funding at some point.

11. Recruit members to our advisory board. Meet advisors, take their advice and figure out how to try and incorporate it

12. Write marketing collateral, white-papers, brochures, etc.

13. Write press releases

14. Distribute press releases.

15. Monitor press to see if we get any mentions. Follow up on those as appropriate.

16. Join industry associations relevant to our target market, attend those meetings to try and meet potential customers, partners, etc.

17. Scour for potential partners, investors, customers, etc.

18. Develop pricing model(s), deal with financial projections.

19. Manage corporate paperwork: File to incorporate, file periodic updates with the secretary of state, tax returns, etc.

20. Manage the product roadmap. Research potential new features and technologies, and prioritize that stuff.

21. Go to "leads group" meetings to exchange leads

22. Go to general networking events (Chamber of Commerce events, etc.) to network and seek customer leads, etc.

23. Respond to inbound leads that come in as a result of our marketing efforts.

And all of that is on top of actually writing code and building the product. So yeah, while being a founder can lead to more freedom in some regards, there is definitely a tradeoff in terms of added responsibility. And once you have co-founder(s) or other people on your team, you feel more pressure because their futures are at stake as well.

[mcv]

> with any degree of success there is also an automatic reduction in freedom because your responsibilities go up.

It's not automatic. It's up to you to choose to what extent you want to exploit that success. If you want more freedom and less responsibility, hire less people than you can afford to, and take less contracts than are open to you. Stay small and be free, or grow big and be rich.

[Smirnoff]

Your thought reminded me of a Ian Langworth's recent quote: "Today, as CTO and co-founder of Artillery, I’m split between infinite freedom and infinite responsibility."[1]

[1] http://firstround.com/article/How-to-Go-From-Google-Engineer...

[oinksoft]

Building a business is very hard work. Some people can pull it off working few hours a week, but the majority will tend towards the 60-80 hours and be able to eventually taper that if they're lucky.

[harrisonweber]

I think what you're highlighting is the difference between startups and small businesses.

[skrebbel]

Right. So a startup has to be about working 80 hours a week or it's not a startup?

[hyperpape]

The term "startup" doesn't intrinsically say anything about a business other than that it's new. But the discussion about "startups" on HN and in the popular press assumes it means 1) long hours 2) a bunch of young guys 3) aiming at extremely rapid growth (often measured by users, regardless of revenue)

It's probably a losing battle trying to and change that use. If the shoe fits, call it a startup, otherwise just use consulting business, small-business, or whatever other term describes it. It's not like you're losing out on something by not calling a web development shop a startup.

[Roden]

Personally I think the term startup is overused. I regularly see simple premium membership sites paraded around as startups in all the startup news feeds.

[vonmoltke]

I work for a small company (less than 20 people including contractors) that has been in business for 16 years. When I left my giant-ass defense contractor job to come here, a couple people there insisted on referring to it as a "startup". It is rapidly becoming a word that means whatever the speaker wants it to.

[skrebbel]

Point 1 is decidedly a part of American work ethic. Plenty of startups in Europe have sane work hours, for example. Admittedly, the amount of startups that recently became successful here can be counted on a single hand, but that doesn't invalidate the point.

Don't tie local culture to a global term.

[harrisonweber]

No, but a startup is a company designed to grow into something much larger very quickly — that (historically) requires a massive amount of work. Small businesses can require 80 hours a week too, but they traditionally serve a much smaller segment of the population.