[patio11]

The default outcome of a lifestyle business is a lot closer to this than a patio11 style runaway success.

Maybe this is a matter of perspective, but I don't consider my business a runaway freight train. There exist many, many, many businesses in your town which make more than I do.

I know literally hundreds of people who have businesses which are roughly similar (consultancies / SaaS shops / infoproducts / etc, created without substantial non-founder investment), and believe me when I say this, I neither optimize for nor have achieved an unattainably high watermark.

[amyhoy]

Our business makes several times what patio11's does and we are not a runaway success, either, not by a long shot.

If you do not actually attempt to make a business — by selling something people need and already are willing to pay good money for — then yes, you don't tend to make any money. Just stabbing out in the dark with "good ideas" doesn't work.

I have helped my students gross more than $2 million in revenue from "lifestyle businesses." It is absolutely achievable and not rare.

This:

> The reality is that a side project making $10K a month is even less likely than a multi million dollar acquisition of a venture funded startup.

…is factually wrong. Multi-million acquisitions are rarer than being struck by lightning, some 400-500 a year. There are at least an order of magnitude times new bootstrappers every year making well over $10k a month than there are acquisitions.

Startup acquisitions seem more common because they get talked about. Your basic availability heuristic (aka cognitive error) at work.

"The median outcome is not that you'll get 0.01% of a niche market, it's that you'll get 0%"

There are so many assumptions in here that it's useful to unpack. What makes you think you need to aim for 0.01% of a niche? Why do you think you need a niche? What's a niche mean to you?

It's the unspoken "knowledge" about "how to do it" that holds people back. Everybody "knows" you have to "find a niche." Meanwhile there are millions of painful business problems all around you that get ignored in favor of looking for some weird little niche market.

[davidw]

It's logarithmic. But your time as a consultant is worth more than some number of 9's of people on the planet (99.99% for instance). You've got one business that runs itself, and another one ticking along pretty well. Maybe you haven't made all the money you want to make, but you're well on your way to financial freedom, appear to be doing something that makes you happy, and have a family (congrats!), friends, and seem to be fairly happy with the world.

If you look at things in absolute terms, rather than relative terms (someone always has more), you seem pretty successful to me in a way that not a lot of people manage. I wouldn't belittle it too much.

[amyhoy]

He's not belittling it, he's (politely and patio11-ly) saying: "Stop putting this huge space between me and you because it isn't there, and you're short-selling yourself by pretending it is."

[davidw]

If we were to look at the most quantitative, objective thing, consulting rates, there very certainly is a difference between patio11 and the average HN user (and most of us are better off than the population at large, I'm willing to bet).

I've met him, and you're right that he's very polite, generally humble and a good guy, and I can appreciate he's seen plenty of people making orders of magnitude more money than him. Still though, he's pretty successful.

[mischanix]

It's a bit irrelevant to go down this road since patio11 has quit direct consulting, but from what I've read, patio11's path to (consulting) success goes like this: patio11 likes teachers, makes bingo card app, charges for it like a reasonable person; patio11 notices all these mistakes he's making while selling to teachers, blogs about it, blog gains popularity among like-minded individuals; patio11 falls into consulting, delivers a good service, and finds out how much he can charge for it.

There's nothing in this story that's dependent on being very lucky or being exceptionally smart; the only outstanding traits here are overcoming the fear of the unknown that plagues everyone and being a good teacher, but both of these can be learned. It mostly just comes down to spending your time doing the right things.

And now with AR, just by focusing on the major mistake from BCC (selling to teachers), patio11 has sort of proven my point for me: it doesn't take that long to bootstrap a successful business with all the resources available to you now. There are more than enough blog posts telling you what to do, what not to do, and there are more than enough open niches that are perfect for microbusinesses to supplant the dayjobs of everyone on HN who has the same restless ambition that makes staying in those dayjobs an impossibly depressing prospect. And from there, consulting for larger businesses with what you learn in your micro is just icing on the cake.