| 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. |