[tptacek]

If by "lifestyle business" you mean "something I stuck in a private Github repository, set up a web page for, tinkered with Google Adwords a bit, and hoped for the best", you are absolutely right.

Patrick's businesses aren't viable because he got lucky with the right lines of code and the right blog posts. He's viable for approximately the same reasons that a decent local bookkeeping firm are. It just happens that he generate value with small amounts of Ruby code instead of accounting services.

[davidw]

> a decent local bookkeeping firm

I have a good friend here in Padova who has started two of those, and they've been quite successful. He also works his ass off from morning til night running the things despite hiring some good people. Something like BCC, which seems to mostly run itself and generate some decent money, is, in some ways, far more "successful" than that, in my book. Generating even modest money without doing anything is a nice accomplishment.

[napoleond]

This is an interesting conversation (the whole thread). I think people get really tripped up with these discussions because they're talking about different things. The first comment talks about "side projects" making $10k per month. I think 'patio11 and 'tptacek as well as yourself would all agree that $10k/month is impressive for a true side project (built and maintained entirely outside of normal working hours), but that it's completely normal (almost required) for even the smallest of "lifestyle businesses". (That term, to me, signifies a business which demands full time attention from its principals, at least to start.)

The "patio11 as runaway success" quote is probably what triggered the rest of this discussion--obviously 'patio11 is successful, but there's nothing "runaway" about it.