Entreporn, The Fallacy That Wastes Your Life - <AUTHOR> http://justinvincent.com/page/1392/entreporn-the-fallacy-that-wastes-your-life <comment><USER3> "If every developer was to focus on the very achievable goal of building a lifestyle/micro business – the entire house of cards would crumble."

If that happened, the whole world would crumble, because we wouldn't have any technology bigger than could be built by lifestyle businesses. Anyone who wanted to build a lifestyle business on the Internet, for example, would find that there was no Internet. You wouldn't have servers or routers or clients or backbones or local cable.

<comment><USER4> Except that instead of a big business doing those things, there could be a network of small businesses.

Each business does a small part of the whole, buying and selling what they need from other businesses.

The reason these networks don't come into existence is the problem of how an interdependent network gets bootstrapped. For example, suppose that gadgets are currently made by a large corporation, Acme, because making a gadget requires designing and making a widget, a vidget, and an xidget, a design for how to put the bits together, and the final assembly, and that is too much for a lifestyle business, and Acme doesn't buy or sell the parts as the whole process is vertically integrated. If there were widgets, vidgets, and xidgets on the market, and designs for building gadgets from them on the market, then there could be lifestyle business building gadgets - and likewise for any other part of the supply chain being removed. However, without any lifestyle gadget makers, there will be no demand for widgets (unless they are useful in another industry).

Maybe there is a business model for helping to bring a network of interdependent companies into existence simultaneously.

<comment><USER5> It's unrealistic and will never happen.

The market, overtime, always comes back to its natural state. Which is, 'Survival of The Biggest'.

<comment><USER6> "Survival of the fittest", you mean. There are plenty examples of big companies that failed (or would have failed wasn't it for government intervention).

<comment><USER5> You're right. By biggest i mean profitability, reveneue, etc. Which is, for a company, an indicator of their 'fitness'. I'm not talking about the loss making whales that had to get bailed out and for whom we are all now paying for..

<comment><USER7> No, you mean "growth of the fittest".

The big aren't successful because they are big, they are big because they are successful.

Of course, you could argue that the incremental value of an added employee is positive for successful companies.

But there's an opportunity cost, if employees in companies are not developing, taking risks, and focused like they would be if they were working for themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm disappointed that this has gotten so many upvotes and positive comments.

There's a middle ground between web application "lifestyle businesses" (like duping credulous customers into overpaying for a time-tracking tool styled with this month's CSS trends) and trying to start the next Facebook.

There's nothing wrong with being a small software company. People have been doing it for decades now. It's boring, but there's nothing wrong with it. Don't expect anyone to celebrate you for doing it, though.

Our time on this earth is limited, and people's attention is even more limited. No wonder that more time and attention is put towards trying to execute on big ideas. Sometimes those ideas end up not working out, but we're all better, I think, for someone having tried.

As pg points out, the ideas that led to the businesses that have formed the infrastructure that enables web lifestyle businesses could not have, themselves, been lifestyle businesses. Someone has to think big, take risks, and deploy significant capital in the interest of a dramatically better world. If you don't want to be that person, great, but don't tell the risk-takers that they're "wasting their lives". Would you say the same to scientists who take big risks? Artists?

The media packaging of technology entrepreneurship is undeniably offputting. But that's no excuse for dim commentary like this.

<comment><USER9> Microsoft was a bootstrapped company and at the time, I suspect that some people derided it as a "lifestyle business". They didn't go chasing after VC money and didn't use the zero-revenue customer acquisition model to grow. Are you sure that Microsoft didn't impact the world.

I'm not sure which "lifestyle business" _duped_ customers into overpaying, but it is absurd to equate the so-called lifestyle business to "duping credulous customers into overpaying for a time-tracking tool styled with this month's CSS trends". I can list far worse cases - corporate fraud and crimes - <USER2> large companies

Ultimately, the "lifestyle business" is a silly vc-invented label. Running after VC money is also a lifestyle. All businesses aim to impact lifestyles of founders, employees and customers. The difference is that vc-funded business also impact lifestyles of vcs. Bootstrapped companies don't impact vc lifestyles (unless they compete with a VC-funded company :).

imo both lifestyles are equally valid, but it is absurd to describe one as a lifestyle company and pretend that the other one (which risks other people's money) is the true and only "risk-taker"

<comment><USER10> He's attacking Amy Hoy, a vocal opponent[1] of the hype around startups whose current business is a time-tracking app called Freckle. Freckle's main attraction is that it has a pleasant user interface. I'm not sure how anyone was duped. I guess it's supposed to be dishonest if you're getting people to pay money for functionality they can get free elsewhere.

[1]: <http://unicornfree.com/2011/follow-the-money/>

<comment><USER11> Yes. In the interest of preserving history, he wrote and later deleted a line that went like:

"duping credulous customers into paying for [something something] time tracking styled with the latest CSS design site trends"

I was not directly named, but if you ask me, it's pretty clear which app he's talking about: my first, Freckle <http://letsfreckle.com> .

And yup, that's me! I dupe 1,000 paying customers every month! They're so well-duped that they write love letters to our support account. I really can't get over the fact that I've got them so well-fooled they actually believe my software makes them happier and helps them run a better, more profitable business.

For the record, though, we have lots of functionality you can't get elsewhere. That's part of the magic of the dupe.

EDIT: Hey, look like that line about duping is back in Alex's comment. Either I'm blind and didn't see it the last time (which I concede is possible)… or it returned.

<comment><USER12> Also seems childish of al3x to forget that out of amy hoy and thomas fuchs' work came scriptaculous which has probably inspired startup founders wowed by Ajax only less than Ruby on Rails itself. al3x probably leveraged that work early on at Twitter itself.

If lifestyle businesses like 37signals and freckle are producing the kind of tools like RoR and scriptaculous, more power to them!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Awesome article.

I'd like to see this taken to the next level: some kind of diagnostic.

It's easy to point out the general case. What's difficult is taking the general truth and turning it into stuff to do _right now_. Answer these questions. If you answer this way, you are heading down the wrong path.

From what very little I've seen, this is something that everybody sees in everybody else but never see in themselves. Perhaps this is because it's easy to imagine somebody else having to "settle" for a business making shinier widgets for 3 cents profit per unit while we all easily imagine ourselves as being the person to "change X as we know it"

I have no idea why some of us are like this. I continue to struggle with it, and I know better.

<comment><USER14> Just start fixing things that you think are broken and charge for them. Eventually it will add up to enough to pay the bills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I used to get frustrated by the mentality that Justin is speaking out against. That said, those of us building "get rich slowly" businesses simply don't need the support network that people making crazy bets need.

The huge risk, huge return world will always be exciting to watch and talk about, and it will always be splashing around waste money, so it will always get a disproportionate amount of attention.

</comment><comment><USER16> That simple ? 10K/month ?

Id love to hear how I can get one of those 10K/month businesses (outside of consulting/programmer-for-hire).

People keep making it sound like it super easy to just get such a business going. How about some examples ?

<comment><USER17> I'd love to know how I can get one of those consulting/programmer-for-hire jobs for $10k/mo.

Do these things really exist? How do you find them?

<comment><USER18> Yes they really exist. Some niches pay more like 20k+/mo pretty easily. Consulting at 150/hour isn't that hard. If you want specific advice learn an eCommerce framework really really well or become a deployment specialist for large clusters of JBoss/Weblogic/Websphere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wait, what?

> The absolute truth is that each and every one > of us can build a business > that can support us. > ... > In truth, there is no reason to fail – other > > than failing to learn from your mistakes.

Yes, _maybe_ we can - eventually. But while we're building it, we still need a paycheck. Building a profitable business doesn't seem like the kind of thing you can do in your spare time, unless you're willing to sacrifice absolutely everything else in your life.

> But even better, once you have the knowledge that comes > along with > building a succesful $10k/month business, you > also posses the exact same > knowledge that it takes to > build a $100k/month business.

And then, why not a $1M/month business? And then $10M/month! Etc! Etc!

I'm pretty sure that a $100k/month business is an outlier, too, it's just closer to the center of the bell curve than Facebook, but still pretty dang far away from everyone else.

<comment><AUTHOR> Myself & Jason (techzing) are both building businesses on the side. Our paycheck come from consultancy. We both lead very fulfilling lives as well as building our side projects... :)

<comment><USER19> How many hours a week do you spend on your consulting gigs, how many on side projects, and how many on your personal lives?

Not trying to pull a GOTCHA, SEE, YOUR NUMBERS DON'T ADD UP, genuinely curious.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hopefully Jasons post can help to answer that:

<http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/bootstrapping-with-kids>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Note: I can only speak for my industry (penetration testing and antimalware) so YMMV

Last month at DC4420 (the London monthly DEF CON chapter meeting):

<dude from corporate security firm>: How many people do you have at Mandalorian? <iuguy>: 6 <dude from corporate security firm>: Really? I always thought you guys were bigger? So it's more of a lifestyle firm? <iuguy>: If by lifestyle firm you mean a company that treats it's people well for doing a good job - as well as they could do on their own - then yes. If you mean a firm that's focused on doing a good job doing work we enjoy instead of chasing cash and ticking boxes all day long, then yes.

Probably the most successful example of this I've seen in my industry are these guys: <http://www.pentestpartners.co.uk/>

I think <http://www.fbtechies.co.uk/> was the first I knew of, but amongst us there's quite a few and it seems as though we're growing. I think the realisation of having a niche skillset combined with commercial ability makes for a compelling enough value proposition for people to go it alone outside the conventional areas.

We don't all need to be multibillionaires (although some do). For some of us it's the choice between working on yet another PCI box ticking exercise, or charming the pants off some cool experimental tech.

I would like to add though that the article really needs some data to back it up. While there's plenty of anecdata from patio11, peldi and (to some extent although I'm obviously not in the same league as those guys) me, a source of actual information would really blow the doors off.

</comment><comment><USER21> I agree. You have no idea how much I agree. My small online business never made it to 10000 us a month, but I don't care. I am writing from a nice Balinese house with a great tropical garden where I'm spending 2 months. And then I'll spend a month in Sri Lanka. Then, maybe it will be China. I have been living like this for the past 10 years, working online and enjoying life as I never thought it was possible. So, go for your small business and be free, it's really much easier than it seems. And it's so beautiful.

<comment><USER22> I'm working toward this goal with my own startup. Thanks for the inspirational comment!

<comment><USER21> Ok so make sure you build it mobile from the beginning. I mean delegate any task which requires to be in a specific place or to be online at a specific time. Or, worse, to be in a specific place at a specific time. It may seem odd, but that's the key. If you want to be free to go anywhere anytime you can't be supposed to be somewhere sometime. There are so many tasks down the road waiting to get you stuck in some place. It may ne hard to do but you need to give them away. Sorry if that sounds insane :) But it worked for me, so I hope it works for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I started a lifestyle business. It did that, and very well. And then I became bored.

If a lifestyle business works for you, then that's what you should strive towards. Some would call me naive or childish, but if you're the type of person who dreams about changing the world, don't sell yourself short. Don't grow up, and don't give up.

Go for it.

</comment><comment><USER24> David Heinemeier Hansson had the exact same conversation with Jason Calacanis and Jason just could not understand why DHH felt that building that kind of business made sense..

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDGHxO6N3Ms>

</comment><comment><USER25> This exact point occurred to me as I was listening to Reid Hoffman define 'entrepreneurship' at SXSW the other day. His definition restricted the term to 'industry-disruptive technology' and 'big ideas'. I thought it was a pretty self-serving definition coming from an angel investor who _needs_ those kind of giant hits to cover bad bets. It's also a lot easier to start what Mark Cuban is calling the Ponzi-style investment process where every round at successively higher valuations leaves the next group of suckers holding the bag.

</comment><comment><USER26> "The chances of building a Google, YouTube or Facebook and scaling to the millions of users required to be "considered" for VC investment are vanishingly small. We're talking in the region of 0.0001%."

You don't need millions of users to be considered for VC investment. More like 10,000 users if the service is free, or 100 paying customers. And it's really not that hard to do that, it just takes enough perseverance to make it through the first few iterations.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure I agree with "Not that hard to get 10,000 free users?"

<comment><USER27> It's not that hard to get a fairly small volume of users (100-10,000) -- compared to getting a huge, YouTube-sized volume (millions of users). But it's still hard to get any number at all. It takes work, persistence, luck, and intelligence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> He ignores that most categories only have 3 or 4 major players and rest can't get enough recognition to be profitable.

Also $10k/month is ok for one or two people, but what if someone gets sick or leaves, a business is not very stable at that size.

Additionally he assumes people want to change the world for monetary reasons, which I don't think is often the case, otherwise you'd manage a hedge fund or something.

</comment><comment><USER29> $10k/mo sounds pretty sweet.

<comment><USER30> And only requires making about $330 a day. This is the benchmark I'm shooting for with mobile apps, and right now with just 2 apps I'm at about $130 a day.

<comment><USER31> What are your apps?

<comment><USER30> <http://www.10millionapps.com/lol-studio-ios/>

<http://www.10millionapps.com/space-gremlin-mac/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> 37signals have been advocating this for years.

<comment><USER33> they also raised money in '06 from Bezos

their argument isn't that VC is evil, more that in a world where a lot of entrepreneurs seem to be focused on the fundraising/grow-quick/big-swing path, there are alternatives

the OP on the other hand is advocating something entirely different

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> "the chances of building a $10k/month webapp business is pretty high" is this true? oh god, what am I doing with my life?.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it's high if you work at it for a year or two.

<comment><USER35> _if you work at it for a year or two_

so this 10k/month figure is averaged from how many years?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's no average. It's just a target. You don't get $10/k a month overnight. It's a figure that you work toward. Many people don't need that much to live. It depends where you're at. If you need 5k/month to live then you can reach your goal even faster. $10k/month seemed like a good goal for the article that could support most people.

<comment><USER35> _There's no average. It's just a target._

uh, okay. then you might want to update your blog before there are 1000s of unemployed web developers building their lifestyle web apps for eternal target of 10k/month.

<comment><USER36> 'Entrepreneurs' who can't think critically for themselves regarding their potential are in for a rough ride.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Excellent article.

Embrace being a lifestyle business and ignore all the startup noise. Do your best to serve your customers and grow your revenue. You'll never get famous, but then again neither will 99.9% of the people who go the other route.

</comment><comment><USER38> This post saddens me. Startups should aim larger, not smaller. That is, in _my_ opinion.

The blog post (which I am interpreting as "every entrepreneur wants to raise VC and swing for fences") is generally wrong, in my experience. For every "a million dollars isn't cool, you know what is? a billion dollars" startup founder, there is one that insists that Groupon is over valued, and startups should monetize on day 1 and be in charge of their own destiny by retaining all equity.

There is no right or wrong answer in terms of what your aspirations are. But there is a _huge_ audience of startup founders that are building lifestyle businesses, and killing it.

<comment><USER39> What's it wrong about, that people don't respect lifestyle businesses? Hmm, I wonder if that's the silicon valley reality distortion field.

The post says that most people don't consider lifestyle businesses, and they should. And you're claiming that lifestyle businesses are in fact quite common, and that you wish more people were searching for scalable businesses. You agree with the post that a lifestyle business is a perfectly fine, viable option. Am I getting all that right?

<comment><USER38> I read the post as implying that all entrepreneurs are chasing mega hits whereas some may prefer, or be better suited towards, lifestyle businesses.

" ... to the advantage of almost every player in our industry that we "believe" in chasing the next big thing. They need us to keep chasing it. In the truest sense – the next big thing – is a carrot on a stick that keeps us occupied and keeps them in business."

Whereas in my experience, lots (loads!) of entrepreneurs are chasing lifestyle companies. You just don't see them as much because they need far less from the ecosystem. I can think of tons of ~$10k/mo companies building iPhone apps, wordpress plugins, b2b web apps, etc etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have a sneaking suspicion they are chasing after Angry Birds, or Zynga... once again very different to a solid $10k/month b2b webapp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> While I agree that you shouldn't knock lifestyle businesses, I feel that the TechCrunch quote was taken a bit out of context. The "dipshit" companies looks like its referring to the kind of apps that have no business model but ride on the hopes and dreams of overeager VCs who swear this is the next Google. Anyone who creates a company without a business model and hopes to sell to Google for $25MM is a dipshit. But those aren't lifestyle businesses, so it seems like that quote was a bit irrelevant.

</comment><comment><USER41> Most startups need VC money because their ideas are obscure, stupid, and market-less. There is nothing wrong with using your skills to build a simple small business to fill a market need. Anyone who feels guilty for trying to make money with their talent is a sheep and a fool.

</comment><comment><USER42> I think there are already lots of software companies which aim not too high. Last time I heard there were 150.000 apps in the AppStore. There are lots and lots of indie game developers and casual game developers; a great chunk of them don't have the income to avoid their day jobs because they are not even ramen profitable. There are thousands of cheap shareware software on download.com. And lots of websites trying to generate money using adsense.

I agree that it may be a bad decision to aim too high, but there is also a possibility to aim too low: into markets where there is not much money or there is free stuff as competition. I've first made the 'aim too high' and then as a compensation I also made the 'aim too low' mistakes. Now I finally aim in-between.

</comment><comment><USER43> The only problem here is that entrepreneurs are humans and as such they tend to swing for the fences. I know I do. Its the come big or go home mentality. Its the American way. Whatever you want to call it, its in our genes to do it that way.

Yeah we could all become the equivalent of craftsmen who had to then organize into guilds/unions to get a decent wage. Why do that when we can go home millionaires with the right idea/right money.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you build a small business you can build a large business. All the same principles are at stake. However, in theory it's easier to build a small business first time round (baby steps). You can swing for the fences on biz 2.

<comment><USER43> Yeah I hear you but the steps you take in building a small business, while perhaps less risky, are the same. Yet you even get cache in trying a big business. I've done 5 startups (2 successful and 3 not) but I can point to that in my next you can't use your small business as an example you can do a big one.

So at a certain point in your life it makes sense to swing for the fences if you are the only bread winner for your family I definitely understand reducing risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Wow, this is exactly what I was saying with a recent comment of mine (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2330900>). There's a wide continuum of successes in the startup world. VC's are interested in the funding the top end, but many devs would probably be satisfied by a much wider swath, that could include wholly bootstrapped operations.

</comment><comment><USER45> I think this article is just an original argument for bootstrapping. I don't think this guy is saying: "don't reach for the stars" - at least that's not how I interpret it. He's saying: "set achievable goals, lean how to execute, then you might just build a big ship organically."

</comment><comment><USER46> Arguing about the term "lifestyle business" is itself distracting.

To me the point is that nowadays you don't have to get permission (in the form of someone else investing in your company) to get started. On your own you can fairly quickly build a business that pays your bills (your "lifestyle") and lets you escape "wage slavery". Once you do this, you have a lot of security and a lot of power/control over your next move.

I didn't think the point was to build a business that makes enough to pay the bills and then stop building. I'm certainly not stopping.

</comment><comment><USER47> DHH's "How to make money online" (Startup School) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY> goes into more detail on this.

The version with slides isn't working right now [http://37signals.com/svn/posts/981-the-secret-to-making- mone...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/981-the-secret-to-making-money-online)

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm in a 3rd world country so $10K a month is more than enough for me to more things. Like 1. Start a foodstore, business; petrol stations (Startup cost around $50K), a popular restaurant etc. So this is what I'm doing now; trying to create a lifestyle business.

</comment><comment><USER49> I want to believe this story, but the reality is that the big companies have economies of scale that are very difficult to compete with and they often win.

<comment><AUTHOR> The agility of small companies makes it ridiculously easy to compete with large companies.

Large companies have huge amounts of unsatisfied customers that are easy to research, find and sell to- who are more then happy to pay for a direct line to the software maker.

Large companies don't even care if you do this, because unless you hit $100m revenue you're about as significant as a gnat on their butt.

<comment><USER49> Honda, Trek, Dell, Proctor & Gamble, Exxon, Whole Foods: There are companies I give my money to and most people spend money like I do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Congrats JV. I've been listening to you on TechZing. You've hit this one out of the ballpark.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks very much :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article is not sensational. It does not tell you what you should do with your life. It does not say VCs are evil. It doesn't say funded companies are a waste of time.

The "if every developer" line is clearly just as much grandstanding as PG makes when he compares hackers taking a job to caging a lion. To take this line in this essay literally -- and be offended -- but not to take PG's line about lions literally is to be intellectually dishonest.

Here's what this essay actually says:

* there's a monetary reason that we're all soaking in VC/fund/"liquidity event" news

* there's a psychological reason that we seek out VC/fund/"liquidity event" news

* reading about this stuff isn't even the remotely same vein as working on it, or making real money

* the author is angry that he believes people are being pushed towards lives/businesses that don't make them happy

* every developer is capable of making a product for an independent income

* and everybody might be happier if they did

Gee, not so controversial, is it?

All the hullaballoo about this article can be only one thing: overly identifying with your life/business choices and attacking anyone who dares call them into question. In a general sense. Not in a PERSONAL attack, for example labeling someone's work "a lifestyle business" or "like duping credulous customers into overpaying for a time-tracking tool styled with this month's CSS trends".

The only reason anyone even paid attention to this article at all is because 98% of what everyone hears, all the time, is pro-big startup, pro-VC, pro- liquidity event, pro- this and pro- that.

There is so rarely a dissenting voice that the moment there is one, however mild, everybody is in attack mode.

In short...

Look, dominant paradigm: You need to chillax.

<comment><USER51> > The only reason anyone even paid attention to this article at all is because > 98% of what everyone hears, all the time, is pro-big startup, pro-VC, pro- > liquidity event, pro- this and pro- that.

Perhaps because you're so far out in the (physical) hinterlands of software, you hear a time-delayed different message. Living close to the epicenter of the startup world, I hear very few people really talk about flip-based startups anymore, and the general consensus is to be wary of VC and take it as late as you need it. Indeed, if I had to describe a "pro-" that has infected Valley culture right now, I would call it the "pro-lean startup" fetishism. It gets a little tedious, but it's a far more reasonable sentiment than the pro- flip culture that dominated the Valley back a few years ago.

Really, the difference between the idea put forth in this essay and a game- changing techcrunch-courting startup is scope. I could work on a small lifestyle product (and I have a few in mind that might be fun), but they're not... game changers. I'd like to work on a product that really makes a difference to a large number of customers. Very few independent products have the resources or scope to achieve this.

Coming out of college, people think they have to work either for a big company or a big idea. The truth put forth in this article is that you need not do either, And That Is Okay. Indeed, there is a great deal of freedom that comes with it.

> Look, dominant paradigm: You need to chillax.

"Dominant," you say? Hardly. "Glorified," perhaps. The vast majority of people do what you do; sell small-scale contracts and services to small-scale partners and customers. And that's fine and good and noble and grist for the mill of global economics. But let's not kid ourselves, it is not an ambitious path, and western culture glamorizes (unfulfilled) ambition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> _"If you genuinely have the spirit of an entrepreneur inside of you, something about No True Scotsman"._

This article, as much as any feature on Mark Zuckerberg, _is_ entreporn. Is it possible to build a $10k-per-month web app? Sure. Easier than building the next Facebook (which is a matter of mostly luck, a lottery)? Absolutely. Are most people who try going to fail? Yes. Is it possible to get funding for a lifestyle business? No, that doesn't exist. So you need to do it on your own time, which limits your losses but makes your likelihood of success very low. If nothing is lost but one's time, is trying a lifestyle business possibly a great idea? Of course. But is making it sound easy to make $10k per month entreporn? Yes.

Also, as for lifestyle businesses, there are good and bad scenarios. A good lifestyle business provides reliable income at a decent rate (at least $100/hour) and the ability to control how much money you make and how much time you spend; if you want more money, you work harder. If you want a 3-month vacation, you take it but make less money. That's what you want: the freedom to decide how much you work and how much money you make. This is a great thing to have, and if some idiot hipster thinks it makes you a loser that you didn't cash out for billions, who cares? A bad ("walking dead") lifestyle business is one that just turned out mediocre and ends up had-by-the-balls by one or two clients who become, _de facto_ , very demanding bosses. Companies like this exist: single-client consultancies that haven't gone out yet, but never got enough headway above the mediocrity of client demands to take off and become something.

<comment><AUTHOR> If the article made sound easy to make $10k/month that was an error on my part. It is not easy, it's very hard. But no where near as hard as building a successful business on VC investment. Don't forget, after you get the investment you're only just starting out... 8 out of 10 VC funded projects fail.

<comment><USER52> I think one also needs to consider the success and failure profiles in each. What do success and failure entail, and what are their implications for your career? The attraction of the get-rich-or-die-quickly company is that, if it doesn't make you rich enough never to have to work again, at least you can walk away from it and hopefully spin your story positively enough to get career credit, for your next job, for the time you spent there.

Taking VC and making $120k/year, which is low-average for a VC-funded firm's CEO, and then failing after three years, doesn't entail much financial loss. And unless the failure is catastrophic and obviously reflects badly on a single founder, it's not a huge career hit. Sure, it's 3 years working very hard for middling pay, but there are worse things in the world. Depending on how one is able to bounce back from the failure, it may have been 3 years very well spent.

As for lifestyle businesses, no VC is going to fund a lifestyle business; it's just not what they do. And bank loans are out because they make onerous personal-liability requirements, so scratch that. This leaves two options. (1) Don't quit your day job. Risk is minimal, but I'd be shocked if more than 2% of these also-employed "entrepreneurs" take off. (2) Quit your day job, and put personal savings at risk. This is a lot riskier, financially, than founding a VC startup if you have sufficient social connections to know (before you start) that you'll be funded. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing, and if you don't have those social connections you'll be eating savings either way while you hunt for funding, but it does mean that it's costly.

<comment><AUTHOR> To get the "opportunity" to get VC funding usually requires 1+ years very hard work with no money of any kind.

<comment><USER52> That depends on your location and social connections. If you're in the Bay Area and have social connections, you can get funded out of the gate. If you're on the East Coast and just out of college, you're going to have to prove yourself before you get funded and, yes, you're looking at at least a year of unpaid hard work. It's all about contacts, and if you have none, you've got an uphill battle-- _especially_ if you're not in the Valley.

Income-wise, a startup is generally a step down, but a tolerable one for most people. If you're 22 and without VC contacts, you can work for next to nothing for a year or two, make contacts by hanging out in the Valley, and start pitching when you have a product. If you're 36 and have a family to feed, but have VC connections, you can usually get early seed funding and pay yourself $100k annual salary, which is low for someone with those kinds of contacts but enough to live on.

When it is impossible is if you're 36 and have a family to feed, but _don't_ have VC contacts. You can't afford to take a year or two off to prove yourself (which an outsider will have to do) but you don't have the contacts necessary to step immediately into a $100k/year salary with just an idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I sense a backlash growing. It seems like the only time people take you seriously these days is if you're in your 20's, have a spiky-haired asian dude as one of your founders and are launching a social/mobile/streaming video app in a weekend. That's what they cover on TechCrunch but not what the vast majority of us out there are doing.

Sidenote: I have nothing against asian dudes, spiky haired or not.

<comment><USER54> The whole point of this type of model is that you make you $10k/mo by selling something that people actually pay money for, which means you don't care what TechCrunch/VCs are excited about. They're irrelevant for you.

$10k is your "fuck you money", provided you can rely on making it every month. This might be easier said than done, though.

<comment><USER55> $10k/month is nowhere close to being "fuck you money".

<comment><USER54> Define FU money.

For me it's being able to support yourself and your family in a fairly comfortable western middle class quality of life. The FU part is that, if you're making this independently and reliably, you don't need to care about the TechCrunch/etc bullshit the OP mentioned.

For another person it might mean living in a West Village townhouse and sending your kids to private schools. For yet another it's owning a private jet and the 49ers. In these cases you probably need more than $10k/mo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Regarding the chances to build something super-successful: It's more interesting to hear about startups that fail. Seeing patterns emerging from failure is way more useful than trying to pinpoint what Google and Facebook founders have in common.

The problem I guess is that the failures mostly just fade away. A service where upstarters commit to write about their journey, especially if it goes bad, in exchange for helpful tips would be _very_ useful.

</comment><comment><USER57> I think Spolsky settled this dichotomy back in 2000: <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html>

</comment><comment><USER58> happy st. patty's day! with a little Irish pessimism!

</comment><comment><USER59> Meh. Conspiracy thinking.

</comment><comment><USER60> TL;DR - Work for your customers, avoid the boss/investor.</comment>


Facebook (De) Friend Awkwardness - <AUTHOR>

So I've noticed recently that a few people that I've been Facebook friends with are no longer friends. These are people that I'm not real good friends with but actually do hang out with from time to time via mutual friends. Every time I see one of them, I feel a mutual awkwardness.
I've read stories of FB friends disappearing due to the lack of db reliability and such so I'm not sure if either party actually de-friended the other.
Anyone else encounter this weird situation or have any insight about it? I can't think of any reason why any of these people would de-friend me. <comment><USER2> You care too much about what other people think... I defriended tons of people, some I even see everyday. The awkwardness is created by you feeling awkward about it. Just don't give a damn, and it's no longer awkward

<comment><USER3> This is a great answer for more than just FB defriending.

* awkwardness is created by you feeling awkward about it

I had a bad case of this for a long time, it still comes back from time to time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Think of it as you are reducing clutter in your personal life. If these people are not really important, then they must not be really important. If someone was really a good friend, they would definitely tell you what they feel about it.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you only see them occasionally, they were probably just cleaning up their list. Stop being so sensitive.

</comment><comment><USER6> doesn't that option work the same as a file or something posted on somebody's wall

</comment><comment><USER7> "I can't think of any reason why any of these people would de-friend me." I am actually on the opposite side. I have so many fb friends that I wonder if they should actually be my friends on fb since I hardly havae any context remaining with them (met them during college etc. but never kept in touch afterwards).Yours is a nice problem to have.</comment>


All-time greatest failed Internet startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-all-time-greatest-failed-Internet-startup <comment><USER2> My favorite part (with reference to eToys):

"They ditched a perfectly working MySQL application and migrated to Oracle which caused them to hire Oracle consultants $2000 per day and spend millions on Oracle big-iron."

Reminds me of when the ads manager at Google decided we needed to ditch MySQL and get a "real database" for the ads system. "Real database" in that case meant Sybase, but it was still a barely mitigated disaster. Sometimes it seems as if the "real" databases are just a colossal scam.

<comment><USER3> Hard to say if the switch to Oracle (and the resulting expenses) was the reason for their demise, but I was surprised by this:

" _In 2000 they were doing around $24 million per quarter with a gross margin of 21%._ "

Wow. How could you get off to a start like that and blow it all?

<comment><USER4> Well, it never was listed that Oracle was _the_ reason, just that it was one of, and indicative of why it failed. If the MySQL solution was working, which the answerer on Quora implied, and there was no immediate sign of its failure, I think transitioning to Oracle at the cost of millions of dollars is a pretty big mistake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How about Iridium? Over $5 billion invested, sold for $25 million.

<http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2000/03/35043>

Right now it is hard to compete with bing.com, losing 2.5 billion per year.

</comment><comment><USER6> Oh ye of little history. Do none remember Xanadu still? Inspired by Eric Drexler's call for hypertext as a way of making society more intelligent, they tried to invent the Web, a decade too early and with standards much too high (cached local copies which would still receive micropayments, two-way backlinks), and never solved the incredibly difficult programming problems they were tackling before Mosaic and HTML came along.

<comment><USER7> Ted Nelson, not Eric Drexler. And not "inspired by" but founded by him. (K. Eric Drexler is nanotechnology, not hypertext.) Not really an Internet startup, certainly one of the longest but not the biggest tech business failures.

<comment><USER6> Ted Nelson was the founder, yes. He was inspired by Drexler, who like certain later transhumanists did human rationality on the side. Do none still remember "Engines of Creation"? It had a whole chapter on hypertext.

<comment><USER8> Nelson started what became the Xanadu project in 1960, when Drexler was only five years old.

<comment><USER6> Correction noted. I'm pretty sure though that at least _some_ of the people on the Xanadu team were Drexler-sent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Ah, how do I miss f'dcompany.com. :)

I'm still impressed by the VA Linux IPO:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geeknet>

</comment><comment><USER10> Anyone remember BroadVision? (shudder!)

For a time there, I worked for UNext, an online University who decided that it was not enough that their site was powered by Broadvision (using highpriced broadvision consultants), but that their Intranet needed to run on broadvision as well. Oh swell!!

On top of that, they decided to contract those consultants straight out of Broadvision Inc itself, at over $300 an hour.

The CEO drove one of the $100k Mercedes Jeep type SUVs, imported ofcourse.

Not soon after, I left Chicago to go back to the Valley. And they ran out of money soon after.

</comment><comment><USER11> Great to see Kozmo mentioned a few times, I still to this day have quite a few Kozmo shirts they used to send out for free.

I'd like to add WinStar, they had people going pretty much door to door in Manhattan selling services, I got a pretty decent free lunch off them.

I'd also nominate GovWorks, not huge in terms of money burned or technical blunders, but I credit the movie startup.com for really exposing some sheer ineptitude.

Edit: How could I forget Globix, the colo that had a coffee shop and a gym.

</comment><comment><USER12> Metricom burned through $600M of Paul Allen's money building out an early wireless network that hardly anyone used, then folded. I don't know if this is quite in the "Internet startup" category since it wasn't a Web site, but it certainly was Internet infrastructure.

</comment><comment><USER13> Surprised there's no mentions of Cuil.

<comment><USER14> Even their failure was a letdown.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I guess technically they don't qualify, but surely Microsoft's web properties have to be right up there. Billions later, they have yet to turn a profit.

</comment><comment><USER16> boo.com was pretty impressive - $188 million in _six_ months and all lovingly documented by their co-founder in CEO in a fairly unapologetic book:

[http://www.amazon.com/Boo-Hoo-Dot-com-Concept- Catastrophe/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Boo-Hoo-Dot-com-Concept- Catastrophe/dp/0099418371)

</comment><comment><USER17> Definitely drkoop.com. Its market cap at one point was around 1.3 billion.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/16/business/technology- briefi...](http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/16/business/technology-briefing-e- commerce-drkoopcom-is-sold-for-186000.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> They ditched a perfectly working MySQL application and migrated to Oracle which caused them to hire Oracle consultants $2000 per day and spend millions on Oracle big-iron. They were hiring out of control. They decided to build a new building to house their new offices because the Ocean Park Blvd offices in Santa Monica weren't pretty enough. They opened up a London office in Piccadilly Circus, the most expensive rental area in London. They replicated their entire USA dev team in the UK for no apparent reason. They started work on a German operation. They launched a warehouse in Belgium (my baby) to service Europe. All execs flew first class between Europe and USA. Engineers were flown around the world as needed. I was even told to expense my groceries while in Santa Monica for 3 months. Trivial, but the little things add up.

\--- none of above would have happened, had they hired professional managers, not a bunch of children willing to spend every single dime on anything other than business itself.

apply that list to any business, including apple, google, microsoft, oracle, groupon, you name it, the result would be the same disaster as with etoys.

<comment><USER16> In some .com disasters it was actually the "professional managers" who caused a lot of the problems as they were the ones who tried to replicate the infrastructure, pay and perks of the large companies they had worked for before.

<comment><USER18> how can "professional manager" burn so much money without any profits, knowing that spending this money will not affect the business (positively) -- is really building your own offices because you seen five premises and dont like the view from windows will sell more toys online??

<comment><USER19> It was a heady time. Success was so inevitable that you could just function on the assumption that you were going to succeed, so you better be ready for it. It was _just about_ to start raining money, the winners would be the ones with the largest buckets, and you better invest in that bucket! Unfortunately what actually rained down turned out to be fire from the heavens, but, well, you know how the story went after that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Turn your handwriting into a font - <AUTHOR> http://www.myscriptfont.com/ <comment><USER2> One of the charms of a printed book is the imperfection of the fonts and the impressions of the fonts. Each 'a' impression is slightly different - maybe a little higher, a little lower, a little blotchier, etc. But if I read an ebook, the letters are always identical.

I've often thought that if I wrote an ebook reader, I'd use a font that mimics the imperfections in printed works. I'd have maybe 20-30 different 'a' images, and select one randomly and then 'jitter' its positioning a bit.

I'd also use a background that looks like paper, rather than the perfect white or sepia ones current readers do. Heck, it would be easy enough to scan a few dozen blank sheets of paperback paper, and then pick one randomly for each page.

<comment><USER2> I should add that I buy paperbacks regularly, often paying more for them than the ebook. I then run 'em through the scanner and read the scanned book on my tablet. I just like the imperfect look of a scanned paperback page than the perfect ebooks. I also like the paperback formatting better than the auto-flow ebook layouts.

I figure I get the best of ebook and hardcopy this way!

<comment><USER3> Plus then you own the scan and don't have to worry about DRM.

> I then run 'em through the scanner

Does that take a long time? Do you have a setup to make it faster than scanning page by page?

<comment><USER2> It takes about 5-10 minutes for a typical paperback. A fat one might take 20 minutes tops. I am a fidgety person and cannot sit still, so I keep my hands busy and scan a book while I watch the news on TV. I use a stack slicer and a Fujitsu duplex scanner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Has anyone managed to assemble a workable font based on Dijkstra's handwriting? Last I checked, there we few attempts but they were all missing characters.

[http://joshldavis.com/2013/05/20/the-path-to-dijkstras- handw...](http://joshldavis.com/2013/05/20/the-path-to-dijkstras-handwriting/)

<comment><USER5> [http://ufonts.com/fonts/dijkstra.html](http://ufonts.com/fonts/dijkstra.html)

<comment> semi-extrinsic That link went straight to malware for me on Android; downvoted.

<comment><USER6> Yes, it has a bunch of ad scripts that cover the page with an invisible flash element. Clicking it generates popups and popunders. Pity you're being downvoted.

<comment> semi-extrinsic Ah, yes, it actually triggers when I scroll.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Better do it five or six times, and then switch among all those captured fonts in the document, to have some variation in the letter forms. Otherwise your document will be the typographical equivalent of a drum track from 80's synth pop. Ooh, hit me with that bit-for-bit identical snare drum sample again: snap, snap, ...

</comment><comment><USER8> This might be a great crypto tool! I can turn my hand writing into a font and then keep printed hard copies of all of my data! No one will be able to read it!

<comment><USER9> Security through obscurity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Are there potential security concerns here?

I know not many people use handwritten letters any more, but this potentially gives this company a complete sample of your handwriting, which they can then use for whatever purpose they want.

<comment><USER11> If you give it a try you'll see it doesn't work well and it's nothing like cursive or 'natural' handwriting. The sheet you have to fill in changes your natural handwriting fairly dramatically (it did for me at least).

<comment><USER12> Because in cursive writing, the letters are connected - that's something that works in high quality, high effort script fonts. They way they do it is to use OpenType replacement features for various combinations of letters. For example, there are a bunch of a's in one font, and when the OpenType system detects a+n, it chooses the a that is drawn to connect with the n. There also may be different versions of the letters, so that the text gets more rhythm (like naturally written).

It would actually be an interesting machine learning application not only to recognize letters from an actual sample (say a document in cursive writing), but also to understand how the letters connect and then create a cursive font based on that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Neat idea, but what's the point of a font that nobody can read?

</comment><comment><USER14> Which are the inner auxiliary lines? The black grid lines? The light square box lines? The inner light horizontal lines?

<comment><USER15> The light square box would make the most sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> While idea is neat, there are artists who design fonts based on your hardwriting with better quality. While I would like sometimes to use my handwriting digatally, you cannot create "real" effect without having every ligature (two, three leters) written in the template.

Just a thought, instead of having every ligature you could let a camera/tablet observe how you are writing certain "test sentences" and turn this data into autoencoder neural network that would turn any text into "your handwriting".

</comment><comment><USER17> Huh. I remember having a program that did this on my old Toshiba convertible laptop back in 2005. I got it on eBay for fairly cheap and it was neat to have a pretty lightweight (for the time) laptop with a screen you could flip around and use as a tablet with active digitizer.

Wonder if I still have the old font file floating around anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER18> There used to be a company that offered something like this in MacWorld and PCMagazine in the early 90's.

<comment><USER19> SkyMall too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> You know, I could see this being a fun tool for people who are into calligraphy to make their own fonts. I'm not sure that just "Turn my natural handwriting into a font" is what this does though. I tried it, and it worked much more cleanly with calligraphy.

</comment><comment><USER21> In case you want something a bit more real than what font engines offer, check out [https://handwriting.io](https://handwriting.io) (disclosure: I work there)

</comment><comment><USER22> I've made a font of my handwriting in the past. I used a similar template, scanned it, and used a TrueType font creation program. It auto-converted the image into vectorized curves, A selected the parts of each curve, and put each glyph into a box. In each box, you could change the letter spacing, kerning on all the sides, alignment of the pieces (dot over the 'i', for instance).

I went through probably a dozen iterations, tweaking the spacing and alignment until it looked fairly natural. Now, I wonder if there was a way to automate that, or if the fonts created with this site take a little manual tweaking as a final polishing step.

</comment><comment><USER23> I can see an application for creating a company/product logo. I'd use it for my side projects.</comment>


Open Source Sleep Tracking – BodyEcho - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/btverskoy/bodyecho-reclaim-your-sleep-with-serious-sleep-tra

<comment><USER2> One question they need to be asking themselves is why they will succeed when Zeo failed, with a more direct measure of sleep than their heart rate.</comment>


Ask HN: Rate my startup: Quirk - <AUTHOR>

Quirk connects your social network profiles to a QR code.  Scan to connect.
http://www.getaquirk.com/
Please check it out and let me know what sucks, what works, and if you'll ever use it.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Andrew, this is cool. Love the name, by the way - "Quirk" for a QR code company is very memorable.

A few suggestions:

1) Agree with the other posters about an explanation on the home page.

2) The process by which I had to choose a permalink was confusing - why do I need to choose a permalink before I get my quirk? It would be way more dramatic to have the QR code pop up immediately after I FB connect. This could also help with (1) - you could caption it "This is your personal QR code!"

3) With FB Connect, you can import not just name, but profile photo and other public data. I'd expect you to generate a profile page at my permalink seeded with that information.

4) Obviously, the mobile apps are pretty key. I sent the QR code to my phone via text (I like that feature, btw). But pretty soon it will get buried in my SMS inbox. I need a way to pull it up immediately, like a Quirk app would do.

5) I like the idea of getting conference organizers to embed quirk codes in name cards. But before I would actually do that, I'd probably want:

a) Really good profiles at the permalinks

b) Customization / branding. It's my conference so I want to promote myself, not getaquirk.com. Branded profiles and conference-specific quirk codes would be key.

c) Analytics / insight into how people are using it.

Of course that's just my guess - you might talk to some conferences and go through the exercise of selling them on the product to figure out what's truly important to them.

(edit - formatting)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Jared. I really appreciate the feedback.

> permalinks

Your suggestions have convinced me to make two major changes: 1) Users will be auto assigned a permalink and 2) users will be able to change their permalink at any time. I think that having the QR code immediately available will definitely have a greater impact, as you've suggested.

I had reservations about user reactions to generated permalinks (for the case when their screenname on the connected network is taken), and about having stale QR codes floating around after a user changes her permalink, but making those changes improves the user experience and mitigates the first concern. Having stale links to Twitter profiles on the web doesn't seem to have been much of a problem, either. There will just have to be very clear, very visible notices that the QR code has changed when a user change her permalink.

> FB Connect

Detailed profile data is available in mobile profiles, but relies on a separate authorization step. Rather than asking for complete profile access when the user signs up with FB, we request authorization for the individual parts of the user's profile as they choose what to make public. The actual authorization process is (in my mind) the worst part of the Quirk UX right now.

That begs the question, would it be better to just ask for full profile access directly from the start? Or will that turn users away?

> fast access to the QR code on the phone

Making the QR code easily accessible is a major component of the Quirk app. We'll need to find a temporary solution until that's released. Perhaps bookmark and save-to-dashboard buttons are a good step (possibly with HTML5 local store support).

> conference customization/branding and analytics

Branding conference profiles is definitely a goal. Alot of the focus has been on the mobile experience (which is what most users will encounter if they're scanning other people's badges) - Once the conference features are ready, the conference organizers will be able to push content to profile pages. Branded web(non-mobile) profiles aren't something that has been explored much yet.

Analytics of how users are connecting is potentially a huge part of the value offering for this use case. That's a path that I'm very eager to explore now that people can actually connect through Quirk.

> profile data

Initially, rich profiles are only presented to mobile users. It's primarily a resources issue, and a rich web profile hasn't been built yet primarily because there are other, likely better, places to consume that data from a non-mobile device - the social networks themselves. The stub that's presented now when viewing a profile on the web is mostly a stopgap, but for the moment, traffic is heavily skewed to the web experience instead of mobile, so it probably needs to be built out just to capture new visitors' attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I love the concept of having an image be my GUID. In fact, I like the concept of cute little square images being aliases for something else, and that there exists a way to decode them. This is such a high level and useful idea that it's bound to succeed for somebody.

The value I see here is the platform, not the "social networking bla bla bla" service. In other words, I would aim to become the platform for QR-to-URL mapping. As of now, you are a QR-to-very-specific-URL mapping service, and the specialization you are taking (a page of my aggregated social networks) is nice, but IMO isn't the most interesting aspect of this. It's more of a demonstration of the usefulness of the idea as a whole.

I'm imagining a world where I see Quirks on product packaging, on product advertisements, on business cards, coupons, promotions, and just about any other surface where I'd otherwise encounter a cumbersome URL. The convenience? I just point an internet-equipped digital eye at it, and I can view the website. By cramming a URL into a Quirk, and printing that Quirk on something, one includes a seamless path from a physical item to it's digital representation. Of course, that pathway needs to be thoroughly tread in order for it to be popular. I see two main obstacles. First, iPhones and other similarly functional devices aren't quite as widespread as they will be. This works in your favor: pretty soon everybody will have these devices and you're service will be more valuable.

The second, where you should aim to come in, is that there needs to be _one_ place that these QRs are registered. This is the type of idea, like Twitter, Facebook, and the ".com" TLD, the has a feedback look of pervasiveness and usefulness. If you became _the_ place to create QR-to-URL mapping, you'd have a stake in whatever QR (actually, just image-to-URL) evolves into down the road and whatever it is used for.

That's my take on this idea. It seems extremely likely that there is already a QR-to-URL mapping service available... and if there isn't there more definitely should be. We're talking paradigm here. Those quirks you see on product packaging? Well, it's a given there to be used with "getaquirk" (or whichever company does this and gets lucky), just as @whatever means twitter.

If I were you, I'd put all my effort into getting your idea validated (and vetted) and branded. Realize your biggest obstacle is not that you must become ubiquitous for this idea to succeed , but that you must seem like you're the service that is _going to be_ ubiquitous. Realize that anybody using your service is investing their time and energy into the platform. Why buy a .info domain when .com is available? You need to be the .com. You need to get traction before all else. Get big names using this, make the "getaquirk" viewer app on all major platforms; stake your claim.

Here's a really quick win for you: Quirks should contain some sort of inerit branding in them. Perhaps a digitized "Q" in the upper right, or something. This would be your "@".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comments, Sam.

I've been trying to work out the best response to this. I think that you're correct in that there is a hole to be filled by a QR-to-URL service - essentially a bit.ly for QR codes. Despite availability of QR codes from existing players (Google being the most significant) and the ready availability of both websites and libraries for producing QR codes from URLs (and any other text), branding will play a big role in making them take off. ScanLife is certainly a player in this space: <http://us.scanlife.com/> . They have QR codes on the Inception movie posters as part of the advertising campaign, as well. But anyone can do it. And given that ZXing is an open source scanning library, anyone can build the apps.

It may be shortsighted, but that's not the business I want to build. Scanning a QR code to follow a business is something I actually want - something that came directly out of a need in my own life - and it's the connections themselves that are interesting to me. QR codes are really only the beginning of what I want Quirk to be - I just think they're a good place to start.

That said, you're not the only person to suggest that Quirk should provide a tool for converting URLs to barcodes, even just as a promotion for Quirk itself. And if that turns into the biggest aspect of Quirk, then so be it. So, I guess we'll see.

Thanks again for your comment - definitely made me think (thus the slow response).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think you must insert what are the benefits for people to use it. Just a phrase. Why I have to use it? What is in it for me?

Your homepage it's too "obscure".

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for taking too long to comment on this. You were the first to point out that the homepage is lacking, and that is now very clearly the consensus.

Thanks for taking the time to look at Quirk. I've been putting a lot of effort into figuring out the right message to send, and how to present it. Hopefully that'll appear soon, and moreover, hopefully it will get more people past the front page and into the signup process.

<comment><USER4> Hey, you're welcome :)

Maybe one day you'll do the same for me.

Let us know when you have changed your message/brand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Andrew,

First off, it was very cool to chat the other night at the night owls. Very much appreciated your thoughts on connecting to different APIs.

I do agree with the other reviewers that the purpose and uses for this product need to become more obvious. I would suggest including some brief illustrative use cases on the front page for people to start salivating over what cool things they can now do that they couldn't before. Having to read the FAQ via "What's Quirk" should not be the primary way visitors learn about your product.

Also, for the dramatic effect of getting your Quirk, why not actually generate it right on the front page with a subtext of "make this Quirk do...." with options for people to chose from? I think that would also help communicate the use of the product better.

Also, why can't I just paste a link (any link to anywhere) that I want my quirk to go to? You could make it a pass-through your site and probably find business models for that as well (I am making the assumption that the Quirk embeds the link back to your site specifically but could go anywhere).

"Link your social network accounts" makes me believe I will get a Quirk that takes people to my actual Facebook profile rather than a Quirk profile.

Smaller Things:

Once logged in, when I click you logo, it doesn't take me back to your front page as I would typically expect.

When I chose to log in via Facebook and then subsequently denied your oauth request, i just get an error page on your site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comments, cool meeting you too.

It's definitely apparent that pointing users at the FAQ was a lazy and ineffective move. I'm working on making the front page a much better introduction to Quirk.

We're not generating Quirks pre-signup (e.g., on the front page as you've suggested) because we think it's better for the encoded URLs to have each user's vanity URL, rather than a random key. This'd be a cool thing to add via Facebook's Instant Personalization, though.

I agree that a good utility for encoding URLs in QR codes is a viable product. Sites and libraries exist for doing so, though none have any real mindshare. If the QR code flood is coming, a bit.ly for QRs is probably going to be a very useful tool. That said, it's not the product I want to build right now.

Thanks for pointing out that error. I'll fix that ASAP; the home page too (right now logged in users are automatically redirected to their account views from the home page).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The first test I give any 'Rate my start-up' is to go to the homepage without reading the submitters post.

The question I ask my self is 'do I know what this is and how I'd use it just by looking at the homepage?'.

Unfortunately, your description isn't on the homepage. "see, scan, connect" may mean something to you, but it doesn't mean anything to me.

On the homepage, I get that the barcode has something to do with app scanning, but it doesn't tell me much more. What do I get if I scan the image? What am I supposed to get? Do I want it?

Your 'faqs' page isn't a whole lot better. I'd suggest getting something on that homepage which is a quick "we're making the world a better place by..."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I've struggled over a number of iterations to come up with a concise description for the homepage. So far, I've either come up short (as it is now), or needed way too much text to get the message across.

I've been taking the approach of trying to get new visitors to try the service, without requiring an in depth explanation first. The demo page, <http://www.getaquirk.com/demo> , which I should probably give a prominent link from the home page, is my attempt at that.

I'm starting to wonder whether it can be explained clearly with a good graphic. I'll be exploring wording options and potential visuals today to try to deliver the message more effectively.

I'm concerned that the FAQ page isn't effective at getting the message across. I would have thought that, in the least, the first question <http://www.getaquirk.com/faq#what-is-quirk> would explain what the app actually does. Is the FAQ page just the wrong place to be delivering that message? (I've been debating that over the last few days).

Thanks!

<comment><USER6> If the description is too long, I suspect you may be focusing too much on the how it work.

I think the initial 'what or why' is both more important, and should be shorter.

For example facebook would say 'we make it easy to be in the loop with your friends. Google would be 'we help you find the info you're looking for'.

You might be in the neighbourhood of 'we connect your virtual and physical worlds'. or something like that. Unfortnately, I don't even understand it to that level, so I can't really help. But don't get into how. If people care, they'll look deeper into how.

Check out simon sinek's "start with why" [http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspi...](http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link. That's a great presentation.

Distilling Quirk into something simple has been a challenge since the start, especially overcoming the novelty (for most people) of QR codes, and emphasizing its use in connecting businesses and customers, without disregarding connections between individuals. That's not to say it can't be done - it's just something we need to focus on.

I'll be giving alot of thought to the 'why' instead of the 'what,' as I go forward. That's a great approach.

<comment><USER6> Good points. My take on it would be that the QR code is a technical feature that people don't need to know about until they are interested.

Email wasn't sold by 'you can send smtp messages to people and businesses'. It really helps to try to put things in context of comparing it to an activity that people currently do, and how it makes it better or different.

Cirque de Soleil is a circus without animals.

An iPhone is a phone, a web browser, and an ipod.

An iPod is like a walkman for mp3.

etc. etc. best of luck

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Agree, great name for the product. I'm starting to see traction around QR Codes. Your timing might be very good.

The value proposition is not very clear. Why would I use your product, what is the _benefit_ of using it. It appears that your business model is to target conferences, is that correct? Will it always be free to everyone else?

One minor issue, on the FAQ page, it says: "A Quirk is a type of QR code, a two-dimensional barcode represented by a pattern of black and white squares (like the one at the top of the page)." But there is no a QR code on the to of the page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comments.

I've been working on condensing the value proposition, especially given the comments here.

As an individual, scanning a QR code once is a faster way to connect than typing a person's or business's name into a search box and wading through results [and repeating across multiple networks]. The premise is that connections are good, and the easier they are to make, the more you'll connect.

Building on that, for businesses, the easier it is for a customer to connect to you, the more likely they'll connect (though I'd love to back this up with some research data). Hopefully, a prominently placed QR code (e.g, on a door, menu, or advertisement) will be a strong visual cue to a customer to connect (since the business can't actively initiate the connection).

All of the core service will always be free. Creating QR codes, linking accounts, downloading apps etc. We think we can generate value from the connection graph without selling the graph itself. The goal is _not_ to farm and exploit the network.

Conferences started out as a good way to seed viral/network-effect growth ... and QR codes on badges are conveniently effective for connecting in that environment. We can provide additional value to conferences by providing analysis and custom content, and that's certainly something we'll look to monetize.

Thanks for pointing out that bug. It's an artifact of an earlier layout for the FAQ page.

Great feedback, thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Clickable <http://www.getaquirk.com/>

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks neat, though I don't have a smartphone. Someday maybe, huh?

I guess my question (and I find myself asking this question of pretty much any free service) is: If it's a startup and it's free, how are you going to make money off it?

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the benefits of Quirk is that only one party involved in the connection needs to have a smart phone. In other words, you can set up a profile and download your QR code (and store it as a picture on a less-featured phone, or have it on a business card), and contacts you make can scan your code to connect. You can follow up on that connection later from the web interface.

We're going to have data about the types of businesses you connect to, and eventually where you're making those connections. We think that's data that can be monetized. In the case of specific communities making concentrated connections (like conferences), that data can be honed into valuable insights into the community, and hopefully the organizers of those communities will find high value in those insights.

Hopefully, there's a business to be built among nurturing customer relations, fostering communities, and analyzing the social graph.</comment></comment>


The Volkswagen Scandal: A Mucky Business - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21667918-systematic-fraud-worlds-biggest-carmaker-threatens-engulf-entire-industry-and <comment><USER2> It had been widely known for at least a decade that all the automakers were "optimizing" ECU software for better mileage during testing.

In retrospect, it shouldn't have been so surprising that they were doing the same for emissions testing too.

What is still surprising is why they thought they could get away with it forever. That no one would ever test any of the millions of vehicles they produced.</comment>


Show HN: NP-Food – Exact Cost - <AUTHOR> https://np-food.com/

<comment><USER2> Hm... I get 'Cannot read property '0' of null — visual.js:45'

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, it's been fixed now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Working fine for me! Awesome product :D

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry things are running slowly!</comment>


Apple bets $600M on improving Apple Watch, iPhone battery life - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/apple-boosts-chipmaking-efforts-with-600-million-dialog-semiconductor-deal/ <comment><AUTHOR> See also: [https://www.anandtech.com/show/13463/apple-licenses- technolo...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/13463/apple-licenses-technologies- hires-engineers-from-dialog)</comment>


The Secret Afterlife of Boats - <AUTHOR> http://granta.com/secret-afterlife-boats/ <comment><USER2> An outstanding article. It took me on a trip to Africa. Dreamy and rich.</comment>


Computer Color Is Broken – MinutePhysics - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKnqECcg6Gw&t=125 <comment><USER2> Your link points to the middle of the video.</comment>


The ImageNet dataset transformed AI research - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1034972/the-data-that-changed-the-direction-of-ai-research-and-possibly-the-world/ <comment><USER3> >Matthew Zeiler built Clarifai based off his 2013 ImageNet win, and is now backed by $40 million in VC funding.

I used Clarifai at a hackathon a couple months ago. It was certainly impressive, but I didn't really see the difference between it and Google Cloud Services AI whatever offerings, other than Google seemed to have a better handle on deployment and production scaling.

I guess I'm wondering how companies like Clarifai and the couple other similar "AI API cloud service" companies intend to take on behemoths like Google?

<comment><USER4> I tried out the top 5 computer vision API vendors last year. See my findings, along with examples of output from all of them here: [https://goberoi.com/comparing-the-top-five-computer- vision-a...](https://goberoi.com/comparing-the-top-five-computer-vision- apis-98e3e3d7c647)

At the time, Clarifai was the "best" one (I caveat by quoting because this was a for a small corpus, with subjective results, not a real train-test cycle). I re-ran the results about a month ago (linked to from the post), and found that Google and others have continued to invest and improve.

<comment><USER5> Great overview. Clarifai is certainly extremely impressive.

Do you play the tablas? My wife and I studied sitar but our instrument was destroyed by the movers in our latest relocation to Shenzhen :( The tabla teacher where we studied was able to play a very complex taal while chewing betel nut and rolling his eyes back in their sockets, immediately switch to a pitch, bend and time-perfect rendition of 'pink panther' melody, then switch back to a very complex taal without skipping a beat. Brilliant to see.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, Clarifai did well. I am keen to learn how well their custom model feature works. Per their FAQ[0], you only need supply 20-50 images per concept. That seems remarkable to me, given that a concept like 'cow' has ~1500 images on Imagenet[1]. Perhaps they are using some sort of transfer learning to facilitate this? I.e. using a pretrained model, and then only retraining the last few fully connected layers, or retraining parts of the entire network?

I am not a deep learning practitioner, but would be curious to know from experts how their custom model feature might work; and from any of their users on how well it actually does.

Tablas: haha, great description of your teacher. I do play, with enthusiasm, but poorly. For those in Seattle, there is an amazing teacher who teaches up on Cap Hill [2].

[0] [http://help.clarifai.com/custom-training/custom-training- faq](http://help.clarifai.com/custom-training/custom-training-faq)

[1] [http://image-net.org/synset?wnid=n01887787](http://image- net.org/synset?wnid=n01887787)

[2] [http://www.acitseattle.org](http://www.acitseattle.org)

<comment><USER6> It is not necessary to train things from scratch; you take the largest imagenet model available and fine tune it for the task. This way it reuses much of the lower layers the have seen lots of data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Never forget about the most important person in all recent neural network object recognition research: Mark Everingham.

Mark was the key member of the VOC project, and it would have been impossible without his selfless contributions.

[https://www.computer.org/csdl/trans/tp/2012/11/ttp2012112081...](https://www.computer.org/csdl/trans/tp/2012/11/ttp2012112081.pdf)

[http://www.bmva.org/w/doku.php?id=obituaries:mark_everingham](http://www.bmva.org/w/doku.php?id=obituaries:mark_everingham)

Mark Everingham passed away in 2012, bringing the VOC project to an end.

</comment><comment><USER8> Shameless plug: we have a workshop today @ CVPR 2017 that explores the classification task of ImageNet using crawled (and noisy) data: [https://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/webvision/workshop.html](https://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/webvision/workshop.html)

In contrast to ImageNet, only the validation and test data were manually labeled. Impressively, on such data, an accuracy of ~95% (top5) is achieved by the winning solution this year.

</comment><comment><USER9> ImageNet is the big one on image recognition, is there other AI/ML/DL competitions that people have heard of ?

<comment><USER10> The Loebner (on the NLP side) this year should be interesting - [http://www.aisb.org.uk/events/loebner- prize](http://www.aisb.org.uk/events/loebner-prize) \- on the AI planning side usually the StarCraft competitions - [https://sscaitournament.com](https://sscaitournament.com) \- interested to see how DeepMind performs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Tangential anecdote: Incidentally the article mentions that ImageNet was conceived through WordNet[0]. I actually downloaded WordNet again last night with the idea to relocate qualifying adjectives from certain noun phrases in a system to a separate list of qualifiers, ie. "adj1 adj2 noun" -> {"noun",["adj1","adj2"]}

What I found was that WordNet has crap coverage, eg. large numbers of real adjectives were unlisted. In my ancient Chinese translation work (hobby), I have basically concluded that Wiktionary[1] is the best thing going, and also easiest to contribute corrections and background data to. So I thought "why not adapt English Wiktionary data[2] to produce an English adjective list?". This proved far more complicated than a quick hack, since the only way the data seemed to be supplied was as a huge XML file mixing Wiki and XML markup.[3] In the end I downloaded a Wiktionary-derived dataset known as dbnary[4] and parsed wordlists out of that, resulting in a satisfying list of 103,125 English adjectives. Total time invested, under 2 hours.

[0] [http://wordnet.princeton.edu/](http://wordnet.princeton.edu/)

[1] [http://en.wiktionary.org/](http://en.wiktionary.org/)

[2] [https://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup- index.html](https://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html)

[3] [https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiktionary/20170720/enwiktiona...](https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiktionary/20170720/enwiktionary-20170720-pages- articles.xml.bz2)

[4] [http://kaiko.getalp.org/about-dbnary/](http://kaiko.getalp.org/about- dbnary/)

<comment><USER11> BabelNet [http://babelnet.org/](http://babelnet.org/) or Open Multilingual Wordnet ([http://compling.hss.ntu.edu.sg/omw/](http://compling.hss.ntu.edu.sg/omw/)) might be interesting for you.

However, the prime use case of WN is as an _verified_ inventory of _machine readable senses_ , providing structured information about the semantic attributes of the word by providing the semantic links to other words/senses. Wictionary will tell you that a word is an adjective, but it doesn't tell a machine what does that adjective mean, how it relates to other adjectives.

E.g., the wiktionary entry on 'corgi' has a few sentences that mention that it's a type of dog, but it's not structured enough for this information to be used, and if you just extract it yourself without manual verification then it won't have high accuracy; WN, on the other hand, has an explicit structured link (hypernym) between corgi and dog. ([http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?o2=&o0=1&o8=1&o1=...](http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?o2=&o0=1&o8=1&o1=1&o7=&o5=&o9=&o6=&o3=&o4=&s=corgi&i=2&h=100#c))

<comment><USER5> Interesting though those features were not required for yesterday's application. Now getting on to something more syntax / grammar interpretation related (ie. to a basic level only, parse-the-structure-of-the-sentence - <USER2> part is a "verb phrase", that part is a "noun phrase", etc.) ... any idea what a good software library would be? I found [https://spacy.io/](https://spacy.io/) \+ [https://github.com/emilmont/pyStatParser](https://github.com/emilmont/pyStatParser) \+ [http://spes.sourceforge.net/](http://spes.sourceforge.net/) \+ [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2699646/how-to-get- logic...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2699646/how-to-get-logical- parts-of-a-sentence-with-java/2703107#2703107)

<comment><USER11> Spacy is an option; for syntactic parsing, you might also want to take a look at Stanford CoreNLP ([https://stanfordnlp.github.io/CoreNLP/](https://stanfordnlp.github.io/CoreNLP/)) or NLTK ([http://www.nltk.org/](http://www.nltk.org/)) or SyntaxNet ([https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/syntaxnet](https://github.com/tensorflow/models/tree/master/syntaxnet)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looking forward to when someone makes a significantly sized, fully labeled medical dataset. Currently, the main thing holding us back on diagnostics using machine learning isn't the software or hardware- it's the lack of labeled data, which is costly to prepare because it requires technologists to work alongside doctors. Still, the results could be huge.

I think machine learning through medicine will save more lives than self driving cars.

<comment><USER11> It's _highly_ problematic due to privacy issues. It would be a nightmare to get a public release for the underlying unlabeled data, especially since we know how well deanonymization can work.

<comment><USER12> There already is some that is publicly available, like the Kaggle lung cancer competition's dataset.

I'm not saying it's easy on any front. It is _possible_ , and it would be hugely beneficial to humans to have such a dataset. Raising awareness about the problem may be one step towards solving it.

<comment><USER13> The problem with a lot of medical labeling is the labels are not very consistent/accurate to begin with. Just go to three doctors with the same symptoms and see what they say...

<comment><USER12> That is surmountable. You can use annotator agreement, and, algorithms don't need perfectly labeled data in order to improve.

Any effort to create additional medical datasets would probably help enhance machine learning diagnostics.

The data that you want to be perfect is the test set, which is smaller than training sets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Li said the project failed to win any of the federal grants she applied for, receiving comments on proposals that it was shameful Princeton would research this topic, and that the only strength of proposal was that Li was a woman."

Jesus..

<comment><USER15> Stories like this are part of the reason I never went into academia. It's amazing how many highly educated people are judgmental and inflexible, and in academia one person like that can sink you. As an engineer in the private sector, worst case scenario I can find a better team/company to work with.

</comment></comment><comment> bra-ket FYI Kaggle is hosting all 3 Imagenet challenges now: [https://www.kaggle.com/c/imagenet-object-detection-from- vide...](https://www.kaggle.com/c/imagenet-object-detection-from-video- challenge)

</comment><comment><USER16> Not just a dataset but hacking community and contest:

> Matthew Zeiler built Clarifai based off his 2013 ImageNet win, and is now > backed by $40 million in VC funding.

On a side note, this looks like a fun company to build: hacking on ML, exposing it via APIs, developers as customers, paid for on a resource basis like a VPS style per-use payment plan.

It's interesting how many of these AI startups are raising huge rounds. The words AI seems to draw them in. At least this one has an obvious business model.

<comment><USER17> I was went to an AI talk at MIT CSAIL (the same Vicarious one I mentioned in another thread). Me and a guy got talking on the way out. He figured I seemed pretty clever, so he started asking me what sorts of companies to invest in.

Turned out he was an investor with some VC firm. I did a little mention of the place I worked at the time (which isn't an AI company, but wanted to be when it was young), but didn't have a business card to give him at he time.

I was actually kinda surprised an investor was attending a talk and saying, quite so uncritically, "hmmm, who do the smart people at talks say I should invest with?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is it possible to hold an image classification challenge without secret data that doesn't lead to overfitting?

<comment><USER19> Yeah, just specify the test set and ask everyone not to train on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> imagenet is a truly terrible dataset. Any image recognition task that humans are not >99.9% on is not an image recognition task.

<comment><USER11> 99.9% is an _extremely_ high bar. People aren't machines, people make errors. If you asked them to tell whether a square is black or white, you would get less than 99.9%.

<comment><USER20> 99.9% is a very low bar for image recognition. if one out of every thousand times you saw a car you misclassified it as a chair, you would be dead.

<comment><USER21> It sounds like you may not have experience in this domain? You're benchmarking an active, time-based task (a person "seeing a car" \- implicitly allowing eye saccade, multiple images, context, depth) versus a static task ("classify this single image based on no context"). They are not comparable.

<comment><USER20> have you actually tried the imagenet task yourself?

The reason imagenet is popular is because it has allowed google to claim that they can beat human performance on image recognition by artifically lowering human performance on image recognition.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Does your startup have the potential to become a $100M+ business? (online quiz) - <AUTHOR> https://mench.com/11966 <comment><AUTHOR> After watching Kevin Hale's lecture on how investors evaluate startup ideas ([http://bit.ly/318hNsE](http://bit.ly/318hNsE)), I was inspired to create a 12 question quiz that any startup could take to find out their growth/success potential based on Kevin's own investing criteria.

You can take it here -> [https://mench.com/11966](https://mench.com/11966) (Currently it only works via Messenger)

I created it in about 1 hour using the same conversational tech we're building at Mench during this year's YC Startup School.

I thought it would be relevant to this community and a great opportunity to showcase the potential of chatbots for assessing/quizzing/categorizing.

Based on your answers your startup will fall under one of the following 4 categories:

\- Great potential! \- Moderate potential \- Low potential \- Poopy potential

I also incorporated Kevin's advice after every answer to help founders get more context as to why your answer may help/hinder your potential for growth.

I'd love to hear any feedback/thoughts!

Many thanks,

P.S: our result for our startup was "moderate potential" to become a $100M business.</comment>


Ask HN: Working at a Big Four? - <AUTHOR> Can anyone tell me what it is like to work at a consulting firm like KP or E*?
Especially as an experienced candidate in IT Advisory, what is the work like? Kind of projects? Work-Life/Hours? Salary/Bonus? Career outlook? Would you do it? <comment><USER2> How exactly would you define work/life balance? You will typically travel 4/5 days a week. Even if you are lucky and only work 40 hours a week, you are still not home. If you have a family and you enjoy being with them, then every hour you are not home is work even if you sitting in a hotel.

When I was in consulting, for every trip to _insert great city here_ I did 9 trips to some IT/Finance back office in the suburbs. At one place there was nothing for 15 miles other than a Hampton Inn, a Subway, and a 2 other local stores. So it's not like my off hours were fun either.

I think it's worth it to do it once. When I did it I gained a lot of experience with both technical and soft skills. The soft skills have helped me a lot in my career. You also learn a lot because you get to see how big companies really work and experience the variety of BS politics at every company. Everybody company you work in as a consultant will have a different type of BS. After a year or two you'll know if you can tolerate that lifestyle.

</comment><comment><USER3> Worked for PWC, DT, EMC (pre-Dell) - great pay, insane hours, no work-life balance - it's all work and a bit of sleep. Fast-track to burn-out.

What nobody seems to mention is that the Big 4 consult to enterprises so you have masses of meetings, "methodology" to follow and the general BS that comes with where PHBs rule. If you enjoy all that and politics then go for it.

Personally I am far happier working as a one-man show. I only take on projects where I can deliver real results on realistic timelines and budgets.

<comment><USER2> >Personally I am far happier working as a one-man show. I only take on projects where I can deliver real results on realistic timelines and budgets.

There is a middle ground between Big 4 and one person consulting. I used to work in the services/consulting org of a decent sized software company that sold data products. We had ~25 consultants in the US and were focused on deployment and light/medium customization. Our selling point was that all consultants were like surgeons and did focused work. We were not a staff augmentation group.

Two great things came from this 1). We didn't have enough people to support multi-year enterprise projects and all the BS that comes with that. If a customer had a big project we'd bring in a partner (e.g. Accenture). 2). Individual consultants could push back on unreasonable asks. For example, more than once I got asked to configure something (e.g. databases, firewalls, etc) that the company I worked for did not sell. I could simply say that I could provide info (e.g. schema recommendations, what ports to open), but the customer had to find somebody else to do it. If you work for a big consulting company the services manager will come in, say we can do it, and things just grow more complex from there as more and more people get dragged into things. Or worse, the services manager leans on you to do something totally out of your expertise because they don't care.

At least 75% of the projects I worked on were reasonably scoped and budgeted. Of course 3 years after I started somebody somewhere decided the consulting team needed to generate more revenue and take on bigger projects.

<comment><USER4> While I agree with most of the sentiment, it should be noted most companies don't 'hyper-focus' specialization like that.

There are always going to be interacting systems and having knowledge of other systems only helps your job performance.

When scoping for a client, there are many legal concerns at play. The scope, handed from the client, cannot be too specific technically. The concern is, if the systems change(due to firm changes, etc...) or one part of the implemented functionality is turned off (typically a free, or exit fee cost) certain technical verbiage would require contract arbitration and renegotiation.

Maintaince fees are different.

Most firms are paid significantly for the software produced, if they employees are not paid a proportionate amount, that's the firms problem not the client.

Unreasonable internal scopes are different then client scopes. You just emphasized you worked in a client facing business, I thought it was an interesting topic to discuss.

<comment><USER2> >While I agree with most of the sentiment, it should be noted most companies don't 'hyper-focus' specialization like that.

There are a lot of on-premise software vendors who are exactly like this. The consulting group exists to deploy, configure, and customize their software. While the consultants may connect and integrate with other systems, it's just a bad idea to start configuring systems from other vendors.

For example, the software we (the company I worked for) sold could pull data from MS SQL. One of our customers had a product from another vendor that stored real-time data in an MS SQL server. Except, it was stored in a funky table structure and the SQL server was installed as part of that product install. It wasn't a standalone SQL server the client installed separately.

The customer asked us to pull data in real-time from that server. After about a day of digging, it was clear the other vendor never intended for data to be pulled from this database and I had a ton of concerns about locks and lost data. So I said they needed to talk to the other vendor about this. As soon as I said "data loss" my management agreed with the decision to not mess with that database. I could certainly talk about our system and what we were trying to do with the other vendor, but we wouldn't touch that SQL server unless they said do.

Consultants at Mulesoft, Talend, and even Cloudera are going to do the same thing. They may pull data from other databases, but the sensible consultants aren't going to start making big changes to a customer's MS SQL server, even if the consultant is highly experienced with that database.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Have never worked for a big 4 but have interacted a lot with people who do / did work for consultancy firms. Mostly on the management consultancy side, even those placed within IT departments were more "management" than "engineering" (Im not sure if this is what they mean by IT Advisory).

From what I gathered it was long hours, bending to clients, lots of justifying-your-existence style work. Think Powerpoint ninja VS Pivotal labs engineer.

On the flip side, great pay and great career prospects. The latter, beyond a good name in your CV, is due to a well known dynamic where placements are offered permanent roles in the companies they are advising. The firms themselves support this as they know that their ex-employee is more likely to support the firm's business in that and future roles.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's a stepping stone gig. You are basically selling your life for X years to get a better gig or to move up in that org.

If you are fresh out of school it's a good deal sometimes. Otherwise, know why you're selling your soul and have a plan.

</comment><comment><USER7> I work at a Big Four firm doing Software dev. From my experience I would give you a high degree of confidence that you will be on projects interacting with a lot of legacy code, using platforms and software that is outdated and typically a code base that serves business purposes only, so sometimes the code isn't top notch.

If you are a typical HNer that likes cool stuff like LISP, functional programming, best practices, etc. you will most likely not be getting any exposure to that. Big Corp to big Corp consulting is about the business first and foremost, not your enrichment and learning best coding practices.</comment>