Belgian biscuits, packaging, and copywriting - <AUTHOR> https://creativesamba.substack.com/p/belgian-biscuits-packaging-and-why-20-01-13 <comment><USER2> People don't buy Belgian biscuits for health, but because they want to indulge. People expect and want them to have fat in it. When you write 'now with less fat' people read 'probably tastes worse than before'. It's not the packaging that is wrong, it's the product concept.

<comment><USER3> > It's not the packaging that is wrong, it's the product concept.

Only if the article is blatantly lying about it tasting the same.

<comment><USER4> The article seems confused.

> And research showed that most people couldn't notice any difference in > taste.

> The new biscuit tasted just like the old one,

The second statement does not follow from the first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "There's your problem. It doesn't matter what something tastes like in blind > tastings, if you put "low in fat" or any other health indicators on the > packaging you'll make the contents taste worse".

Well we've trained our mental models to believe that healthier food has a greater chance to taste worse. And rightly so because it usually does.

<comment><USER6> >And rightly so because it usually does.

True. And this is being a rational consumer. The cookies may taste the same, but I don't want to risk my money and pantry space to find out.

<comment><USER7> It's true. Most people are very averse to throwing away food, so they'll force themselves to eat the cookies they don't like before they go back to the store to buy the non-lowfat ones again (if they're even being produced anymore), meaning you've just associated multiple bad memories with your brand. Not a great move.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those like me to whom it wasn't immediately obvious, this is talking about marketing "copywriting" (i.e. the text you put out for marketing) and not "copyright" which sounds the same but is a completely different thing.

</comment><comment><USER9> I feel that these attacks on the rationality (and intelligence) of the average person are misguided. Rationality means evaluating the information provided to you. If you do not give importance to any qualitative information (e.g., taste), it makes sense to evaluate them on the quantitative information alone (i.e., lower fat) which is not relevant for many people.

I would go as far as to say that even in cases such as the gluten-free fad, people are somewhat justified. Producers started saying that their products were gluten-free to serve the customers that needed that information (i.e., celiacs). However, the average person did not know about celiac disease, so they reasonably thought that the information was for them. The logical conclusion was that gluten was bad. Now, that is wrong, but to be fair how are you supposed to know that? You are not a dietitian.

It's not a matter of rationality, but that is difficult to evaluate information if you do not understand the context in which is produced.

</comment><comment><USER10> Kind of reminds of of when Kraft did the opposite, they change their Mac & Cheese and didn't tell anyone:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/21/business/media/kraft- reve...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/21/business/media/kraft-reveals- revamped-mac-and-cheese-50-million-boxes-later.html)

<comment><USER11> This is, far and away, one of the best bits of submarine marketing I've ever read.

Every sentence is carefully crafted to hypnotize the reader into believing that a) they have already had the new Kraft dinner b) it tastes identical c) people who think it tastes different are wrong d) everything is okay, it's all going to be ok.

Know what? It worked. Stuff tastes the same as it did when I was a kid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Somewhat related, this reminded me of the story how companies are going green/sustainable with their products without telling customers about it: [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/sep/08/producers- ke...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/sep/08/producers-keep- sustainable-practices-secret) Quote:

 _Why would firms spearheading sustainable practices not publicise their good work? It's a question that puzzles Professor Steve Evans, director of research in industrial sustainability at Cambridge University's Institute for Manufacturing, who suggests that such examples are widespread. He believes this stems from a common perception that there must be some kind of downside to the introduction of sustainable practices: either a reduction in product quality, or an increase in the price of manufacturing, or both._

</comment><comment><USER13> This feels like an advertisement for the book more than an article about Packaging and Copywriting.

</comment><comment><USER14> I won't buy foods that say "lower sodium", "lower fat", etc. on the packaging. It's not because I'm illogical like the article suggests, but rather that 80% of the time such foods do in fact taste worse.

<comment><USER15> It's not just that they taste worse. Sometimes manufacturers reduce fat but try to compensate by amping up sugar or artificial sweeteners.

<comment><USER16> How would you compensate less fat with more sugar? They taste totally different.

<comment><USER17> Here's a study:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4742721/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4742721/)

> We found that the amount of sugar is higher in the low fat (that is, reduced > calorie, light, low fat) and non-fat than 'regular' versions of tested items

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Similar to how some companies avoid putting the word 'vegan' on clearly vegan products. Even these new meat alternatives. There was a story a few years back about how half of the Girl Scout cookies are vegan but the soccer mom sellers didn't want the logo on the product in case it reduced sales. Initially some said vegan on the box and those were crossed out to hide it!

<comment><USER19> The Euphemism Treadmill dictates that "vegan" is now "plant-based diet."

Among those that herbivores would like to convert, "vegan" is saddled with negative perceptions.

<comment><USER20> There is actually a difference between 'vegan' and 'plant-based diet'. A car can be 'vegan'. A car is not part of a 'plant-based' diet.

<comment><USER19> Understood, but that difference doesn't apply when we're talking about food specifically. I'm saying that the "vegan" label is marketing liability if you're trying to sell to the general public (and not just to the existing vegan community).

If we're talking about shoes, or cars, then the euphemism will be something like "cruelty-free". No car company is going to associate their cloth interiors with veganism. Well, maybe Subaru would :)

<comment><USER21> Don't forget about the subset of vegans who avoid palm oil/almonds and other particularly environmentally taxing plant-based products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It may totally not be the case, but this story sounds like something a marketing guru would make up to post on LinkedIn.

<comment><USER23> Checks out. The correct amount of snark not-so-subtly implying that consumers are stupid/irrational as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Another related urban legend in the marketing world, the flip side of this anecdote: A low-calorie, healthy soda called "Tab", sold in the USA in the 70s, once sold a version that actually tasted good (Tab Orange). Sales stalled. It turned out that the people who wanted to drink Tab didn't want it to taste good. They wanted to feel healthy and virtuous. If it tasted good, they would not feel like they were sacrificing for health. They later repackaged Tab Orange as Fanta Zero, and it did well.

<comment><USER25> Here in New Zealand they just launched Coke Zero Orange. Looks like Coke, tastes like Fanta. I am pretty sure it is just Fanta Zero minus orange dye plus whatever they dye Coke with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Most of what we 'feel' comes from preconceived notions. The famous example of taking a drink from your glass without looking, gagging on it because it tastes all wrong, only to find out you had orange juice and not milk as you remembered. Once you know its orange juice then it tastes ok again.

Everything is filtered through pre-conceived notions. Everything.

</comment><comment><USER27> I guess this is "a classic marketing mistake," as the author says, but I see this more as a mission-based problem. It sounds from what little is written that increasing sales was the manufacturer's priority, not a product that would be better for consumers.

I run a small, wholesale bread bakery. I made a similar kind of ingredient change about two years ago, replacing a small amount of refined sugar with an even smaller amount of malted barley flour. Either way, the products got hints of both color and sweetness. I made the change because I know there are people who are put off by refined sugar as an ingredient. I only made it a point to tell the one customer that packages my breads in a way that requires nutritional labeling. I have told other customers when the change was pertinent to some conversation we were already having, but I never did this as a selling point.

</comment><comment><USER28> > They assumed consumers make rational decisions.

Maybe they believe that low-fat sugar and simple carbs is worse for you than sugar and carbs combined with fat, due to the lower glycemic index?

(Obviously not, but the biscuit maker is guilty of jumping in on the sugar- industry nonsense dietary advice that fat is the only bad thing, and should be replaced with sugar).

</comment><comment><USER29> One thing is certain: If any product says "New Taste!" it is unquestionably a regression and tastes horrible.

My personal score is about 20/20 here.

</comment><comment><USER30> > One of Belgium's leading biscuits manufacturers made a classic marketing > mistake.

> They assumed consumers make rational decisions.

When I see "low fat" on a traditionally high-fat food, I make the rational decision to avoid the product, because it's not going to taste good and it's going to be less healthy.

</comment><comment><USER31> In New Zealand a "Belgian biscuit" is a specific type of biscuit. Would recommend.

[https://www.greggs.co.nz/Our-Recipes/Baking/Belgian- Biscuits](https://www.greggs.co.nz/Our-Recipes/Baking/Belgian-Biscuits)

</comment><comment><USER32> Side note: Substack's font kerning is wrong and if this website is designed to be a blog - they _really_ need to look at the font settings.

Edit: it appears to be an issue with the font itself. I just turned off the custom font the website is so much more tolerable.

</comment><comment><USER33> the book he recommends at the end of the article looks interesting. My only issue with it is the lack of a TOC.</comment>


Go package: fanout – make writing parallel code even easier - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sunfmin/fanout
 hide goroutines and channels from developer. <comment><USER2> Oh, hey, it's a generic package that means you lose type safety and saves you from writing roughly 10 lines of code.

Buffered channels + goroutines + WaitGroup already allow you to implement this trivially, and because channels are builtin generic, you can do it without the nasty type casts. Really, []interface{} is a terrible type to work with.

<comment><USER3> > _Oh, hey, it 's a generic package that means you lose type safety and saves > you from writing roughly 10 lines of code._

Or actually, it's not a generic (as in generics) package, which is why you lose type safety.

<comment><USER4> > Or actually, it's not a generic (as in generics) package, which is why you > lose type safety.

Can we please skip just one opportunity to begin this endless flamewar on a HN post about Go? Just one? Please?

This topic has been beaten to death and beyond, and is not relevant to TFA at all, as the word "generic" can be used in many contexts, and it's more than clear which context OP meant.

<comment><USER3> > _and is not relevant to TFA at all_

How is it not relevant to TFA? This is a speficic example of the problem with not having generics!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just yesterday I was staring at some of my go code thinking that channels are the "goto" of concurrency. You can make just about anything with them, but to understand code you have to read it all, hold it in your head, and reason about all possible outcomes. In the '60s that's how flow of control was done. As the '70s went by "structured programming" came in and exotic things like _while_ loops, _switch_ statements, and functions that you could only enter at the top (so limiting!) became the norm.

This post proposes a level of abstraction to take a common 10 line idiom and abstract it to a word. I'd much rather read code with the abstraction. (In this case it is clean to read, but there are many complicated patterns in common use involving auxiliary chans for cancellation and timeouts.) Sadly, this is where it collides with the go language designers. Go is anti- abstraction by design. If you don't like that then you descend into _interface{}_ hell and manual runtime type checking, or change languages, or just repeat yourself a lot and pray you get the fiddly bits right each time.

<comment><USER6> Oh, they use abstractions a lot, just not the flow control ones, mainly objects. Like sync.WaitGroup mentioned here is an object and is a completely brain dead choice for this kind of thing. Some form of parallel map() instead would be much easier to understand and to reason about, for example: [http://play.golang.org/p/4I-uBJ1Tce](http://play.golang.org/p/4I-uBJ1Tce)

Anyways, I mostly agree, just not generally over abstractions, but more in the context of proper flow control abstractions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wrote a similar Go package for running work loads in parallel, but I used beanstalkd for job/result transport. This allows me a bit more freedom to spread the workers/requesters across my network. It's a bit rough around the edges and could use some refactoring, but it works well for my uses.

[https://github.com/eramus/worker](https://github.com/eramus/worker)

<comment><AUTHOR> Bookmarked and Stared!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems to be way too trivial for a library: [http://play.golang.org/p/U0URukpeO3](http://play.golang.org/p/U0URukpeO3)

Although I like the idea of having some kind of API to spread the work across multiple machines, since channels are slow anyway.

</comment><comment><USER8> >How does it make the program run faster?

Sunfmin, wrong answer, you'd have a 20x improvement with 20 workers only with 20 cores (ignoring the limited overhead), regardless of the number of workers your queue of jobs will be consumed in number_of_jobs*single_job_duration/GOMAXPROCS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, but there will be I/O waiting stuff right? For that whois command example, I find the CPU usage is zero if I am not running it parallel.

<comment><USER8> Yup, if your jobs are i/o heavy the cpu time is wasted waiting if you execute them in a strictly sequential way. With your worker pool the cpu intensive part of the jobs is instead being executed concurrently GOMAXPROCS jobs at a time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why does this need to be a dependency that you bring on? This is a trivial pattern.

</comment><comment><USER10> Write yourself the 20 lines needed before pulling an extra 3rd party deps just for that.

The cost of having another 3rd party deps is greater than the seconds you save from using this.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure what the usefulness of this is (apart from saving you from writing one or two functions yourself), isn't it just a parallel queue?

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess it is a parallel queue, It saves the trouble to worry about goroutines and channels and synchronizations, encapsulated the logic that talked in [http://blog.golang.org/pipelines](http://blog.golang.org/pipelines) last part. To make use of that pattern easier.

I have quite a few use cases myself:

1\. Say there is a article on the web, that contains dozens of images embed in the html. Which I want to crawl the article, and Also the images, and put the image into S3 for faster serve. I can use the fanout concurrency pattern to put upload all the images simultaneously to S3 to make it faster.

2\. Say I have 20 mysql node sharded data, I want to fetch top 50 latest created data from all of them, and sort it to and show it to user after.

<comment><USER11> Oh, yes, there are lots of use cases for parallel queues, for sure.</comment></comment></comment>


Gas stoves may routinely generate unsafe levels of indoor air pollution - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/5/7/21247602/gas-stove-cooking-indoor-air-pollution-health-risks <comment><USER2> But it's against building code for me to install a nice Chinese 900cfm exhaust fan in my American kitchen. We're capped at 400cfm.

But I did install an ERV to give my condo fresh air and lower PM2.5 and keep co2 under 700ppm

Edit: I would install an electric/induction oven/range but I can't. Then I'm violating the electrical code for the power for the square footage of my unit because I have a 60 amp EV car charging circuit.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone know what percentage of gas stoves have pilot lights? In the US at least I believe anything from the last 10 years will have electric start and the number might be more like the last 30 years.</comment>


Ask HN: Stripe Atlas alternative that's more suitable for lifestyle businesses? - <AUTHOR> For example, one that allows LLC setup in your state so that you don't have to pay Delaware state fees in addition to your state<p>Does it exist? <comment><USER2> It's unclear what it is you think Atlas gives you and therefore what you would consider an alternative.

If you're in US, you can accept Stripe Payments without a company. You can accept money in your own name or by registering DBA and using that as a name.

Stripe Atlas automates creating an LLC for exceedingly low price.

If you're in US it would be hard to find a better deal but if you really don't want to spend $500 on Atlas then you can do all they do manually. It won't be free, there are fees you have to pay anyway. And figuring out what paperwork to submit and filling it out (without paying some professional for advice) will be painful.

Atlas is most attractive for people outside US that want a US identity because Stripe Payments (and others) don't support merchants in every country.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there anything aside from the Delaware fees for an LLC that you think Atlas should improve upon?

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems particularly focused on high growth startups, which makes me feel like it's less suitable for smaller and slower growing cash flow type businesses. But I may be wrong.</comment></comment>


Staying Rich Without Manufacturing Will Be Hard - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-03-28/staying-rich-without-manufacturing-will-be-hard <comment><USER3> You can't pay an American worker 20 times as much to make the same product in the same number of hours. The only way to be competitive at 20 times the pay is for each worker to produce 20 times the output, i.e. automation. So what we have is a choice between fewer American manufacturing jobs (automation) or no American manufacturing jobs (outsourcing). People don't want to hear that, but those are the alternatives.

And given that, automation is clearly the right answer. Some manufacturing jobs is better than no manufacturing jobs, and more local manufacturing creates more local non-manufacturing jobs in sales, transportation, administration, etc.

<comment><USER4> Hmmm I don't know about that. Growing up my father was a tool maker (worked for Molex), that means he figured out how to make the molds people designed. That sounds easy to some, but understanding how to cut different materials the right way is a pretty unique skill.

Anyways, he basically trained his replacement(s) before they laid off a large portion of his machine shop. He trained probably 15 - 20 Chinese over the course of a few years. In the end, as expected, they laid him off. Fast forward 10 years and they had to bring a lot of the tool making back.

Turns out the Chinese either had worse quality control or poorer skill, but they simply couldn't produce at the same level. You only need a few molds for a production line, but each needs to be near perfect. The Chinese couldn't do it. And even when they did / could, the intellectual property was often stolen, so competitors would pop up and customers would get pissed.

You're correct automation is needed. However, so is high quality standards, higher education, higher moral codes / higher pay to keep people honest. The fact is, you can't really find skilled labor elsewhere easily (they want the same as the US wages). That's why the US's number one export is education, and probably why every company still fights over software engineers and really every STEM field.

Unfortunately for manufacturing, the fight is over. When they tried to bring the tool making back there were very few people still doing it. Every single one of my dad's friends (including my dad) had moved on to other jobs. The fact is, all that tribal knowledgewas passed down from master to apprentice was lost. After they laid off the masters, there was/is no one left to really continue.

Personally, I view this as a loss of critical mass and now our skills are likely no better than anywhere else, at least for tool making.

I think this is a warning for every business. Sometimes it's worth paying the price to keep talent. Companies like Google, Apple, et al, know this. Hopefully, that will keep tech and a lot of the other large US companies from losing their way.

<comment><USER5> _> the Chinese either had worse quality control or poorer skill, but they simply couldn't produce at the same level. ... The Chinese couldn't do it. _

It seems that China's workers can make Macbooks and iPhones with high precision and low tolerances according to Apple's specifications. Were the Molex molds more complicated than that?

In other words, if those specific 15-20 Chinese workers failed, maybe choosing a different set of 20 Chinese employees (or partner manufacturer) would have given the quality desired?

<comment><USER6> I don't know the OP but I think his father is biased. The story is repeated a lot (The Chinese/Indians/Other-Race are cheaper but can't produce the same!) even for Software developers (Indians). In most cases (at least for the software engineering) the problem turns out that the other-race pay was low, and thus attracted low talent. The company probably wanted to cut costs and picked cheap foreign workers that didn't perform.

<comment><USER7> If it's that easy to move highly skilled positions to the Far East, how do you explain Germany's prowess in high-end manufacturing? Surely all those jobs should have moved to China by now? It's been two generations since Deng opened the country up to foreign manufacturers.

<comment><USER8> Germans may think beyond next quarters earnings.

<comment><USER9> Its because most of these companies are small and largely family owned. i.e. the owners understand the product, and moving it to china means they would need to move to china as well.

In many ways the difference is that headquarters is next or on top of the factory instead of in a different state.

<comment><USER10> _Its because most of these companies are small and largely family owned_

Sorry I have to question this .. Bosch, Mercedes, BMW? There are a few notables such as Krupps that were _once upon a time_ family owned but increasingly these companies are owned by global conglomerates.

Yes, these companies do outsource many functions to poorer countries but their centre of gravity is very certainly in Germany.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This reminds me of a quote from Neal Stephenson's epic Snow Crash novel:

"When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain- drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery" ― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

<comment><USER12> > There's only four things

Weaponry.

<comment><USER13> That's not necessarily true. Excluding the obvious comparisons with Russian and Chinese weapons sales, France, Sweden, and Israel also have significant defense exports. America has a huge export market for weapons because America has a huge defense industry. Even a small percentage of that turning into export sales results in some pretty eye-popping numbers. I would be willing to bet that, as a proportion of their overall defense industries, French and Swedish export sales are much larger than America's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Those numbers are worse than I thought they were. I thought US production had recovered to 2008 levels. This isn't good, and it's really important.

To some extent, Trump was elected to fix this, but so far, no initiatives have appeared which help US manufacturing. How much protectionism the US should have is a real question. China has a considerable amount, and is trying to become an autarky, not dependent of the rest of the world. That's been quite successful in the Internet sector. China can probably do it; they're big enough.

<comment><USER15> Pretty sure removing regulations on energy development (and therefore, cost) are an effort to supporting manufacturing, and Trump has taken an aggressive stance at repealing as much regulation especially in the energy sector, as he can[0][1][2].

Those are just a few citations, but just look up some of his executive actions and orders, as well as some recent legislation he's signed. Some of these addresses repeal of regulations (Using the Congressional Review Act).

The GOP border-adjustment tax is being worked on currently. While debatable in how it does or does not favor imports or exports, at the very least seems to favor establishing business in the US and eliminate tax benefits of incorporating outside the US.[3]

This, and his general desire for a slashing of the corporate rate, should incentivize corporations (manufacturing and otherwise) to move, stay, and hire in US, and move US from one of highest rate countries to one of the lowest.

[0] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2017/03/28/tr...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2017/03/28/trump- in-the-name-of-american-energy-independence-scraps-obamas-climate- plans/#4c2ab7442258)

[1] [http://dailycaller.com/2017/02/02/trump-to-sign-repeal-of- ob...](http://dailycaller.com/2017/02/02/trump-to-sign-repeal-of-obama-era- coal-mining-regulation/)

[2][http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/319488-trump- si...](http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/319488-trump-signs-repeal- of-transparency-rule-for-oil-companies)

[3] [https://taxfoundation.org/faqs-border- adjustment/](https://taxfoundation.org/faqs-border-adjustment/)

<comment><USER16> These are supply-side arguments that still continue to fail to impress when implemented in reality.

Just to narrow to one obvious piece: the difference in type of energy matters if the _goal_ is to support local manufacturing. It's a variation of the "Buy Local" argument applied to manufacturing suppliers. Reducing the cost/regulation of oil/gas/coal doesn't support local manufacturing near as much as it continues to support/cheapen global shipping costs (because oil/gas/coal continue to transport well across borders, and continue to keep cargo ships/planes fed). On the other hand, increasing solar/wind is a much more "local" energy resource investment (it's tough enough just to store it for time-shifting, much less to transport across borders) and _might_ be better for the stated goal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The article doesn't present any sound evidence for hypothesis in the title. Manufacturing output has declined sure, but real gross domestic product grew and it is still growing. This means that maufacturing production is replaced by other sectors of economy: mostly services.

It seems logical to expect that in the future we'll have more jobs in services (e.g. tech) and less jobs in manufacturing. This is good for everybody, good for workers, because jobs in services are less dangerous, and good for economy too.

<comment><USER18> > jobs in services are less dangerous

This depends on how you define dangerous. Heart disease is the number one cause of death in the United States killing ~614,000 people per year whereas accidents account for ~136,000. Sedentary behavior has been shown to increase the odds of heart related disease. Moving from more active manufacturing jobs to more sedentary service jobs could arguably be more dangerous to the longevity of a person's life.

[https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of- death.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm)

"Physical inactivity has become a major public health concern because it is the second leading single cause of death in the United States, trailing only tobacco use (31)."

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2857522/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2857522/)

<comment><USER19> Also to note: when I worked retail, I was significantly less active than when I started working software. With retail, my feet just hurt too damn much for me to want to play sports on my days off. When I started a software job, I had 3 weekly semi-organized games I played in most weeks, as well as occasional pickup games on other days.

<comment><USER18> Could you clarify why this should be noteworthy? I mean this in the nicest and most respectful way possible - I'm not sure how the statement fits into the discussion.

<comment><USER19> Always happy to clarify!

My logic is roughly this:

1\. The comment I replied to was talking about harms to health by being sedentary.

2\. A lot of people on HN are young professionals with desk jobs, which at first glance seems more sedentary than most service jobs.

3\. I thought it would be enlightening to realize that many of those service jobs can cause one to be _more_ sedentary than a desk job. If I had not experienced it myself, I would not have considered this.

<comment><USER18> I think I've identified my confusion.

I had interpreted the original post to be a comparison of the levels of physical danger in manufacturing vs. service industry jobs. From my perspective _both_ programming and retail are service industry jobs since they don't involve creating physical products by hand or through the use of tools.

<comment><USER19> Service industry is where no goods are produced. Non-live entertainment and software development both produce intangible goods, but still produce goods.

Furthermore when one talks about the movement of low-wage jobs from manufacturing to services, it's assumed we aren't talking about professional services (e.g. lawyers, accountants), but unskilled and low-skill service jobs such as retail, food-services, and child-care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> To move to a more automated manufacturing industry and to expand the service industry the US needs more educated people. You can't do hi-tech manufacturing with high school graduates.

I think US needs to fix it's education system first to make sure that all deserving people get a chance to go to college without incurring debt. It can easily be done considering the money the government spends on defense and other (I'd call useless) agencies like NSA, DEA, etc.

One of the first steps could be to pay college tuition for students matching certain criteria (I'm not sure what the criteria could be - maybe GPA - <USER2> I'm certain that some elibility criteria can be defined).

<comment><USER21> Why draw lines at all in deciding who is deserving? In my country anyone can study anything without going into debt. The only requirements are prior degrees. It leaves young people free to choose their path in life. We spend 6.6% of our gdp to have that system. The US spends 5.6% of gdp on its system. That's close enough that the US education system should be offering better choices and outcomes to students. Why isn't it?

<comment><USER20> I agree. Thats why I said "to start with". Universal free education should be a right in this day and age. However if the Congress is to pass such a bill they most probably won't make it all free on day one. They (and the population) need to ease into it, so reimbursing tuition fee as a "scholarship" could be a good starting point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is why people don't trust news media and government.

This stuff was 100% obvious back in the 90s days, when the left wing people were protesting globalism, what was left of manufacturing imploded, and big agribusiness crushed Mexicos economy.

Since that time, we've been told time and time again by economists that we're all wrong, the service economy is great and life is great... just go to college for retraining.

<comment><USER23> That's because the left (Or more specifically, its social policies) has been co-opted by neo-liberalism. We now have people who, with a straight face, can claim that Hillary or Obama have liberal policies.

<comment><USER24> That's because they ARE liberal policies.

Globalization means everybody in the world benefits, not just Americans.

Or did you want Nigerians and Sri Lankans to remain in poverty forever?

<comment><USER23> Yes, offshoring all our manufacturing to places with no worker protections, no environmental protections, long work weeks, and poor wages is absolutely a liberal policy. We're all about winning the race to the bottom.

The World Bank and the IMF have always been the left's shining beacons, that bring progressive enlightenment to the downtrodden masses, the global south is not being ruthlessly exploited by multinationals, and we've always been at war with Eastasia.

I mean, that's not how _I_ remember the politics of the 90s, but who's to say?

<comment><USER24> If you want those places to start having worker rights and environmental protections, then you better make sure they're rich first, by giving them jobs and trade.

The only reason they don't have these things is because they're poor in the first place. Only wealthy societies can afford those things.

Free trade is the global labor and environment solution.

Or maybe you want those countries to be environmentally destructive forever?

<comment><USER23> Look - you don't have to believe that these complaints are valid. You don't even have to believe that viable alternatives to unrestricted capitalism should exist. I'm not trying to convince you of that!

However, you are incredibly unlikely to convince me that in decades past, those beliefs were held by 'progressives.'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> _" Why should a country specialize in making things, when it can instead specialize in designing, marketing and financing the making of things?"_

 _" This is a legitimate question... Ricardo Hausmann believes that a country's economic development depends crucially on where it lies in the so- called product space. If a country makes complex products that are linked to many other industries -- such as computers, cars and chemicals -- it will be rich. But if it makes simple products that don't have much of a supply chain -- soybeans or oil -- it will stay poor. In the past, the U.S. was very successful at positioning itself at the top of the global value chain."_

I would certainly call Google's search engines, Apple's iPhones and Intel's processors "complex products that are linked to many other industries". Comparing the fortunes of Apple vs Foxconn also shows that the top of the value-chain certainly lies in design/marketing, as opposed to manufacturing. The evidence the article presents is utterly baffling and unconvincing.

<comment><USER23> Google has a market cap of $570 billion USD, and employs 70,000 people.

GM, Ford, and Chrystler have a combined market cap of ~$130 billion USD, and employ 600,000 people.

Google makes a lot of money, and pays its employees well. Unfortunately, it hardly employs anyone.

<comment><USER26> You summed three competitors' employee counts as a comparison against Google. I don't understand. You say "it hardly employs anyone" but from your numbers I read, "70k is a little less than half of 200k".

<comment><USER27> It employs nearly half the people, and makes about five times the money. That's a 10x spread.

<comment><USER23> It's actualy closer to a 40x spread, since the combined market cap of the Big 3 (Now including Fiat) is 130 billion.

The market doesn't value job creation. The ideal company is one that doesn't have to employ anyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I was discussing something like this with an economist friend recently. His view was that most economists (rightly I think) focus on consumption not production. In theory, you can run a trade deficit forever to keep consuming more than you produce.

Where I think the model probably breaks down is that you can't have infinite debt levels, so your consumption growth is capped by your production growth. I would think you run out of assets (e.g., Manhattan, London real estate) to sell to net-export economies, but I guess there's always financial innovation to bring you new products to sell

</comment><comment><USER29> The disturbing thing is that the US is not building its own robots to automate the factories, they are being imported. Clearly we aren't as innovative a nation as we think we are. Hey, at least we have Uber.

<comment><USER30> Pretty sure the us is the world leader in factory automation. We export robots to build washing machines, and import washing machines.

<comment><USER31> Sorry to burst that bubble - that couldn't be further from the truth, especially when it comes to high-tech automation, i.e. industrial robotics.

Japan is still THE undisputed powerhouse in this field (Yasakawa, Kawasaki, Fanuc, Mitsubishi, Epson...), with the EU a distant second (ABB, KUKA, Stäubli, Comau...) and China rising quickly (e.g Siasun, Foxconn).

<comment><USER30> Fair enough. I was thinking Emerson, ge, Rockwell and the like. More industrial processes kinds of things, but thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Really this is about increasing demand and not supply. Americans need to be trained to not want cheap shit. They need to learn to value stuff like repairability and durability. Americans need to want things that only Americans can make. As long as they want stuff that can be made by the dozen, then they're just going to get all that from the cheapest maker.

<comment><USER33> This seems like a diffuse cost / concentrated benefit problem to me. It will be an uphill battle to get a large number of people to pay more for things in order to benefit a relatively small group of those employed in making those things. This doesn't even really work for local face-to-face service work where the benefit to the local community is fairly obvious, let alone for manufacturers largely located in completely different states.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The article does not prove the headline in any way. Towards the end it mentions a couple of experts who believe in this premise, but doesn't actually provide anything of substance to back up that belief.

</comment><comment><USER35> My wife works in fashion. What they have found is instructive. They have spent 20 years outsourcing their production to China. After 20 years of economic and wage growth in China the cost savings once you take into account shipping etc is eroding. Adding to increased demand from the local economy, the value for outsourcing is quickly eroding and most fashion companies are looking for the next low cost production region (Vietnam and Pakistan are two).

I am no economist, but I believe that there will be a global rebalancing in the near future: manufacturing will return as the rents in low-cost regions approach the local cost of manufacturing.

<comment><USER36> This has been happening for a while: [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/business/global/17textile....](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/business/global/17textile.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Industry doesn't need a "helping hand". It needs a free hand and a level playing field. If government wants to offer a helping hand, how about helping to address the rampant industrial espionage on the part of our trading partners.

<comment><USER38> > how about helping to address the rampant industrial espionage on the part of > our trading partners.

That sounds like a Trump Tweet. Are there any facts supporting the theory that the US is more of a victim than everybody else?

<comment><USER39> It's widely known that as products are manufactured in China, the manufacturers copy the schematics and make the same product more cheaply as a generic. Sometimes they straight-up steal the molds. Sometimes they blatantly ape other manufacturers (see older Xiaomi phones - obviously rip-offs of iPhone software look & feel - for that reason, they kept them in the Chinese market, since Apple would sue anywhere else).

Is the US more of a victim than any other country? Well, insofar as US businesses manufacture more in China by volume than anyone else, yes. Although not on a case-by-case basis - a Canadian company is just as much a victim as any American one.

<comment><USER40> Patents are a protection racket that prevent progress; if they can make a generic version cheaper, good, that's how it should be. If people prefer the genuine thing, they'll buy it. Patent holders aren't the victims, they're the mob crying about being prevented from using their monopoly to keep prices high.

<comment><USER41> Here's a study you might be interested in reading:

[https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2013/05/do-patents-help-or- hi...](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2013/05/do-patents-help-or-hinder- innovation/)

<comment><USER40> Seems to agree with me, however, I don't need a study to know that legally preventing people from copying other people, prevents all of those other people from making progress. Patents make copying into theft, but copying is not theft. The reason we have patents is not to grant patent holders a monopoly, it's to ensure society doesn't lose knowledge that might otherwise be locked up in trade secrets; granting patent holders a limited monopoly is not the goal, it is the means by which the goal is achieved, making secrets public knowledge. The system has however gotten out of hand and patents are now collected and used as legal weapons against competitors to prevent competition. Software patents in particular, should not exist, and are rarely enforced because virtually everyone violates software patents on a daily basis as the patent office is too ignorant to know what should and should not be patent-able.

<comment><USER42> It took James Watt a very long time to find a partner to fund his invention. Without a patent, that partnership wouldn't have happened. That doesn't mean that our IP law or practice is current or ideal; it's not a binary choice.

<comment><USER43> What financing alternatives might have worked other than patents?

<comment><USER42> None that were available to Watts, certainly. Developing a new technology at the bleeding edge took a lot of money, even then. Steam engines useful for warships were so far in the future that military funds weren't an option.

<comment><USER43> To the contrary. There were a number of mechanisms instituted over the years to protect and promote the spread and continuation of technical arts and knowledge:

1\. Guilds. Frowned upon, but not without their uses, benefits, and sound arguments. (Actually, part of Watts' problem was that he was thrown out of the Hammermen's Guild -- the black-smithing union, in Scotland, from which Adam Smith had Watt installed at the University of Edinburgh.)

2\. A royal charter. Rather than a patent, say, the formation of a public corporation (similar to, say, the contemporaneous British East India Corporation), to which subscribers could buy shares and steam power be distributed throughout England (this was pre-Unification).

3\. A royal or parliamentary award or prize. This was offered to several other of the major inventors of industrial technology (largely in the textiles trade).

4\. An obligatory license. This would have allowed Watt a share of revenues on his invention, but _not_ limited the rights of others to enter into trade.

5\. A guaranteed or favourable government contract. This is essentially what Eli Whitney secured, not with his cotton gin, but with his mass-produced arms, in the United States. And from whence he gained most his financial gains.

That's just off the top of my head.

Patents are both tremendously distortionary, and not particularly good at rewarding actual inventors.

<comment><USER42> An obligatory license is a kind of patent. That modifications of our current patent system are possible is not something I'm likely to argue against, and haven't here.

The guy tried. That a spaceship or marvelous benefactor or coincidental prize could have landed and paid him money is true, but not probable. Governments weren't in the business of mining (the application then.) They had no interest, but in any case do you really want them picking winners today? Their record is horrible in that way. You cite a military example with Eli Whitney, but I had answered that in advance. As for industry prizes only he understood that such an advance in fuel-efficiency was possible.

I really don't think you've ever tried to sell an idea of this kind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> What it really comes down to is societal priorities. The Chinese have been willing to do things over the past few decades that the US isn't, and it's given them an advantage in low-cost production.

One of those things is trash their environment. In the US, we have the federal clean air act, an EPA to enforce it, and various similar laws and enforcement bodies at the state and local level (e.g. CEQA).

A second major example of this is labor laws. Workers in the US have strong protections including the right to organize, vote, minimum wage protections, not to endure wrongful termination or sexual harassment, as well as various overtime provisions and strong protections of salary in bankruptcy. They have none of this in China. In China, due to lax enforcement of safety, major industrial accidents happen as a matter of course. I recall reading two separate times in the Economist over the last several years when workers were trapped inside of a burning building, leading to hundreds of deaths. And I keep hearing stories about workers getting woken up in the middle of the night, handed tea and biscuits, and asked to start working.

Anecdotally (I'm not as sure about this) I think many people in China work much longer hours than we do in the US. Most middle-class jobs in the US give at least a day or two off per week; I'm not sure how common this is in China.

We also have strong protections of rights in the US including freedom of speech, rights to a fair, speedy and open trial, break time to vote, and various protections relating to bona fide religious practice, including exemption from some collective bargaining agreements.

All of these things cost money -- a lot of it. So we're going to have a slightly higher cost of production, or perhaps a bit higher taxes.

The real telling thing though is the flow, not of goods or money, but of _people_. Net in-migration to the US from Asia feels much stronger than vice versa. And so I ask: perhaps our manufacturing is in decline, but, why do so many people move here from the rest of the world? Is it possible that the Chinese middle class is getting tired of lead paint in their food, random lengthy incarcerations of political prisoners, a one-party state that openly engages in religious persecution, lack of a free press, or lack of a functioning civil court system?

Now, one can certainly make the argument that some of these protections have gone too far in the US. Perhaps unions have too much power. Maybe companies like Uber/Lyft will force the discussion on making the employment regime less onerous in places like Illinois (my home state), where firing someone is almost always a lengthy court case due to a shockingly pro-labor employment law regime. Perhaps the pendulum could stand to swing back a big in the direction of economic competitiveness. Or maybe the US and China will converge.

I consider myself a pretty strong libertarian, but it really makes me think.

</comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash This piece is lacking in details about non-manufacturing, non-agricultural output, with the obvious exceptions of finance and real estate.

Completely lacking is any assessment of American economic juggernauts: high- tech (like Silicon Valley) and culture (like Hollywood). Both represent industries that are very very hard to replicate because they require immense talent ecosystems. You can't simply cut taxes and labor costs and get a Hollywood - with massive global consumption - out of nowhere.

America is very safe in these kinds of industries. Typically when other countries develop their own they either end up with extremely niche products (like India's Bollywood) or bland products with little real mass appeal (quick, think of the last Chinese movie you enjoyed that wasn't _Ip Man_ ).

<comment><USER45> Problem is this view makes 90% of American population and territory redundant. You can just substitute 'America' with 'California' and that won't alter the sentiment at all.

<comment><USER46> Finance in NYC

Oil refining and seismology in Houston

Biotechnology in Boston

The USA absolutely has a series of high tech clusters outside of California that are globally competitive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> How does manufacturing view internet businesses where the product is a SAAS and pulling in global revenue?

</comment><comment><USER48> Nobody talks about software, damn is it HN ?

</comment><comment><USER49> People shop for the best deal. Companies look at countries and do the same. Give them a better deal by lower taxes and reducing regulation, and back they come. Raise taxes and regulation, and away they flee.

<comment><USER50> That has to be an oversimplification, else all the companies would have already moved.

Suspect that "I am used to things as they are" is a powerful incentive to keep business, not just citizens. (I say this as someone trying to move out of the UK because of the combination of Brexit and the Investigatory Powers Act: moving is extremely unpleasant).

<comment><USER51> there is always a barrier to leave... but there is also a barrier to return.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Resources for learning business side of startup ( new company )?? - <AUTHOR>

I am deep in technical things and have little or less knowledge of business side of start-up.
What are your resources to learn business side or must know things e.g.
- Finance - Accounting - Sales and Marketing - Taxes - Operations
Kindly list any or all of your go to resources for deep knowledge of Finance and Sales.  Everything else will follow I believe.
Let's create one master thread as I can't seem to find easily in historical posts. Assume that only one to three person will be running the start-up ( or new business ) for few months and knowledge of basic items that they should have.
Your comments are welcome and don't forget to link the resources you already use. <comment><USER4> > \- Finance - Accounting - <USER2>

My take has always been that you don't need to be an expert on these things, you just need to know the basics... enough to not do anything blatantly illegal or whatever - with an eye towards hiring somebody (even just a contractor or outsource agency) to deal with this stuff when you have real revenue. But for most startups, "you should be so lucky to have the problem" of actually getting far enough for accounting and taxes to matter. If you do, there are tons of agencies that offer "part time CFO" services and outsource accounting.

To get the very basics, I just reference stuff like _Cost Accounting for Dummies_ , _Financial Accounting for Dummies_ , _Managerial Accounting for Dummies_ and a college accounting text I bought for a quarter at a used book store.

> Sales and Marketing - <USER3>

I'm going to take a pretty expansive view of what this includes, so I'll start with two books:

1\. _The Four Steps To The Epiphany_ \- Steve Blank

2\. _The Art of the Start_ \- Guy Kawasaki

Also, for the basics on stuff like "how to incorporate" just look for any of the generic NOLO[1] books that you can find in the small business / entrepreneurship section at Barnes & Noble. There'll be something like "How to incorporate your business". Note that you can probably go a long way in terms of developing "product market fit" before you even bother incorporating.

But once you get to a point where you need to handle money, you will need a business bank account. To open one of those, you'll typically need two or three things: A copy of your company's Articles of Incorporation / Bylaws (you'll have filed these when you incorporated), an EIN number[2] (you can get this online in about 10 minutes from the IRS) and a minimum deposit. And whoever goes down to open the account will probably need their personal ID (drivers license, whatever).

If you have co-founders, are raising capital, etc. and need to deal with equity issues, there are some "stock" documents[3] out there from YC that you may want to look into. There is also a lot of info out there on equity, startup funding, etc. at VentureHacks.[4] There are also several good books on dealing with VC's, etc. BUT... a note: Not all startups need to, or should, or can, raise money from VC's. Be careful not to obsess over fund-raising. Remember, the real goal is to _make money_ not to _raise money_.

OK, going back to sales and marketing for a bit... I am getting tired of typing, so I'm just going to dump a list of books and/or links to previous discussions here and skip the exposition for now.

 _Mastering The Complex Sale_ , _The Prime Process_ and _Exceptional Selling_ all by Jeff Thull.

 _The Ultimate Sales Machine_ \- Chet Holmes

 _Sell or Be Sold_ \- Grant Cardone

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4417443](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4417443)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5591574](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5591574)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8049940](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8049940)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8050058](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8050058)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7653263](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7653263)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2495939](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2495939)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3496969](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3496969)

[1]: [http://www.nolo.com/](http://www.nolo.com/)

[2]: [http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-%26-Self- Empl...](http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-%26-Self- Employed/Apply-for-an-Employer-Identification-Number-%28EIN%29-Online)

[3]: [https://www.ycombinator.com/documents/](https://www.ycombinator.com/documents/)

[4]: [http://venturehacks.com/](http://venturehacks.com/)</comment>


Censoring of wedding Larry Page and Lucy  - <AUTHOR> http://irintech.com/x1/blogarchive.php?id=1839 <comment><USER2> It could be the result of Google intervention, but it isn't necessarily censorship. CNN Money may have removed the information due to a polite request from Larry, because posting such information violated some privacy policy, or because it later found out the information was inaccurate. In order for it to be censorship, there has to be so evidence of coercion.

And since Google doesn't really have a lot of power over CNN Money, I don't really see how there would be any coercion.</comment>


Possible Church Built on the Site of Constantine's Conversion to Christianity - <AUTHOR> https://hyperallergic.com/453107/archaeologists-may-have-discovered-a-church-built-on-the-site-of-constantine-the-greats-conversion-to-christianity/ <comment><USER3> As an Orthodox Christian, I sometimes get a (good hearted) kick reading these quotations from theology professors describing something as a phenomena that to us is just normal, everyday part of our faith. There is so much rich history.

<comment><USER4> I feel the same way. Unfortunately, being a Christian and especially - <USER2> Orthodox one is not popular these days especially among those who are traditionally Orthodox nations such as my homeland Bulgaria. Western materialism is our doom and I hope more of us see it!

<comment><USER5> >Western materialism is our doom

i doubt it. The leaders of Orthodox church, like the Russian Patriarch Kirill seem to have successfully integrated their religion with Western materialism like $40K watches, Maybach cars, etc. and enjoy close spiritual, social and economical connections to the Russian political and economical elite who have openly fully embraced the Western materialism. I think any good Orthodox follower should just follow their example.

<comment><USER4> Most of the high ranks of the Orthodox clergy are just "heritage" from the KGB era and their mission is to destroy Orthodoxy and they are very successful at that. For example, Kirill totally turned even Russophiles against Russia with his last visit in Bulgaria demonstrating by the book how a good Christian should NOT behave!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Doesn't Google Chrome Let You View Source on POST? - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=1082a452e274f6db&hl=en

<comment><AUTHOR> If you right click or Ctrl-U using Google Chrome, it makes a second request to the URL and shows you the source of that second request.

This strikes me as a bug, because when you click on a button that says "View page Source", and it shows you the source of a _different_ page, that's not expected behavior.

However, it seems so glaring and has been around for so long that I'm guessing there's a reason why Chrome does it.

Anyone know the reason?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Even worse, if you right click and hit "Save Page" it _also makes a second request and saves a different page_.

</comment><comment><USER2> Just open the Web Inspector and view it in the Resources tab.</comment>


Signal on the outside, Signal on the inside - <AUTHOR> https://www.whispersystems.org/blog/signal-inside-and-out/ <comment><USER2> Yay. Now if only they could sever the dependence on Google Play so I could actually use it.</comment>


When Big Companies Are a Good Idea - <AUTHOR> http://www.yosefk.com/blog/graham-coase-when-big-companies-are-a-good-idea.html

<comment><USER2> The problem with Coase as I see it is it is a case of fitting a model to the facts, so has no predictive power at all, even if it is the correct explanation. Some of the factors are changing, as technology cuts information and transaction costs and makes markets cheaper, for example. So how much does that mean firms will shrink or grow?

<comment><USER3> Here are a few questions I wish yosefk.com would address:

1\. Why do small companies exist? This is vice versa to his question, "Why do large firms exist?" -- if large companies have the advantage in eliminating transaction costs, small companies should be eliminated in favor of medium and large companies. (I'm taking into account Coase's "decreasing returns to the entrepreneur function.")

2\. Is it possible small companies are more efficient at solving some problems -- and large companies others? For example, a large company should be better at, oh, say, contracting with the Department of Transportation for major freeway construction projects. I guess what I'm saying is: there may be an "endgame" where small companies dominate large companies (or the other way around) -- but in the here and now there's plenty of room for both. Evidenced by the fact that both types are still around, with no apparent trend eliminating either.

3\. Are there any good reasons stated in the article or the Coase theorem that _ _don't_ _ involve intellectual property, for big companies to exist? (I can think of a few, but I want to hear what others have to say.) Intellectual property is so polarizing, and I'd prefer to think about Coase Theorem in different terms than it's phrased by yosefk.com.

I actually think the Coase Theorem does have the ability to predict economic outcomes, but remember that econ isn't usually about perfect predictions anyway. Econ is usually about identifying a better way to eliminate inefficiencies -- a knob to tweak, or a strategy, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good article - more people should be aware of Coase's work. However, I would surmise that PG was talking about "you" in the sense of "a hacker someone like myself", not about people in general, many of whom should not go try and create companies.

<comment><USER5> PG may have been talking to "a hacker someone like myself", but arbitrarily defining "you" is a bit of a fallacy in my opinion. If "you" can mean that, then why can't "you" refer just to the subset of people that could start successful companies?

Sorry for the semantics argument, but I don't really think PG (or anyone) can use "you" to refer anyone but whoever reads their work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think my previous company did not get the memo about us all being on the same team. You never knew who were gona stick a knife in your back. My personal theory some people do better playing the game at a big corp, some do better trying to run their own thing. Neither is inherently superior. Different games for different personalities.

<comment><USER7> I see the same at my current company. I think it's because it operates on a market with a huge barrier of entry.

My guess is that the more regulated and inefficient the company, the more you see sociopaths and the like in them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm>

</comment><comment><USER9> I worked at a semiconductor mixed-signal startup - rife with control-loop theory, analog design, digital design/firmware, and lots of application support/software. They do exist. It's just very hard for them to last without eventually getting acquired by an established bigCo. But the same kind of rings true for a decent chunk of startups in the software space.

That said, most semiconductor startups do partnerships with bigger companies for second-sourcing or foundry help.

The transaction cost problem is true whether you're a startup or a big company. If anything it's better to be a highly-partnered startup than a startup-division at a big company as you may be able to avoid lots of the bureaucratic headaches the large company is accustomed to, helping to keep employees more motivated.

</comment><comment><USER10> pg was specifically addressing the issue of management that is out of touch, while Coase was explaining the role of the firm. There is no reason why these reasons couldn't co-exist.

The main driver behind running a startup and working in a big company is a tension between two factors: control and leverage. As the chief of a small startup, a young person exerts a great deal of control over their destiny. However, they are short of resources. Even $20k from yc only goes so far. In contrast, at a bigger company, one has to constantly fight for resources. However, when they are available, and applied judiciously, the money can go a very long way. There is also the added benefit of working with some very brilliant technical people who may have no ounce of business-sense in their bones.

On the far end of the scale, when one has advanced further up the rank, there is a great deal of firepower at your disposal. It is actually the same with startups. No startup can forever stay at 2 employees. In the end, there has to be sensible management in place.

</comment><comment><USER11> This isn't exactly criticism, but curiosity. I would like yosefk.com to address the following:

1\. Is the revenue generated by a company proportionate to its size? Or do smaller companies make more? Or larger companies? Comparisons would be like WePay vs. Microsoft (or, in the same sector), WePay vs. PayPal.

2\. Are the problems he notes in a hypothetical industry dominated by small companies outsourcing exclusive to hardware manufacturing, or to all aspects of the manufacturing process?

</comment><comment><USER12> tl;dr -- Big companies are a good idea because they offer employment and suit the author's nature nicely because he possesses a strong "aversion to business."

Starting the article with pg's question--"Why be a manager when you could be a founder or early employee at a startup?"--then going on a different tangent altogether to answer "Why do large firms exist?" never left me satisfied with the author's claim he "could fill a book explaining why" to be a manager when you could be a founder or early employee at a startup. Claiming the question of why large firms exist to be the question implied by pg's original was a logical misstep.

pg's question appears--to me, so obviously I could be wrong--to dispute the wisdom of working at "companies where the only way to advance is to go into management." I'd have expected a "response" of this length to somehow defend either A) going to work for companies organized this way, 2) removing companies from the discussion altogether and defending the hierarchies & organizational principles behind management & its being the default rungs in the advancement ladder, or D) answer why being a manager is to be preferred vs the founder or early startup employee role.

The attempts to explain _how_ markets work to the advantage of large firms-- with random mentions of economic theory peppered about--does little to explain _why_ they exist this way at all. It's merely a narrative of what exists now. A better--and more thorough and compelling--article would have tackled the big question of why our markets operate in such a way as to be of greater advantage to large firms who secure resources through contractual negotiations that evince preferential treatment to larger vs smaller buyers. If everyone interested in producing a product were able to achieve the same price-per- piece when buying two pieces as buying two million pieces, this shallow argument of why large firms exists--and are a good idea--would fall flat. The transaction costs the author uses as defense of the big company are artificial --an economic barrier placed atop the market that prohibits entry of competition by securing preferential treatment for one's own company.

Moreover, the article never gets back to the question it begins with-- _why work where going into management is the only way to advance?_ This is what I waited till the end of the article to find out. Quite disappointing. I'm still wondering. I've recently started working at a company where the only way to "advance" is to be in management. Before this, I was at a small company where I felt locked in as a programmer--where my ability to build reliable software was, of course, a benefit to the company they relied on, but where in 3 years I was never once asked to "advance" in a meaningful way that didn't mean becoming a "manager". I was pretty disappointed. Even in small startups, the business-as-usual notions of managers over programmers, designers, and other productive talent prevails. This company was better than others, but was eventually undone--a rift between the managers ultimately led them to shut down the entire company and lay everyone off. Now, having moved on to a larger company where I'm now "managing", I find myself wondering why this is any better of a lock-in than my previous post--meetings, emails, phone calls, reports, productivity ... all of this shit just bores me, gets in the way of getting a task done, and offers so little value to both my team's work & the company's bottom line. And of course here, as in so many other companies, advancement is tied to remuneration and other perks. But why should I put up with this shit instead of moving on? I work very hard to keep carving out time & tasks on which I can program directly, but it's tough.

The article touches on a couple key points that (I think) it erroneously attributes to being good points for big companies--namely, trust and cooperation. Moving from a small company to a larger company--and obviously, this can be anecdotal (but I don't think it can be so easily dismissed as such)--trust and cooperation are not abounding. Larger companies divide employees into distinct departments that, rather than operate in the company's best interests, operate in their manager's interest and draw up all kinds of political districts through which it seems impossible to build trust and a cooperative spirit among coworkers. There are departments who attempt to control parts of the business for which they have absolutely no skill, training, experience, or even basic understanding. Offering to work with them to help them meet their goals goes nowhere. Large firms do not equal a sudden conversion of competition to cooperation or mistrust to trust--which the author, to his credit, acknowledges. But neither do they truly "frame things right". Where questioning why to become a manager vs a founder or early employee, pg is questioning exactly what is fundamentally flawed--working in a place where advancement equals management (and, implied I think, where management is the only way to have a voice in the operations, visions, practices, and future of the company itself). Lack of trust and cooperation is a fundamental flaw of the market itself, which big companies both exacerbate and use in their favor. To be fair, there are undoubtedly certain companies which successfully create a culture of trust and cooperation among their employees--and these are companies likely to be admired and studied as examples for others. However, trust and cooperation must be both created and nurtured. Why can't the market do this, too? And are big companies at all at fault for the lack of trust and cooperation in the marketplace? Why would a large firm seek to increase overhead through hiring if they could establish trust and cooperation among partners in the marketplace?

I think the answer to the question requires a careful consideration of management itself--its goals and benefits, its responsibilities and rewards. This article adds little to that discussion. Furthermore, answering the question should entail a discussion of advancement itself. If we pull promotion to management out of the equation (which we should), what are we left with? What now qualifies as "advancement"? Is it just economic advancement? Is there advancement to positions of greater responsibility, impact, input, etc., that does not equal being turned into a manager? If a company (big or small) is hiring the right people for the right jobs, does anyone really need to be a manager? Should a manager's (or other "senior" person who is in a position to dictate what is to be done) idea of what to do next outweigh the input provided by a talented, experienced person who is actually going to do the productive work? Managers excel at creating a lot of fake work for employees and otherwise wasting everyone's time. This is, in my experience, overwhelmingly apparent and exacerbated in large firms--perhaps because small firms stay away from creating a culture of managers.

As it is, answering the question of "Why do large firms exist?" or the author's own premise of "When Big Companies are a Good Idea" needs far more than a marginally informative retelling of how large firms behave in the market today.

<comment><USER3> I'm going to throw out my opinion here (for discussion), but I should preface it by thanking you, I learned a lot from your post.

It seems large companies have a few distinct advantages:

1\. They can operate divisions at a loss (e.g. Microsoft Entertainment and the XBox 1). They can "ride out" a down economy. This would be like having an angel with really deep pockets.

2\. Stronger negotiating position in all cases: employees, clients, and vendors. Again, the investor network can compensate here for startups.

3\. Kind of an outcome of #1 and #2: brand and leadership longevity. Sometimes you really can know more after having operated a business for decades.

My opinion is that all those advantages could create barriers to entry... but the big co's have enough problems of their own to let small co's innovate past them.

IMO this is good for both the large and the small, and especially good for the market: the established players can bring huge resources to bear on optimizing "solved" problems. The startups bring the right mix for getting ahead of the curve.

<comment><USER12> These are excellent points that get us closer to considering the question of when big companies are a good idea--especially #1. The ability to operate divisions at a loss and ride out a down economy is certainly an advantage had over the small firm who one might expect to be much harder hit when its core competency is hard pressed by external forces. So, one might be justified in saying a big company is a good idea when market forces bear negatively on participants, allowing the large firm to weather the storm less disastrously than a small firm. Of course, one can counter this proposition by arguing the large firm thus exhibits an unnaturally advantageous existence, not only bypassing but perhaps also eroding, perverting, retarding, and preventing evolution of the market in directions for which it is unprepared and in which it would lose its currently stronger standing. And yes, a similarly framed argument can be made _for_ the large firm in the context of the evolution of markets--the larger, stronger company is the more fit, as evidenced by its ability to ride out market changes, retooling and repositioning itself for future success when the chaos dies down. However, I think it more likely this is only true as a result of its unfair advantage in having been large enough to not be naturally weakened & removed by the market as smaller firms are-- because it is not removed from the market as a result of large concentrations of capital not possessed by smaller firms who are potentially better suited to adapt to changing conditions more rapidly but are forced out due to markets operating in line with extant large-firm bias (even when the market itself could benefit from the loss of the large firms).

#2 is, for me, quite close to the line of thinking offered in the OP, and of course the one I take issue with--it is more a statement of the way the market works now than a solid reason for why a big company is a good idea. I find this is a result of market players operating in such a manner as to give preferential treatment to a large company for reasons that don't actually equate to a larger company possessing this stronger negotiating position _a priori_. Rather, leveraging an existing preference that is itself an artificial construct (historically built by large firms) atop the market offers little in defense of why the large firm exists or is a good idea. In essence, the large firm enjoys a stronger negotiating position in the market because players in the market prefer to negotiate with a large firm because they believe it is in their best interest to do so because the large firm wields vastly larger capital with which it entices the players to negotiate with it over smaller players. This is circular and, in my view, ought then be discarded in attempts to explicate why this is a good idea.

#3 is a bit harder to pin down. I'm not convinced there is an inherent goodness in brand longevity as far as markets are concerned--or where employees, vendors, clients, or anyone else matters. I also find the material history of humanity and the markets replete with more examples of why leadership longevity is a bad thing than the reverse. There are certainly far more examples of long-term leaders ultimately driving their companies--large or small, it doesn't really matter--into relative oblivion or disarray or irrelevance than long-term leaders consistently innovating ahead of the markets, responding to changing conditions and rapidly correcting course so as to move forward. Leadership longevity often results in market players who have a vested interest in maintaining their position in the market through either coercion, prevention, or weathering out blips. It also can create companies who fail to change with the market because they believe _they_ have it right and the _market_ has it wrong. Perhaps in some cases this can be true ... but the perspective is always funny to me when people discuss "correcting" the market or some similar type of action. Correcting the market has always struck me as code for "get the market back in line with the operational goals of the large firms who have been benefitting the most." When the market moves against them, they seek correction and realignment. When the market moves toward them, they seek protection and cultivation.

Anyway, your points are far more interesting avenues to thoughtfully consider when big companies are a good idea. Not yet to the "Why do large firms exist?" question from the article yet, but at least getting closer to what I thought the author was going to do. And, we're still far from the question the author started the article with in the first place, of course.</comment></comment></comment>


The "Army of One" entrepreneur - <AUTHOR> http://swombat.com/2012/1/17/army-of-one-entrepreneur <comment><USER2> In theory I like this concept, in practice it blew up in my face.

After two years and two ideas that failed, (executed poorly, no traction, no market, trouble in cofounder paradise -- you name it, I've failed it), I decided to try a different approach: rapid exploration of niche products. In the course of a year I spun through about one idea per month.

I got remarkably good at (in)validating my ideas. (Hint: write down who you think your target market is and then pick up the phone. Have a conversation. Ask if they would pay $X dollars for your product where X is something that makes you cringe because you think it's too much. If it's worth pursuing they won't hesitate to say yes. Then tell them if they give you $X right now you'll start building it for them -- if they ask where to send the check you're golden, otherwise you need to rethink your assumptions. If you don't know anyone to call run some ads to a fake landing page, collect emails, then offer an amazon gift card or something for a 30 minute phone call. I wrote about it here: [http://twosixes.wordpress.com/2010/05/29/tips-for-talking- wi...](http://twosixes.wordpress.com/2010/05/29/tips-for-talking-with- customers/))

I finally landed on something, (and feel free to steal this) -- filtered google alerts for PR agencies. I had customers using the service and waiting for a bill. But I never implemented the billing system, I procrastinated it hard core. It wasn't because I was afraid they wouldn't pay, (they would have). It was because I was afraid of supporting the project. It was like I built myself a job I didn't want.

So for me the biggest pitfall of this approach was a total lack of vision combined with a drive to pivot to product/market fit at all cost meant I created something I had no passion about whatsoever.

<comment><USER3> Interesting, not to get too off topic here but is there a reason you didn't use a 3rd party service for billing like Paypal or something? Sounds like you went 90% of the way and stopped at the last 10.

<comment><USER2> More like the last 1%. Implementing the billing system would have been trivial. It was a mental block. I just didn't want to completely commit to the business I created.

<comment> mike-cardwell This sounds like something you could have sold. Did you? What happened?

<comment><USER2> It ended up here: <https://github.com/sfioritto/lookout>

No license but I'll throw a BSD license on there later if anyone wants to use it.

Update: It's been a while but I think when I left off I was working on a bug in the Bayes module. The concept was new to me at the time and I was still wrapping my head around it. Also I'm sure the email parsers are out of date at this point.

Basically the whole project was an excuse to learn Bayes rule and use Lamson. Plus people wanted to pay me for it. But once I got the code out, I quickly lost interested as explained above.

EDIT:

A few emails from people interested. Look here for a little more info: [http://twosixes.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/welcome-to-my- delus...](http://twosixes.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/welcome-to-my-delusion/)

After this I learned you need to price it for the entry level PR folks to pay for it. Honestly I learned so much after this I think your best bet would be to pick up the phone and chat with PR people to fill in the gaps where I left off on the blog.

After implementing the billing system I was thinking of pivoting out of the PR agency market and into small businesses (who do their own monitoring). I was also looking at ways of gathering alerts without actually using Google Alerts and blatantly violating their TOS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm kind of curious how successful swombat is, and if he followed the strategies he's recommending to others.

What I see a lot is that a lot of startup people give startup advice in order to draw more attention to themselves and to their products/consulting gigs. When I see that swombat has two businesses and time on the side to do consulting, then that's a pretty big red flag.

<comment><USER5> I should really take the consulting thing out. I'm spending 95% of my time on GrantTree, half a day here or there on Woobius, and no time whatsoever consulting.

I've invalidated a few ideas via this approach, but right now I do have an idea that's "sticking ", so I'm following that one for now.

<comment><USER5> I should add that yes, I follow or have followed most of the strategies I talk about, and when I haven't used them myself, I say so!

My posts are based on direct personal experience. In some cases the "lesson learnt" may be anecdotal/deeply contextual, but I usually take pains to follow my own advice in [http://swombat.com/2011/1/20/how-to-write-good-startup- advic...](http://swombat.com/2011/1/20/how-to-write-good-startup-advice- articles) and make the context clear so that the reader can decide if this is useful advice for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great post. There's a "swing for the fences" mentality in the SV / startup community that I think has driven a lot of potential talent away from entrepreneurship in general.

The idea that entrepreneurship requires immense sacrifice to do well, or to be "worth doing at all" presupposes a set of romantic values that _just don't_ map well to the relative size and frequency of market opportunities.

My Mac app nets me between $100-200 per month, every month, for noise-floor incremental time commitment. For anyone obsessed with becoming a Successful Entrepreneur, that's a 'how dare you even mention it' achievement. But you would be AMAZED at how an extra $100-200/month can improve a man's happiness at the end of the day. It's like an anti-aliasing algorithm for all those little bullshit expenses that, in aggregate, can lead to non-trivial stress.

If that $100/month (and the feeling of delivering value to direct customers) makes me 5% calmer and happier while I'm hanging out with my wife and son at night, it's an enormous win.

<comment><USER7> I've made the same realization. There's something incredibly satisfying about having built something that others find helpful. That's where most of the joy of entrepreneurship comes from. Optimize for reaching that goal first and then move onto secondary goals like becoming a billionaire or changing the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> (Slightly off-topic)

I said this on twitter, but just realized that I never said it here ( > 140 chars this time):

Daniel, your blog is great! It has quickly moved on to my "must read" list. I don't know how you do it every day, between your own thoughts and the curation of so many others' great content, too.

I may not understand everything and it may not all apply to me, but believe me, enough of it does. Fellow Hacker Newsers should definitely bookmark you.

I also have a hard time understanding how someone could have such a high quality daily blog and get much else done. I struggle to post once or twice a month.

Keep it up. Your efforts have not gone unnoticed and are really appreciated.

<comment><USER5> Thanks! :-)

 _I also have a hard time understanding how someone could have such a high quality daily blog and get much else done. I struggle to post once or twice a month._

I'm not quite sure how I do it either! I think there's a certain rhythm that comes out of writing something every day. It's like the anecdote about the pottery teacher who asked graded half his class on the weight of the pots... the more you do, the easier it gets to keep on doing it.

Unfortunately this last week I haven't quite kept to my daily rhythm... but I've got 2 more articles in the queue now, so the rest of this week is covered. :-)

Perhaps worth also noting that these days I wake up around 5-6am, and my first priority is usually to get a blog post written. That might take an hour or two, then I get on with my day...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This pretty much describes exactly what I did. I worked on my idea nights and weekends for about 6 months (iOS app) before launching. 6 months after that I was profitable enough to quit my job and do it full time. Instead of going the typical startup route and seeking funding and hiring people, I decided to travel the world while building up my startup. After a year of doing this, I'm making many times what I was at my day job in silicon valley and really enjoying being my own boss. I think the army of one part-time idea really resonates with my personality. I like the idea of startups, but I have a family and am fairly risk averse.

</comment><comment><USER10> The niche market accessible to one person working part time sounds very much like what Rob writes in "Start Small, Stay Small", and I think it's a great concept. In particular, one aspect of it that's good is that it works fine in "the rest of the world": you don't need to be in Silicon Valley or get VC or anything else.

That said, I'm not sure about parallelizing the process, that presents some risks if you're already spread thin.

<comment><USER5> It certainly is, and I've linked to several of Rob Walling (<http://www.softwarebyrob.com/>) 's posts in the past. Rob is a great example of a one-man-army type of entrepreneur. I know a few others who are successfully applying this model.

Re: parallelising, obviously you can only focus on one thing at a time, but many ideas take time to build out - as in, waiting time. If you've got control over your time, why not spend that waiting time testing out other ideas? In practice, I think most people who are still at the validation stage will in fact parallelise part of the process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> tl;dr version: People usually do a depth-first search for product-market fit, but there are good reasons to consider a breadth-first search.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd not advice this for people that loves their comfort zone nor those who have a hard time unlearning things.

For the rest, it might be their hope.

If you can be hyperproductive you can do it. But you can't be that productive if the technology you use doesn't help you to achieve that by design.

In my case I've validated the product's idea with a prototype in ~15 days, then started to develop the product. Now, it's in full commercial operations since last august.

Here I've wrote a little about the technology I've chosen: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3467308>

<comment><USER13> I'm glad you brought this up. It can be unhelpful/damaging to tell someone "this is the way." It could cause cognitive dissonance, confusion, and conflict for many between one's own previous experiences of what they are currently capable with and what is being stated they are required to do to be successful. I go through this very often. The latest being the push that's going to around, mainly that VCs and incubators perpetuated, that you need to find technical co-founders. This mainstream idea is promoted because it reduces the risk for those who will profit/benefit from reduced risk in their investments. Likewise, people who are, as you call them, hyperproductive, will probably have more successes from having more experiences and also be the personality to be vocal of their methods and will have more experience and success to be vocal about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm highly skeptical of this iteration idea. I've been through this two times and it's taken me two years each time to fully prove out the idea.

Any examples of good businesses that have been proven out in a short period of time?

<comment><USER5> You can't "prove" anything about businesses until they either finally fail or finally succeed (whatever your definition of failure or success is).

However, you can get a pretty decent idea of how successful an idea will be if you push it further without spending anything like 2 years on it. Most ideas that are invalidated after 2 years of the founders working their bollocks off on the business could have been invalidated much sooner than that.

Ask experienced entrepreneurs (who have built profitable businesses) around you. I think you'll find that most of them already do this to some extent - they don't commit fully into an idea until they've tested the waters and found that this idea is worth committing into.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "What's the best strategy to get from having no startup to having one that provides you with income?"

I would argue that the answer to this question is to enter a market that has already been verified for you.

In the start-up community there seems to be a huge emphasis on seeking out and creating new markets and business models. While this is a fantastic thing, it is in no way a prerequisite for starting a business.

Everyday entrepreneurs the world over start successful businesses in preexisting markets. If you're a developer looking to start a business, you don't need to verify a market for mobile application development, you know it exists. The only barrier is your skill level and ability to attract clients.

I know this stuff is obvious, but I think the notion of validating markets has become overemphasized in the start-up community. There are plenty of opportunities where much of that leg work has already been done.

<comment><USER5> That's not a bad angle, and in fact to minimise the risk, a services business may be a good idea. However, services businesses come with their own bundles of problems, not the least of which being that you're still caught in the "sell your time for money" trap which stops you from doing other things. It's better than a job, but not as good as building a product.

I think in all cases where you're building a product, whether it's competing with existing products (better), or an entirely new thing (worse), there is some amount of market validation to do. Does anyone _want_ your "accounting software with this extra feature"? Will anyone care about your "Basecamp but with a different look"?

Best to validate those before sinking lots of dev effort in them...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> swombat, what mental framework would you apply when looking at a project and wondering if it is "the one"?

Or perhaps I should be taking from your post that unless you really are tackling a problem that takes full time over several years, then your plan probably should include running multiple businesses/sites at a time.

<comment><USER5> Quick answer as I'm on my phone!

The framework is simple: each of those projects is basically throwing something on the wall to see if it sticks. Your definition of "it sticks" may vary, but basically, if you're seeing enthusiastic responses from target potential customers, in a tangible way that means you're fairly confident that money will be forthcoming, or even better, if you're seeing money coming in, then it probably counts as "sticking".

The exact definition depends on the type of business... I'll write a follow up post to explore that in more detail.

<comment><USER16> Thanks, and I'd love to hear more as you mentioned.

For example "money coming in" could be:

* $100/month (ok, we're getting something)

* Or $2,000/month (still not enough to live off, or whatever is less than your living expenses)

* Or $5,000/month (ok, I could live off this)

* Or $10,000/month (from my perspective would be a comfortable income).

I guess one part is one would have to look at the acceleration of the growth. If it's $800/month after 2 year's work it doesn't sound like you're really on to "the one".

<comment><USER5> "Success" really depends on way too many factors to come up with a general formula, as I've argued in this article:

<http://swombat.com/2011/12/23/entrepreneurial-success>

However, I'd say if your business helps you move one rung up the ladder (from zero to survival, to comfort, and then to wealth) then it's "successful" at least on the financial level.

In terms of figuring out if the business is "sticking" early on, that can't be ascribed just to money - it really depends on what you're building. You need to figure out the core metrics that drive your business and see whether they're going somewhere good. In some cases, the metrics are money, in others they might be user growth, or something else!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You've been around here for quite a while, but other than recognize the name, I knew little about you.

I want to say that I just finished reading your account of the London bombings - and how close you were that day - and was quite moved. Recognize this coming from a 5 year infantry vet that often sees stories about "how I was 5 km from a bombing!" as much ado about nothing.

I'm glad you took the time to share, and I hope that the action helped in your healing. Cheers.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is how I work.

As an "army of one" you can be almost as fast as a small team, and you can execute with much higher conceptual coherence. I.e., you can aim better.

It is important to filter out ideas you're not interested in running, even if they could make money.

And once you start getting traction, it's important to focus hard on exploiting it.

Making $1000 per month is harder than scaling that to $100,000 per month (if the market size is large enough).

<comment><USER19> _Making $1000 per month is harder than scaling that to $100,000 per month_

Many times over, although it seems like everyday I hear of an affiliate marketer who is killing it online and I wonder how.

<comment><USER5> _Many times over, although it seems like everyday I hear of an affiliate marketer who is killing it online and I wonder how._

Having interacted with that world somewhat in the past, I can say that there are some very rare affiliate marketers who are making a good chunk of cash - but those are people who have invested a lot of time and energy into building vast mailing lists of followers who sign up to stuff they recommend.

If you're willing to spend years building such a mailing list, you can make a few thousands a month jumping between various MLM opportunities. Personally, I'd find that deeply unsatisfying work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I suppose many here work on multiple projects, in fact is there anyone who doesn't? It's just that people don't usually brag about their failures (or non-successes). Personally i start a new project every 2 months, usually minor ideas or things i couldn't find online. It doesn't take that much time anyway ...

</comment><comment><USER21> Does this advice apply to those that are working at a dayjob? I find it hard as it is to focus on 1 idea

<comment><USER5> I think so. You don't need to focus on all your ideas at the same time, you can take turns with them. The more important take-away is to test multiple ideas until you find one that actually works, before committing to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Great post swombat! A great followup post would be one on identifying and testing micro-niches.</comment>