In some ways it's easier than ever before, and in others it's much harder than it was 10 or 15 years ago, depending on your industry. For software, the barriers to entry have been decimated. Modern frameworks, libraries, PAAS, and now generative AI etc massively boost dev productivity. It's viable to build an MVP as a solo dev in weeks or months that used to take years.
However, it's easier for everyone else too, and the market is now so flooded with B2B SAAS apps that it's extremely difficult to find an untargeted niche, or even one with incompetent competition, and it's even worse in the B2C space. All the low hanging fruit has been picked.
I started my own company Grizzly Bulls (https://grizzlybulls.com), an algotrading platform, two years ago and the experience has highlighted the difficulty of the non tech aspects of running the business -> marketing, sales, support, etc. It's highly niche and my indicators and models and therefor value prop are entirely unique and unclonable, but the hardest part is reaching new audience. As a freemium SAAS, we have very strong free to paid conversion and even lower premium churn so customers must be content with the product and results, but I've found it very difficult to grow the top of the funnel exposure.
No, even with all that you mention, it's still fairly difficult to make an actually good website, regardless of the amount of AI you throw at it. In contrast, the marketing side is still within how it was before, simply because devs know nothing about marketing, generally speaking.
Frankly, I'm still very much trying to figure out viable and efficient marketing strategies myself. A large portion of my current users have come from somewhat viral posts/comments on HN, reddit and other investing forums. I also have social media accounts with automated model performance updates and free signals, but I don't have a ton of followers.
I've tried blogging and that's hit some decent results, particularly some of my technical blogs directly related to building algorithmic trading systems, but blogging is very time consuming, so I'm unsure the $/hour really pays off in such a niche space. I even wrote a book on the topic, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C9SB2LDG, but also that was a lot of work that I'm not sure was worth it.
So, best of luck! Marketing a very niche product/service is way harder than I originally anticipated. I'm now brainstorming how to pivot marketing towards a more mainstream audience. Really the market for investing with alpha and generating higher long term returns than the market should appeal to just about anyone with a disposable income, but building a level of trust and understanding is key.
I feel like your grizzlybulls.com site is quite nice & loads very quickly for being under the load of HN visitors. The idea of democratizing algo trading for the masses is appealing, but there is that trust factor even for mere trading signals, let alone automated trading. You may have to provide more rationale on your site for what (and which) algos can do for the everyday trader.
I think I'd give consideration to changing the name since I'm not sure the name speaks directly enough to the idea of algo trading. I'd work on finding a better one.
Your book looks interesting & I'll have to consider buying it. Good luck to you.
Thanks, really appreciate the feedback! I thought of the name Grizzly Bulls as kind of catchy since the goal is periodically hedging market downturns and so somewhat oscillating from (grizzly) bearish to bullish in macro outlook, but agree that it definitely does not feel directly connected to algotrading. I'll give it some more thought.
Easy and Entrepreneurship don't go together. Serious comment. But let's bite.
- Easy to "register" a business at least in USA ? Very easy. Could be done in 30 mins depending on the state you register in.
- Easy to "build" a product or service ? May be. If you have tons of experience in that product/service already. Usually not. In software world, I will concede that it is relatively easier to build things these days because of the ecosystem of libraries/open source/frameworks/tutorial/youtbe etc but easy doesn't mean simple and no guarantee for success.
- Easy to "sell" the product/service ? Very hard.
- Easy to "operate" the business ? people/customers/issues/tickets/hiring/legal/tax/accounting/ops/conflicts/lawsuits/contracts/govt bullshit blah blah. Not even close.
- Easy to "sustain" the business over a period of years ? (Read 7-10 years for anything real). hahahhah.
Importantly it depends on the country. Some are very easy and small business-friendly. Some are complicated and costly: high compliance fees, small business taxes and strict regulations. Hopefully OP lives in one of the former. Maybe someone here knows a nice list of business-friendly countries, I found -
Why does this matter? Anecdotally, I started out in a very friendly country and later moved to one with more restrictions. I'm not sure I would have had the courage to have made it work if I didn't have the earlier positive experience that have me confidence to work through it (and the cashflow to afford the right legal advice), and I've got friends in that more difficult country who decided it was too hard and went to work for someone else or left for an easier country.
That list seems pretty rubbish though. Austria and the UAE being comparable in terms of ease of business? Japan and the Netherlands? And no mention of the Channel Islands and Caribbeans at the top?
If it were so easy to do so, people would be rushing to set up businesses in NZ. I don't see that happening though.
It’s never been easier. It’s basically as easy as filling out a simple form.
Entrepreneur by definition just means ”a person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so.”
Then the real question begins: can you hack it as an entrepreneur? Can you grow, and harvest, enough to eat? Can you do it for others?
These questions define the heart of entrepreneurship — succeeding at being an entrepreneur — which is so very much more than simply being an entrepreneur.
Becoming an entrepreneur vs succeeding as one is, and do forgive the metaphor, like the difference between being a pig or a chicken at breakfast: the chicken is involved; the pig is committed.
This word has become dilute. What even does “greater than normal risk” even mean? What is success as an entrepreneurship. But as many on this forum can attest, the hammer and forge or entrepreneurship remains a crucible for testing yourself against the world as great as any other.
So file paperwork. It’s easier than it has ever been. And then join us in building something great, and find out for yourself.
There’s never been a better time to start a company! Except for yesterday.
Edit: not gpt. And it appears I’m unpopular with entrepreneurs who are vegetarians.
I think you ask the wrong question. One does not “become” an entrepreneur. That word serves as shorthand for someone who starts and runs a business, usually incurring some risk to do so.
Anyone can start a business. Fewer can start and grow a business successfully. I think the challenges have little to do with the year.
I'm going to write about my own experience starting a B2C SaaS.
I think it is much easier to build something complex in a short amount of time now than before. For example, you can use something like modal.com and have a very powerfull AI backend very fast, and you only pay when your services are active so you don't need to have deep pockets at the start. It was much harder (and expensive) just a couple of years ago.
On the other hand, this means there are much more people building things now than before, so it's much harder to stand out.
But the most important thing, I think, has always been your personal situation: do you have the luxury to dedicate your time to something that might not even work out in the end?
It is incredibly easy to start a business in the USA.
In most areas, you can form an LLC for $200 or less. If your product is a service or delivery based (not a physical storefront with local customer traffic), you may be able to legally operate from a home office without a business license.
Getting started is easy, succeeding is a little more difficult. The single biggest hurdle most technical people face is probably marketing and/or customer relations --- finding paying customers and dealing with them in order to actually get paid.
Techies often have a glaring lack of real world experience in this area --- which may or may not be a significant problem depending on the nature of your business.
If you need to even consider the difference between a one-time $200 cost to setup an LLC vs a $20 cost to setup an LLC, then you are going to have a really hard time being an entrepreneur and starting a business.
I think you're reading too much into that. A fact like that just makes folks curious as to how the procedures and end result is different enough to justify a 10x pricing difference rather than a reality check as to who or who isn't ready to start a business.
Without exception, the founders with the best outcomes in my network have a co-founder who has been in the industry for decades, has personal relationships with the leadership of the category leaders, and got a meeting with them for the startup in one phone call.
The startup becomes a design partner to the #2 or #3 in the space, proves out the model, and raises tons of capital.
Almost all the money in any industry flows through one company. Almost all the money that doesn’t flow through them flows through #2 and so on.
The power law is real in markets.
So distribution means doing business with a customer who has already captured the market distribution and solving a problem for them.
Study Proctor & Gamble, they pioneered the model of being a monopoly that provides services to their suppliers.
The biggest problem the category leader has in any market is that their market isn’t getting bigger & their supply chain isn’t getting more efficient to the degree that it could. They know why, they just don’t have solutions.
When I started out, computers were rare, and software was rare. We were in thd business of "computerizing" companies. We often supplied hardware with software. We found our space and grew as the space grew.
Contrast to 10 years ago where we saw a market with poor software, and entered that. Most businesses in the space had a product, albeit an inferior one. Progress capturing that market has been slow though, people don't like change.
If I was to do another product now, I'd focus a lot more on the willingness and ability, for the market to adopt new things. Being better (a fair bit better) is not enough. It's a lot harder now to get traction, to build trust, to convince people to change.
I'm a self taught swe so I have built all sorts of apps professionally. From social apps to e commerce to b2b saas. I've also done everything from web, mobile, infra, data, etc. I love tech!!
I'm also a big fan of optimizing processes, whether it was in my previous jobs like maintaining an office supply or cleaning. I like to help out my friends on their projects like building physical stuff or volunteering and then finding out their pain points and coming up with a plan and implementing it.
I'd like to build all sorts of businesses. It has been something I've always wanted to do eventually. I think everything is doable, but it needs capital. I want to put everything I've earned into my current business, and see how far I can take it before I try to raise VC (no idea how that works tbh).
I find that people who actually run businesses suffer from technology overwhelming them. They want a solution that works, but are forced to purchase multiple subscriptions and hardware solutions that don't work well. All the tools that do exist out there to solve these problems are really technical. Like think about Notion. Maybe you and I as tech workers can find it easy to use. Try getting an abuela or someone's abba who runs a shop to use it. Impossible. Even I find Notion hard to use at times and I consider myself a geek (definitely not at a Stanford level, but I try on my terms).
So I've got a few pilot customers hopefully who will use my software.
Through my software I hope people can build and sustain all sorts of businesses. Eventually I'd like to take a crack at the enterprise software behemoths. But that's way down the line, right now I'm just an ant :)
In my case I grew up not that well off, and I'm a first gen immigrant. I am trying to become an entrepreneur while balancing a full time swe job. I have no fallback at all, and while I have no family of my own yet, I do have parents who gave me a shot at life in US. I can't just go for broke because they rely on me to some extent. I'd say it isn't difficult, but requires persistence. I'm sure if I had a foothold in this country I'd be quitting my job already and living off my savings, but unfortunately not in this lifetime.
I'm hopeful that this year is a turning point for me. I'm in Bay Area for a while now, and hoping my hard work pays off. No revenue yet but I will get there :)
Starting a business in 2024 can be exciting! Using technology and working from anywhere makes it easier. But, there are challenges like many others trying too. Being different, making friends, and staying strong when things change are important. Success comes from new ideas, making connections, and being strong even when things are not easy.
Both easier and harder than ever. Building has become extremely easy, almost trivial. But obtaining an audience to validate and sell has become extremely difficult due to channel saturation and competition. You either need to be an expert at audience acquisition or have a large amount of funding.
Ok let me tell you a secret here. A secret which books, youtube channels, startup accelerators won't tell you.
The stories that you hear with hard work, finding a niche, product market fit, build a great product are all lies.
The true secret is what I think of as "dirty business".
Think: spam, sex, gambling, money making, scraping data, connections (which are not dirty per se but often not mentioned in stories).
Examples:
LinkedIn: spam
Snapchat: sex
Google: money making
Facebook: sex, spam
Slack: connections
Uber: connections, money making
Airbnb: spam
I can go on and on and almost any large scale success (over $10 million ARR) have had these things.
The only time these can be broken is when a new paradigm starts:
Examples:
PC
Internet
Mobile
LLM
These usually happen every decade or so and you have ~2 years to make it (Dirty business also helps here to go really fast).
The other key insight is the way the capitalism system works, if you achieve the initial growth, you almost always will succeed. To go from $10 million ARR to $100 million ARR is easy as pie.
So, the bottom line is if you are a normal, moral person, who is righteous and thinking I will make something to help others and disrupt the world, you will fail.
The alternative is small tech businesses which at the most you can sell for a few million dollars. That is still achievable and easy. You must hyper focus on a location and a niche and just sell to them. But I don't think of them as a startup. They are more like your local salons and restaurants. A mom and pop shop which is instead dealing in software.
For B2B software you need to have at least 3 - 5 customers willing to sign $10,000 and above contracts before you write a single line of code. This is still possible but you need the connections and the deep insight of the industry to make something meaningful.
I do not know why so much of the literature and teaching stuff discounts that initial spark which causes startups to grow. They are all lies. Focus on connections with local politicians (donate $10,000 to the up and coming politician?), movers and shakers, buying large amount of scraped data etc. Think dirty business and then maybe you will have a chance of succeeding.
Would love any counter arguments and comments. This is from a very long, over a decade research into why some businesses succeed and others fail.
Oh there's Uber mentioned at the bottom there, with no clear definition why it's not racketeering.
Another interesting situation was when I was reading up on bank runs. Basically the default behavior of a bank is to have a bank run when people pull out of it. People will pull out when deposits are not insured by the gov or other third party entity. 2008 crash happened because entities that were not banks were behaving like banks (e.g. construction companies giving out loans) but they were not insured like banks. When banks are insured, they are very tightly regulated to the point they make little profit.
Most of the time, when someone makes a ton of money in finance, they're not playing by the tight rules of banks but act like banks. Basically all the fintech stuff you see today.
Absolutely. I was talking to some more folks today. I just finished looking into this a few days back. I might write a book or something on this. It is crazy how much B.S. we are fed without talking about the spark. Building a good product and those things matter much later.
The big trend of the last 20 years has been the leveling of the playing field. Everybody has access to all the same information about what (not) to do. On how to raise money. On how to build products. That’s not to say that everybody has equal chances, it still matters where you’re born for instance, but it’s more equal than it has ever been.
This is good for most of us because the leveling works in our favor. But entrepreneurship being easier and more people doing tech startups also raises the bar for everybody. More competitive markets favor people who are better and work harder.
People demand meritocracy but don’t like what it implies: having to compete with the rest of the planet.
However, it's easier for everyone else too, and the market is now so flooded with B2B SAAS apps that it's extremely difficult to find an untargeted niche, or even one with incompetent competition, and it's even worse in the B2C space. All the low hanging fruit has been picked.
I started my own company Grizzly Bulls (https://grizzlybulls.com), an algotrading platform, two years ago and the experience has highlighted the difficulty of the non tech aspects of running the business -> marketing, sales, support, etc. It's highly niche and my indicators and models and therefor value prop are entirely unique and unclonable, but the hardest part is reaching new audience. As a freemium SAAS, we have very strong free to paid conversion and even lower premium churn so customers must be content with the product and results, but I've found it very difficult to grow the top of the funnel exposure.