There's a "Growing B2B SaaS" podcast that had a guest that made an impression on me. He said tech is the wrong industry to try to grow a lifestyle business. You can do it, but your business is substantially more likely to be disrupted than more brick and mortar industries.

You might've had a solid calendar scheduling app in 2015, but by 2024 everyone is eating your lunch from every angle, while the plumbers continue to plumb. And the major moats like network effects or marketing specialization usually only apply to larger businesses.

His advice was to always go big, grow quickly, and sell quickly. Even if you go smaller for a higher chance success, the income stream likely will crumble as soon as you stop actively pressing forward with the product because of the intense competition in the software space. The lower risk option of growing and selling quickly, in his estimation, was the best risk-adjusted return.

This is such good advice. Other than domain experience and or networks of relationships that can help introduce them to domain problems...I wonder how people get exposed to what software to build/problems to solve?

This resonates .. I built top selling Mobile Apps in 2013-2015 and very quickly after making it to the top copycats came from all over and revenue dwindled.

Source? Sounds like a conversation I want to hear more of.

Podcast is "Grow your B2B SaaS", the guest was Ryan Allis.

You can always go big after starting small. The most important thing is to start. There are 1000s of small things which are not visible unless you start.

The effort to do something small is definitely less than when you try something big. And my little experience even hitting small is exponentially difficult.

Agreed on the first point, but I'm once walked with a VC who told me the the owner of this restaurant (him pointing at a restaurant) works harder than Mark Zuckerberg .. I found to be likely true.

So the concern here is that it may be as hard (or very similar) to start something small vs trying for something big .. I will note that going for something big also likely means starting small (so again same effort)

Ah, the struggle of life: finding the lowest gradient slope to climb that results in the largest maxima. A slope where you're not too early, not too late, where you can build a moat, and where you hopefully enjoy the journey.

You used a few ordinary words but you described my dream

There are hundreds of thousands of restaurants across the US, ranging in size from a food truck to McDonald's.

You can have a big idea that makes no money (like Quibi, a streaming service that raised 1.75 billion and shut down after 6 months). You can also start as a door to door salesman selling baking powder and accidentally create Wrigley's gum. You can also assemble custom computers as a side hustle and then scale the business to become Dell.

You have no clue what's going to become a big business. You have no clue what idea will require a lot of work, and what idea will just go viral. Candy Crush makes more money than No Man's Sky.

The thought that you can predict what idea will make it big is laughable. VC's invest in hundreds of companies because while they're pretty good at picking companies, they know it's largely a crapshoot.

I think this is mistaken, there are ideas that obviously have the potential to be big .. and ones that have hidden potential to be big. Some people's entire jobs is to find a track them (whole VC industry). But yea, it's not easy.. it's tricky.

I mean, yes. The total addressable market for some ideas is larger than others. But realistically, you have no clue what percentage of that market you'll be able to capture. You can guess, but that guess has a lot of uncertainty.

>Some people's entire jobs is to find a track them (whole VC industry)

I mentioned this. What percentage of companies that a VC invests in actually go big?

I'm not denying that VC's are great at their jobs. But I'm pointing out that the best of the best at this have ~5% of the companies make more than a 3x return. 50% lose money.

I don't have the insights of a VC, but I always liked Peter Thiel's approach of "You want to be the last mover, the last company in a category".

Not in the sense that everyone should always aim for it, but simply as a "reality check". You won't be able to directly compete with large established players - so don't.

The problem with that argument is that it will have you waiting forever for a gig as cushy at Mark Zuckerberg's.

If you wanted to start a company like Zuckerberg's you had one place (Silicon Valley) and a time period of less than ten years in which things like that were getting funded (or alternately, a similar window in China that may or may not still be open)

You'll always be able to find people who want to be partners in a restaurant, whether or not they are out of their mind is another question.

You don't need to be waiting tho .. the question is whether to deliberately go after big ideas .. Marc Randolph, founder of Netflix, specifically went after Netflix as an idea to be really big and make him a lot of money .. So did @pg with ViaWeb

10k MRR no debt solo biz more or less means retirement in a high COL country. I would worry about maximizing your odds of success

> 10k MRR no debt solo biz more or less means retirement in a high COL country

Without context, this could either be very nice or not remotely feasible. A charitable take would be that you have next to no expenses, and some other personal salary or have another household income, and you own your own home, and you're basically already prepared to retire anyway and this would be an amount that you'd be able to earn in perpetuity, then... maybe?

But if it lasts only a few years then that's just a nice boost to savings or a down payment on a small condo. In my high CoL city, if you earned the equivalent of a flat $10k/m after tax and managed to get it all up front, and not have to spend any of it on literally anything else, then you'd be able to pay cash for a townhome and be back to needing at least a few grand a month for living out the rest of however many decades you have.

It's retirable money if it's the floor of what you earn over the course of an entire working life, or some other variables prove favorable, but I guess it's quite bleak how not far that money goes these days.

A person has to be completely financially incompetent not to have a very good life on $10k per month – no matter where in the world.

Or an expensive drug habit, or paying loan sharks, etc.

20 years ago, sure. The US has become obscenely expensive since then. Two kids in preschool at the same time in the US will be about $3000-3500/month. Add a mortgage on top of that and that $10k has mostly evaporated.

If you're falling for such scams then you'd have to put yourself into the "financially incompetent" category. You can hire a nanny for less that will take much better care of your kids.

Cost of a full time nanny is about 3000/month in a high col area. Childcare for small kids is expensive, and while it may be a scam, it’s a scam most parents I know have no choice but to pay into.

Describing mortgage payments as a scam seems pretty out there. Renting isn’t any cheaper, and with a mortgage at least your home is an investment

$10k/month (after taxes) for the rest of your life? Ok, I agree. But if it’s just for the next couple of years, it’s certainly not a game changer.

> A person has to be completely financially incompetent not to have a very good life on $10k per month – no matter where in the world.

I don't agree, or at least it depends what "a very good life" looks like, but that's not the point, and I think it's just a strangely framed association between MRR and retirement, which is usually discussed in terms of an aggregate at some specific point.

If I make $10k a month as revenue and take it all as salary, I'm left with probably ~$7k or less after taxes, assuming I'm not paying an accountant, doing all my own paperwork, all the usual caveats. That's potentially a great salary depending on lots of factors, but it's only a retirable amount if a very healthy portion of that goes directly to retirement savings/investment. If you don't own a home yet, it's easily possible that $2-4k of that could go right into shelter costs, $1-2k to miscellaneous daily expenses and bills or transit. It's great if you're single, own a home, have no dependents, are frugal, have roommates etc... and as an income in retirement at a typical retirement age, it's probably pretty great in many cases, but as a young person you'd need to keep it up for a few decades consistently to retire on it, and idk how safe a bet it is that a small project would continue earning that money long term.

All of that might be implied, or it might not, idk anything about the person who posted it originally, but $10k a month after paying for a high CoL mortgage or rent, food, a kid, I just don't see it. $10k a month USD living in SF? $10k a month AUD living in Sydney? What about $10k a month CAD living in London?

There's just not enough information to make such a confident assertion, imho.

> [...] what "a very good life" looks like [...]

The great American philosopher Russ Hanneman comes into mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oV4IVy8tvE

While $10K was a rough number, the same can be said about $20K .. it "should be", "relatively easier" to get to that solo .. the point is should you aim for that, or aim for much bigger .. which will mak you realistically hit that goal .. and my perspective had been that aiming big, while starting small (smallest complete unit to get you to a reasonable income). What you do after is another story.

the purpose of the expensive property in the high COL city is to be near the best jobs. 10k MRR is recurring, it is not a job, it continues if you stop working, it is an asset that can be sold, it means you never need to be employed by someone else ever again. Recurring revenue also grows, 10k MRR today is 20k MRR in 2 years if you work it, which you have time to do because you are not wage slaving your life away at your job making other people rich, clocking your hours and vacation time for those 4% raises while the business doubles revenue. 10k MRR means you are now free to do literally anything with your life that you want, such as grow your business if your number is 50k MRR or whatever, which is $600k annualized and at 8x saas revenue multiple can be sold for 5 million which makes you top 99.9%† net worth in the world.

†Fact check: not top 99.97 I as originally stated, just top 99.9 according to https://docs.dpaq.de/17706-global-wealth-report-2021-en.pdf - $1M threshold = top 1.1%; $5M threshold = top 12% of the 1.1%

> the purpose of the expensive property in the high COL city is to be near the best jobs.

Yes, in theory, and in most cases, among many others.

The rest of your comment provides useful context, and I agree, it's a great place to shoot for and build from, such that if it grows to those numbers it's certainly possible to rely on in full retirement mode.

...a family

But if you're already there tho :), I don't know if retirement is the right path ... I would think it's aiming for something big ... I cannot imagine a life of relaxation .. especially if you're young and healthy .. also building big gives you the power to do more good in the world .. no?

A life of relaxation can be a life of helping people, making art, making useful things without using revenue as the metric, pushing the limits of your field.

> 10k MRR no debt solo biz more or less means retirement in a high COL country.

That's not even an engineering salary, and you haven't factored in operational costs. It needs to be higher than this. And there's also no guarantee the business will last.

He didn’t say high COL city, he said high COL country.

Plenty of people retire without engineering salaries in the US. $5k/month after taxes and expenses can be enough (or it can be a fraction of what you need).

Agree that thinking of it as a never ending money tap is the bigger issue.

But yeah if you gave me $10k/month pre-tax today (assuming it was never-ending) I’d be done working for the rest of my life.

US social security pays about $3k/mo, so $1k/mo post-tax pre-expenses is not just enough to retire but also typical. These are real numbers from a real person (unmarried) in my life. They own their house, have about $200k in retirement assets (generating that $12k/yr in income) and otherwise have a fine life which is spent mostly gardening and helping parent grandkids. People are not rich!

The main issue with this narrative is that social security is on track to be insolvent in less than a decade. If that happens, then the long-tail of regular non-rich people are going to be in a world of hurt.

There are risks, costs and benefits whichever path you take.

Have you ever built something small? I mean the whole thing, including the parts you know you're not good at and the parts you've never done before. If not, maybe start there.

A big idea can be aspirational: "I will make the biggest bestest X the world has ever seen." You can have that goal and still make the smallest most interesting part of X as your first iteration.

If you prefer a more rational approach, there are standard methods of business/product assessment that you can apply at the idea stage to rule things in and out. Success or failure is rarely guaranteed, but if the idea is big, unexamined blind spots can bite you years down the road.

Another factor is resources: do you have time/money/drive/attention-span/grit to see a big idea through to maturity. There are many steps in that process and each step has its own challenges and potential for failure.

By buildings small things, you will find ideas for bigger things that people actually need.

Yes, and by building small things, you can more easily try out different techniques and tools with less risk than doing the same with something big.

I think it's optimizing for learning versus revenue, which don't have to be mutually exclusive. Sometimes you need to start with one to get to the other.

When MicroSoft BASIC came out, you couldn't see Windows, Azure, or even Word. But there was a path to here from there.

So build small things to get to big things? (I guess you can decide at that point)? This maybe successful as a strategy to find "big" ideas ...

> My thinking around that is it's pretty much the same effort to build something small or something big

Your thinking have huge mistake, because you thinking about money, without considering market.

What I mean, market is not a single flat place where all 6 Billions walking and you will look at them from crystal tower.

But real market space is multi-dimensional, for simplicity I will tell analogy.

Imagine, Newton method of finding roots of equations. For simple case it could been considered rough 2D surface, like Moon surface projection, with indefinite number of holes, and some holes are huge, and others are tiny.

And height of edges of hole, which you research are important, because they are practically proportional to energy need to overcome edge of your hole, so it defines some tension, or budget to come to other hole, or it named enter barrier.

And hole width define, how many money could be here.

What important for business, as I said before, you are not only person on Earth, there are at least hundreds millions smart people (about 10%), who also want to make some money and making research of their environment, so your concurrents are aware about surface line of market, and where it have holes.

And typical human avoid small holes, prefer to enter large holes or even huge holes.

So, when you enter tiny hole, huge probability, you will not see any market concurrence there.

What also important, start small doesn't mean, you will not become big any time, as you could make some fat in small niche, and than you could make try to enter bigger niche, or few neighbor small niches, etc.

In reality, McDonalds and Walmart began in regional small niches, and enter mega-cities after make fat in niches (for mcdo way you could watch "the founder" cinema, for Walmart, read "made in America").

Sure, if you have few spare Billions, you could start already big, but I bet, you would not ask this question having Billions.

PS any way, you are not alone, ask if you consider cooperation.

What I also remember, market professionals usually name big holes as red oceans, mean, they are red from blood of huge players, battling there.

It depends on what sort of life you want. I'm not a 'wheeler-dealer', so I'm keeping small. You need to go big to become a billionaire, but then it takes over your life.

You also need to think about what your product actually is, how many people want it, how much they want it, and how much they'll pay for it. Market size might make the big-or-small decision for you.

Finally, I think you need to consider what sort of problems your individual knowledge and experience gives you insight into. There are already thousands of PDF converters crowding search engine results. You need to find something that no one else has thought of (even if it's just a variation on someone else's product) so that there's something that makes your users want to give you money, rather than just using whichever competitor was top of the search results today.

Every single big thing started as a small thing. Every single one. Google was once just an algorithm and some math. Slack was a chat app some game devs built to talk to each other.

The Path Appears To Those Who Walk.

If I understood correctly, you're saying starting small is best because things that may seem small may actually be a thread to something big .. even if it isn't obvious .. but the habit of starting things will be the truest test .. this is a good one.

The best thing imo is build something that addresses a pain you already live and understand. Trying to build for an industry you do not know will be much harder

Instead of thinking about what to build, think about what to solve, so that you are not running around with a hammer looking for nails, and instead you are looking through the toolbox for the best tool for the problem at hand

VCs can only back ideas that are worth over a billion dollars. Everything below a billion dollars is small.

This creates two different types of companies. With VC-backed you'll have an abundance of cash, because that cash is buying you time, growth, etc. If cash is the problem, then do big ideas. A common strategy is to grow one vertical and ignore the others, while paying off the ignored verticals with cash. This is your YouTube without ads, your Android without an app store.

With smaller ideas, you'll be self-sustainable and resistant to enshittification because you're not buying (tech/product) debt with all that money. You can't actually build things that need multiple verticals, like Facebook or Google; you'd run out of money long before. And you often can't hire senior level talent.

The downside is the big idea will usually buy out all the small ideas. You built a PDF converter for a game and then Zynga offers you $10m cash for it. Is that really a downside?

Also one thing that's always overlook is distribution. How do you reach the market? Slack lost ground to MS Teams despite having the better product because MS dominates enterprise channels. Big ideas are able to dominate distribution and siege you no matter your moat.

I've thought a lot about this, but there is so much critical context that has to fit into your thinking. And it depends on your goals. If you are super ambitious and want to change the world, only big ideas will do. If your goals are more about money or lifestyle, $50,000 / month is the same no matter how you get it. The older I have gotten, the less interested I am in the scope and risks of change-the-world ideas ;)

Getting that kind of money from a big corporate job, I would guess, is a lot more hassle-ridden than if you did it on your own. I also think the competative context is important to understand.

I actually have been experimenting with a tool[] I made to very quickly get an understanding of just how competative the marketplace is for a particular idea -- big or small. I have a million ideas, prefer the "smaller" ones, and prefer to enter where there is a real market opportunity.

https://already.dev

To go big you first have to dominate a small market. Every big success started as a niche. It's not so much that you can pick the size of the success ahead of time, but rather make sure to increase the odds that things will work at all.

My advice:

1) target a large TAM - is there a large enough market of people that are willing to pay for that type of solution?

2) try to maximise problem-founder fit - what are your unfair advantages and do you have access to early adopters who can give you feedback and spread the word?

Ideas are common. Execution is rare.

Execution is much easier on something small.

(Side note: Facebook wasn't big to start. Facebook started as "Stalker-R-Us on Harvard College Girls")

After a decade or so of experience, execution has become a lot easier, and it's good ideas that are rare.

I don’t think it’s a binary thing that you can just pick. I think you need to have experience to know what the big ideas are for an industry - especially now that the low-hanging web 2.0 ideas seem to be pretty well picked through.

You mention Zuckerberg - even Facebook was made through having experience in the right market and taking an existing product to the next level, and probably a bunch of iteration along the way.

People forget that FB started small. It started as a webified version of the print Face Book for Harvard students. It grew incrementally from there.

Microsoft started as a BASIC interpreter for 8bit microcomputers. MSDOS was a re-branding of QDOS as in quick-n-dirty-OS.

It's not the same effort to do something small and something big.

It may be at first, but if your goal is $30k MRR then at some point you could consider your task to be "done" (ideally, in reality its never like that). There are businesses that once set up it takes a lot less effort to keep afloat than to keep growing (and that's why they are attractive).

It is very, very hard to raise money for something small though. Maybe you can get a loan, but anything anywhere near the favorable terms that VCs give you is impossible. Games use publishers for equity funding and the terms are terrible.

So, if you are going for something big, you are better off going for pipe-dream-big. And know that once you start you will basically be on the growth-train until IPO/acquisition or exit with an empty handed. If you are going for something small, you will almost certainly have to bootstrap, which means it will take time.

Whatever it is you want to do though, just do it now. Time flies and it doesn't forgive.

This resonates .. intentionally going small may not be the same effort per se .. but because it's harder to raise money or you raise at like 50% dilution .. you're tight for budget .. all this adds up to be the same amount of work for the first few years .. this is actually a helpful perspective.

You should probably not confidently believe that you can make a “small game” that is guaranteed to generate $10k (let alone $30k) MRR.

One thing about utility is it never ceases to exist as long as the conditions are perfect, something like PDF converter was a repercussion of Adobe acquiring the market of a new format via Windows and one day Windows decided not to include Adobe suite in Windows. That's what crashed the complete cycle, now there are millions of PDFs in circulation with gigabytes of information but latest version of Windows doesn't contain any stuff to edit, compress, convert them atleast not to a normal person who's the real consumer. Plus there comes the point of charge required just to convert information in same medium which some people don't agree on paying hence this type of tools will exist till the dawn of computer

From a business perspective, both small and big ideas have their pros and cons. Small ideas are easy to implement and iterate, which can quickly validate the market. You can accumulate experience and funds before aiming for big projects. Big ideas have great potential but come with high risks and large investments. Which do you think you're more suitable to start with, a small and steady project or a high - risk, high - return big one?

I think TAM is a relevant metric here.

Most people think of TAM as "how big could this be". But an equally important side is "how many people might be willing to buy this". Because that measures how easy sales will be.

Big ideas have larger TAM and therefore it's a little bit easier to land that first sale. Even with a very early stage product. With a large TAM you can pretty much throw infinite darts at the board and maybe on will land.

If you target too specific of a market (.dwg => .pdf converter for civil engineers). You'll have an easier time finding your market, but fewer chances to land the sale.

For those who haven't seen it before, TAM = Total Addressable Market.

The 'big vs small' debate is not always about money.

The World Wide Web was a much 'bigger' invention than FaceBook; but Tim Berners-Lee's net worth is a tiny fraction of Zuckerberg's.

Is "Imaginary Situation A" better than "Imaginary Situation B"?

No idea. Just hit the market with what you have. Iterate until you find people willing to pay for your thing.

Actually this is a position my friend is exactly in and I'm helping him navigate .. my thought was go big .. but curios to see other thoughts

The point is that nothing is real until it's done.

A dollar irl is worth more than one hundred billion in a fentanyl-fueled fantasy.

If you can make something small that generates 30k in MRR, you should definitely do that. I fear that you are being quite optimistic about the numbers here…

You're more likely to release a small idea than a big idea which means a small idea is more likely to make money than a big idea.

Small ideas will need less maintenance and constant development but you could spend more time on bespoke features for customers.

Small ideas win everytime for me.

You won’t find one true answer that fits all use cases and your lifestyle. What approach motivates you?

The general YC advice is to find a way to validate your idea and “fail quickly” with the least amount of time and effort.

That’s kind of orthogonal to the potential scope of the problem, but applies to how to get started.

A solo-developed game generating 10K-30K in MRR over more than a handful of months would already put you on the top 10% of all released games on Steam. It's not likely to happen unless you have experience in the space and possess strong artistic skills.

This! Data! okay, so it's actually rare to get there .. and you'd need skills to get there .. wouldn't it be better to push harder for compounded results?

Hit a single first before trying for a home run.

Just do something that you can execute well

maybe you need to answer this question: Are big ideas just a collection of small ideas?

So much of this depends on the context, goals and personal situation.

The answer won't be the same for a multi millionaire looking to spend his time working on a cool project or for a low wage worker trying to make it and quit a boring job.

If you already have financial freedom, i guess you should aim for the stars, as in go for something big.

I you're trying to reach financial escape velocity and get rid of your 9 to 5 job, you might want to try small ideas first as it should be easier targets and you probably only need one successful project to be free. Then you can go for the big ideas.

Ah .. I thought about this, but I've found that most people who have hit "financial freedom" generally tend to lose momentum and lose drive .. fewer of those actually end up building something bigger .. just a personal observation .. although honestly it seems compelling .. but unsure how it will affect me / my friend specifically

Look at reward to effort ratio. Big doesn't mean more money.