Yes, well, I went into partnership. It was hard to leave my previous job in a big company as it was a good company, good package, great people, 10 minute commute. The reason I left was because although the job was good, I would never become more than a small cog in a large company and then retire. I wanted to do something cool, make a difference, and have a shot at earning enough for my family to have a good life and start some altruistic projects.
The things that enabled me to leave and start something new were that I became more known for my work so I was offered opportunities, advances in broadband, video conferencing, web based project management, collaboration tools, powerful hosted DVCS, and other free tools allowed me to easily work from home so I didn't have to relocate or commute for hours.
It has been a good few months, it is going well, and I'm excited for the next year.
Yep, back in January. I wanted to do design work professionally so I set up a simple LLC. Real motivation was to test my own skills and see if I was able to run a successful business. Went full-time in October. Despite all the negative connotations around starting a business these days, I can't say I have too many complaints.
Side note: Congrats to all HN members who started a company and kept it going this year. It's a lot of work, but fun as hell.
Yep, I started Parse with some awesome co-founders in YC. We started it because we saw all the pain that comes with making an internet enabled mobile app, and wanted to make a platform that made it easier.
That was you?! Awesome! I love Parse. I'm signed up in the beta and it's not just giving me a backend service but teaching me some iOS programming too. Thanks for that man.
Not a company, but I have been doing freelance work on my spare time since college. I graduated 2005. 2011 is a special year for me. I got 3 more regular clients and made more in a couple of months than what I would normally get in one year with my dayjob. Regular cleints keep sending me work. Eats a lot of time but totally worth it since I (w/ wife) have plans to move to New Zealand.
Yes! About a year after finishing school, I started an LLC to sell an electronics kit [1] that I was working on and also as an entity to receive income from an Android app's advertisements. It's been great; I'm not quite in the black yet but I'm already experiencing some growing pains for hand-assembling these power supplies, and android ads pay my cell phone bill plus a little extra.
It's kind of neat to be able to say "yes, I build these things from scratch, based on my own knowledge and research, due to risk from my own pocketbook, while working full time."
Also, I've met some very cool people (whose work I had only previously admired from afar!) because I had questions about a library they wrote or was improving a design of theirs, not to mention starting to form a set of people who I can email for advice (from how to make PCBs to the best tape to order from ULine.)
My co-founders and I have just quit our jobs to focus full-time on it. It's a mobile-focused B2B media company (pull up constructiondive.com on your phone for a very rough feel for where we're going). I'm working on a blog post to explain why, but the short version is we see a great market opportunity and our team is uniquely qualified to fill it. I really like working in the B2B space because there's a ton of money floating around, but it seems so unsexy that there is little competition from innovative startups.
I've started to do web-dev/design and 3D since january here in France.
I'm 20, I work around 20-30 hours per month, and I've make 7000€ in one year (tax deducted).
We spent 2010 freelancing figuring out the business side of things a bit, earning some money to give us a bit of a runway, kicking lots of ideas around, and working on our tech chops.
12 months in we're starting to focus more on marketing and sales than development, and we're aiming to be profitable sometime before the end of 2012.
We connect travelers with locals in their destination who can give them experiences that traditional tour companies cannot.
Me and my co-founders have been bootstrapping it since earlier this year, when we failed to find any real competition online for this concept. In a fit of global consciousness synchronicity, there are a few dozen now popping up all over the world.
The first thing I see this service being used is for news readers. Not having to develop this technology themselves will lower the cost/barrier of entry into their markets, so hopefully they can focus on interfaces. Beyond that, I'm sure people could use it to scrape and aggregate information about what people are concerned with around the web.
On charging for it, I'm not sure yet. I was thinking of using a credit model similar to Twilio for payment. Service might be 1c/unique (previously un-fetched article) and .1/0.1c for each fetched (cached) article.
I've run across OpenCalais before and I think it's a great big idea -- I love the idea of a semantic web.
Also, let me point out that it doesn't work on pages that aren't necessarily articles. For instance, someone did a search using : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3390727
I've got an update coming down the tunnel to fix this, but it might be difficult with this page because there isn't much substance. I'll think more about how to solve this in a way that makes sense relevant to the rest of the pages out there. My main focus is to not write any code for edge cases, but to figure out a way to solve the whole of the web at once. :)
I know it is a shunned statement around here but "I developed an idea for a company" this past November. Regrettably, my programming skills are limited so step 1 is learning enough to create a prototype for my project. I am really interested in shaking up the language learning industry and plan to be able to answer this poll differently in 2012 :)
Continue to better your programming skills, it's a challenging but worthwhile endevour.
Being as though I was in the same boat as you (and my programming skills are still laughable!), what I found to be really helpful is while you're learning how to program, using other skills (maybe you know how to make a webpage, or animate)to create a mock-up to more quickly and easily translate your idea into something concrete and more understandable that could attract people (read: potential co-founders) into at least looking at your idea--at the very worst they can see that you've put some time and effort into your raw idea and as I'm sure any technical co-founder here would say, that's a good start. Good luck Meng. :)
Sure did - http://gun.io launched in late September, with the idea of making it easier to find freelancers for microtasks, and to channel more money to open source projects.
I'm a single founder, and it's a boostrapped project, but I'm counting it here anyway. Things are going well.. I think, at least.
Yes/No. After HN told me it was stupid to give away freeware, I quit my dayjob, moved back to the States, and started two companies. Doing great and happier than ever!
One of these companies already existed as a non-profit, so that was re-filing to go the S-Corp route and start making real money. The other is new.
Totally biased poll obviously but still nice to see all the stories.
I was lucky enough to find two amazing cofounders to start Ridejoy and doubly lucky to participate in YC. Being a founder isn't for everyone but for me, it's the most thrilling occupation I could imagine. I wouldn't trade it for anything.
Yep. I quit my job to start my own venture. It was scary but it was long overdue. For a while I had been doing the "working on the side project after work" but then I realized that if I do want to do this, there is no half-assing it. It's time to go big or go home.
Sorta. Within the last month I put together http://exquisitejobs.com/ and started collecting interested emails. I aim to make it easier for quality freelancers and job seakers to find great jobs!
I have started a new startup, but haven't started a company just yet. Where I live it would be a suicide, and I only plan to start one once the project is ready to make money or raise investment.
I usually consider my start-ups to be pre-trading/revenue stage, where it can have a url & be in active development, but not be necessarily be an active registered company. Generally I prefer to avoid the expense (and in some countries the hassle) of business registration if I'm not sure the start-up will reach launch or revenue stage.
In my view, a startup is a commercial project -- which these days can easily be done online without formal incorporation, even by a single person. And if having a formal company hurts more than not having it, the choice is simple.
Shutdown one startup (Notifo) with one awesome cofounder and started Picplum.com with another awesome cofounder and we became roommates too. 24/7 startup bliss!
"While Notifo will continue to run in the interim, I encourage you to find alternative methods to accomplish your notification needs."
http://blog.notifo.com/notifo
Incorporated a newco this year (webvio.com) which is the first new entity in awhile. Its a labs project with our first launch of todayskicks.com so far.
I started Helpjuice.com a couple months ago. It's now profitable.
I had an idea, called a few companies that I thought would pay for it. Then, I skipped school (I was in high school at the time) for a couple of days and built it. After I had built the BARE minimum version (now that I look back, our "search" was using simple MYSQL LIKE "search" and I was selling it) I was able to get a few companies to pay for it. And am now working on it full-time.
Maybe I'll write a blog post one day about the process.
Looks like a very good service. I've already found better deals for a couple of the medications that I am taking, and one where a 90 day supply is little more than a 30 day supply. You have been bookmarked. Thanks.
There are two probable sets of selection bias going on -- one is that HN readers are probably much, much more likely to start a business than those from the general public (just like Fox News viewers are more likely to vote Republican) and then on top of that, people who started their own business are more likely to take the poll than those who didn't (because they are people who did start a business, clearly the topic is of more interest to them).
Sure: I was the founding CEO, and wasn't scaling with the company. I helped hire a CEO with more industry experience who already knew most of our potential partners - one of them had actually offered him a senior position.
I left on good terms with a decent severance package and kept a good chunk of equity.
