How easy is it to become an entrepreneur in 2024?

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.

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.

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.

I’ve launched startups since 1996, now advise & invest as well as run my own.

I see products all the time that are compelling & do a better job solving a problem than any other problem in the space.

Doesn’t matter.

Sales & marketing is the hardest it has ever been.

I’ve stopped looking for product opportunities. Now I look for distribution.

Peter Thiel’s advice in “Zero to One” is avoid competition, find a monopoly before it becomes one.

Another strategy is find an existing monopoly with an underserved need or want.

Steps I've been taking so far -

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.

Easy is some ways and really really hard in others. The stress will shave a few years off.

For a lot of people, a job in big tech is the way to go.

Whatever you decide to start, 80% of your time will be dedicated to sales, marketing, and biz dev, so make sure you like these activities.

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.

It is the same as it was, because the ease of creating a business is displaced by the difficulty of making money from it.

Being a entrepreneur is a descriptive label, not a prescriptive one.

What kind of entrepreneur? You should search out opportunities you believe in, not what somebody else is saying is the next trend.

You don't need to say "non-entrepreneur" - by default everyone is a non-entrepreneur if you're not an entrepreneur.

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.

If you have the sales skills and another marketable skill then it’s easier than ever.

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