news.ycombinator.com• Jul 15, 2024• 1 min read
Flying Solo Is an Unfair AdvantageI've always wanted to build and sell my own software.But I imagined nasty things like taxes, legal, support, and maintenance coming my way. I would be taken to jail for accidentally violating some esoteric tax regulation. My favorite part was always building, and the employee trade-off of having more constraints and no grown-up responsibilities seemed like a great deal.Not only did it seem like a great deal, it WAS a great deal. Most of my years as a wage-slave have been quite enjoyable. Like Nassim Taleb says, "The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary."Running a niche software business in the cloud now requires so ridiculously little overhead that it is almost a rounding error. Most of the taxes, accounting, compliance, payments, servers, networking, databases, and marketing can be automated away if you are willing to pay for it. Take my money!There is another shift, too: generative AI. It now writes most of my code, helps communicate with cust