Ask HN: I have no “business sense” what to do about it?
6 by the_only_law | 5 comments on Hacker News.
Bit of quick background: no education, have worked mostly in lower paying software jobs in a variety of environments (mostly non-tech) I suppose this may be a place to ask as this seems above all, a business oriented site. I have absolutely no “business sense”. In fact, I’m not even sure if that’s the correct term. There’s always a lot of talk of startups and businesses on here and it all seems so foreign to me. I have no network (most people I’ve worked with have been lifers at whatever company or I’ve long since fallen out of touch) and virtually no friends at this point. I have no idea how to go about entrepreneurship: knowing where to look for problems, figuring out if a problem could be a potential business, etc. I know very little about business finance or how to bootstrap something. I have no capital of my own and am not sure I could build any in a reasonable amount of time (though perhaps some software business, such as SaaS products, don’t require much to get started). I don’t know how to sell myself based on past experience due to how random and vague it is. I typically find myself uninterested the “hot” or “up in coming” areas of tech I’ve seen and when I do find something I’m interested in, it’s mostly always in an area that doesn’t make for a good business for one reason of another. Maybe it’s something heavily commoditized already, maybe it’s in an oligopolized industry where entry is just unrealistic, or maybe it’s in an industry that tends to be a bit more “gatekeepy” where someone with my background would likely be unwelcome or not taken seriously. Now that’s a lot of stuff I don’t know or don’t have. Perhaps some of them could be realized with enough research, but others seem unlikely. What sort of things can I do to remedy the above issues? I’m still very young at the moment, but I feel I’m running out of time to decide to do many things. Not that I can’t do them later in life, but the returns will be diminishing the longer I wait.