In both cases it was the viral element of the idea that made it possible for me to turn what was once a side project into something more. If you can't spend all day every day working on it, you need something that will grow even when you're not watering it.

I wasn't actually planning on revealing this, but you guys seem to really want to know and the community has been good to me. And maybe you can give me more advice.

I actually have a degree in CS and I love to code, but I tried for a while and never managed to make money on my own with my tech skills before Patrick. I figured (correctly, I think) that my problem was not with my hacking abilities but with my business skills - I had absolutely no good sense of what people would give me money for.

In my mind, I saw myself stumbling around on a seemingly infinite plane while I was trying to follow a hill-climbing algorithm to maximize the amount of money I was making. So I imagined something like a random-restart approach might work: let's jump somewhere totally different and try climbing any hills we find there. Plus, I knew that people were willing to give money for baked goods, so I figured that simplified the business component to an extent.

It turns out I was right - I did find a hill to climb and I've gotten a lot better at business in general.

The dilemma now is I really enjoy coding and actually think I have the skills to run a softare business (which could ultimately be more lucrative), but have a growing food business on my hands. I'm certainly not complaining - really, anything that brings me more money to buy stuff like a dryer makes me happy - but sometimes I feel out of place.

Now that I've hired a manager for the bakery, I have a bit more control of my time and I've recently been able to take on a bit of consulting work, which has turned out well, and I'm pumping the money into growing the bakery.

I think that's the optimal strategy I can follow for now. What do you guys think? I look forward to hearing your thoughts on my relatively twisted path.

Really neat. I wished there was more stuff like this on HN.

  - You will constantly wait for them to make a decision.
  - It will be your fault they took so long to make a decision.
  - They will have emergencies of their own making.
  - It will be your fault they have emergencies.
  - They will commit to little or nothing on paper.
  - It's not their fault because they never committed to that.
  - You think you have specs; they think you're prototyping, so...
  - You will do much work 2 or 3 times.
  - They will constantly change priorities.
  - They will forget they changed priorities, so...
  - They will complain when a lower priority isn't done.
  - You won't get paid on time.
  - You will spend lots of time trying to get paid.
  - They will always find some excuse to not pay.
  - You may never get paid.
  - If it's good, it's because they thought of it.
  - If it's bad, it's because you suck.
  - You can't win.

In the middle of all this, they still had time to try to bully him into getting back the surveillance equipment from their botched attempt, with lines like "We’re going to make this much more difficult for you if you don’t cooperate."

Just reading the story sickens me.

I think you're missing the larger point: when the best and the brightest technological minds are chasing the instant riches of social networks for dogs, they're not creating new antibiotics, energy efficient cars, cheap building materials, or any of a thousand other different things that people with big brains might be doing to better the world.

People who are smart enough to be writing social networks are more than smart enough to be doing pharmaceutical research or inventing solar cookers for the third world. There's just not much of an economic incentive to do it, when it's easier to sell to the vices of the first world.

That said, I realize that I'm a hypocrite on this point: I'm in this wacky social-network-hoo-hah business as much as anyone else. I just wish the economic forces were aligned differently.