Not everyone wants the responsibility of being in control of their own destiny. Even though I’m a fulltime freelance developer, I don’t have enough constant drive and ambition to follow a single idea I’ve had. Maybe I’m just lazy.

I think there is another factor: knowing your business / your context; being aware that skills and vision may not be enough – “selling” is something I know I’m not good at.
That said, i’m going to sign up at builItWithMe :)

This is a really big problem for me, and actually something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. I think I have something in the ballpark of an answer. Conveniently, this dovetails nicely with a post that was just written by Paul Graham, The Top Idea in Your Mind

To understand the context, go read that and come back. I’ll wait.

I’d like to think that I’ve actually had a lot of good ideas, and fortunately a lot of those ideas have found their way into Open Source projects. Could those ideas have been used to build a business (or two) instead? Probably not.

Developers (typically) live in a self-reinforcing world that is focused around solving developer-centric problems. Software architectures, IDEs, editors, terminal hacks, git workflows, etc. These are the kinds of things that developers focus on, and while they make great hacks, and things you can easily share with others, they don’t necessarily make great businesses.

But sometimes they would make great businesses, and this is the crux: because developers are so focused on solving technical problems, they might not even see that the solution to a particular technical problem is marketable in the first place, let alone how to market it.

Some people (like you, Marc) have made the effort to exercise their brains at solving both types of problems. For the rest of us, having someone with good (i.e. marketable) ideas that appeal to us (and preferably money and/or some useful technical skill with which to contribute) that we can partner with is really helpful.

Efforts which you need to put into business is so much more than working for others.

The biggest problem (for me at least) is that I can’t complete my ideas/projects because they don’t raise money. If they don’t raise money and I haven’t win the lottery and I don’t have a trust fund…Well… Life keeps going on and I have to pay bills. My college loans alone are half the cost of rent and then there’s rent oh yea and cable bills, phone bills, etc. Then don’t forget to eat. That’s the cycle, each month on the same day (roughly) I watch all the money I earned leak out.

My top idea, my “business” that I could be building simply requires time to complete it. Time I don’t have because I need to do something that will bring in money to pay bills.

So I do have a project that hopefully will make me money and will be profitable day one. It is a business built by a web developer. Can I benefit from having other developers help me? Sure. Things will get built faster. Do I need a designer and project manager and an entire company to build it? No, I went for Graphic Design, I can develop. I can build the entire thing and manage and setup the server myself. So what would I raise money for? Who do I need to pay? Hosting? Well, that’s fairly cheap and with ads and affiliate programs hopefully by the time I get more traffic and need to pay more for hosting, I’ll have it.

So it’s a profitable since day one business, via ads, affiliate programs, etc. The problem is, I’m so swamped with taking care of my bills and needs, that I can’t take care of this “business’” needs. So I think that may be one reason why more developers aren’t building businesses. It simply is easier said than done. EVEN when you have a REALLY good idea. Not that I think my idea is unique or the best in the world, but it does have fairly low competition and it’s done differently.

So there – add another one. Knowing the landscape. Maybe there are more developers than you think starting businesses…So the question becomes, how many developer startups fail? Maybe more developers are building businesses, but we all just haven’t heard of them because of the high rate of failure. Especially in this economy.

I have discovered “bartering” websites recently. I have swapped expertise with people who have different skills. For example, I am primarily a web marketer, but not a programmer. I have listed my marketing services in exchange for programming services. It works!

Great post @Marc.

In addition, if devs want to be entrepreneurs they should learn how to let go of programming and start learning on how to be entrepreneurs. Learning the market, going outside and asking people around about what software do they want is an example.