What happened when I opened a restaurant in Portland
It&#x27;s amazing how much better we Software folks have it when it comes to starting a business.<p>Last I checked, the profit margins for my single-player SaaS business were somewhere around 90%.  And the interesting thing about that isn&#x27;t even the number.  It&#x27;s that SaaS is so profitable that <i>you don&#x27;t even have to calculate your margins</i>.  To an order-of magnitude, every dollar a customer pays for the service can be considered profit.<p>Real Businesses have expensive office or retail space.  We have &quot;wherever we happen to be living at the moment&quot;.<p>Real Businesses have employee salaries.  We have an industry where a single person can plausibly run every aspect of the business from writing the code to marketing to racking servers to high-touch Enterprise sales.  That single &quot;employee&quot; can have his &quot;salary&quot; set to (Total Profit) &#x2F; 1.<p>Real Businesses have equipment and other recurring costs.  We have those too, but they&#x27;re <i>tiny</i> compared to other types of business.  Like, single-digit-thousands per year tiny.  All in, for servers, software, dev hardware, etc.<p>It&#x27;s almost unfair, how Software wins in pretty much every category against pretty much everything else.<p>Nobody tell anybody!