By that, I mean product-based businesses with at most a few million in revenue, a 5ish person team, a solid sustainable market position, and no desire to revolutionize any unicorns.
I believe this used to just be called "a small business". Not a terribly new idea, but being rediscovered perhaps by tech people?
A small business is fundamentally different from lifestyle tech business or a bootstrap. There could be hundreds and thousands of small businesses, say in a certain FMCG market in different local ares. A tech market with hundreds or thousands product businesses catering to a same target audience, probably, doesn't exist at all. Product companies tend to either grow or whither. Centralization is the norm.
Building a lifestyle business mostly rules out services as most desired lifestyle business model is some sort of passive income scheme. Content oriented monetization models are being slowly, but surely killed by ad blockers. An innovative product tailored to the needs of a small, well defined audience seems to be a best bet for a lifestyle business and that's very different from a classical SME.
I was reacting to the definition of "lifestyle business" not the label.
I don't think passive income is needed at all, I think "lifestyle business" is a useful definition for making tradeoffs in your business decisions in favor of your lifestyle.
e.g. setting up a consulting business in a small coastal town because you like to surf every morning, even though it costs you potential business. To my mind, that's certainly a "lifestyle business".
Doing this with a product business is harder but not impossible.
> I was reacting to the definition of "lifestyle business" not the label.
I don't know about you, but personally I get annoyed when people create a false dichotomy between a startup and a "lifestyle business". Not everyone who declines to play the VC game is a "lifestyle business". It should also not be a dirty word, which is the way it comes across to me sometimes.
Lifestyle business is a dirty word somewhere? "Lifestyle" business is a significantly more rational choice in comparison with VC backed startup if one considers their personal happiness and psychological wellbeing as an important metric.
> There could be hundreds and thousands of small businesses, say in a certain FMCG market in different local ares. A tech market with hundreds or thousands product businesses catering to a same target audience, probably, doesn't exist at all. Product companies tend to either grow or whither. Centralization is the norm.
Each local area is a separate market. Those types of businesses have limited geographical range, and a given range can only support a handful in a specific segment. For a technology business, the market is usually not limited by geography. Fundamentally, it is the same principal: a given market can only support a limited number of players.
Now, the size of the market may preclude traditional small business growth models. It depends on how tied to locality a particular business idea is. I could see, for instance, something like Homejoy working on the scale of a single metro area. In fact, having dozens of metro-area-sized Homejoys might actually work better than a single, national incarnation.
