FWIW, I agree with OP here. Kids are a game changer and having a stable paycheck coming in gives you time to dedicate to your family without stress. This is highly underrated in the first 3-6 months when you're trying to figure out what this new life looks like (living on 2 hour chunks of sleep). Speaking from experience trying to start a company, having a kid, then quickly realising I need a job asap.
Riverdb's https://github.com/riverdb/riverdb/blob/master/README.md seems to appear a bit counter-growth.
- A proprietary, alpha software is could be anti-growth in the PG world.
I think your README.md can be made more welcoming with
- a getting started - tutorial/configuration - install steps - a video link why this is cool.
It definitely needs documentation, getting started, tutorials etc. But I never really published this or even made a website for it. Thanks for the tips!
Now I will go back to startuping.....
Working at startups is not the way to wealth (i worked at too many). Goodluck and networking will get you there much quicker then hard graft. Thats how the majority of the winners come about. Getting lucky out of the blue, thats a totally different game. You idea could be the best, but because you couldnt market it, its a nothing burger. Do you want your kid to grow up around a stressed out shell? or a WFH dad who can spend their timing growing with their child?
I this guy sounds like me; my honest opinion is u can get a job, and still work on your side project. The guys i know who made it at our age, well they are telling me they wish they wernt that successful because its so much more stress. Being responsible for employees is a totally different game to SWE. It changes you.
Hey I love coding, tech, AI and I'm passionate about it. So Creating a software others use, make me so happy. Having a small team of people, who can grow with me is the other aspect which excites me.
Went through all worldwide & Ycombinator startups which are high growth. Registered at Workatastartup. Used https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/ to see what they are searching for.
Chose 10 companies with positions where I have very strong hard skills. Interacted with the particular company's product. Wrote a nice paragraph on ideas how I can contribute.
Not necessarily. I believe, at first, the only thing you need to do is - talk with people. Start with tech conferences. I believe a lot of them would let you deliver a session. You will create more connections and also you'll get a lot of feedback from people that will help in refining your message and pitch. One talk after another, you will realize how accurately people are able to understand, what you are trying to deliver. Refine, talk, listen - that's your cycle. Also, because you are building an open-source product - you might also find some contributors.
Edit - ‘Talk with people’ - you already started here. Good job on that.
Ask questions of people like product managers of the form, "How do you validate your ideas for products before you commit to invest building them?" or "What product did you think would be a hit and was a total flop? What caused it to flop?" Ask people in release engineering or manufacturing, "What takes the most time in getting a product out? How about a feature to a product?"
If you are a software developer, imagine that a functioning, growing company is a large legacy code base that you want to learn how it works. How the pieces work together, what the roles of the parts are. If you're a hardware engineer imagine the company is a big circuit you're analyzing, same thing, what do the parts do and how do they contribute to the overall functioning.
You will get to know a lot of people in the company and you will get a much better understanding of what it takes to bring a product to market.
What ever you do, and this applies to people anywhere in their career, do NOT consider any job "just a paycheck." Use a job to learn more about why people are willing to give this company money so that the company can pay you to work there.
The secret, such as it is for entrepreneurs, is "For what reason would people give me money?" And you can also ask "What would I pay for this idea?" and then subtract from that what you've learned from your work experiences would be the costs of producing it.
PS> Even the best university education does not train you to build a successful company from the ground up. Nobody teaches that, you have to learn it from people who have done it or even better are doing it.
I have often wondered how to distil this point down. It's like these people know the patterns/systems that work to generate the results they want. They can replicate them at any company and generally know what needs to be implemented or what's missing. Tune from there. I think the key is somewhere in the patterns/systems but still that's too vague to implement. Basically, you need to join somewhere successful, get to a level were you can see across the org, and learn what patterns/systems they use and replicate them. Mix in competent people too.
And it never stops being important.
People do some bizarre things to get their jobs done each day and if you see enough similar bizarre things from lots of people, you ask questions then present potential solutions to see if there’s a product hidden in there.
Wishing you luck!
This one girl Sarah who raised $800k-1million and told me today that she's looking to hire her first engineer.
They are all in this YC-Level community https://founderscafe.io
The description of what you are building sounds like a deeply technical, profoundly specific thingie for deeply technical people (with unknown market, and unknown business proposition at best). The fact you have not started with or outlined the problem it solves, the business need, or who is the customer in non-technical terms feels like a massive red flag to my naive mind. Bluntly, at best it sounds like a "tinkering hobby" - NOTHING wrong with that, unless you need to pay the bills :).
I would suggest getting a job in a place / position where you can observe the business flow, verbiage, get some mentorship, and not only pay the bills, but set yourself up for long term success should you desire to build something of your own again. I have no idea what your technical prowess is, but it sounds like you may have spent your years building stuff rather than building business, and that's where your growth opportunity lies. To put it another way "Selling and marketing are not my skillset" is almost a token of pride for us techies, but it is empathically not a successful mindset for a potential business owner. If marketing and selling are of no interest to you, and you just want to do the technical part, than accept your own preferences and priorities and go work with/for somebody who does prioritize and excel at sales and marketing :)
(all this of course based on reading three paragraphs you've shared and therefore as likely completely misread and wrong as not :).
Best of luck!
P.S. For what it's worth: nothing prepares and nobody can explain to you the MASSIVE transformation and upheaval of your life that having children will be:). If money is in any way a stressor, to you or relationship, or if this brings you anxiety, that's another good reason to settle that down before kids come along :>