buttminer

I am a big fan of this. As a 25 year old, I feel that I was truly the last general to experience what true boredom was like as a kid. Hanging out at the school during the weekend wondering what to do - those days are over now. Technology has definitely taken over our lives, and now there's always something to do.

I believe that leisure time is something that most people don't have nor know that they want. As the article states, it lets you think outside of the box and come back with fresh ideas. In a work-centered society though, it's really hard to justify spending that time. Even knowing all this, I still fall into the trap of always being busy with something.

The first thing I did was find paying customers, as brudgers mentioned.

There are many many many business ideas that are hard to generate a single dollar of revenue off of because the problem you're solving is not big enough.

I'm in the cannabis point-of-sale space. The problem I was solving was inventory management for a single store I knew. If could help him track his numbers better, that was worth money to him (because he would save money for his business), and he was willing to pay $100/month for that right off the bat.

If I was solving something like, have a cool iPad display to show your products to your customers, that wouldn't be worth any money. It's not solving a big enough problem.

As we scaled, our value propositions shifted from a micro-scale more towards government compliance. Now we charge $500/month because we are solving a bigger problem.

Long story short: find a problem people are willing to pay for. If nobody's willing to pay, that's because the problem isn't big enough.

I got an email 2 hours ago saying that I didn't get in, then just one one a few minutes ago saying that I was in the advisor track? Sounds great... but is the system sending correct emails for round 2?

Don't want to get my hopes up.

For speed of development, you want the most normal/boring stack there is, in combination with what you're familiar with.

Note that if there is more than 1 engineer, it is absolutely worth it to work with common technologies. Elm/Elixir are not common technologies (though people love talking about them).

Node + Express for the backend is super simple. Mongo or MySQL/PostgreSQL you will have no problems with (though I am biased towards relational databases) React for the front-end is also simple, very well known and easy to hire for.

If your application is more basic or more CRUD-oriented (as most apps are), Ruby on Rails has always been a solid choice and will continue to be a solid choice for years to come. There is also a very large pool of people who are very well-versed with it.

"Vue.js is awesome. I’m telling this after having used React for more than a year in production software". I wish the author gave some mentions as to why that's the case (and why he's even using Ruby here).

I've been using React with MobX and Typescript for the past year in production and it's been treating me and my team very well. The framework feels quite invisible at this point.