chowes

Anyone else amazed that those ads only cost 10k?

Use what you know and run fast. Any day you've spent debating this is a day you aren't closer to shipping.

They mention this in the article

Not a book, but Microconf has been posting all of their talks on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHoBKQDRkJcOY2BO47q5Ruw

> Call around, talk to your network. I don’t just mean those ~300 people you’ve never met on LinkedIn, but your actual family, Facebook friends, etc. ... Figure out what the problems that they’re having are. Solve exactly the problems they express

This is, imo, the biggest hurdle for engineers who want to become entrepreneurs. I've seen so many HN posts about people trying to crowd source startup problems, trying to automate away this piece and just get down to coding. I too struggled with this for the longest time. I felt like a solution looking for a problem. Just give me a problem, any problem, and I'll build the best damn app and be on my way!

But that's not how it works. If you want to stop being an engineer, you need to stop acting like one. Engineers have their problems roughly scoped and entered in a JIRA board. Entrepreneurs have to go find problems to solve. You want to go be an entrepreneur? Go learn to talk to people. Go learn to listen to others, empathize, and to convince people to believe in you. You will be a company of one - so go build out your personal sales & marketing departments.

Buying put options are a great way to protect yourself against downturn risk. I think of it like an insurance policy. You pay a premium to protect yourself in bad times.

However, I'd recommend always having a put contract outstanding, not just when you predict things getting worse. You got lucky this time, but next time you may be too late.

Not the OP, but what I have struggled with here is the feeling of being a "solution looking for a problem". It's a step before where you're at. It's not that I can't identify owners, it's that I can't identify _problems_.

I am lacking the domain experience to even have the first conversation, and it feels like paying people to ask "so tell me everything that is wrong with your business" is the wrong way to do it.

I know PG mentions "solve problems you have yourself", but I am not a business owner. I'm a software engineer.

That video you linked earlier - Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business - was incredible and feels like the right move once you have that idea. But what about finding that idea?

I can't seem to find anything about Case - can you link to them?

Check out https://workona.com/. Been using it for work recently and really enjoying it.

Why wouldn't you just use regular Python?

Must be related to them merging the chat backends for WhatsApp, FB, and Instagram

SEEKING WORK

Location: Boston, MA

7+ years experience.

Remote / On-site

Specializing in:

- Machine Learning / AI / NLP

- Search / Graph Databases

- BI / Data Analytics

- SFDC, Quickbase, additional "low code" platforms.

- Web app development (frontend / backend)

- Python dev

chowes2168 [at] gmail [dot] com

This is satire, right?

oh i would do anything for love... but i won't do that

Looks awfully similar to Mark

Looks awfully similar to Clojure's EDN

Took me way too long to realize that image wasn't playable...

Maybe an ingredients.json instead of a package.json, sub versions with quantities, and then this becomes a constraint solver!

I can't wait for a Visual Studio Code implementation of this...

Pretty cool. Just a thought - maybe add an endpoint directly to the shell script? Would be cool to be able to simply `curl max.io/...` and see it

Not trying to be dismissive here, but is there any more to this than declaring the DOM and on* handlers in JSON?

There's a road on the right hand side - you can see cars driving by.

We were still having product-market-fit surveys with potential customers, and friends (some of whom are investors).

I think narrowing down to a specific industry like you're doing helps the problem immensely. A true schema builder is a hard sell to both non-technical users (when point solutions offer more with WAY less setup) and technical users (see how tech people view Salesforce, for example). However, Quickbase and Airtable are doing it currently. Very interested to see how Airtable matures.

Ah alright - so definitely more aimed at people who can code. Ours was more focused at end-users.

That is one area where Salesforce shines. APEX and Visualforce can get you just about anything you may need for customizations. I'm sure something similar will pop up, but then people will complain about having to sell your soul to them, too :)

Workato is another nice tool to augment Quickbase & Airtable. It's like Zapier, but allows you to add some code (Ruby in fact) to do custom hooks.

I guess it really depends on how complex you need to go, which then brings me to my point about being master-of-none - at that point you're losing your abstraction and essentially building a custom app.

I agree with this in premise, and had a very similar idea with a friend earlier this year - that many of the business apps out there are really just CRUD apps.

The main piece of feedback that we got when pitching this idea was that you're going to end up as a master-of-none. Yes, we could give you the tools to set up Customer, Ticket, etc. objects. But in order to win over Zendesk, you're going to need all of the features they provide. Chat, ticket queues, automation, etc. Business users also don't want to be architects - a turnkey solution that solves 80% of their use case is better than a blank slate that they have to start thinking about schemas, relationships, etc. The old saying "nobody ever got fired choosing IBM" can now just as easily be applied to VP of Sales picking Salesforce.

That being said, there ARE tools to do this: Quickbase (enterprise) and Airtable come to mind. I'm curious if the author has looked into using one as their base instead of Google Forms/Sheets.

I'm sure AWS will happily host any of the hundreds of startups who want to (try and) beat the Echo in the "consumer facing" aspect. It's a win-win.

Babel is doing a great service at making such complexities painless from a user's perspective.

Looks pretty great - why stop at academia? Many devs would love a quick, good looking resume or github page.

When working with a large (read: quantity of models) REST API, is there a parallel Redux pattern to Ember's ember-data?