circleit
Advice to OP. Just do anything besides what you are currently doing and that will change your trajectory. Like try not working at your desk and work somewhere else. Work different hours. Don’t work and do something else. Just don’t do what you’re doing - do one of the infinite amount of things you could do otherwise
Anyway, you shouldn’t need to announce this and get all that PR or whatever. You should just be doing this all the time. Why? Because that is how you build products that solve problems / build things people really need.
I come from Stanford, and I know all these finance people, and I do all this data analysis and you investors should all give me money because I can converse intelligently. Blah blah.
Build fucking good products by living as a user of your product. No hubris here, but I signed up the first couple thousand of my users by busting my ass on the streets asking everyone to check out my product. From observing them I learned their needs and how to build something solid. We blow everything that competes out of the water and are experiencing growth that would make the incumbents cry, especially because we are going to eat their lunch in the next few years. Dumped $1.6M of my own money into the company to do it, no investors. Moved to a foreign country multiple times to work with outsourced dev teams so I could afford it. Sleeper on floors, built awesome relationships. And best of all, my product ameliorates society so out KPIs are how much are we helping people. Got the most inspired team that’s like family. Yada yada. Wouldn’t trade this life for anything and I have zero tech background and am a single founder. Yeeeeee
Given the advice in my first comment, and I guess counter to the other comment in this thread saying “neuraltypical” tactics don’t work, I was going to ask, have you ever said to yourself at the count of three you will get up and do the task you have in mind?
Physically: put your phone in your bedroom or wherever you keep it when you go to sleep. Don’t be in that room till you go to sleep. You break the habit of normally having the phone with you all the time. See what happens when it’s not.
(Should mention they just got a new director and she is really awesome. Came from the women’s bean project. Hope she can make some positive change but she’ll have to fight a lot of bureaucracy.)
Tech has massive opportunities to organize and align data to make things more efficient in all these areas and it is.
Concerning profits - if the model focuses on sustainability - doing something that exists currently that is better for people and planet, and at lower cost - then there should be plenty of profit.
Tl:dr - you’re paying a very good and fair wage for what you’re offering and should probably have many interested candidates when recruiting.
I’m kind of bummed because I was hoping there were going to be a lot more people focused on this and scaling it, but in this thread there are not…
Because the topic of hydro and growing food and all that is on HN here, I wanted to leave the following comment on a higher level.
Ten years ago I was super dedicated to problems surrounding water, which of course include food and all the issues we have with our food systems. At the pinnacle, I was working with a half acre aquaponics greenhouse in Watsonville, CA. We had 8000 striped bass and produced and incredible amount of fresh produce. It was pesticide free because of you put chemicals on the plants it would get into the water and hurt the fish.
It was more “natural” than hydroponics. You weren’t using fertilizer imported from all over, everything in the system could be produced on-site. The more biologically diverse the system was, the more resilient and productive.
Both hydro and aqua phonics - the latter of which has been practiced for thousands of years, definitely save a ton of water. But I think aquaponics has a massive chance of being mainstream, especially as automation and all the advanced tech and robots get better.
It’s about ecological engineering on a local scale - you are maxing out the ecology to human and nature’s benefit, and there are so many relationships to learn and exploit.
It’s strange how impactful this could be on a grand scale - see some Dan barber Ted talks [1]
Just really need to get some investment on this on a big scale, like the hydro houses in Canada. No one has, from all that I know, really built aquaponic systems on a grand scale that are economically viable. But I see it coming and after I wrap up my current company, I’m jumping right back in to working on this.
We are just going to be doing what nature did best before we murdered all of it…but maybe Mac it out super hard and super quick compared to what it could do.
Lastly, with all the climate stuff: Don’t forget, you can’t put a price on the systems that produce the food, water and clean air we breath, cuz you know, we’d be dead. Well maybe we can, but we sure aren’t trying.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with...