That checklist strongly assumes you want to make yet another web site or phone app. I'm closely familiar with a few startups, 2 of which were in your area, and not one of them fit that checklist.
One started with mortgaging a house for money. The idea was to make and sell a weird magnet that would create unusually parallel field lines that could be electronically rotated. This could be used to characterize hard drive heads before cutting the wafer apart. The founders were an electrical engineer and a mechanical engineer. They were soon joined by a few other people to perform manual labor to assemble magnets. The plan was to sell these, for tens of thousands of dollars each, to companies that made the equipment for checking wafers. The deal didn't happen. Instead of giving up, they doubled down: make the entire piece of equipment, priced at hundreds of thousands of dollars, and sell it to hard drive companies. This meant more employees, creating a device the size of home refrigerator that could operate in a cleanroom. That worked. They got bought by an instrumentation company that was seeking to enter that line of business.
One started with spare cash on hand. The idea was to make accurate undetectable underwater rangefinders and datalinks. This too required electrical and mechanical engineering. SBIR contracts (see https://www.sbir.gov/ or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Business_Innovation_Rese... for that) provided some funding. SBIR is great; it helps you get your accounting in order. Roughly a decade later, this company is still running as a startup.
One started out of a university that was doing security research. SBIR contracts were important. The company split while still a startup, due to incompatible lines of business. One half continued on as a boring small company, now almost 20 years old. The other half grew with a doubling time of 20 months, ultimately to be purchased by a large defense contractor. It had a web page consisting of just an image and a phone number.
One that I'm less familiar with, much older than the others, built mower attachments for tractors. It got to hundreds of people and then was purchased.
I can't remember if I talked about peeps with money, but they don't really relate to my problems - I have enough to get by and care for needs of those closest to me and that's all that matters at the end of the day.
Next steps are 10 customers, you got it chief. I can have that by the end of February. Putting the Software-Developer-Estimation-Error in play, I'll have that count by Christmas next year.
Manually. Got it.
Learn to sell -- > How/docs would be appreciated
Don't Automate: Agreed, the human element is nice and makes me feel like I'm heard and understood.
I don't have enough domain knowledge to know what ICP is in detail, but I know that I want to create things that help me and help those directly around me - VFX, developers, people who want to code but cannot yet, managers that want to streamline process, but cannot because current process and detail knots prevent them, Architects who want to make changes, but are ignored, and best practices not followed due to neglect of being heard and understood.
Ah, next sentence says I don't need to worry about it until its big ... and previous sentence above says Walk before you can run...
Okay, well, thanks for your context/ advice. I appreciate you taking the time to comment on something that I've been thinking about for awhile, but never really doing because I haven't had context or domain knowledge and every time I tried to look it up I got firehosed and overwhelmed with TMI. Thanks for lessening my scope to a high level (level 1) rather than directing me back to detail level (level 4) info I need a business degree and hours to describe https://c4model.com/
That's a cool way of looking at it. I do know of problems. they are everywhere, from capitalization and grammar issues to dropping problems and frustrating peeps.
Thank you for setting this in a way that is understandable for next steps.
I already solved someone's problem- Open Source Blender made it impossible to key groups (containers) and so I programmed a workaround for someone as a $15 bet that I could, and made a GUI for it - he used it and thanked me, but it was kinda lame doing it for 15 bucks - I don't know how to ask for gobs of money.
I also setup someone's server (minecraft , gitea, docker compose, etc) for $30/hr - because I didn't think he could pay full rate ($66/hr) I got a few hundred on that.
I saw what FAANG's employee's make and it's ridiculous - 1.2 million after 9 years ? I want to drink from that firehose, but depending on a FAANG for an amount like that seems like a massively corruptible dependency - similar to how Google is being charged for Sherman monopoly practices.
The world as I see it is kinda acting dumb. I cannot fix all the problems I see, only the ones that directly matter to me and are within my scope to fix. I can point them out and document for other people to notice. And yeah, if my outlook is skewed due to context, correction/more context is welcomed. Thanks for caring about my issue, and providing context on a twitter that has, what appears on first glance to have good business advice - I wish it was in markdown on github so it would be easier to reference.
>Open Source Blender made it impossible to key groups (containers) and so I programmed a workaround for someone as a $15 bet that I could, and made a GUI for it - he used it and thanked me, but it was kinda lame doing it for 15 bucks
Not at all. You sold something for $15, which is more than $0 and a proof in a way that you can produce something of value to someone and sell it. Can you sell that again?
How irritating is that problem for those who have it? How expensive is it, as in, how much time and money are those who have this problem losing? How much would they stand to make in time and money? How frequently do they have that problem: is it only once in a while, regularly, or multiple times per day? Is it time of a highly skilled / expensive role or profile? Meaning: is it time of someone paid $$$/hour or $/hour?
>I don't know how to ask for gobs of money.
You have conversations in which you ask for gobs of money and keep your lips closed.
>I also setup someone's server (minecraft , gitea, docker compose, etc) for $30/hr - because I didn't think he could pay full rate ($66/hr) I got a few hundred on that.
You can't really know if you don't ask. I remember when I was in college listing my rate for a service that was 15x what others were charging. I was called by art galleries, jewelry stores, and companies to solve that problem.
One person could buy your "server setup" service because they don't know how to do it. Another person would buy it even though they know very well how to do it, but they wouldn't be doing something that is more valuable than $66 [either an activity that generates more, or napping, or anything], or that they "dislike setting servers up more than they like having $66", or that's just a distraction for them.
I was thinking about the whole process. I could make a freelance software guild, but no one would want to join that (I wouldn't due to sketchiness/no-pay) ,maybe I could have a low retainer for developers to be on standby (like lawyers) and save a certain number of hours per month for when work floods in. Retaining developers would be a bit of fun -like a club of sorts or a guild. I'm not sure what the rates or sustaining would go (I'll pay you X money to do nothing until I need you).
it would certainly build communication to an extent if it was a 2 week check in.
I think the prevailing advice in this thread will be to worry about finding the work, and only worry about finding developers once the "work floods in".
I wrote a long response to this but accidentally refreshed my tab, so you're getting an abbreviated response = /
I can give you one of my favorite examples. I have a pretty intense job, and I've struggled to some degree with the way stress eats into both my work productivity and my well-being after work. I wrote this script to mitigate the bouts of workday akrasia that induce me to almost-unconsciously procrastinate, as well as the unfortunate habit of checking work email/Slack after work hours or while on breaks (one of the pitfalls of not physically separating my work and recreational machines).
I use a simple launcher app called gmrun, which allows defining custom protocol prefixes. I've defined a few of these protocols, but my favorite is "m:", which switches "modes" on my laptop. Appending a prefix-string of either "work", "rec", or "all" rewrites my i3 config file to switch to the corresponding "mode" by selectively disabling a set of switch-to-workspace keybindings. It's about 100 lines of straightforward Python code incl docs and newlines, took me half an hour, and it paid for the time I put into it in less than a week. Probably a _dozen_ times a day, I catch myself trying to switch to the workspace that has my messenger apps or personal browser windows, and disabling the keybinding is enough to short-circuit the stress-driven impulse to distract and procrastinate and remember that I am trying to do focused work. It works very similarly for checking my email/Slack after work hours, something I almost never do now for the same reasons.
This is pretty tuned to my situation, OS setup, and personality, but that's pretty much the point: I'm extremely spoiled by Linux, i3, etc due to having a system that's been custom-fitted to my every need every moment of my computing life since late high school. If there's a rough edge, I sand it; if there's an optimization opportunity, I take it (if the ROI seems clearly worth it).
Not to get on my soapbox, but it saddens me a little that so many people I talk to, particularly technical ones, have become disconnected from just how many affordances general-purpose computers can offer without ever being _forced_ to avoid choosing the ease of a one-size-fits-all approach.
Hey, thanks so much for introducing me to the term "akrasia" because it works perfectly to describe a phenomena that happens to me as well. And my solution is similar, if admittedly much lower tech (I comment/uncomment lines of my etc/hosts file to switch modes).
But it was the rest of your post, describing the way in which you're environment has morphed with you over the years, and how you've been able to really dial in your computing experience...it's so striking! There are few people who can say the same. I certainly cannot. I have personally gone through perhaps 3 complete redos in my adult life. But it's disruptive and bad, and I have to admit I feel some envy that you've been able to maintain a single coherent thread of evolution for so long. You must move around incredibly smoothly - I'd be curious to see a video of a few cycles of a build-test-debug cycle with your setup. I would also be curious to know how your file-system is organized. That seems to be the most difficult problem of all!
> I have to admit I feel some envy that you've been able to maintain a single coherent thread of evolution for so long
What I find most interesting is how fundamentally it's changed over time while maintaining continuity over those years. In college, I had a tricked-out compiz setup with wobbly windows and a skydome and a wallpaper set via script and a bunch of other cool frills, a far cry from the spartan, productivity-focused keyboard-only setup I have now (I don't even have a wallpaper because a tiling wm means I can never see it). But at any given point, the majority of my workflow was similar to what it was the year before, and many of my config files date back to when I first started using Linux. Even when switching to i3, I already had a very keybinding-heavy workflow, so I just needed to learn one or two extra keybindings to get started, providing a gentle transition from my previous setup until I became more of an i3 power user.
> I'd be curious to see a video of a few cycles of a build-test-debug cycle with your setup
For work, I use a single screen session per "task". Im an MLE working on autonomous vehicles, so my environments vary, but I tend to avoid GUIs so every workflow (except browser-based tools like tensorboard or github code reviews) can fit within my screen sessions. Switching from my dual-monitor workstation to my laptop is pretty seamless; the same screen session is used for each task, but mapped to fewer visible windows at a time.
> I would also be curious to know how your file-system is organized
I'd imagine so; the biggest reason this isn't interesting is that I simply don't keep that much on my local filesystem, at least for personal use. I have a repos directory and a scripts directory, and then I pretty much just use the Debian defaults. Perhaps my Google Drive structure would be more interesting, but even there the structure is pretty straightforward, with folders like Finances and Career.
For work it's slightly more complex, but also more driven by the environment tools that work provides (eg a datasets folder that gets mounted into the Docker images I use to train models).
