I'm working on a paragliding track visualizer: https://skyviz.io - I started it just for myself, then it kind of got out of control, and now I'm spending wayyy to much time on it
After many years of working on enterprise crud apps, it's so refreshing to actually use some maths and 3d programming again :D
But now it seems the the only way forward to make more out of the product is by doing marketing... Something that is absolutely NOT my area of expertise nor interest
I'm working on a tool to track and smoothly visualize paragliding flights in 3d: https://skyviz.io.
It started as a side-project for my own needs. I wanted to share flight replays of my paragliding tracks on instagram, but there just was no tool for it, so I hacked something together. People seemed to like the resulting videos, so I figured I could build an UI for it and publish it and see what happens :)
Coolio! :)
I built something similar [0] a while ago. My goal was to _visually_ demonstrate how fast a virus can spread. I wanted to make it is easy for everyone to get an understanding about exponential growth and how different measures can have a great impact on the spread of a virus.
Disclaimer: This is an unpolished toy project. It was built in a weekend by simple dude who likes to code but has no idea about virology and epidemiology.
> The only other thing I can come up with which could be easier than Scrum Master is to apply for a manual QA role. I don't think I have to say more, but essentially, you will look like you've worked around the clock when really you just click a button at the beginning of the day and then go to sleep again.
Laughed out loud at this hahaha. There is one dedicated manual QA guy in my team that perfectly fits this description. And he probably earns more than I do.
I am really surprised so many people actually use recruiters :O Why not just look for a job yourself? They are so annoying to me, I can barely imagine anyone actually taking them serious...
I just read your whole journey since quitting google and it was very inspiring, thank you :) Glad to hear you still feel like it was the right choice.
I am now where you were 3 years ago: I just quit my well-paid SWE job without any concrete backup plan and all I have been dreaming of for years is being an entrepreneur.
It either happens now when I'm still young, or never, I figured.
However, I am still quite unsure how to actually get the ball rolling.
My current game plan is to just brainstorm for a week or so and then start building the best idea I came up with during that week, then give myself a release deadline of one month for an MVP and see if I can raise some interest.
But after reading the paragraph about ideas[1] I am not sure anymore if this is a smart approach or not...
What do you think, what's the best thing to do to get to that initial spark?
Thanks for reading! Congrats on starting out on your own.
>However, I am still quite unsure how to actually get the ball rolling. My current game plan is to just brainstorm for a week or so and then start building the best idea I came up with during that week, then give myself a release deadline of one month for an MVP and see if I can raise some interest.
That mostly sounds sensible to me.
I recommend thinking more about the "raise some interest" part. There's a common trap that indie founders frequently fall into (myself included) where you build an MVP but don't think about marketing it until you've already built it. And then you realize there's no plan for finding customers.
Once you build the MVP, how will you find customers? Can you skip to that part without even building the MVP?
One of the ideas I liked in the Jason Cohen video[0] I linked in the article how he built WP Engine. He wanted to build a product for WordPress consultants, so he just emailed consultants and offered to pay them their hourly rate if they'd jump on a call with him and answer questions about their pain points. He didn't have any demo to show them, but people took his calls because he was showing that he valued their time (most accepted the calls and declined the money).
So, I think building an MVP is great, but it's even better if you can talk to customers before you build anything and find out what problems you can solve for them. A great book for this is The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, for which I've published my notes.[1]
> Once you build the MVP, how will you find customers? Can you skip to that part without even building the MVP?
It's not that I've never heard this before, but my excitement just gets in the way and wants to start building immediately :P
So it's good to hear this again, I really need to take this to heart...
Thanks!
Can re-confirm: the lady who brings my family raw milk just wrote to me on Signal instead of WhatsApp without me even asking. I'm positively drowning, happily, in this tsunami!!!
Depends on what you want. It surely will stay relevant for many years, and angular jobs will not go away anytime soon.
If you are interested in it or you find a job that requires it, just learn it. It's not like it's gonna take a year to learn it. IMO if you are a SWE, it takes maybe a week or even less, and you will be ready for most angular jobs.
