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

> 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?

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?