malcolmocean

in the application form. it explicitly states which visas it sponsors: J-1, TN, E-3, sometimes O-1, and says "Softmax is not able to sponsor H-1B visas for this role."

The idea that what matters most is having the most followers is very arbitrary and not relevant to many strategies for enjoying Twitter. In my experience, Twitter is best as a place to have conversations, and this is optimal at some number of followers below 10k. There are many accounts out there having an amazing time at small numbers, having curated a medium-sized following of people who are interested in talking with them about the things they want to talk about.

(author here)

Well detected! Yes, I do have an financial interest in this semantic battle. I haven't read Scott Adams' whole book but I found myself called to respond to his take when people were rejecting my app or my other writing and just citing "goals are for losers". So yeah, I'm critiquing a straw man here—Adams' thinking is deeper than that, but the people quoting him seemed to just have a naive anti-goals slogan.

Even prior to starting the app though, goal-setting had changed my life in a really meaningful way, and I would still have taken issue with "goals are for losers" as a blanket statement. Most people don't realize that it's possible to just decide to do something and work towards it, and goal-setting can be a really powerful frame for that.

I would say that I'm not the one calling the other Olympic athletes losers—Scott Adams does that in his book and I'm responding to him. Goals are for everybody.

Anyway, Adams is making some good points (goals and systems are different, and presuccess failure is a real issue) but he's also overgeneralizing—it is, in fact, possible to have goals without having presuccess failure. Goals can feel good at every turn. Which I won't go into further here because I made my case in the post already.

I'm the creator of Complice and it was indeed made largely by me (I have another collaborator but he joined after it was already making over $3k/mo) but I wouldn't call it simple! Both the software itself and in relation to your comment above that describes how it's not just "how easy is it to build?" but "how easy is it to market?"

In a world where most people are just looking for a better to-do list, Complice is offering an entirely different philosophy of productivity, so it can be hard to explain it, as opposed to something that just straightforwardly scratches somebody's itch.

I will say that the software plays to my strengths: I'm not a data structures & algorithms guy, or a machine learning guy, or a fanatic about the perfect REST API, and Complice is much more about the workflow and the interface, which is what I'm good at.

So "super simple" also depends on what you're good at!

There is something important to be said about the effect of having a really clear sense of purpose. I think this is seriously underrated.

But I think it's also the case that part of how we discover purposes to orient towards is thinking about areas of our lives and envisioning how they could be different.

(Also I'm not sure why you're comparing the Big Five list with these lists)

Fixed! Thanks muchly.

Totally agreed. I think I have a few years at least before I need to worry about VR market saturation crowding me out though :P

It's an interesting question of whether it might make sense for me to get into that space with Complice (which is mostly a productivity app—the rooms are just one feature). I can see reasons why that might make sense but I think it's ultimately pretty far from my central value proposition and it would make more sense to partner with BigScreen or something instead.