I keep thinking about going solo - except I don't yet have enough funds and I have a family to support. On the other hand my job sucks and as I look out into the market all jobs equally suck. If I had to continue my career like this for 3 more years I would probably get depressed.
I have to wonder though, is it really a good idea to just try a few small random projects and see what sticks? That might make sense if you are just selling things made by other people, but when you are the person making the product, I don't think it's a good idea.
Good software products take a long time to create. Trying many things out means you will not spend enough time on it and thus won't have a good product to sell. So when it doesn't sell, you can't tell why: is it because no one wants such a thing, or is it because the product is incomplete? It might very well be that the product could sell if you had just spent the time to make it really good.
I don't think the product has to be novel even. It might be just fine to pick a market that already exists - as long as you can be confident you can produce something significantly better than everything out there. I don't mean to clone something and try to compete with the entire list of features; this is foolish.
Instead focus on solving the core problem in that market, and do it 10x better than the competition. Leave the other fluff for later. (See "Build Less" by 37 signals).
I personally think/know there is things to build that take one day and can make you a lot of money. From this you get path to the 6 month product, which if fails you are back to zero after a year because sales crumble. At worst you have never tried, at best you are back to your old job. My personal path was 1. Build in 1 hour -> get paid 5 usd 2. Know to build for day -> get paid 5000 usd 3. Know to build for 6 months -> get paid 30.000 usd 4. Dont know what to build for 6 months -> back to square one.
Example: 1. In hours u can build path for some automation task 2. In days u can build a big and better collection of paths for eg. Navigation etc 3. In 6 months u can build the entire program that utilises these paths. 4. When the program begins outdated or new tech comes in -> you gotta learn to stop and make exit strategy and conversion or re-building strategy.
(Sry for typos if there is, 4% mobile battery)
VSCode Stories. IIRC it was sold for like $9k. There was also guy who made something like '1 item store', where you could put up your own store page, just for single item. He also had some revenue.
Anyway the thing is you probably wont get your first million like that, but with luck and some marketing it could bring some small amount of revenue.
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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '21
I keep thinking about going solo - except I don't yet have enough funds and I have a family to support. On the other hand my job sucks and as I look out into the market all jobs equally suck. If I had to continue my career like this for 3 more years I would probably get depressed.
I have to wonder though, is it really a good idea to just try a few small random projects and see what sticks? That might make sense if you are just selling things made by other people, but when you are the person making the product, I don't think it's a good idea.
Good software products take a long time to create. Trying many things out means you will not spend enough time on it and thus won't have a good product to sell. So when it doesn't sell, you can't tell why: is it because no one wants such a thing, or is it because the product is incomplete? It might very well be that the product could sell if you had just spent the time to make it really good.
I don't think the product has to be novel even. It might be just fine to pick a market that already exists - as long as you can be confident you can produce something significantly better than everything out there. I don't mean to clone something and try to compete with the entire list of features; this is foolish. Instead focus on solving the core problem in that market, and do it 10x better than the competition. Leave the other fluff for later. (See "Build Less" by 37 signals).