ChipSkylark

Identify who you and society views as the masters / what "mastery" is

Immerse yourself in their world and surround yourself with them on a daily basis if possible (where/how they work, where they train, where they hang out, what they do)

Create a super tight, iterative feedback look where you can make measurable improvements daily to your current skills, ideally with a testing or competitive component with scoring system or methodology - trial/error and experiment, but quickly

Debrief after these sessions on how it went, what was improving, what could be better, what feels completely off and difficult. Take appropriate time off to digest what you did and avoid burnout

Supplement with theory, books, video review (if applicable) and studying in addition to training and performing so you become a student in the craft

The goal is to get to a point of exponential acceleration and improvement to get you to mastery quicker by determining the pareto 20% skillsets and field experience ("inputs") that create 80% of the output value to get you to that 95 percentile, and double down on that once you've figured it out (and have validated that from the masters).

I personally think chasing mastery without deep burning passion for the thing is dumb and a waste of time because most top performers are probably 90-95 percentile pseudo-masters anyway and just lucky/well-connected. You might hit a point where the masters possess something you don't and never will, so it's crucial to understand that early (like a physical or genetic trait that you are born with or optimized for idk). Assuming everything above is in place, and you have unlimited $ and time commitment to make it work, I estimate a dedicated and focused 8 hours, every day would probably take 1.5-2 years to get to mastery, but YMMV.

Firstly, I believe people will buy almost anything if it's positioned and marketed to them correctly, so I wouldn't get discouraged if there are similar things out there at this stage. The trick is building and positioning a product with specific features that can withstand the buyer question of "what is my next best alternative" and ultimately choosing you. That, plus good unit economics, is how you build a foundation for a strong business. Most likely you'll overhaul the entire app and pivot 2-4 times before you get a strong product market fit, so be open to change (which is why building the entire thing before validating need is a great way to get your heart broken when it needs to be overhauled).

For Taskwer:

I didn't listen to it

I'd start there, and introspect as to why you ignored the advice of the experts and experienced people. Validating market need before building anything you intend to sustainably sell is always a good idea. This will help you next time around and help you better understand yourself.

At the same time, salaries didn't keep up with inflation, and more and more people started to struggle financially.

This is ground zero, the starting point, step one, etc. You think you've identified the problem. Who is struggling, exactly? Are you learning about this from a Business Insider or New Yorker article, or do you actually have a line of sight to a real person in your life this macro economic thing is hitting directly? You need to be able to contact at least one, but ideally 10 people to start, who are "struggling" and need to do odd-jobs or service work to make ends meet. Without them, you don't have a need and subsequently you don't have a service or an app that will go anywhere in its current form. You could perform (or purchase) the services yourself for the time being while you figure out who is more important to market to and how to market to them (my favorite lean solution to the cold start problem), then swap in the other participants in that side of the market over time. This can work really well if done correctly. In every two-sided market place there is a favorite child who is more important to the system and needs more attention, like drivers in Uber or homeowners in Airbnb. You should figure this out early on.

just like on Kickstarter.

You need to have positioning that supports canned responses / dismissals with real incremental value to answer the inevitable comments like: "oh, so like Kickstarter? LOL" or "This sounds exactly like task rabbit". Ultimately I think you'll need to validate whether this incremental value is strong enough to carve out a niche for yourself and win users from the other solutions.

Now, I have an MVP, and most of the features have been implemented, but I have no users.

Often times the MVP is a fraction of what you think, and you should spend the other X% of your time on GTM strategy and experimenting. The images on the site show payments support, messaging, scheduling, etc. I'll bet you could have prioritized better around a single core need that is unmet, and built the first feature cheaply. In this context, the value is connecting the right people at the right time, and you could deliver this with a cell phone, G-Suite and a great landing page with a form for email/phone number collection.

My impression is this is a grass roots, neighborly / community-driven idea, which is really cool. It has a feel-good, positive slant that pulls on your heart strings, which I think can help with marketing. The next question I'd ask is: "who is the type of person that would buy this over a Taskrabbit or existing expert solution?". Who wants to feel good about paying for services in addition to being happy the job got done?

I would turn to churches and similar groups, community centers, and leverage your own network to find a key partnership that can give you a pipeline of paying customers who want to feel good about using this type of thing rather than the typical service aggregator. In the future, I'd think about hiring or partnering with someone to round out your weaknesses, like an extroverted, people-oriented person with a large network who will shamelessly market the thing and isn't afraid of rejection, difficult conversations, vulnerability, etc.

The site looks great, and congrats on building something and deploying it to the world. That's hard and not many have done this, and is something to be proud of. Worst case, you have a great portfolio project to show off (maybe when pitching yourself as a technical cofounder on the next thing?) Now, if you get one paying customer and see that $ hit your bank account, that's even harder and you're doing what most people only dream and talk about, which is something to be even more proud of. Stay with it!

Hey all,

Excited to share and solicit feedback for a project we're building to assist pre-sales and customer success teams in value selling for B2B SaaS solutions.

HotStart is a pre-sales data integration platform that makes it easy to build compelling business cases and product demos by ingesting end-user event and click stream data to warm-start B2B SaaS products. The main goal is to enable teams to use real events from your prospect to supercharge custom demos and come up with value reports that make ROI and product benefits crystal clear to the buyer (increasingly referred to as SaaS Value Engineering).

Today, B2B SaaS teams accomplish this by providing prospects with custom JS tags that live on their site/app during the pre-sales cycle to collect click event data. Alternatively, they might request a single large file export from the prospect and perform manual ETL to accomplish the same thing. Developing and maintaining these tools, and building value reports can be a time-consuming and technically-challenging task, often blocked by constrained engineering teams. HotStart democratizes high-fidelity custom demos and rock-solid value reports to help customer-facing teams increase deal size and close deals faster.

Check us out here to learn more and, if applicable, discuss your use case: https://yep.so/p/hotstart

Cheers, Chip

Always nice when the startup CEO emails you directly via CRM automation about your unique potential at the company and when you agree to chat he hands you off to the "senior technical recruiter". Always makes me feel extra special :)

I'm picturing energetic and socially conscious "hip" 20-somethings doing a country-wide elementary school tour where the whole school gathers in an auditorium to watch them rap about the dangers of social media.

If it works for cigarettes...

Hey all, Chris from Upways here. Wanted to share a little bit about the story behind this and why I think its useful. Apologies in advance, this is a long one.

During the pandemic I suffered from some serious burnout from a programming career that took a major toll on my mental health. Being a few years into a new SWE role, going to the office was a great change of scenery and gave my days a pretty good lift and progression that I found I really missed when remote work became the norm. My employer had outstanding resources for support and my managers all were incredible at looking after my needs, but even with all of that I felt that my personal life story apart from my job was fading away. WFH became work in this room, sleep in that one, eat in that one, etc and my headspace was so consistently occupied with details around the products we were building that I had lost track of the big picture in my life, where I’m going, and what I value and aspire to do as an individual and not as an employee in a large organization.

I really needed someone to follow up and check-in on me for my goals in the music industry, and overall just stay on top of the things that had nothing to do with my career, so I started a service called Upways. Upways is essentially a team of accountability partners who provide recurring, structured 15-minute check-in calls (1 to n times a week) to make sure you are staying on top of your personal goals, tasks, and productivity outside of work. We do this by calling you at set times each week and asking a few simple questions about your stated goals: 1) What did you complete? 2) What prevented you from not completing something? 3) What are you going to do doing next? - all tracked by a shared google doc.

I originally started doing the calls myself since I was so familiar with the check-in format from my day job, and I really just wanted to see if I could earn some money by talking on the phone with other people and providing value instead of programming all day. In time I built out a team of socially-skilled professionals who range from social workers to accountability/relationship coaches with the key hiring criteria being dependability and hands-on experience with structuring and supporting concrete life goals. I’m proud to say that as of today, we’ve helped people stay on task to successfully build careers in painting and music production, repair damaged relationships, prepare for exams, launch podcasts, lose 60+ lbs of excess weight, prepare for interviews, get job offers, write novels, start/expand internet and in-person businesses, and perhaps most relevant of all - write cool software that matters to them.

It’s been an incredible experience doing all of this in just less than a year since starting out, and my aim is to share this service with the highly talented, creative and motivated people on HN who could use another person in their corner when they’re pushing forward on goals that seem to only matter to them. If this sounds useful to you, I encourage you to check us out or ask any questions. Happy to answer any on here on HN or chris@upways.co. Thanks!

I'm not a doctor or health professional of any kind.

But my friend showed me a study a while back of turmeric supplementation and how it can be comparable and in some cases more effective than prozac: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23832433/

I started taking 450-900mg daily and noticed an increase in optimistic perspective and seeing "the point" of doing things during rut of burnout after quitting my last job. Just my story. This is not health advice.

Personal take/rant/experience:

I fell in love with programming because I didn't give a shit about maintainability, architectural considerations, stressing vulns or holding a pager all night to support a living computer system. I learned how to code and got the degree because of how much fun it was every day as a beginner - growing, learning something new and exciting, feverishly building new things to show my friends and use for myself.

I hate to bring a cloud over this profession but I recently left engineering completely because of my depression and how harmful these ways of thinking can be to a person in the long run: modeling everything an equation/stats model, applying worst case scenario visualization and planning to everything you do, risk analysis and limiting your downside by covering every base, preventing you from going all-in on your dreams and enjoying the reward from the risk. You're basically being paid to be paranoid and to think and act like a computer all the fscking time.

Not everything can or should be quantified, and your value as a person and the relationships you have to others are not math equations or statistical models. The incredible beauty and magic of the human experience exist outside these modes, and can be found in your relationship with people, your feelings and emotions, and the freedom to follow your nose and truly embrace things that are meaningful and fulfilling to you.

Try scaling back all forms of social media + notification-based apps and start re-adding them incrementally, one variable at a time, and track how you feel and think in response to each new addition. It takes a while but opens your eyes to the egregious behavior modification taking place on these platforms at scale.

I'm at a point in my life where I only care about major, materially-significant news events that could impact my health/safety and the safety of people I care about. I treat all other content as ignorable, nice-to-have at best.

Being already known by my friends and family to be an "overthinker" and prone to "analysis paralysis", I sometimes wonder why I'm still a SWE. I've slowly started to realize over time that my profession is filled with overthinking and over-engineering, and that our interview process can even select for it. IMO its hard to be the person that aces the technical interview gauntlet then walks out of the building and turns the analytical skills off.

Many interview processes seem to favor how well a candidate can enumerate edge cases and problem spaces over effective risk assessment and cost management. They're both important to evaluate but often in practice the dumb solution is what my team ends up using because can be more maintainable, cheaper to build, easier to reason about, etc. Today my aim is to get my requirements, write as few lines of quality code in as short of a time as possible, test it, ship it and be done.

Narrow focus and the ability to scope things down to what exactly what matters helps a lot. I defeat over-analysis by meditation, intentional dumbness/willful ignorance, and flow state.

Large corporations like Amazon offset tax liability with tax credits from huge R&D expenditures [1], and those can be "moonshots" or highly innovative products that change the world. The famous CEOs quoted in this article take full advantage of this and there is definitely room to get creative with how that money is spent.

A friend of mine working at <large tech megacorp> told me that it is not uncommon for them to assign product/eng teams to build novel, competing solutions to the same problem or product space, sometimes without even knowing about the existence of the other team(s).

Similarly, I've heard <other large tech megacorp> sends the green college new grads out to hack together products and innovate with new ideas as quickly as possible, and once they find product market fit, they hand over the project to the seasoned senior engineers to build it out at global scale.

These anecdotes might just be hearsay BS, but it does make me think: how creative can you get with R&D and who makes those decisions? In what ways do the CEO/CFOs play a constructive role in this process?

[1] https://www.vox.com/2018/4/9/17204004/amazon-research-develo...

One more to the pile. My method:

1) Write down a clear S.M.A.R.T. goal or thing you want to do on a piece of paper (OKR style), a clear definition of why you are trying to do the thing, and when you should have it accomplished by.

2) On a separate piece of paper, define your expectations around how chasing that thing will feel and what you expect to happen when you accomplish it

3) Put the second piece of paper about expectations in a paper shredder - destroy it

4) Create a google doc (or whatever) with large bold letters at the top: My goal is to do X by Z because Y. Make accessing this doc as low friction as possible (a bookmark icon on home screen, a bookmark in browser, etc)

5) Create a consistent schedule (1 hour every other day?) and use the doc to track. Treat this as your personal standup doc: make entries on the disciplined timeline, and plot out next steps at the end of each entry. Review weekly (Sunday night?), take notes on your progress, etc.

6) Finally, at the target date, reflect on where you are, and celebrate anything and everything that happened as a result of your feeling inspired by an idea or goal and making tangible progress in your life because of it. It's beautiful.

For the progress doc, viewing your progress makes it harder to give up on - think of it like “We’ve gone 100 days without a workplace accident” or “I haven’t had a X in the last 50 days” - you build up momentum and commitment to seeing something through for the sake of not letting down the older version of yourself i.e. You make quitting an increasingly bigger deal.

Regarding expectations - of course, I'm joking about steps 2 and 3. For me, living life chasing the vision for something gets in the way of actually getting after it, because by definition it's dreamy, and each step you take closer that doesn’t resonate with the dream is another kick in the pants. Soon, you give up and move on because the dream (expectation) is significantly different from the actual experiences you have while taking steps towards it.

For goal setting, I cannot stress the importance of setting S.M.A.R.T. goals and detaching from the dreamy stuff. If the vision is truly powerful and meaningful to you, it will be kept alive and supported by material success on the smaller milestones that you accomplish.

2 cents: Get off / moderate your social media, news media, TV show service intake - stop giving in to the comparison game that you can never win. When you play this game, you are living vicariously through the lives of others instead of realizing the incredible opportunity you have in each moment to maximize your own potential and be the best version of yourself.

For a long time a source of my discontent in life came from comparing my small steps towards big goals to the empires and platforms of the top performers in the same field. It made me feel irrelevant and like my efforts were pointless. I got out of that trap by taking extreme ownership of my actions and what I create, and I started viewing my progress solely relative to who I was yesterday, rather than to external benchmarks. I forget the exact quote, but it's similar to something like: "the best way to improve something is to start measuring it." and this really crystallized for me when I read a blog post by James Clear: "The Domino Effect." Momentum is important in our behavior - harnessing it to your own benefit becomes like a super power once you can appreciate how useful it is.

Note: I realize this response sounds similar to what you have already tried, but it's slightly different in a way that might be useful to you.

Background: senior year of college I took one of the deep learning courses my CS dept was offering, and I was nervous about it early on because I nearly failed the math pre-req test they gave to assess whether we could handle the concepts in the course and get some value out of it.

I ended up doing well in the course and passed with a great grade, even though I felt like I was drinking from a technical firehose the whole time. The technique I ended up using to get myself through was what I call depth-first learning. Basically you start from the beginning of a non-trivial, legitimate starter project or material, and work through it as you normally would. When you hit a point of confusion or a knowledge gap of any size, pause everything and follow the concept graph all the way down until you bottom out or hit something you have seen before and understand, then backtrack and continue from where you first branched. Taking notes in a gdoc or something is also crucial.

I'm not claiming to have reverse-engineered cold fusion or anything by learning this way, but my main takeaway was this: everything I thought was complex was really just a huge pile of simple things that I understand (or could understand with minimal effort). It was all about understanding the essence of what is going in the big picture and how the smaller pieces relate to it. The main difference I think in this approach vs what you have already tried is that you are using a similar approach with a reference manual, and not a legit near-state-of-the-art project with a concrete goal in mind. If you don't try to accomplish something specifically, you're just going to load up a bunch of information in your head, then eject it when you come across a problem you are actively trying to solve.

My friends like to talk about how awesome it would be to time travel or know what the outcome of a future decision will be. Even when armed with knowledge from observed outcomes of near-identical setup scenarios, majority of the time they end up doing exactly what they would have normally done. Happens to me from time to time.

Sure. I came up with this method on my own but I'm sure someone else has already tried something similar and documented it.

Take a piece of paper (or google doc) and put a theme or idea in a single sentence or line of text at the top. Then write a chunk (I'd say 5-10 sentences, but it's arbitrary) below in whatever style naturally comes to you first. Re-read it and note any obvious characteristics about it that jump out at you (e.g. it reads like a research paper, it uses colloquial language, sentences pack a lot of information, my diction is terse, etc - whatever). Then you write a new white space-separated chunk below it where you play with a completely new style, or maybe go in the the opposite direction of something you noticed in the last chunk (be more blunt and terse when your last chunk was long and dense, or maybe introduce fun abstractions and colorful analogy when the last chunk reads like an arXiv paper).

Once you feel ready to consolidate it, re-read them and cherry-pick things from each chunk that feel right to you as the writer and synthesize the text into a final piece you are happy with. I'd say you should also timebox consolidation so you actually have something workable in a timely manner. Often times I find that this method creates a balanced style for me, because it is my best effort at emulating my favorite style to read - a style where I never feel like I have the writer "figured out".

Bear in mind that this is a completely arbitrary approach and is just how I like to do things. I came up with it from musicianship where you develop your own style by emulating one person, then another, then you have a bag of tricks to pull from when it comes time to decide who you want to be as a creator. Your style may change over time, and I think this method allows it to evolve based on what feels right to you vs. just following what has always worked or what others seem to be happy with.

For me, this is one of the most valuable posts I have seen on hacker news. Thanks for sharing.

I strengthen my writing muscle by writing down a foundational "anchor" concept at the top of the page and then writing about it in isolated chunks or paragraphs that use orthogonal approaches (i.e. changing the tone, verbosity, directness, amount of supplemental information). Then I consolidate and prune ideas until I have coherent content. This helps me form my writing style and keep it fresh and dynamic over time.

I find that giving yourself the space to express things in new ways helps your audience see how you change as a person over time, which is cool because I feel like I can understand and connect with the author or artist better because I see changes in growth and trajectory.