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've found some shifts in my language have helped with this. Here's some examples from a blog post I wrote on this awhile ago:

Instead of "Some people are born to be singers—I’m not one of them." ▶ try "I didn’t start with any singing talent—I’ve had to learn it all."

Instead of "I suck at math." ▶ try "Math has been challenging for me."

Instead of "I’ll never be an artist." ▶ try "I feel really dissatisfied with all of the art I’ve tried to produce."

Instead of "I would never be comfortable offering hugs to strangers." ▶ try "I’m finding it really hard to imagine offering hugs to strangers."

Instead of "I never seem to be able to keep my notes organized." ▶ try "In the past, when I tried to keep my notes organized, I didn’t have much success."

Instead of "I’d really like to learn to juggle, but I just can’t." ▶ try "I’d really like to learn to juggle, though I haven’t started yet."

Instead of "I’m not good at origami." ▶ try "I haven’t learned how to do origami yet."

Instead of "I’m just bad at it, and I don’t care." ▶ try "Well, it’s not a priority for me to learn right now."

Here's the blog post, which features a few other kinds of reframes as well as some other examples: http://malcolmocean.com/grow

Can also help to get your friends in on it so they spot when you're using fixed-mindset language and point it out for you :)

(Creator of complice.co here, summoned by HNWatcher.)

I'm glad to see this thread because yeah, most productivity apps are just organization structures that don't support metacognition at all, and so people end up in all kinds of stuck modes.

Complice is definitely better, in that for instance it has different phases for planning your day, working, and reflecting on your day, or that if you say you're going to do X today then don't do it, it doesn't just go on your list for tomorrow but instead you're prompted to break it down or come up with a new plan.

And, I think there's a huge amount of potential here that's yet to be explored, both in Complice and other systems. Relatedly, if you're familiar with developmental psychology or subject-object shifts, we've started strategizing on how to design Complice to guide people through growing into different ways of relating to the world, themselves, and their goals.

I have a different very simple workflow I use for this stuff that I call a Captain's Log. Basically it's like a journal but instead of reflecting after, you intentionally start journalling as soon as you're not sure what you're doing. Link to that: https://malcolmocean.com/2017/11/captains-log-ultra-simple-t...

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!

Creator of Complice here. I agree it's sad the rooms are empty! I thought it would be way easier than it turned out to be, to get a room off the ground. There are a few private ones that are consistently active, but for some reason I've had a lot of trouble getting a public one to stick.

Last summer when IndieHackers launched on HackerNews and Complice was one of the businesses featured there, I made a "Hacker Hall" room (https://complice.co/room/hackers) and posted it to Show HN. It had people in it for a few weeks but it never quite stabilized.

Based on the experience with the private rooms, I think it would only take a couple of champions--people spending most of their working hours there--for it to then be attractive to visitors. This thread probably has enough people to do it. I'd say just comment below if you're willing to hang out in the room consistently for the next few weeks, even if nobody else is there. And if a few people are up for it, then give it a shot. And let me know so I can support you in that!

I think the other thing that's needed is for at least a couple people to actually turn on their cameras, and to chat during the pomodoro breaks, so that people are actually connecting with each other.

Here's the Hacker News room, for instance: https://complice.co/room/hackers

(Not a lot of people in it lately, but we could change that ;) )

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)

I remember a classic breakdown of 7 areas of life which has in a few places when reading about goals etc: Career, Family, Financial, Mental, Physical, Social, Spiritual. These aren't terrible decent, but I think Alex's breakdown is much better for sparking useful thought:

• Values & Purpose • Contribution & Impact • Location & Tangibles • Money & Finances • Career & Work • Health & Fitness • Education & Skill Development • Social Life & Relationships • Emotions & Well-Being • Character & Integrity • Productivity & Organization • Adventure & Creativity

I actually liked these so much that I integrated them right into the yearly review section of the productivity app I run, Complice (https://complice.co/). The app is subscription-based, but you can use the yearly review without paying :)

To get to the yearly review, make an account then go to https://complice.co/YOUR_USERNAME_GOES_HERE/reviews/2016/yea...

I run a productivity app called Complice (https://complice.co/), which is currently making me about $3k/mo. If you want to learn tons more about the process of getting to profitable, you can read my profile on IndieHackers from back in August: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/complice

Too content with your life? Think bigger. eg... http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/

...it doesn't have to be climate change per se. The point is that if you don't see things to improve on a given level, look at a higher level. Or a longer time horizon.

A lot of this is going to be hard to solve on the level of software. But not all! And maybe you can team up with people with other skills.

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.

Strangers has worked in some of the earlier rooms I've worked with... I think the issue here is that it's basically all strangers to start.

It's easy to add a few new people to some who already know each other, but harder to just throw a bunch of strangers (some of whom are more in troll-mode) into a room together.

Awesome! Yeah I find it can work very well with teams, including in-person (you don't use the video or chat as much, but it's still cool to be in sync and see what each other is working on.)

I'm kind of a jack-of-all-trades, so I did all of my own design. I don't know that I could get hired by a big company to do design work, but I'm good enough to make my own UIs.

One thing that has helped a lot is doing a lot of "hallway" tests: you watch someone sign up, then you cringe at how bad your UI is, then you fix it.

(I'm the guy behind https://indiehackers.com/businesses/complice)

I got a ton of signups to Complice yesterday via the IndieHackers HN launch (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12269425) so I thought it would be cool to see if we could coalesce a new little community of people doing pomodoros (25/5 work/break periods) together online.

One of my favorite features of HN is that it lets you limit how much time you spend on it per day. I love systems that work with the users' interests in mind, and I think that this coworking chat does so more than almost any other chat app, because it has clear work periods where people can be productive.

I described this in pretty great detail over on IndieHackers (https://indiehackers.com/businesses/complice) and also answered a bunch of related questions on this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12269425

TL;DR = spent 20h/week for 2 years building a product that people wanted. But there are a lot of juicy insights etc in those links.

I really like this "I'm feeling kind of lucky" feature that Google search used to ship with Firefox and that still works:

http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navc...

It goes straight to the first result if the result is very good, otherwise shows you the search results.

Hmm. I think my biggest milestone came when someone signed up for the free trial, didn't respond at all to the personal "how is the trial going?" message... didn't respond to my "btw, your trial is ending in a couple days... any questions?" message...

...and then their trial ended and they paid.

Even though I'd written a full software system at that point, the app was still fairly hands-on, and it wasn't until then that it was fully obvious that someone would pay for just the software. In retrospect this is a pretty big thing that it would have made sense to test much earlier somehow.

I'm pretty optimistic by nature, and Complice has felt promising since the beginning. I think it probably helped that while I had a vision/goal (= become ramen-profitable by graduation) I didn't spend too much time fretting about it. I just focused on making incremental improvements to the system (eg UX).

And this in many ways is the philosophy of Complice itself: stay oriented towards the big picture, but focus on what you can do today.

I reached out to some friends of mine, pitching them something like "I'm developing a system to help you achieve your goals. It's based on daily planning and reflection. Paypal me $10 for the first month if you're interested." The actual conversations were much longer than that, in which I explained a bunch of the high-level thinking behind it, mentioned that I was looking for some beta testers, etc. I probably also mentioned that I'd trialed the basic system myself and informally with another person.

One of the nice things about offering "I'll help you achieve your goals" is that pretty much anyone wants it if you can actually do it. The latter part is of course hard. But yeah, because of this I probably asked only 15-20 friends and got 10 to pay based on that. It also helps that I have friends who are willing to experiment and who trust me not to just run off with their money.

Part of what also helped, I'm sure, is that I reached out to people I knew individually and they got to have the sense of being part of this early group of testers.

I followed the "do things that don't scale" approach. At the start, I didn't have custom software, but I queued up emails manually using Boomerang, to bug people each day at the time they specified, to plan their day and reflect. They replied, and I put their data into a spreadsheet and elsewhere. I spent about an hour per week for each of those users at the start. I was giving them value manually/personally, rather than with software.

I mean, mean is better than median in that if you multiply it by time then it gives you the sum.

But mean over what period? It's a bit complex.

I think that probably @csallen was using "peak" because some of the projects had since gone defunct and he wanted to count them. Although I think in such cases it would make sense to do an average of the best year or something like that.

For projects like mine (https://complice.co/) which are still growing, "peak" is also weird, because it suggests that... I'm not still growing? I'm not even sure. At any rate, it doesn't make sense to use my average over the last year if my average over the next year is going to be twice as much. Better is probably just the total of my active subscriptions.

Founder of Complice (https://complice.co/) here, one of the sites featured (https://indiehackers.com/businesses/complice).

I'm game to answer questions that people have that weren't answered in the interview!

I'm the founder of Complice, one of the sites featured. It took me a bit under 2 years to reach my "poverty threshold" target, working an estimate of 20h/week on average. To break it down further, it was more like 5-15 hours/week for the first 7 months, then 30-50h/week that summer when I was off from school, and other similar fluctuations.

These are all total ballpark estimates that I made a couple weeks ago: I've used various time-tracking systems but none that give accurate overall time spent. Based on my within-Complice stats though, I can tell you that I've done 2800 tasks towards Complice. That's not very specific, but still kind of a neat figure.

I don't have a good breakdown between programming and marketing time, but I would estimate that 80-90% of my time was spent on things more product-development related. Only 75% of Complice tasks, but the programming tasks are more likely to have been eg 8h working on a single feature.

I started Complice (https://complice.co/) 2.5 years ago while in university, with the goal of making enough money by graduation that I didn't have to get a job. I succeeded at that, and have now grown it to about twice that, and it continues to grow, mostly via word of mouth and a few communities.

I mostly work on it one day a week, when I have a super maker schedule day and code for like 14h straight. The other days of the week I answer support emails and sometimes write blog posts. Total time these days is about 20h/week, and if I want to it can easily be 4h or less.

I've written a bit about my experience getting to here: - http://blog.complice.co/post/129788685472/complice-goals-ach... - http://blog.complice.co/post/130460454477/complice-at-2-year... -http://blog.complice.co/post/139686741757/my-complice-origin...

In some senses it worked fairly smoothly for me, but I'm not assuming it's easy. Some basic advice: (the posts above elaborate on some of this) - do things that don't scale - charge people from the beginning: ideally get 10 people to literally send you cash for their first month's subscription before you do much work--message friends directly rather than setting up a huge sales site - then gradually automate it with software, - (before you get monthly payments running on your app, you can run them with moonclerk (which uses stripe, so it's a seamless transition))

By following these principles, you know that at each step of the way, you're building something that people will pay for, because you have people paying for it. This also forces anyone you talk to for advice to take you more seriously.

Feel free to hit me up on twitter @Malcolm_Ocean with questions or just to connect :)

I've had a similar-but-different experience around being taken seriously with my app Complice. I'd be making small talk with other entrepreneurs (often students or whatever) and people would regularly break the ice with, "So what's your idea?"

...and I'm like "idea? I have a business. I make my living off of this idea."

uhh... https://logo.clearbit.com/amazon.com

I think this is really cool and am stoked for Marketing for Devs.