HN user
Connect with at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharm1la/ or https://x.com/sharmi1a
Just came to say, I appreciate your emotionally intelligent and balanced take on your experience, where it would have been very easy to react and let emotions take over (understandably).
Astro blog deployed on Github Pages.
VS Code for editing.
Points to Ponder
-> Use the basic Astro template for blogs. It is basically enough for a self-hosted blog needs. Using any of the third party themes/templates with a list of features has a bunch of disadvantages. It takes more effort to customize and upgrading to newer versions totally breaks the setup, sucking in hours of your time.
-> VS Code has plenty of Markdown Extensions. Markdown Preview and Frontend Masters come to mind.
I think problem is not as much as wordier sentences as sentences devoid of meaning or the same stuff repeated too many times to fill a 300 page book.
I still prefer the original version of the classics to abridged versions.
Hi OP, I saw your project lists. I think you are on the right track. You are not spending too much time in dev and are experimenting in multiple ideas. You got one notch under your belt. You also seem to be quite an accomplished writer. Thats two.
The next step is to talk to prospects. May be talking to customers was part of your role in your current or previous work? If not, then there are some learnings to do. If you cannot contact your prospects before you build the product, you cannot sell to them after you build. If I were you I would start by reading Mom Test. It will change how you look at things. But it is not a cure-all. There will be lots of learning to do even about how to contact prospects, how to talk to them to get actionable insights and not genial confirmation etc. (I am currently here). If you already have a product, it is still ok to do that. You can ask ppl in your target group for testing your product etc. That is also a great learning experience and can lead to rapid development of your product. You will truly believe you have thought through a lot of UX flows and would have done a great job and still uncover a lot of blindspots.
It also helps to learn to market and sell. This will shape how you build your product and how you talk about it. Are you currently working? Does your current company or your previous ones have sales and marketing roles? Do take them out to lunch, talk to them about their product goals, their day to day activities etc. These are some stuff you will be doing when your product is ready to market.
If these make sense to you and need someone to chat with, ping me. Would be happy to compare notes.
Wow! This is something that's been rolling about in my brain but the author has elucidated it in a way beyond the thought and attention I gave this.
Anecdotally, I have seen and `read` multiple founders' posts and comments detailing the mistakes they have made, year after year, month after month.. and I went and made most of the mistakes all over again. I still see others follow the same path.. But why don't we apply the advice we read so often and makes so much sense?
I believe while the reading the articles, the advice resonates and makes sense but when we go into real world, it gets messy.. It is harder to notice the patterns. But one thing is true, when we do make those mistakes, we can then hark back to that advice and realize the wisdom in them. Atleast after that, it gets easier to not fall into those traps again and the advice is internalized.
So, what is the use of writing about your hard-learned advice, you ask?
1. We start noticing the patterns earlier thanks to the memory of the advice humming there at the back of your mind and so the learning is faster. 2. It gives one courage and confidence to get up, dust oneself off and try again, cause others have done that before me or you.
* Unlike how technical people often understand these stories, development is a smaller part of the story. From my own experience, it is a huge journey to understand marketing and sales. We generally undervalue marketing and sales in programming forums. Every founder has to pay their dues to cross this chasm and see success.
* Very few startups, probably a infinitesimal number, are overnight successes. Startups are actually a long grind. There are a lot more lows than highs and the lows tend to be really low. The effect is even worse when you go solo. It took the author 5 years to breach the 5K MRR ceiling. That's a long timeframe and it takes a great amount of fortitude, patience and persistence to stay focused, keep learning and handle uncertainty in the face of lack of visible progress (you are actually learning even in failures but it often doesn't feel good).
Walkman was the first device I got saving up pocket money. So it was definitely affordable.
Checkout the blog of onlineornot creator. I have learnt some important insights from his posts.
I faced this too but I attributed it to some obscure bug or setup issue. Seems like I am not alone.
Google sheets takes forever to load (Just 150 records on the biggest sheet. 9 other sheets with paltry records). Any keypress or scroll takes 10 seconds or more to take effect. I am torn between getting work done and being annoyed by how I am forced to use Chrome. Didn't yield, yet.
I think I might understand how you feel. You need a human connection and someway to make an impact in this ephemeral world.
Have you considered some form of mentoring of young people who are willing to learn? It could be in the course of your work or could be related to some hobby.
I believe it could be a rewarding experience to share your experiences with someone who could benefit from it and see them thrive.
I have always had good experience with Thinkpad T series. But anything outside Lenovo's business range laptops is usually terrible. It's like an entirely different company! Had a terrible experience with IdeaPad and it died just after a year :(
As a mint user myself, welcome to the land of peace :) , after the pesky issues of Ubuntu.
I would like to share how I handle mint-unaware software systems.
As a kind of workaround, to get Docker to work, you would find the equivalent of Ubuntu for your Mint Version. Mint itself is based on Ubuntu LTS versions.
For ex: Linux Mint 21 is based on Ubuntu 22.04. So packages for Jammy Jellyfish work pretty well for Linux Mint 21. You can add the apt repo for Jammy Jellyfish in Mint.
Considering Mint has had a significant mindshare in Linux for quite sometime, it would be great if the major software providers make it easy to install on Mint.
But it would be too much of a stretch for minor players or open source providers to support so many flavours. The above workaround is a win-win all around.
Dealing with fraud detection is a real pain!
Every 3 months, I have to pay the school fee for my 3 kids. The amount is almost the same for all three. The first payment always goes off without a hitch. But, when I go to pay for the second kid, bam, it locks up the account. Our local branch is utterly clueless. Then we will have to jump through multiple hoops to get the account activated. This whole drama happens like clockwork every three months. It doesn't matter that it's just a school payment, and doesn't matter that thousands of parents are making payment around that time.
Friends holding accounts in other banks face the same issues. So, it is not isolated to my bank and changing banks will not help.
So, now, we've decided to take the one-kid-a-day approach. It's a bit more work, 'cause I have to remember to make those payments over three days, but it sure beats the headache of reactivating the account every time.
I am really sorry for all those who have lost their job today.
There seems to be a lot of negative view about managers here.
If I had to judge managers by my experience at my first job, I would be first in the line decrying them. But, now I see that is the result of faulty processes, promoting too early and for all the wrong reasons.
In my second job, my manager was my strength. We didn't have much meetings, rather lots of one-on-ones or 3-4 people discussing. Most of us were just out of college. So, when we had strong opinions on the product features, they not only heard us, but helped formulate a proper argument that we could present. He was also a good mentor, helping me reframe my viewpoint, when I didn't agree with one of my very senior colleagues (Later turned out the senior colleague was right. In retrospect, I really pity that colleague for he had to work with a big bunch of naive college graduates with no coding discipline :) )
It helps that the whole environment in the company was one of openness, camaraderie and a real desire to make a difference. But a good manager can always make a great difference in your work and happiness.
Basic stuff: We have gotten used to treating Google Search as a one big reference search engine. We don't bookmark stuff anymore, cause you can get it in a few seconds of search. We don't remember much stuff anymore, cause you can get it in a few seconds of search.
Except, it is not `a few seconds` anymore. When I search for basic technical reference, google gives me 5-10 spam blogs before the actual documentation site. Some of them are absolutely useless (GeeksforGeeks). You need to spend precious minutes parsing the results to find the one you need.
One would think, considering Google is built by developers, the results for developer-related queries would be good. If this is so bad, what about the result for searches for people in other unrelated streams?
https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Founder-Painfully-Honest-Startup...
Lost and Founder by Rand Fishkin goes in deep about the challenges of leading a company. It felt honest and truthful and talks about the implications of each choice they made in tech and marketing.
My kids love Mark Rober https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md75n8cyenA
PBS Eons https://www.youtube.com/@eons
Action Lab - https://www.youtube.com/@TheActionLab
MinuteEarth - https://www.youtube.com/@MinuteEarth
MinutePhysics - https://www.youtube.com/@MinutePhysics
SciShow - https://www.youtube.com/@SciShow
Real Science - https://www.youtube.com/@realscience
Brain Scoop - No long active, but there are some real gems here : https://www.youtube.com/@thebrainscoop
Recently started watching:
Eddie Woo - https://www.youtube.com/@misterwootube
At an younger age:
Sid the Science kid: https://youtube.com/watch?v=FWtHft4ijzk&feature=share
Super Why: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Xu9MkyxZIZM&feature=share
Dinosaur Train: https://youtu.be/peBl3lrKglU
Magic School Bus: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLhOnau-tupQCt22fUPj3...
Firstly, congrats on make sales! You have overcome the most difficult part of starting a business, and you should be proud of it!
Regarding your product/website, I concur with the feedback given by the other commenters here.
To truly understand what they are trying to say though, I would recommend 2 books:
Obviously Awesome, by April Dunford. This talks about how to position your product to your customers.
StoryBrand : It will specifically help you how you tell you & your customer's story on your landing page
Both of these are really short books. You can read each in a day but totally worth 10x for the time you put in.
This should help you get on to the next step! All the best!
My kids glue to their seats for
Ted-ed
MinuteEarth and their related channels
Mark Rober
Sometimes Extra History. Especially their series on how writing evolved.
Dinosaur documentaries.
There are multiple responses to the above parent noting how readable the above line of code is and yet how it might go wrong.
The first pitfall of using english as a programming language that occurs to me (as a totally Cobol ignorant person):
* Human languages tend to be nebulous around the edges and fluid, often with single word taking up multiple meanings and same function done by multiple words. There are multiple ways to express the same concept. This allows for the language to change and evolve with the times.
* OTOH programming languages need to be specific and exact for the computer to be able to interpret it and ensure it functions as expected across devices and over time.
This means to make English function as a programming language, we will have to take the existing language, whittle down most of the senses and many words, assign one function to one word and use a very trimmed down and reduced version of English.
Now you will have to know two forms of English * The human one * The computer-compatible one
Worse, our human version of the language can often trip up our computer-compatible one. I imagine even debugging would be harder, because when you look into the code, the brain would see perfectly good english and not register any issue with punctuation or tokens as expected by the interpreter.
Consider the below version.
MULTIPLY TAXRATE FROM STATE(43) WITH BALANCE GIVING SALES-TAX-AMOUNT.
omad=one meal a day
It is a form of time restricted eating/fasting that is being researched of late for it's positive effects on health and longevity.
I have been watching Google Search Console closely for little over a year now due to several projects I have on it and have observed similar issues.
These patterns predate the GPT3 and ChatGPT changes.
Patterns I have seen: 1. New site does not get indexed, though it satisfies all of Google's requirements. 2. Old sites slowly lose pages from it's index. Sometimes pages get added again but the net change is always negative. 3. New pages added to existing sites also do not seem to be indexed.
OTOH, if there are indexing issues that Google warns about, you fix it and mark it as fixed in Google, those get verified around 2 weeks later and has a sizeable impact on impressions.
A lot of reasons below are valid. And also the technical context addressed by one of the other comments. But beyond that, as a company's size increases, the proportion of value contribution from the code is increasingly augmented by the functions of marketing, sales, support and distributions. The value of code in isolation diminishes so much, the risk is usually not worth it unless it is something very unique like GPT.
If you are trying to bootstrap, try microconf talks on youtube.[1] Good signal/noise ratio. I still find good informative talks.
If you find a speaker on microconf interesting, follow their talks on other channels.
Newsletters I find useful:
https://marketingexamples.com/ - copywriting examples https://tips.ariyh.com/ - 3 mins tips extracted from research papers
For those who are trying to sign up:
Students are not meant to sign up directly. So you have to sign up as either a teacher or a volunteer (parents are this category). Then you will get a code. You need to use this code to create a student account.
This is not quite intuitive but I have a 12 year old kid and that is motivated me to dig around till I got it :)
I appreciate that you are still trying to learn marketing and not sitting back on your laurels or outsourcing the work. There shouldn't be any upper bounds on your growth just because you make more than one person needs, assuming you are one person at all.
Even if you might not need this skill now, you might still need it in the next project. Also you are the best possible person to understand what works and doesn't work and why as you will have the indepth understanding of the product.
That said, I do not have much to offer in the way of advice. I hope someone else would be able to.
In the meanwhile, I would like to pose some questions and maybe you can figure it out yourself or someone can help you.
1. As someone else have pointed out, have you been iterating on your work? Even ads need lots of iteration, feedback and course correction before it clicks. The same goes for other marketing channels too. Here analytics and googling can be your friend.
2. All the channels you have been speaking about take time to produce rewards. They are more like a garden that needs sowing, tending and weeding before results start to appear. How long have you been doing these activities? Have you been giving consistent attention to each channel overtime?
3. You have the most important treasure key to marketing success. Customers. Have you been talking to your most ardent customers? How did they find you? What value do you add, in their own words? What problems have you solved for them? What capabilities have you enabled by solving the problem? Where do they hang out? How can you reach more of these people? It is very important that you be able to talk to them and see your product from their viewpoint. I would recommend that you record the interviews (with your users' permission) and playback often to get a good understanding from their perspective. Maybe you are targeting the wrong market?
And an obligatory recommendation to "Obviously Awesome" by April Dunford. It is a short book but full of interesting insights.
Even if the open source contributor does not intend to monetize (not that there is anything wrong with that), even in it's core idea, it is still essential for open source contributors to know marketing.
1. As someone below said, even if you give away for free, people need to know what it is and where to find it. If you do not market, then you are just singing a beautiful song into the Void.
2. For an open source contribution to live and be useful, it needs to be maintained and evolve with the time and needs. That needs a healthy community around the project.
3. Open Source contributors are also living lives and there will come a time when they need to step back. This should not have a debilitating effect on the continuity of the project.
4. Also having a healthy community that supports in dev, responding to issues, documentation etc will have a positive impact on the contributor's mental health in the long term.
I don't know what is your fitness level and what is minimal for you :)
I use videos from FitnessBlender[0]. You can choose your fitness level and how long you would want the workout to be and it will present you the matching workouts (Remember to choose free workouts). The free workouts are available on youtube also. You can play directly from their site or download it to your device.
Thats interesting. Which other models are open sourced that are in comparison to OpenAI? I would like to set it locally and give it a try.
I built a word exploration site niftyword.com. It is used by around 200K people a month. At it's peak it was used by half a million people a month. It is useful enough for some people that random strangers email when I am careless enough to let it go down :)