109 karma · joined November 29, 2022
What are you hoping to achieve by finding such a community?
I am not sure what's unique to side-project developers besides the fact that they are often intrinsically motivated.
IndieHackers has a lot of people developing stuff on the side, but the clear focus there is to make money off it at some point in time.
I think you need to specify what you want from such a community for us to make better suggestions :)
Bring people together and increase the chance of "luck" happening. This is extremely exhausting though and a lot of work in the beginning. I know a couple of people who are like that and it just comes natural to them.
In the end, this is being entrepreneurial even if you don't make money from that. You could call it consulting..
Depending on where you are there might be regional groups or (non profit) organizations who specialize in that kind of work. Always worth to check that out.
Sure some people can hyperfocus (ADHD, ..) but most people cannot.
Building a landing page isn't the hard part. There are plenty of tools for that as well as for image/graphics generation. These people often have used them a lot already so they know their way around them.
The hard part is figuring out the content, the problem you are solving and who you solve it for. This often isn't done before and these landing pages become part of a portfolio and that's it.
Another side not, which probably doesn't apply here, but in general: Work culture is different everywhere. Not better or worse, but just different and coming into a company with the wrong expectations and behavior is probably a recipe for disaster.
We went with notion and while it was kind of fine in the beginning the performance has degraded more and more. Sometimes things do not load at all or it takes forever.
What does notion do? Instead of fixing performance they work on Notion AI to make writing easier. Not sure how other people are using notion but I am never writing in full sentences or paragraphes anyway. It's a way to store notes and bullet points 90% of the time.
Anyway, most important for me is to have a way to create a kanban board. Discussions can happen async inside of the tickets which is a kind of documentation in its own.
What I have learned is to start with as little structure as possible. Most people don't ever look into notion or a wiki ever again and everything that's being put in there is basically dead in this moment. Even worse than no documentation is often wrong and outdated documentation.
It would need to become significantly cheaper to run in order to decrease prices.
My prediction is, that they will start offering specialized applications. ChatGPT for marketing, chatGPT for coding, ... and they will have different prices because the perceived value will differ.
They literally have all the data they need for that because they just had 100 million user show them what they use it for.
I think it's a great position in general, but I wouldn't want to do it all day.
Some more or less random thoughts:
- Content creation is hard, especially in the beginning. - The content is always marketing, so it has to align with the overall business strategy.
- Creating content on linkedin is a great way to get to talk to many people with different backgrounds.
- Is your name attached to the content or do you post in the name of the company? Very different in my opinion.
- How do you stay sharp technically? This is a real challenge. After 6 months you already out of touch with a lot of the day-to-day work as an engineer. So find a way to stay close to tech, try new things, learn about tech as well.
- Talk to the founders, product management or whatever they have about their vision and strategy for the company and the product. Do you align with that? if yes, content creation is much easier.
- Not sure how easy you can move out of content marketing. It seems like it's a great way to be stuck in a dead end. You need to leverage conversations with your customers and other people to influence company strategy to open up a way into management. Maybe someone else can give some more insights here.
There is probably a lot more to it. Feel free to ask more questions.
Is there any chance to build a web app on top of the library which people would use? This could be a way to monetize, although I don't see ICs using such a tool.
Another way could be consulting/service based on your library. Let's say the library produces results and you can sell these results as a report to the company. The boundaries between consulting and service in such cases are quite fluid in my opinion.
Anyway, as others have mentioned, selling libraries to ICs is hard. Most work on their own stuff that fits their needs. Coding is also a way to understand and to build up intuition about things, so not sure.
I would actually go talk to a few people you think you could sell to at some time and figure out what they think about using such a lib.
Making money with dev tools is super hard from all I have experienced and seen.
The best way is probably "use locally for free to make your development easier" and then have a "use it as a team" paid tier but still pretty hard. Kind of like docker is free but hosting docker images isn't because that's what business profit from.
A lot of developers have a "I could build that myself" attitude and they pain has to be very high before they would buy a solution.
This is one of my learnings from the last 6 months. It's much easier to sell to the "business side".
However, building trust is the foundation of any sales process.
But most of the daily activities need much more RAM nowadays. Even most websites need an enormous amount of RAM to run smoothly nowadays.
This would be roughly what I would do:
1. Why do they really want to talk to you. What are they to gain?
2. What is your secret sauce? What's the core IP and core learnings that you are not willing to share because it's at the core of your execution.
3. What are you actually open to talk about? How could you benefit from each other without directly competing? Maybe they target the enterprise market while you target the small and medium business market. You are not really competing in this case.
4. Go into such talks with an open mind but stay cautious. If they don't want to share anything at all don't share much either.
Well yeah, but you realize that BD has at least 10s or more of engineers work on such their projects.
I think with your background I would opt for a pre-made platform (there are many, don't have experience with any of them) where you worry mostly about the software.
Maybe, just use your laptop webcam or a Raspberry Pi to do computer vision, somewhat related to your DS/ML experience.
Since you have already got users, you need to talk to them:
- How did they find your? What did they search for? - What problem are they trying to solve?
Would any of them give testimonials? Social proof is increasingly important, even in B2B markets.
Most marketing is a long game. For B2B content marketing LinkedIn is the place to be at the moment. Engage regularly and post regularly as well. This is a lot of work and takes at least 3-6 months till you see first results depending on how aggressive you are.
Robotics is a wide field with many opportunities:
- Computer Vision - mechanical hardware - path planning and localization, SLAM - Control engineering - Software engineering - ...
Then, there are plenty of more business oriented roles: - Application engineering => how can robots solve the customers problem - technical sales / marketing - ...
I think it makes the most sense to leverage your previous experience to move into the field and than find out how to continue. E.g. Start as an application engineer and then move towards control. Or if your background is ML/AI, Computer vision and then progress into another field.
> Actually kind of surprised that there are still so few robotic jobs and companies. Guess it is harder then I think...
Robotics takes a lot of people and money. Hardware, Software, an actual problem to be solved, ... I think once we are seeing a platform(s) to build robots more easily, there will be more companies as well.
It's a great way to stay technical, drive business value and interact with many people on a regular basis.
> Writing Docs, Events, hands-on coding etc
That actually does sound fun, much more fun than building systems to be honest.
For me, quitting my phd was one of the pivotal moments. I realized that a) it wouldn't get me where I wanted and b) the work environment wasn't fun at all.
See ChatGPT, CoPilot and co. Only very few people actually worked on those systems and even less were actually ML researchers. For me, it sounds like you have a strong case of FOMO.
Back to your actual question. Hard to give advice without more information. Is there any chance for further career development in your current position? Any way to branch out into something adjacent? Focus more on backend or frontend?
I think we will see 3 major trends in the future.
1. Active Recruiting / Headhunting will become even more relevant and probably more obnoxious in the short term. This will extend to all roles across the board. Even now, there are on campus recruiting events to fill junior roles.
2. Curated job/people matching platforms. This is something I have just seen recently where they offered companies to become part of the pool to post job ads and candidates also had to submit their CV/portfolio which was then checked before it was put in a pool as well. I think this could be a way of finding people for very high-skill positions in a clearly defined niche.
3. Companies realize that they cannot fuck around with their job ads. 99% of job ads are horrible. "Java/Javascript", "C/C++/C#" and so on. Is it a remote job or is it "remote" where you have to be in the office twice a week? Companies love to complain about the lack of applicants but they do everything to get as few as possible. This goes hand in hand with employer branding. Sure, some people might not care, but especially people younger than 30 very much do.
Something I do see though is that there is a trend towards more and more distraction. Always be available in slack, large offices where someone always wants something, etc.
Also, in my experience, some companies just love to have pointless meetings with many people that cannot contribute at all, because it's just not relevant to their work.
I do like to work in teams, in general, but it has to work for everyone at the end of the day.
Not sure why this would be a selling point besides the plain information of what kind of product you'll be working on. The tech stack at SaaS companies is usually relatively modern, but more often than not the code base / system architecture is a clusterfuck that has been growing for years.
"Looks interesting" is often a polite way to say "cool, but we don't need it". Imho, the first thing you really need to figure out is, if you are onto an actual problem that people have and are willing to pay for. I have built 2 MVPs before that nobody used in the end because we didn't do our homework in the pre-MVP explorative part of the journey.
Talking to more people should be your number one priority at the moment. I wouldn't even pitch the solution in the beginning but start asking about their work, their roles, their problems etc. If there is a clear fit you may pitch/teaser your solution at the end.
Contrary to @salimstartup, I would say marketing is definitely something you should do, but you shouldn't pay for it. Content marketing is really the way to go at the moment. Find out where your customers hang out (hackernews, reddit, medium, linkedin, twitter, ...) and post valuable content. Takes a lot of time but makes getting interviews with other people much easier and eventually should lead to (some) inbound leads/users as well.