You are an inspiration. I have been following your journey since your post about quitting Google hit the HN front page. And what a wild ride it has been.
Your journey shows how hard it is to build a business (especially hardware-based), but with discipline and perseverance, it's definitely possible to create one as a solo founder.
I also have a business idea that I would like to work on, but I am not ready to quit my full-time job yet. I have a few questions for you:
1. Have you always been so disciplined in life? If not, how did you improve it?
2. As you shared here (https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-1/), doubts are natural when you haven't succeeded yet; how did you keep going? Did you ever come close to giving up and going back to corporate America?
3. I believe you have a partner; how did this affect your relationship with your partner?
4. Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
If you are ever in NYC, please hit me up; I would love to buy you a drink and chat more in person.
>Have you always been so disciplined in life? If not, how did you improve it?
No, I was a lot less disciplined when I was younger. I remember as a teen trying to learn Java several times and always getting bored a day or two in. I was a good student, but I would procrastinate work and distract myself while working.
I probably became more disciplined in my twenties, but I unfortunately don't think it was something I tried to do as much as it just happened.
One thing I think helped was protecting my focus more. I used to hop between different tasks a lot and constantly check social media or email if I had a moment of downtime or boredom, so I became more aggressive at stopping that.[0]
I also found the book Deep Work by Cal Newport to be helpful in staying more focused.[1]
>As you shared here (https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-1/), doubts are natural when you haven't succeeded yet; how did you keep going? Did you ever come close to giving up and going back to corporate America?
I went into it with the expectation that it might take 3-5 years for me to find a successful business, so I think that was helpful. I've spoken to other founders who feel disappointed that nothing they're doing is working because they were expecting success to come quickly.
I definitely did worry that I wasn't cut out for being a founder and that my skills made a lot more sense for a big tech employee. The thing I found comforting was reading stories and listening to podcast interviews with other founders where they talked about how many failures they had before they landed on the right business.
I never came close to going back to a corporate job because I knew I had enough savings to last me, but if my financial situation had been different, I might have given up before I landed on something that worked.
>I believe you have a partner; how did this affect your relationship with your partner?
There are lots of effects in different directions. Me not having a regular job means that my income is less consistent and certain, and she absorbs some of the risks I take. I also feel like I'm not a good partner when I'm stressed a lot about work, and so part of my motivation in de-stressing the business has been to be a better partner in my personal relationship.
>Knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?
I wish I'd done educational products ("info products") earlier. They're like a microcosm of the experience of launching a product because you have to find customers, pitch to them effectively, and then deliver something they'll want. Like you can do that whole cycle in a month, whereas it would probably take 3-10x that long to do it with a SaaS. I made my first course right as TinyPilot was getting traction, and that course made more than anything I'd done in the previous three years.[2]
> I wish I'd done educational products ("info products") earlier. They're like a microcosm of the experience of launching a product because you have to find customers, pitch to them effectively, and then deliver something they'll want. Like you can do that whole cycle in a month, whereas it would probably take 3-10x that long to do it with a SaaS.
Something that helps with this fast cycle is that many people have prior experience which they can turn into an info product. For example, Daniel worked for many years at AWS, and then after quitting could write up https://dvassallo.gumroad.com/l/aws-good-parts by leveraging his many years on the job.
If the info product is along the lines Daniel describes,
"This is an opinionated book. We only cover topics we have significant first-hand experience with. You won't find most of the knowledge we share here in the AWS docs."
it's really valuable.
I find it similar to how it's more effective for a fresh university student to ask senior classmates which classes are good and which professors to avoid, rather than asking professors or academic advisors. They'll get more relatable advice from peers.
The same goes for lots of knowledge or skilled work, whether accounting, construction, or something else. First-hand experience that doesn't appear in textbooks can be so valuable to others.
| The thing I found comforting was reading stories and listening to podcast interviews with other founders where they talked about how many failures they had before they landed on the right business.
The first 50 episodes of the Indie Hackers podcast had a big influence on how I approached bootstrapping. The episodes that stood out in particular are:
Just found about your blog. Great job and you are a great inspiration.
This is a personal question and I hope you don't mind. Do you have kids? How do you manage risk, especially financial risk of startup?
No, I don't have any kids. I think it would be much harder to follow the path I did if I'd had children to support.
I've been thinking about risk a lot in the past year. I used to feel like I had this safety net of getting a job in big tech again if the founder thing didn't work out. When all the layoffs and hiring freezes began, I realized that my safety net may have disappeared.
It's scary to lose the safety net, but at the same time, I felt grateful that I've had the last six years to practice earning money without an employer. If I had been laid off, I'd be in a terrible position of competing against thousands of other recently laid off employees who are all desperate for work. If TinyPilot were to fold, I don't think I'm guaranteed another successful business, but I feel like I'm more likely to build a profitable business than to get a job as a developer in a poor tech economy.
Agreed. I read your original post during a time where I was starting up a solo company and it's great to see you've eventually seen success after all these years! The points you make about which problems seem interesting as an engineer and which ones lead to actual success resonate a lot. Congrats on TinyPilot!
It has two perspectives, 'Main' and 'Review'. For each perspectives, you can configure different 'windows' to be shown/hidden. Window types are 'Changes', 'Journal', 'Branches', 'Git Output' etc.
For the Main perspective, I configure it to show me History + Remote/Local branches + 'Git Output'. This is when I want to interact with the remote repository.
For the Review perspective, I configure it to display the Files/Folders and Changes. You can configure the 'Files' view to show 'modified' files on the top, review the differences in 'Changes' section below and do quick commits.
Yes, the above is not as nice as Eclipse being able to display semantic changes but it's a very nice workflow and have not found anything better.
I worked at a company which wrote their own scheduler and it was fraught with bugs. Dealing with time and date is HARD. Really, really hard. Your custom scheduler will break and at a worst possible time.
If Cron doesn't work, get an open source or commercial solution. And who cares what tech the scheduler is written in? Scheduler's job is to provide run your programs and provide API and a nice GUI if you desire.
Yeah exactly. I don't understand why they wanted the scheduler to be written in Python, since the scheduler should be decoupled from the jobs they are running anyway.
Holy Crap. This is amazing. Lot of folks have tried to make a general purpose visual programming solution and it always sucks. However, if we narrow the problem to
1. Show some data on a grid based on user input.
2. Let user select a row.
3. Provide different buttons to take actions on the selected row by doing an API call.
Then your tool solves the above problem extremely well (based on the tutorial I saw). And I guarantee you that any organization with tech teams have need to create plenty of such 'mini apps'.
I recently started a new job as a technical lead and I am going evaluate this tool seriously. Due to the nature of the business, we will be prefer an an on-premise solution. Do you have existing clients who use your on-premise solution? How are the updates to the tool distributed? And most importantly, what's the pricing like? Feel free to reach out to me via email.
BTW, you guys have done FANTASTIC job on the main page design/copy. It's been a long time since I saw a product website which instantly sold me on the idea. Well done!
Thank you! In fact, most of our enterprise customers are on-prem. Updates are distributed regularly and you've always got the choice of whether to update. Will reach out!
Cold Fusion shipped with a wizard to build web CRUD apps against SQL databases, which worked, and you could then continue coding from. It wasn’t bad, and came long before Rails or Django admin.
Definitely! You'll find Retool supports much more than SQL databases and Django admin supports a tiny subset of Retool use cases. For instance, most companies find that after a certain scale Django admin apps need to be converted to custom code. Retool is designed makes custom code unnecessary at any scale.
I did, but in an early stage where I had only one lesson in the archive. Didn't really catch up. I'm planning to switch to the new domain hnlessons.com, maybe I'll do then another one
> I’m not asking for your trust, but I’m committed to earning it.
Love this line. I had followed Xamarin when it was independent and I get a strong feeling that Nat wrote this himself and it's not just a PR speak. I am cautiously optimistic about GitHub going forward.
I would agree that majority of people don't realize how addictive smartphones can be and they don't care about fixing it.
At the same time, I think there are a decent number of people who realize that a smartphone is a GREAT tool they must have in their life but if they are not careful, it will take over their attention completely. The fact that apps like Moment (https://inthemoment.io/) exist and do well is a proof.
I welcome Siempo and I hope they offer a compelling app on the iOS platform. (See my other comment to know why I have my doubts regarding this)
I meet everything with criticism until it proves applicable. I hope this app succeeds as much as the next person, I just enjoy creating discussion on this type of forum. Instead of just blindly saying "Go app team", I want to point out all the concerns I have with the foundation of the app. That is what this site is about, intellectual discussion.
