Comment by darkhorse13 2 days ago
You know I 100% agree with your advice, but I can never follow it in practice. I just run head-first into development, driven by a nebulous vision that I can't properly explain. Forms.md is the peak of that experience for me haha.
Thanks for the comment and support though, again I 100% think this is solid advice, but I also believe it certainly does not apply to everyone/all products out there.
> just run head-first into development, driven by a nebulous vision that I can't properly explain. Forms.md is the peak of that experience for me haha.
That's not building a business, that's hoping you accidentally stumble into one.
Separately, developer tools are extremely hard to build a business around. You can know that by looking at how few success examples there are.
So, where to start:
1 - decide if you want to build a business (available evidence: you don't. you want to play with tech.)
2 - figure out how business work. For starters: you can't afford to reach out for a $25/mo product. Someone buying for a year only returns $300. You cannot make those economics work. But this is all easily learnable, certainly for anyone smart enough to be a competent engineer. But you have to want to.
2a - for typeform, lots of engineers can build that. We pay to not build, and especially not to operate, that.
3 - very candid interviews w/ one of the founders of tally.so are available discussing how the business works.
You're not alone in this matter. I myself as well also seem to by driven by such.
I have gotten some crazy ideas which I have implemented / are in the back burner (currently a student , but oh man)
This advice is generally right though. I also wish that there is an ideal way of doing things , like how linux manages the kernel he likes and he can live decently or some other project.
You might look at source-based like posthog , some api project used to be like this.
Its really hard earning money in open source. But if you do , that is all so great. Also starred your repo.