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I gave a talk at Dropbox called "How to start a business without quitting your day job" that I think delivers a lot of the punch on this page without the weird

by akanet 10y ago

I gave a talk at Dropbox called "How to start a business without quitting your day job" that I think delivers a lot of the punch on this page without the weird culty vibe. Give it a watch (for free, obviously) if you like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8UwcyYT3z0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8UwcyYT3z0

Cyph0n 10y ago
Thanks for sharing! Watching it right now ;) Edit: damn, I love your presenting style. Keep it up man!
foxhop 10y ago
Very neat, I have always intuitively followed these constraints and I have noticed that they keep me out of trouble. I don't shoot for the stars, I shoot to create value and make a bit of some money. That said, I end up passing on a lot of way more interesting / world changing ideas, for more boring ideas.
fpgaminer 10y ago
Thank you for sharing. For quite awhile now I've had in the back of my mind that I want to develop some kind of side business. I'm perfectly happy at my full time job, and incredibly busy ... but I've always been the kind of person to spend my free time tinkering with hobby projects. It would be nice to pour that time into something that generates a little extra cash and has the potential to blossom into a small business. Trouble is ... my ideas suck. Either I have a really good idea that requires inventing new technology, or I have a niche idea that I can't fathom how to monetize or market. I'll take your points about being boring to heart and hope something finally springs to mind under those constraints. But as of a month or two ago I already realized that I needed to tone my ideas down, and after all that time with it in the back of my mind ... I still have nothing. Frustrating.
- irremediable 10y ago
  What are some examples of the ideas that need a new technology, if you don't mind sharing? I'm interested to hear whether the ideas are really pie-in-the-sky, or they're just a bit too tricky for practical implementation in the present day.
  - fpgaminer 10y ago
    Latest idea I already posted about a few days ago: a keycard based doorlock with actual security (ed25519 based authentication, instead of the standard crackable 48-bit DES). Nobody really cares about that level of security. A phone app that makes scanning documents stupid easy by using machine learning to identify when a document is on screen and automatically take a picture, and then use more machine learning to convert the picture into a cleaned up image. The concept to train the machine models is pretty easy; just print out a known document, take a bunch of pictures, and train the model to convert from the pictures to the original document. But it would likely require massive kernels to get enough context to do the necessary 3D transformations. Could probably reduce the strain on the algorithm by using traditional picture->document algorithms and then use the model to clean it up further. Either way, it's new tech that would require a lot of work. Vocal isolator for extracting vocals from music, using a machine learning model. These tools kind of already exist, but they don't use machine learning, usually require user interaction to tweak knobs, and don't work particularly well. My bet is that a 1D conv network can do great, and generating examples for training is super easy. But, again, new tech, and as easy as machine learning sounds it usually devolves into long nights of debugging, tweaking, and banging your head trying to figure out why changing one hyper-parameter ever so slightly completely changes your results. A hardware password manager. Like KeePass/LastPass/etc but as an actual hardware device, possibly a wearable/watch. The idea is that a hardware password manager provides more security than a software password manager, by virtue of not being susceptible to malware (though yes passwords can still be stolen 1 by 1 if used on an infected machine), and most importantly works with phones/tablets over bluetooth. Requires developing hardware, productization, etc. Not a big market; nobody cares about security. I have a quiz website that I built for my wife, who's a teacher. It allows here to give online fill-in-the-blank type quizzes to her classes, with a set amount of time to take the quiz, and a set amount of time that the quiz is available. She's happy with it; I made it because she had something similar with Edmodo but the school dropped Edmodo. I can't imagine such a simple website is worth much though, and it's currently only designed for her and a bit rough around the edges. It'd take quite a lot of UI updates and a bit of backend tweaking to make it usable by the general public. A couple game ideas, mostly geared towards programmers. Pretty niche, and games take immense effort versus profit. A service to provide email to Bitcoin addresses. You authenticate yourself using your Bitcoin wallet's signature mechanism, and then can receive email like at e.g. 1p7H5w1LfgLT6tat951e85dFXEDQjNp8L@example.com. I got this mostly working, but rendering emails is super hard, who wants to use yet another mail client, how do I monetize, how do I fight spam, etc, etc. Lots of security and anonymity angles to this, but security is hard, so again lots of work. NSFW: Machine learning based porn assistant. You thumb up/down images, it learns what you like, and finds more of it. Keeps learning as you thumb up/down its results. Classic machine learning model. Requires new tech, and it probably requires training a model per user (super expensive), or some kind of transfer learning. Lots more beyond that, all very pie-in-the-sky, new tech related, or super niche.
- seibelj 10y ago
  I have similar ideas, and want to start side businesses. I have succeeded a couple times. I'm about to launch a new one, send me an email (in profile) and I'll show you what I have, maybe we can bounce ideas or collaborate. I do software and certain types of hardware.
2michaeltaylor 10y ago
Haha I'm sorry if it came across as 'culty'. I'll check out the video thanks for sharing.
- akanet 10y ago
  I'm sorry too, I kind of threw that in there without much thought. If I had to be more specific, I'd say that what you've done is really more like enshrining what you in particular have done at your company, without too much thought about what might be generally applicable. For instance, the way you recommend a hyper-specific style of elevator pitching I think has basically no impact on success. Success with pitching is (according to my dumbass) way more about identifying who your actual audience is and why they care than about getting this perfect "pitch" correct. The discovery process around that is much harder and ambiguous than defining a pitch on paper. Also, you have really specific stuff in there like "blast your contact list". I mean, okay, I think that might work for some people in some industries, but I don't think it's great advice for the median new founder. Neither is doing a CAC/LTV for a business when you haven't even figured out potential distribution much use, either. Anyway, my longwinded point is that this is kind of culty. What makes cults what they are? I think it boils down to their unshakable conviction that their specific rituals are correct and their motivation to convince others of that. I don't think that "follow these specific actions and you will have a business" is advice that you can give in good conscience.
  - 2michaeltaylor 10y ago
    ^^ super useful feedback, thanks for taking the time to explain and get more specific. Generally, most people do NO (or very little) research, testing or thinking about their business idea before investing significant resources into it. My aim was to get them thinking, even if my way isn't the best. If I can help them avoid analysis paralysis and just DO something that moves their dream of starting a business forward, without risking too much money and time, then I'm happy. :-) With over 10k words I didn't have the time (or frankly, energy) to dive too deep into any one topic. For example elevator pitching, which could be a 10,000 word blog post in itself. Happy to provide links for further reading though if you have any specific resources you find useful? I actually think the culty thing is kind of a compliment; some of the most successful companies are kind of cultish and many great marketers talk about building 'Tribes' (e.g. Seth Godin). Maybe I just absorbed a bit too much of Noah Kagan's charisma when I worked at AppSumo, I dunno. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This is a bigger topic again, but in my experience rather than 'optimizing' (investing a lot of time choosing the best possible path) it's much more efficient to 'satisfice' (invest less time and choose a good enough path). Does it really make that much difference which elevator pitch format you use? Or is it more important that you actually do write one? Providing multiple options would only scare most people away because it's too hard to pick. Hope that's useful background / partial justification for cultiness. ;-)
Bpito 10y ago
This was inspiring and I hope this will push me to realize my boring idea I had in mind for a few years.
PostOnce 10y ago
Do you have the slides sitting around as a pdf or something somewhere?
- akanet 10y ago
  Sure, I hacked em together in google slides so that's easy: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Vf2vPBlIInV792KOIiiCHNjWYfMmjjgbgDVq_4_769s/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Vf2vPBlIInV792KOIiiC...
biztos 10y ago
Thanks for that, I watched it and probably wouldn't have found it if not for your comment here! I think that for a lot of people who might try small businesses, the "use of surplus energy" is intermingled. Maybe you want to make some cool piece of software (because you just want to); and you want to use it to do something creative (because fulfillment); and you want it to also be a business (because you want more money). In that case it's much harder to focus on the "boring" part. (I am assuming of course that there exist things that are "boring" in the business sense but still allow for some satisfying creativity and/or fun hacking. For instance CoderPad gives you plenty of room to do cool programming things, if doing those will make you happy. You just might have to book them on the lifestyle/happiness ledger. The bingo-cards thing, maybe not so much.)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

by akanet 10y ago

Cyph0n 10y ago

Thanks for sharing! Watching it right now ;) Edit: damn, I love your presenting style. Keep it up man!

foxhop 10y ago

Very neat, I have always intuitively followed these constraints and I have noticed that they keep me out of trouble. I don't shoot for the stars, I shoot to create value and make a bit of some money. That said, I end up passing on a lot of way more interesting / world changing ideas, for more boring ideas.

fpgaminer 10y ago

Thank you for sharing. For quite awhile now I've had in the back of my mind that I want to develop some kind of side business. I'm perfectly happy at my full time job, and incredibly busy ... but I've always been the kind of person to spend my free time tinkering with hobby projects. It would be nice to pour that time into something that generates a little extra cash and has the potential to blossom into a small business. Trouble is ... my ideas suck. Either I have a really good idea that requires inventing new technology, or I have a niche idea that I can't fathom how to monetize or market. I'll take your points about being boring to heart and hope something finally springs to mind under those constraints. But as of a month or two ago I already realized that I needed to tone my ideas down, and after all that time with it in the back of my mind ... I still have nothing. Frustrating.

irremediable 10y ago
What are some examples of the ideas that need a new technology, if you don't mind sharing? I'm interested to hear whether the ideas are really pie-in-the-sky, or they're just a bit too tricky for practical implementation in the present day.
- fpgaminer 10y ago
  Latest idea I already posted about a few days ago: a keycard based doorlock with actual security (ed25519 based authentication, instead of the standard crackable 48-bit DES). Nobody really cares about that level of security. A phone app that makes scanning documents stupid easy by using machine learning to identify when a document is on screen and automatically take a picture, and then use more machine learning to convert the picture into a cleaned up image. The concept to train the machine models is pretty easy; just print out a known document, take a bunch of pictures, and train the model to convert from the pictures to the original document. But it would likely require massive kernels to get enough context to do the necessary 3D transformations. Could probably reduce the strain on the algorithm by using traditional picture->document algorithms and then use the model to clean it up further. Either way, it's new tech that would require a lot of work. Vocal isolator for extracting vocals from music, using a machine learning model. These tools kind of already exist, but they don't use machine learning, usually require user interaction to tweak knobs, and don't work particularly well. My bet is that a 1D conv network can do great, and generating examples for training is super easy. But, again, new tech, and as easy as machine learning sounds it usually devolves into long nights of debugging, tweaking, and banging your head trying to figure out why changing one hyper-parameter ever so slightly completely changes your results. A hardware password manager. Like KeePass/LastPass/etc but as an actual hardware device, possibly a wearable/watch. The idea is that a hardware password manager provides more security than a software password manager, by virtue of not being susceptible to malware (though yes passwords can still be stolen 1 by 1 if used on an infected machine), and most importantly works with phones/tablets over bluetooth. Requires developing hardware, productization, etc. Not a big market; nobody cares about security. I have a quiz website that I built for my wife, who's a teacher. It allows here to give online fill-in-the-blank type quizzes to her classes, with a set amount of time to take the quiz, and a set amount of time that the quiz is available. She's happy with it; I made it because she had something similar with Edmodo but the school dropped Edmodo. I can't imagine such a simple website is worth much though, and it's currently only designed for her and a bit rough around the edges. It'd take quite a lot of UI updates and a bit of backend tweaking to make it usable by the general public. A couple game ideas, mostly geared towards programmers. Pretty niche, and games take immense effort versus profit. A service to provide email to Bitcoin addresses. You authenticate yourself using your Bitcoin wallet's signature mechanism, and then can receive email like at e.g. 1p7H5w1LfgLT6tat951e85dFXEDQjNp8L@example.com. I got this mostly working, but rendering emails is super hard, who wants to use yet another mail client, how do I monetize, how do I fight spam, etc, etc. Lots of security and anonymity angles to this, but security is hard, so again lots of work. NSFW: Machine learning based porn assistant. You thumb up/down images, it learns what you like, and finds more of it. Keeps learning as you thumb up/down its results. Classic machine learning model. Requires new tech, and it probably requires training a model per user (super expensive), or some kind of transfer learning. Lots more beyond that, all very pie-in-the-sky, new tech related, or super niche.
seibelj 10y ago
I have similar ideas, and want to start side businesses. I have succeeded a couple times. I'm about to launch a new one, send me an email (in profile) and I'll show you what I have, maybe we can bounce ideas or collaborate. I do software and certain types of hardware.

2michaeltaylor 10y ago

Haha I'm sorry if it came across as 'culty'. I'll check out the video thanks for sharing.

akanet 10y ago
I'm sorry too, I kind of threw that in there without much thought. If I had to be more specific, I'd say that what you've done is really more like enshrining what you in particular have done at your company, without too much thought about what might be generally applicable. For instance, the way you recommend a hyper-specific style of elevator pitching I think has basically no impact on success. Success with pitching is (according to my dumbass) way more about identifying who your actual audience is and why they care than about getting this perfect "pitch" correct. The discovery process around that is much harder and ambiguous than defining a pitch on paper. Also, you have really specific stuff in there like "blast your contact list". I mean, okay, I think that might work for some people in some industries, but I don't think it's great advice for the median new founder. Neither is doing a CAC/LTV for a business when you haven't even figured out potential distribution much use, either. Anyway, my longwinded point is that this is kind of culty. What makes cults what they are? I think it boils down to their unshakable conviction that their specific rituals are correct and their motivation to convince others of that. I don't think that "follow these specific actions and you will have a business" is advice that you can give in good conscience.
- 2michaeltaylor 10y ago
  ^^ super useful feedback, thanks for taking the time to explain and get more specific. Generally, most people do NO (or very little) research, testing or thinking about their business idea before investing significant resources into it. My aim was to get them thinking, even if my way isn't the best. If I can help them avoid analysis paralysis and just DO something that moves their dream of starting a business forward, without risking too much money and time, then I'm happy. :-) With over 10k words I didn't have the time (or frankly, energy) to dive too deep into any one topic. For example elevator pitching, which could be a 10,000 word blog post in itself. Happy to provide links for further reading though if you have any specific resources you find useful? I actually think the culty thing is kind of a compliment; some of the most successful companies are kind of cultish and many great marketers talk about building 'Tribes' (e.g. Seth Godin). Maybe I just absorbed a bit too much of Noah Kagan's charisma when I worked at AppSumo, I dunno. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This is a bigger topic again, but in my experience rather than 'optimizing' (investing a lot of time choosing the best possible path) it's much more efficient to 'satisfice' (invest less time and choose a good enough path). Does it really make that much difference which elevator pitch format you use? Or is it more important that you actually do write one? Providing multiple options would only scare most people away because it's too hard to pick. Hope that's useful background / partial justification for cultiness. ;-)

Bpito 10y ago

This was inspiring and I hope this will push me to realize my boring idea I had in mind for a few years.

PostOnce 10y ago

Do you have the slides sitting around as a pdf or something somewhere?

akanet 10y ago
Sure, I hacked em together in google slides so that's easy: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Vf2vPBlIInV792KOIiiCHNjWYfMmjjgbgDVq_4_769s/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Vf2vPBlIInV792KOIiiC...

biztos 10y ago

Thanks for that, I watched it and probably wouldn't have found it if not for your comment here! I think that for a lot of people who might try small businesses, the "use of surplus energy" is intermingled. Maybe you want to make some cool piece of software (because you just want to); and you want to use it to do something creative (because fulfillment); and you want it to also be a business (because you want more money). In that case it's much harder to focus on the "boring" part. (I am assuming of course that there exist things that are "boring" in the business sense but still allow for some satisfying creativity and/or fun hacking. For instance CoderPad gives you plenty of room to do cool programming things, if doing those will make you happy. You just might have to book them on the lifestyle/happiness ledger. The bingo-cards thing, maybe not so much.)

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]