6 ms·

Apply your technical skills to a non-technical business. Dont start a tech startup in a tech hub. Run a business completely unrelated to tech and use your skill

Apply your technical skills to a non-technical business. Dont start a tech startup in a tech hub. Run a business completely unrelated to tech and use your skills to improve that business, theres SO much low hanging fruit out there. The venn diagram of tech skills and a non-tech business is where the opportunities are. This applies to many other unrelated skills.

cj 4y ago
Best advice in the thread so far. You’re chances of success are 10x higher trying to build technology for tanning salons than it is building the next new docker kubernetes react native infrastructure as a service. Unsexy sells.
- shantnutiwari 4y ago
  > You’re chances of success are 10x higher trying to build technology for tanning salons Except tanning salons (or hairstylists or dog walkers or plumbers) usually a) dont have cash to spend b) Dont see their problems as software related c) are in many cases hostile to software, due to geniune bad software I remember some time ago when I used to hang out in bootstrapped.fm, every week a person would come in and say "Oh I built a software for salons/hairstylists/dog walkers" how I can sell it? 4 weeks later they had shutdown their business, and a new person would come in, rinse and repeat.
  - chickenWing 4y ago
    Don't build software for salons; start your own salon that uses software you create, and make that your competitive advantage. Don't know how to cut hair? Then you probably don't know what software would help in that business anyway. Find a business you can do yourself, and help yourself using your technical skills. This is also why this (very good) advice is not so easy to follow in real life. You need multiple skillsets.
    - lostcolony 4y ago
      The obvious problem here being that there is a very, very fine line to tread where software actually matters. If you're not as well placed as the incumbents at the core product (salon, sure), software will not save you. If you're better placed than the incumbents at the core product, software doesn't matter. If you're (roughly) equally placed as the incumbents at the core product, software can help you, but it will likely take a while to realize any competitive advantage. And, I say placed, because there are a lot of factors at play. There's the quality of the service/product (itself a huge set of variables), pricing, location, and availability, to name a few. None of those will custom software directly help you with.
    - JackFr 4y ago
      https://www.getspiffy.com/about https://www.getspiffy.com/about Guy owned two carwashes in Cary, NC. Thought technology could enable mobile carwashing. Got connected with the right technology people ...
  - machiaweliczny 4y ago
    Tell this to Booksy.com (valued ~1B)
- mandeepj 4y ago
  > Unsexy sells. Not for me; it has to be sexy, world and life style changing. I’d rather build something like one of the top used apps or just be an employee at a tech co.
cosmodisk 4y ago
This is amazing advise. People working in tech, especially in high tech orgs live in bubbles and often imagine that the whole world is like this. I know a multimillion £ business that probably gained hundreds of thousands in productivity by simply introducing shared mailbox. Some of those low hanging fruits are litterly on the ground ready to be picked up.
- mandeepj 4y ago
  > I know a multimillion £ business that probably gained hundreds of thousands in productivity by simply introducing shared mailbox. Good if someone can pull it off. But, I believe that company might have sold that feature as an add-on to their existing customers. Otherwise, you know “Sales” are the hard part
  - eru 4y ago
    I think the advice here is not so much to sell a solution to these businesses, but to start a business in that sector and run it more efficiently---thanks to tech magic---than the competition.
    - mandeepj 4y ago
      > but to start a business in that sector That's what I also meant. Even if you start a business, the features that your product would have, will be sold as a "solution" - in layman's terms.
- vagrantJin 4y ago
  > Some of those low hanging fruits are litterly on the ground ready to be picked up. Why we are talking about low-hanging fruit instead of picking them up? I have a hunch they aren't low hanging after all.
ehnto 4y ago
I keep peddling this idea, but if tech wages came back to reality it would be affordable for small to mid sized companies to hire software developers to truly empower their specific businesses with software. The reason for that is the same reason your idea works, most businesses outside the tech bubble stand to gain a lot form software. Currently they have no way to act on it except to hobble together a ruby goldberg of SaaS services or try and cram their businesses into a monolithic piece of software that expects your business to run a certain way.
- ironlake 4y ago
  >if tech wages came back to reality it would be affordable for mid sized companies to hire software developers to truly empower their specific businesses with software. Most mid-sized companies don't have the skills to manage and deploy software developers that can solve their problems. Those skills tend to be expensive, and the software project, historically, has a high chance of failure. So, yeah, the high price of tech wages seems to be correct.
  - ehnto 4y ago
    I disagree. You can do software very simply, it's in an environment of excess that teams tend to over-complicate software and software deployment into complex monsters that are expensive to maintain. Small business software problems often lack the scale and public facing nature that causes problems for software infrastructure and increases it's complexity. I speak from experience in executing some of these kinds of software projects, as I live in a market not influenced by the SV bubble. Our market has a bunch of bootstrapped software businesses too, because the economics of it are more favorable to that kind of enterprise and you're not competing with 200k+ wages. I'm talking about Australia as well, an expensive first world country.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Most large-sized companies don't have those skill either. In fact, going into some market and solving a problem with software is almost always done by people not used to work in development that go and write something by themselves.
Volrath89 4y ago
Which industries do you consider as the lowest hanging fruits?

cj 4y ago

Best advice in the thread so far. You’re chances of success are 10x higher trying to build technology for tanning salons than it is building the next new docker kubernetes react native infrastructure as a service. Unsexy sells.

shantnutiwari 4y ago
> You’re chances of success are 10x higher trying to build technology for tanning salons Except tanning salons (or hairstylists or dog walkers or plumbers) usually a) dont have cash to spend b) Dont see their problems as software related c) are in many cases hostile to software, due to geniune bad software I remember some time ago when I used to hang out in bootstrapped.fm, every week a person would come in and say "Oh I built a software for salons/hairstylists/dog walkers" how I can sell it? 4 weeks later they had shutdown their business, and a new person would come in, rinse and repeat.
- chickenWing 4y ago
  Don't build software for salons; start your own salon that uses software you create, and make that your competitive advantage. Don't know how to cut hair? Then you probably don't know what software would help in that business anyway. Find a business you can do yourself, and help yourself using your technical skills. This is also why this (very good) advice is not so easy to follow in real life. You need multiple skillsets.
  - lostcolony 4y ago
    The obvious problem here being that there is a very, very fine line to tread where software actually matters. If you're not as well placed as the incumbents at the core product (salon, sure), software will not save you. If you're better placed than the incumbents at the core product, software doesn't matter. If you're (roughly) equally placed as the incumbents at the core product, software can help you, but it will likely take a while to realize any competitive advantage. And, I say placed, because there are a lot of factors at play. There's the quality of the service/product (itself a huge set of variables), pricing, location, and availability, to name a few. None of those will custom software directly help you with.
  - JackFr 4y ago
    https://www.getspiffy.com/about https://www.getspiffy.com/about Guy owned two carwashes in Cary, NC. Thought technology could enable mobile carwashing. Got connected with the right technology people ...
- machiaweliczny 4y ago
  Tell this to Booksy.com (valued ~1B)
mandeepj 4y ago
> Unsexy sells. Not for me; it has to be sexy, world and life style changing. I’d rather build something like one of the top used apps or just be an employee at a tech co.

cosmodisk 4y ago

This is amazing advise. People working in tech, especially in high tech orgs live in bubbles and often imagine that the whole world is like this. I know a multimillion £ business that probably gained hundreds of thousands in productivity by simply introducing shared mailbox. Some of those low hanging fruits are litterly on the ground ready to be picked up.

mandeepj 4y ago
> I know a multimillion £ business that probably gained hundreds of thousands in productivity by simply introducing shared mailbox. Good if someone can pull it off. But, I believe that company might have sold that feature as an add-on to their existing customers. Otherwise, you know “Sales” are the hard part
- eru 4y ago
  I think the advice here is not so much to sell a solution to these businesses, but to start a business in that sector and run it more efficiently---thanks to tech magic---than the competition.
  - mandeepj 4y ago
    > but to start a business in that sector That's what I also meant. Even if you start a business, the features that your product would have, will be sold as a "solution" - in layman's terms.
vagrantJin 4y ago
> Some of those low hanging fruits are litterly on the ground ready to be picked up. Why we are talking about low-hanging fruit instead of picking them up? I have a hunch they aren't low hanging after all.

ehnto 4y ago

I keep peddling this idea, but if tech wages came back to reality it would be affordable for small to mid sized companies to hire software developers to truly empower their specific businesses with software. The reason for that is the same reason your idea works, most businesses outside the tech bubble stand to gain a lot form software. Currently they have no way to act on it except to hobble together a ruby goldberg of SaaS services or try and cram their businesses into a monolithic piece of software that expects your business to run a certain way.

ironlake 4y ago
>if tech wages came back to reality it would be affordable for mid sized companies to hire software developers to truly empower their specific businesses with software. Most mid-sized companies don't have the skills to manage and deploy software developers that can solve their problems. Those skills tend to be expensive, and the software project, historically, has a high chance of failure. So, yeah, the high price of tech wages seems to be correct.
- ehnto 4y ago
  I disagree. You can do software very simply, it's in an environment of excess that teams tend to over-complicate software and software deployment into complex monsters that are expensive to maintain. Small business software problems often lack the scale and public facing nature that causes problems for software infrastructure and increases it's complexity. I speak from experience in executing some of these kinds of software projects, as I live in a market not influenced by the SV bubble. Our market has a bunch of bootstrapped software businesses too, because the economics of it are more favorable to that kind of enterprise and you're not competing with 200k+ wages. I'm talking about Australia as well, an expensive first world country.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Most large-sized companies don't have those skill either. In fact, going into some market and solving a problem with software is almost always done by people not used to work in development that go and write something by themselves.

Volrath89 4y ago

Which industries do you consider as the lowest hanging fruits?