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Just wow. This is not that hard. How much money are people sinking into micro-SaaS in 2023? If you live in a cheap place, get a decent job, then you can save

Just wow. This is not that hard. How much money are people sinking into micro-SaaS in 2023? If you live in a cheap place, get a decent job, then you can save money which you can use to start a business. It costs literally $50 to get a LLC from your local Secretary of State or equivalent. You can do it yourself…like tomorrow. Your chances of making it to Elon Musk status are slim, but there’s literally no excuse in America to not spin up an LLC by tomorrow, get a free EIN, open a bank account for FREE, throw up a landing page and start interacting with potential customers… …in literally days. That’s how you do it!

acuozzo 4y ago
Sounds good, but who are my potential customers? If I follow the "scratch your own itch" advice I ultimately fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. a better register allocation algorithm for 6502 C compilers. If I follow the "put yourself in the future and build that" advice I fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. a library capable of guaranteed constant-time computation. If I follow the "build products for your niche hobby community" advice I fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. a better than state-of-the-art comb filter designed for NTSC laserdiscs. If I follow the "capitalize on new trends in tech" advice I fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. an ML model trained to invert audio cassette dub generational fidelity loss. How do you figure out what people want when you're very, very, very different from most people?
- zamnos 4y ago
  Trying to form an entire business around some small bit of technology is a non-started, imo. Focus on one area (eg the 6052 uc), blog with passion about what you're doing, build a following, and start up a Patreon. The long tail of the Internet enables business models that target tiny niches, so the cassette heads can find each other, and subsidize the creator of an ML model trained to invert audio cassette dub generational fidelity loss. It's a scary leap to make, but if you can pay some bills following your passion, making things you need to build, then I'd call that a win.

acuozzo 4y ago

Sounds good, but who are my potential customers? If I follow the "scratch your own itch" advice I ultimately fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. a better register allocation algorithm for 6502 C compilers. If I follow the "put yourself in the future and build that" advice I fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. a library capable of guaranteed constant-time computation. If I follow the "build products for your niche hobby community" advice I fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. a better than state-of-the-art comb filter designed for NTSC laserdiscs. If I follow the "capitalize on new trends in tech" advice I fail because nobody wants to pay for e.g. an ML model trained to invert audio cassette dub generational fidelity loss. How do you figure out what people want when you're very, very, very different from most people?

zamnos 4y ago
Trying to form an entire business around some small bit of technology is a non-started, imo. Focus on one area (eg the 6052 uc), blog with passion about what you're doing, build a following, and start up a Patreon. The long tail of the Internet enables business models that target tiny niches, so the cassette heads can find each other, and subsidize the creator of an ML model trained to invert audio cassette dub generational fidelity loss. It's a scary leap to make, but if you can pay some bills following your passion, making things you need to build, then I'd call that a win.