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A lot of naysayers on this idea but there’s plenty of low hanging fruit that companies would love to find a cheaper option for. It would of course take time to

A lot of naysayers on this idea but there’s plenty of low hanging fruit that companies would love to find a cheaper option for. It would of course take time to gain traction without a sales force but also this very community of people that would band together could effectively evangelize a better solution with just their existing network. Tech people are often the early adopters and word spread via Twitter, etc. I’m in non-tech industries in finance/accounting and during budget conversations a few things over the past few years consistently pop up as this costs too damn much; smartsheets, zoom, slack, etc. I actually implement a specific Oracle product that costs most companies 6 figures a year that could easily be self service SAAS product with a much better solution. Financial analysts skew mildly technical and could implement it themselves and be targeted fairly easily. Competition exists but they always bloat the product to charge almost as much or more than Oracle does. But end users only care about a few small features and I think some one could execute those much better than what exists on the market. All competitors require an enterprise software sales process to even see/demo their software. If the analysts could login, connect to their data, and set some custom configurations (possibly llm assisted?), and worry about monetizing the relationship until the value prop has been realized- then I think this would spread on its own, people in the industry talk, change jobs frequently and take their tooling preferences with them. Best of all, this group of people usually report to a cfo and can offer their department a significant cost savings by doing this, saving the company money is literally their job already. That’s my business idea without giving it away entirely lol. Comment here if you’re actually interested in this, I would love to join a group like this working on something as a group. I can code but never done so professionally or as part of a team.

em-bee 2y ago
this does sound interesting, but the challenge is still funding the start. bootstrapping is great (and i prefer it over having investors) but i still need to feed my kids. so the question is, how do we get to ramen-profitability (make enough so we can feed ourselves, even if it's only ramen noodles)
- conductr 2y ago
  I get it but don’t have a direct solution for that, it’s a process and includes many unknowns and has no guarantees but isn’t the premise here to use our unproductive time while unemployed to create something that hopefully is worth something one day? It’s odd to me that while unemployed people are all individually working on side projects, learning the latest stacks, etc and do it all as throwaway code that will never see the light of day-and that’s seen as acceptable, as is contributing to open source, etc. But doing those same activities as a cooperative and paid in equity is where people draw a line. There’s definitely a lot of details to work out if this were to take shape. How much equity do people earn, what happens when they get a job and their availability declines, etc. But it wouldn’t take much effort to think through those kinds of things and make something reasonable/fair.
  - em-bee 2y ago
    i get your point, but it doesn't match my reality. all my time is spent on searching for and applying to jobs. i tend to have more time for side projects while i am actually earning money. in part it's the anxiety of not spending enough time on searching for work, which makes it difficult to focus on something else. i can't even spend much time with my children without feeling guilty that i should be spending more time on jobhunting. it would help if i still had some savings like a year ago, but those are almost used up by now.
    - conductr 2y ago
      Makes sense. After initial period, I only see enough jobs to keep me busy ~10 hours a week. It's how I spend my first ~2 hours a day so we do just have differing realities in that regard

em-bee 2y ago

this does sound interesting, but the challenge is still funding the start. bootstrapping is great (and i prefer it over having investors) but i still need to feed my kids. so the question is, how do we get to ramen-profitability (make enough so we can feed ourselves, even if it's only ramen noodles)

conductr 2y ago
I get it but don’t have a direct solution for that, it’s a process and includes many unknowns and has no guarantees but isn’t the premise here to use our unproductive time while unemployed to create something that hopefully is worth something one day? It’s odd to me that while unemployed people are all individually working on side projects, learning the latest stacks, etc and do it all as throwaway code that will never see the light of day-and that’s seen as acceptable, as is contributing to open source, etc. But doing those same activities as a cooperative and paid in equity is where people draw a line. There’s definitely a lot of details to work out if this were to take shape. How much equity do people earn, what happens when they get a job and their availability declines, etc. But it wouldn’t take much effort to think through those kinds of things and make something reasonable/fair.
- em-bee 2y ago
  i get your point, but it doesn't match my reality. all my time is spent on searching for and applying to jobs. i tend to have more time for side projects while i am actually earning money. in part it's the anxiety of not spending enough time on searching for work, which makes it difficult to focus on something else. i can't even spend much time with my children without feeling guilty that i should be spending more time on jobhunting. it would help if i still had some savings like a year ago, but those are almost used up by now.
  - conductr 2y ago
    Makes sense. After initial period, I only see enough jobs to keep me busy ~10 hours a week. It's how I spend my first ~2 hours a day so we do just have differing realities in that regard