I don’t have the willpower to go through the tech company interview gauntlet again. Writing resumes, awkward networking events, LinkedIn DMs, job application after job application. I could probably get through it and get another job. I’m decent at using computers and regularly take showers, who wouldn't want to hire me? I got my last job through a job board, and the job before that through craigslist lol. But the struggle, the rejection, the pain. Is it possible to legitimately survive through other means?
I thought about trying to monetize bawcast, turn this into some kind of local news company, make money through advertisements. I'm not ready to give up my baby, though. I'm fine if bawcast stays small and unknown forever. It's like a clubhouse for close friends, a place to speak freely and share thoughts and ideas and BS online. I’m going to try to monetize another company I own, Hazybridge.
Hazybridge is sort of a generic placeholder. Two english words, easy to spell and visualize. I originally planned to turn it into a consulting type business, but consulting seems like being employed with any of the benefits of being employed. Hazybridge has a catchall email (anything @hazybridge.com forwards to me), a phone number, and an instagram account. Earlier this week I tried to open a business bank account. I almost made it to the end, but I need certain incorporation papers to finish setting up the account. It doesn’t matter anyhow as I don’t have any customers to charge in the first place!
I’ve read part of “Start Small, Stay Small” by Rob Walling. It’s about launching a startup without spending your time raising your money.
Most of the advice has been repeated by business influencers a thousand times over, the gist is, 1) find a niche market, 2) market to them, 3) get some slick designs made by someone with talent, 4) ship the minimum product or service, 5) automate what you can and move on.
Walling claims that the mistake most technical people make is they build a cool product first without figuring out who would want to buy it. It ends up being way too bespoke for anyone else to use it, so it goes nowhwere and they eventually lose interest. There’s nothing wrong with this, but you can’t expect to make money that way. You may learn some new skills or optimize something, but you are the only customer. Technical people think a solid product will sell itself, but that is far from reality. People buy mediocre products all the time, look at ecommerce websites like Temu, Wish, Amazon, etc, quality isn’t the defining feature, but they go for scale over everything. The same is true for technical products. MS Excel didn’t win by being the best spreadsheet software, it won by being good enough and coming bundled with Windows.
So, what does Hazybridge sell and to whom? TBD!
Things that happened:
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