How did you navigate the line between "I should just make money off of my own product and forget customers" vs "I should focus on the product and acquire customers"? Since there's an opportunity cost to doing both, I'm curious to understand how you navigated things with that kind of "fork in the road", so to speak.
I wrote an app for the iPad that I use to monitor the stock market during the day. I use this app literally every single day and have been putting features into it that make the iPad a sort of extension of my trade desk. I now have two builds, one for me and people in my office, and one for the public.
I'm trying to open pieces of my framework to the public to help me get feedback currently to see if my work is usable by others. I'm trying to address issues like what you're mentioning. I think that, in some cases, you can actually be more productive on the iPad than on the desktop. It depends on the workflow within the app.
Crypto-finance aside, I've only seen one financial technology company advertise for jobs on YC. On the surface, it just looks like YC doesn't have that much of a FinTech presence. (Outside of payments, anyway.)
Since they had that "RFS" for financial services, I'm curious to see what they present from this space on demo day.
When I choose a model, I choose that model for a reason. I get frustrated when I get a car that doesn't have features in the way I'd expect.
If I were buying the car, maybe I'd have time to get used to the placement of controls and the handling. If I'm renting for a short period of time, I don't have as much time to get used to the quirks of a particular vehicle. I want the experience to be as close to cars I'm familiar with, so I care about the model. This is even more important in cities with a lot of traffic and congestion.
Whether the experience is positive or not almost always comes down to the car I get stuck with.
I don't disagree with the tone of your post at all, but I had one comment:
I'm not sure the series 7 is a good representation of the industry. Unless muni bonds excite you, that exam is questionable in value except in the areas where they stress suitability of investments for clients. (I like that the exam focuses on clients a lot; I think it actually helps with developing a customer-centric mindset.)
It's a coin toss, but I went with iOS and don't regret it. The biggest reasons I don't regret it have nothing to do with the platform itself and have everything to do with having resources like raywenderlich.com and the articles on that site. I found that community and environment to be very very helpful.
The only frustration I really had was that, in the Apple world, things change fast. When I'd Google something, I'd find some code from 4 years ago that would show ways of doing things that were outdated. There are also minor disputes here and there on what's "the best way" to accomplish things, but overall, coming to -a- solution in most cases never took more than a day or two of frustration.
How did you navigate the line between "I should just make money off of my own product and forget customers" vs "I should focus on the product and acquire customers"? Since there's an opportunity cost to doing both, I'm curious to understand how you navigated things with that kind of "fork in the road", so to speak.