Yes I too miss the days where I could walk 6 miles into to town to go the general store. The grind of making every step myself, learning the path to avoid the mud, the rock in my shoe that just wouldn’t leave. Good times. Cars suck.
Kidding aside. The human brain has unsurprisingly a huge attachment to effort and equates it with perceived value of a process and outcome.
Whether one spent 20 years developing a general cure for cancer or just magicked one into existence right now does not change the immense value many could gain from it.
Writing software was never about the value to the writer it was about the value to the user.
In the past, one could care less about the user to an extent because they simply enjoyed the process or “grind” of building. There were signs like the engineer that went off to fix a bug and took 2 weeks rebuilding some part of some system delaying the overall feature or product release. The excuse being that it was of course necessary and good development takes time.
Now one may be able to fix that bug in minutes and anything that takes longer than an hour with AI is more seriously questioned as necessary. Sometimes it still is but more often than not that engineer simply wanted to build, to grind on a problem at the cost of potential user value.
What does a "pure" indie solo hacker do? What does sustainable mean to you?
Not to assume your definitions but in my experience I often get the impression that "pure" means one just gets to code and not worry about anything else.
"indie" means one gets to pick what to code, how to code, when to code, why to code, etc.
"solo" means not having to deal with anyone one doesn't want to deal with.
"hacker" means standards, processes, tests, commits to main, etc. are only necessary when and if one wants them to be.
"sustainable" means at an equivalent or more income and less or similar costs as a job where someone else handles the marketing, sales, legal, design, anything one doesn't want/like to do as well as absorbing most of the downside risks of market shifts, loss of customers, competitor moves, etc. Additionally, one can go on vacation whenever they want and the income keeps coming.
All of this for as long as one wants the situation to last.
Sounds great to many I'm sure as it basically describes being a wealthy gentleman inventor/scientist/artist in 1880s England.
Most activities are hobbies until someone other than the participant is paying for it. Most everyone has a status of amateur until they get paid then convert to professional.
There are a lot of nuances in above statements and hobby and amateur are not reflective of lack of quality or expertise. There are I'm sure many hobbyists building wood chairs of finer quality than anyone can buy anywhere. It's up to them if they want to get paid for it.
May sound harsh to the person wanting their hobbies to be paid for unconditionally but if you're the one doing the paying it's reasonable to expect something out of the deal.
If one could figure out how to get companies to actually use it which seems highly unlikely.
In a presumably asymmetrical information process where one side has more information that’s valuable to the other but not shared the only reason the informed side would share is for their benefit or they were forced to share.
So if sharing all that info you mentioned would somehow improve their hiring process i.e lower costs, decrease false positives (hiring bad candidates), increase overall quality of hired candidates, etc. then some companies may be interested in that value trade off.
Other option being forcing companies to share info through say lowering access overall to candidates (we all left LinkedIn and others and only communicated, applied, etc through your new site).
* I would say only good candidates could move leaving only bad ones on LinkedIn but “good” is subjective and I think the lower threshold on quality companies will accept in candidates is sadly lower than many of us like to think.
Also there’s an assumption of information asymmetry here but in reality we have as little information on companies hiring processes as they potentially do on our individual job searches.
If your site also included visibility into candidates search, how many you applied to, how many interviews you got and success/failure rate, why you didn’t call that company back or ultimately didn’t choose one offer over the other then it actually would be lifting the information veil on both sides so to speak.
Of course, many candidates may not be comfortable revealing that info if currently working due to possible retaliation (even if technically illegal). So you’re left with candidates that are unemployed currently who are at disadvantage in favor of hiring companies.
Put another way, if you were the world’s most desirable candidate for whatever field and level you’re at, it was known and agreed far and wide, would it benefit you to share where you applied, how you did, etc?
All this being said, my aim is never discourage someone from trying to solve a problem they believe is important nor flatly deny that something could work just providing some things to think about to hopefully help somehow.
The new California law only requires that Steam makes it clear you are buying a digital license.
So per the history of Steam’s terms and agreements users could have been buying digital licenses for a while and Steam just wasn’t upfront about it.
Also depending the lingo in their T&A, digital licensing could apply to all purchases moving forward, all past purchases, or only specified purchases.
Either way if you made a purchase without clear acknowledgement that your ownership and it’s characteristics was terminable or could be altered in the future then I could see legitimate cause for refunds due to false pretenses, bait and switch, or something like that.
Granted Steam also just changed arbitration clauses so they may already be prepping for responses like mass refund requests.
Anyways, time to get rid of steam, save what games I can, find an alternative.
Whether you learn to build it yourself or get outside help, the optimizing for low-cost (no outside funding) usually means whether accepted or not a longer timeline to competitiveness. That timeline could potentially be reduced through significant scope narrowing in terms of provided features, platforms, etc.
If you think your niche customers will go for that narrowed scope and will accommodate a longer product timeline then you could build yourself but of course might go faster/smoother if you bring on outside help which may be pricey unless some heavy convincing of potential.
As for building in Bubble or from scratch that depends a lot on scope and product roadmap.
A Bubble app may be enough to provide value to customers while initially determining the right narrowed feature set, business model, pricing, etc. especially if deeper features might not be necessary for a few years (unless you take outside funding / accrue enough savings to expedite those features).
None of this is meant to dissuade, I have though been on projects that attempt to capture a niche that isn't fulfilled by current offerings only to discover the reason why is that, that niche of customers maybe aren't exactly sure what they want or only have enterprise SAAS offerings to compare to and really just want that product for cheaper.
Also there are numerous software products (especially SAAS) taken at face-value that don't look to be much more than a simple database and GUI but in reality, user access, legal requirements, privacy and security expectations, SLAs drastically increase the scope to be considered a viable option for companies.
All of this dependent of course on your unique knowledge of industry and problem-space and relationships with potential customers so hope this helps give some things to consider and best of luck!
https://nav.al/how-to-get-rich
—- not personal blog per se but collection of all personal interviews. Excuse the clickbaitish title, it is not a pitch of any kind.
Kidding aside. The human brain has unsurprisingly a huge attachment to effort and equates it with perceived value of a process and outcome.
Whether one spent 20 years developing a general cure for cancer or just magicked one into existence right now does not change the immense value many could gain from it.
Writing software was never about the value to the writer it was about the value to the user.
In the past, one could care less about the user to an extent because they simply enjoyed the process or “grind” of building. There were signs like the engineer that went off to fix a bug and took 2 weeks rebuilding some part of some system delaying the overall feature or product release. The excuse being that it was of course necessary and good development takes time.
Now one may be able to fix that bug in minutes and anything that takes longer than an hour with AI is more seriously questioned as necessary. Sometimes it still is but more often than not that engineer simply wanted to build, to grind on a problem at the cost of potential user value.