For me, it's around product-market-distribution-founder fit. Some questions are:
Product-market: Are folks already spending money on such products or problems? How does my product solve that issue? What are their alternatives, including doing nothing? Are there big players? If yes, there's plenty of money. How's my product different? Any smaller niches that are underserved?
Distribution: How can I reach the target customers? Is that a channel I can actually access? Do i even have a chance to reach them?
Founder: Is that product-market-distribution combination my thing? Is that a distribution channel I want to use, or does it turn me completely off? Do I even want to serve those types of customers?
It might be a super product-market-distribution fit, but if it includes stuff I dislike or even hate, the risk of procrastination, etc., rises sky-high, and everything becomes a pain, a dread, and a constant fight, exhausting my willpower fast and thus causing me to fail.
Wanted to test another way to capture feedback for a bunch of apps and stuff on the same site. Registered users can add new posts to the feedback board, and all can comment and vote on them. And I can set a status on a post, so they see if something was implemented; simple done state.
I liked nolt.io from the design and stuff. But it does too much, and the monthly price didn't fit for a simple test. The others in that league were the same. The indehacker's are mostly not GDPR-compliant and have this doom-laden smell of neglect.
Was recently looking for such a streaming thing; just streaming from a set of MP3s in a folder, nothing fancy. The majority looked too complex, with too many moving parts, for my idea.
Found one in Go that might interest you too: GoFM. Although I dropped my idea for now, I'd love to see yours come to life, too.
Feedback board or feature board are the terms, and there's a plethora of SaaS options, from tiny to large.
I recently searched for one, but they were either over budget, required extra user accounts, weren't GDPR compliant, or too complex. In the end, I coded a custom solution for my site.
No clear target niche/audience. Looks like for everybody but that seldom works.
Lacking trust signals, for example why should I trust your finance app or the transcript thing from a random personal site.
Too tech focused. Devs might drool about that but the average user is scared away.
Lots of fluffy wording where I zoom out. In my experience caused by the lack of a clear niche. Pick one, have a single target user in mind and write for that person. Will evolve over time so just start with something.
I worked around 7 years on the smallest 11 Zoll MacBook Air from 2015, on my lap sitting in an armchair in my living room and all was fine. Party even developing in Java. The only pain was the SSD was too tiny once I got into audio stuff.
Now, it's a 2022 MacBook Pro M1 Pro with 16GB and it's enough for most stuff I do. Only the 1Tb SSD got too small again.
If you want to work and get results, just get it done with whatever you got. Everything else are excuses.
On a side note, every dev should be forced to code on average consumer computers.
Thanks for the feedback. My goal is to bring mindfulness closer to developers using a mix of developer-centric topics and some more general topics as we are still humans and have a life outside of code :-)
Any topic suggestions? Anything you'd like to learn in the next issue?
Trust is essential and I wrote about it before but left it out in this post. If the involved parties trust each other, they can accomplish great goals together.
However, if you want to change a system or even build up trust, one can only start working at oneself. And that was my intention for the post, raising awareness that devs must change themselves and stop blaming other humans or even patterns for shit they (partly) created themselves. We can not change another person, we can only change us and maybe inspire others to join.
Same is with trust. People do only trust you if there is a good reason for it. And you have to build that reason up over time. For example, if I can't hold my ground with given estimates, how can I expect that the other person trusts me (in that point)? Those sum up. In the end, often biz does not trust devs and vice versa. But I can't change biz nor the other devs, only myself.
Agreed, it is a system and devs are a part of it. However, a problem with a system is that a single individual can almost never change it alone. You can not change people; you can not change your team members.
You can change yourself though and inspire people to move with you. So, any change starts with oneself and not with others.
Created the app to help me with my own practice. It reminds me during the day to take a short break for a mindful moment. It is not just a gong and I am on my own, no it plays a short guided meditation helping me to focus.
Product-market: Are folks already spending money on such products or problems? How does my product solve that issue? What are their alternatives, including doing nothing? Are there big players? If yes, there's plenty of money. How's my product different? Any smaller niches that are underserved?
Distribution: How can I reach the target customers? Is that a channel I can actually access? Do i even have a chance to reach them?
Founder: Is that product-market-distribution combination my thing? Is that a distribution channel I want to use, or does it turn me completely off? Do I even want to serve those types of customers?
It might be a super product-market-distribution fit, but if it includes stuff I dislike or even hate, the risk of procrastination, etc., rises sky-high, and everything becomes a pain, a dread, and a constant fight, exhausting my willpower fast and thus causing me to fail.