I don't know where the recent idea that em dashes are difficult to type came from. MS Word automates turning a hyphen into an em dash as you type in the same way that it converts "teh" into "the" and has done so for as long as I can remember.
I find the whole AI / em dash thing frustrating as I used to used them all the time. They have meaning that hyphens don't. I've now had to stop using them because they are seen as AI generated, and structure my sentences differently as a result.
Have you considered slashing features in order to speed up your MVP release? Our own "must have" features are often not must haves for users. I was in the same boat a few years back and released a cut down version missing what I thought were must have features. Many years and 1,000+ users later no one has ever requested the missing "key features."
I have the same issue as him but the issue is that users today expect a certain level of fidelity otherwise they will stick to incumbents.
I think your advice worked back in 2010-2018 when the bar was very low.
My audience literally didn’t want to use my product because while it was solving their problem it didn’t have the same level of fidelity as their current stack. So I had to spend a lot of time improving it.
These days the bar is so high. Unless you really do find something unique that has not been technified.
These days it’s mostly a David vs Goliath style of battle.
I switched off sales of my last desktop app a couple of months ago. It was still bringing in sales of about $600 a month, but it felt like a weight hanging around my neck. Despite shutting it down I expect I'll still get a couple of support emails a month for the next 10 years.
We're building a desktop / SaaS app right now that we'll be selling using a SaaS model. A combination of desktop app built with Electron and a web app for managing accounts and teams. I'd never touch a "once off" pricing model again.
>It was still bringing in sales of about $600 a month, but it felt like a weight hanging around my neck.
I had the same feeling when I shut down mine last year. In theory I could have left it running for some pocket money but after 23 years I had had enough. After a couple of really slow months I decided to discontinue it and retire.
Despite being a dev of 20+ years, I use Wordpress as a non-technical user, hosted on a paid for plan on Wordpress.com. I never deploy, never have to upgrade, never have to troubleshoot issues. Whatever monolithic and legacy complexity is part of Wordpress I don't see it.
I use it regularly - 3 or more posts a week - and it's as fast as I could hope for. So easy to create and edit posts. So many plugins for just about everything I want to do. And professional templates - with support - are so cheap I'm almost embarrassed to be paying for it.
I think a lot of people see Wordpress as it was back in the early 2000s, when amateur bloggers were liking each others posts and getting comments was the goal. And fighting spam was a daily chore.
I see it as a simple publishing platform where I can focus on writing and not on infrastructure. I really don't care what's under the covers. If your better solution is any more complicated than me signing up, I'm not interested.
There is definitely a reason that WordPress is popular. And it’s quite good as a CMS. But have you tried writing your own theme? I looked into it but it just seemed way to convoluted.
LinkedIn have an automated rater for applications. Any that their tool consider to not be a fit is automatically tagged "Not a fit" and color coded accordingly, making it very obvious. It's probably based on the location of the applicant Vs the location the job specifies and the skills on their LinkedIn profile.
My own experience when posting jobs was that 70%+ of applicants were rated "Not a fit" and that it was an accurate rating.
This means that when the ad poster goes in to look at the applicants they can discount a huge proportion from the start as the list is already triaged.
FHIR is a data standard for sharing healthcare data. It's in use all around the world by healthcare, health insurance and medtech companies as well as researchers working with healthcare data.
Vanya grew out of my own frustrations as a developer working with FHIR. I wanted an easier way to see the data behind the APIs. To say Postman is not ideal for working with this data is a major understatement.
We're a few months away from a commercial release, and have an MVP available for download right now. We're very much building in public and have a strong user base already all around the world.
Just finished a Sunday morning release of the latest version. Looking forward to the next 6 months!
I don't have a great story, but from my own experience I see the key as being a willingness to step outside your comfort zone. Do (if not embrace) the things you tend to avoid doing as a lone developer.
An example: I never liked meetings with new people, but I knew I needed to talk to people in my industry about what I was building and about what their problems were.
So I set up "office hours". Zoom meetings where I talk to one or two people a week. Randomly, anyone in my industry who wants to talk to me can book a slot using Calendly.
I promote this occasionally on LinkedIn and on my website, and it's led to many interesting conversations and collaborations.
Same with making videos, giving presentations, putting yourself out there and telling people what you're working on.
Generally, do (some of) the things you don't want to do.
Keep it just for the email addresses and accounts you may have opened using those email addresses. If you don't, there'll be something you've missed and you won't find out for 6 months. But drop the website.
I have a number of zombie domains that I keep just for that reason.
I share your taste in books. 7 Habits in particular absolutely changed my life. I’ve always thought that its title doesn’t really do it justice. There is a lot more depth to that book than you’d think based on the title alone. It has helped set my moral compass.
Lean startup is a recent discovery for me - and boy do I wish I’d read it sooner!
Edit: also I highly recommend Stephen Covey’s audiobooks of 7 Habits and First Things First (read by him)
yep, funny how I wanted to post these exact 3 books (should grab the 4th one soon), I've bought them all at once, perhaps we've read the same blog post that recommended them?
I find the whole AI / em dash thing frustrating as I used to used them all the time. They have meaning that hyphens don't. I've now had to stop using them because they are seen as AI generated, and structure my sentences differently as a result.