Thank you for having one of the few reasonable takes on the Vision Pro.
People also forget how bleak the iPad app market was for the first year or so. They also forget that VR has existed for the quest for the better part of 12 years and there are .... 4? 5? very good apps.
Even now there's nothing -incredibly- compelling for the Quest. I'm not a hater, I've owned 5 of them starting at DK1.
The iPad cost 14% of what AVP does, so comparisons to it are largely meaningless. iPads took off because a huge population of grandparents and kids had a use case
for it....Netflix, Youtube and Newspapers on a device that's less complicated and cheaper than a full computer.
No such equivalent exists for AVP, it's a new type of device for pretty much everybody.
I think you're appreciating (what I also appreciate) that the chomp, ghost bite sound, and death sounds are all in the same tempo/bpm, so that when things happen it's in "rhythm"
If you look closely, the chomping visual doesn't -actually- match up with the chomp sound, it's closer to if there was a track of chomping at a certain chomps per minute that gets toggled on/off if pacman is chomping. Same with everything else-is, so you mute/unmute sounds when the event happens, rather than trigger a sound play.
Confession: I use it constantly. The thought of having to look up how to do absolutely everything makes me wince.
I am -genuinely- open to suggestions on how to get over that I just can’t currently justify making everything harder “for a short while” when that short while feels like it could be weeks or months to catch up to fluency.
Oh. One other thing. I tend to go backwards. UX first. Then API. Then whatever fuels it.
If I go the other way around I -inevitably- forget some stuff that is crucial for the front end implementation, whereas it’s hard to forget how it supposed to work for the user.
That's SUPER interesting. We should form like Voltron. But also I wonder if that's a meaningful 'heuristic' to use both in analysing ones own performance but also in coaching others.
Not sure if you care about validation. If not skip to 2.
1. Anybody want it?
First I pitch the rough idea to a few paying customers. If they are lukewarm on it I set it aside.
If they are warm on it I set it aside.
If they say they want it I set it aside.
When some time goes by and they check in and say “whatever happened with (feature) I consider it validated.”
2. Be bad at it
Give myself permission to make the absolute worst version of it.
That frequently involves writing a one page max description of it, and then asking myself “okay how much of this could I cut before it was literally doing nothing.” But if I’m feeling bored I just start coding.
This version has no error checking. No tests. No capacity for large requests. No logging. Nothing. It just prays beyond all reason that the user doesn’t do anything silly that breaks it.
3.beta test the MEV
I just made it up. It’s not a real acronym. most execrable version. It fits because it does feel like something I excreted. I hate it. I’m embarrassed. My impostor syndrome is no longer a syndrome it is just accurate identification and classification.
I give it to those users who were interested.
I watch them on hot jar.
4. Tea leaves
This is the hard part. If they are enthused great. But if not You kinda have to sense whether or not their dissatisfaction is because it’s an MEP.
If you’ve done it right, however, and found something they super want they will actually struggle through it to get that thing done. Sometimes the MEP isn’t far off from an MVP. Sometimes their satisfaction is enough to convince you not to do the rest of the stuff you thought was necessary in your on paper Valhalla take.
5. Users of Software
I often forget that your average software user does not have our relationship with software. They don’t see the amazing version in your head so the crap version feels like magic.
You’d be surprised how hard people will work with a subpar system with the hope that it’ll work out for them, both from optimism but also from a lack of viable alternatives.
Or maybe you’re not that surprised because you’ve voted in America zing I went political at the end.
Oh sure, all the time. But that's always a bit wild-west, since I'm more or less doing it for fun, then my approach is always "Well what do I want to do, emotionally" so it's hard to advise on fun projects. It'd be like "What's fun for you to do?"
I guess if I had any kind of advice for that kind of thing it might be this: I've realised that even in my fun projects, there's a 10% crappy annoying tedious thing that -very- frequently stops me from finishing the fun projects.
A potentially bit good of advice would be to do that thing first, use all the "new fresh code base" enthusiasm to BURN through the code you're gonna hate so that it's just fun from then on.
If you're referring to a product feature the dev wants versus a feature the customer wants, I don't think there will ever be a case when the former takes priority
(I have followed this advice, and it has brought me a level of success and comfort I didn’t know I could have, as an admittedly run of the mill developer)
Wow - that is some very high quality information about bootstrapping. And I co-founded a profitable SaaS!
Caveat: when someone talented explains things, there is a lot of “it’s obvious” (to them) and they can easily explain why it is obvious, and it all sounds convincingly obvious (successful founders often are very convincing - correlation). However the details of how he learnt his opinions and the details really really are not obvious unless you have the right talents, or perhaps if you can develop the right skills (where it is only rarely obvious how to learn them well).
Aside: I loath the term micro-SaaS - especially when applied to a business with “$1,000,000 ARR” - but even the spelling is crappy. What does micro imply? Jason mentions at the start he prefers the word “self-funded” which I really like (presumably the title of the video uses “bootstrapped” because that’s more common?).
There are civilians from Ukraine (that belong to the other side of the conflict) that have been living in war conditions for the last 8 years. The aid agencies Epic chose are unbiased, and help civilians from both sides of the conflict. Hats of to Epic.
I’ve helped a half dozen people with this. One trick is to just keep a notepad by your bed and first, first, first thing try to write down what you remember from your dreams.
My suspicion is eventually the brain says “oh you care about this? Okay cool I’ll hold on to them for longer.”
People also forget how bleak the iPad app market was for the first year or so. They also forget that VR has existed for the quest for the better part of 12 years and there are .... 4? 5? very good apps.
Even now there's nothing -incredibly- compelling for the Quest. I'm not a hater, I've owned 5 of them starting at DK1.