Hacker News Reader

^ There's nuggets of gold in this comment. I went through a very similar cycle. Learn from our mistakes friends!

Is this the nugget of gold? “As soon as I started focusing on a single, well-understood, boring business problem (“we need a good website”) everything changed.”

It’s the generalist vs. focused part. Many of us who have been successful in tech have done so because we are good generalists. But, that doesn’t transfer well as something that you can market. So there is great power in narrowly focusing on some skill that has demand you can meet.

It's also important to identify the thing that people request first, such as a good website. Plenty of work is done after that problem is solved or in addition to that problem.

The person who solves the "we need a website" problem gets to solve those additional problems if they want to.

That is a great point. Advertising as a generalist is hard because at the point a generalist is needed they already have a website and a developer.

You need to meet them at where they are, when they are in the market for a developer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com