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You know I 100% agree with your advice, but I can never follow it in practice. I just run head-first into development, driven by a nebulous vision that I can't properly explain. Forms.md is the peak of that experience for me haha.

Thanks for the comment and support though, again I 100% think this is solid advice, but I also believe it certainly does not apply to everyone/all products out there.

> just run head-first into development, driven by a nebulous vision that I can't properly explain. Forms.md is the peak of that experience for me haha.

That's not building a business, that's hoping you accidentally stumble into one.

Separately, developer tools are extremely hard to build a business around. You can know that by looking at how few success examples there are.

So, where to start:

1 - decide if you want to build a business (available evidence: you don't. you want to play with tech.)

2 - figure out how business work. For starters: you can't afford to reach out for a $25/mo product. Someone buying for a year only returns $300. You cannot make those economics work. But this is all easily learnable, certainly for anyone smart enough to be a competent engineer. But you have to want to.

2a - for typeform, lots of engineers can build that. We pay to not build, and especially not to operate, that.

3 - very candid interviews w/ one of the founders of tally.so are available discussing how the business works.

You're not alone in this matter. I myself as well also seem to by driven by such.

I have gotten some crazy ideas which I have implemented / are in the back burner (currently a student , but oh man)

This advice is generally right though. I also wish that there is an ideal way of doing things , like how linux manages the kernel he likes and he can live decently or some other project.

You might look at source-based like posthog , some api project used to be like this.

Its really hard earning money in open source. But if you do , that is all so great. Also starred your repo.

Do not let yourself code if you’re good at shipping and learn the rest.

Or spend one week building and one week in market learning and getting feedback on it.

This has worked well for me.

Excellent advice.

> Secondly, treat this project as an education. You had an idea and spent months implementing it. That's the easy part. The hard part is finding a market willing to pay money for something. So for your next project do the hard part first. First find a market, find out what they will spend, ideally collect a small deposit (to prove they're serious) and then go from there.

Absolutely. As engineers, we want to focus on the things we find fun, which is building software. But decisions like "should I use Rust or Python? GCP or AWS or bare metal? procedural, OOP, or reactive functional actor model?" are so incredibly irrelevant for running a business. It's all sales, sales, sales, and marketing (which feeds into sales).

If I were starting a business from scratch again today, the things I'd start with are: 1) who is buying this product -- if it's B2B be extremely specific with names and titles at specific companies; 2) why they would care about your product -- what pain point is it solving for them? what are the competitors/alternatives and what advantages do you offer? 3) how are they going to find out about your product; 4) how much are they willing to pay. I'd make sure to answer all these before writing the first line of code.

This is a great answer, thank you! Do you have any suggestions on how to "find a market"? What did you do, if you can share that? I think that would be incredibly helpful for the OP and many others.

Firstly, I should say, there's no "formula" here. If there was I probably wouldn't post it on the internet :) Luck plays a part. (But you can work to give yourself more chance of good luck.)

If I had to try and distil it down, we dabbled a bit here an there, but what ultimately made the difference was "marketing". In the sense that we travelled quite a lot in the beginning, went looking for distributors (in international markets), tried to connect with potential customers wherever they hung out, and so on.

For example we make plug-ins to a very niche tool - but the users of that tool would have (in person) user groups - typically 10 to 15 people or so. I travelled the world going to those group meetings, organising meetups in places that didn't have them, showing an interest, and of course selling plugins. Today our user base is "established" and I hardly ever travel anymore.

For a major commercial product I visited similar markets to ours, knocked on the doors of distributors, tried to find people who wanted to integrate our product into their market. I failed a lot but succeeded twice, and those 2 have been paying us lots of money every year for 20 years as they make sales.

Your approach may vary. Start locally. Talk to shop keepers, restaurants, businesses, charities, schools and so on. Look for markets that are not serviced (which is different to where the person is just too cheap, or adverse to tech for other reasons.)

Of course it's a LOT harder now to find unserviced markets. There's a lot more software out there now than there was when I started out. Ultimately though it's about connecting with people - real people not just sending out spam emails. And so meeting the right person at the right time is "lucky". But if you're not out there luck can't work with you. You need to give luck a chance.

> Firstly, I should say, there's no "formula" here.

There are a lot of variables, and luck does play a big role. But with that said, there is something very akin to a "formula" at the high level. That being Steve Blank's "Customer Development" methodology, as laid out in The Four Steps to the Epiphany.[1]

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/09...

Thank you! Seriously, I appreciate it, and I'm sure many others will, too!

The two most straightforward ways are 1) build what you know, 2) talk to people about their needs.

I had created an hackernews post about ideas and whatnot and I had also gotten such similar advice.

Yeah , you're most likely right. But as the next HN commentor (darkhorse13) just below it said , Its just too tempting to not do it.

There's nothing wrong with having fun. The past couple years I've been dabbling in ceramics. It's lot of fun, and I have a lot of stuff now, but its a hobby not a business.

Frankly, making it a business would rob the fun from it. I like the randomness of it - making something and not knowing how it'll turn out.

In the same way coding can be fun. Work at your own pace on whatever you fancy. Finish it, or don't, no-one cares. When upu get bored with it, then stop.

This is a hobby, and hobbies are good. But hobbies are not a business. I have a day job to earn an income to give me time (and money) to indulge my hobby.

It's possible to turn your hobby into a business, but then it turns into work, not fun (it can be satisfying, and pleasurable but it comes with strict demands.)

So cool, dive into any projects you like, just don't be thinking that those projects will become businesses. (Its possible, but the risk is really low.) If you want to create a business then you need to focus on the business principles first.