On an unregistered browser, someone has to guess the answer to two security questions and the PIN. Did it occur to you that maybe it's not a problem since it's been that way for at least 8 years now (I signed up in 06)?
I contract out to a few hedge funds for writing trading systems. I have my main product and roll updates out every few months.
if a fund wants a couple of hours a month they pay a flat fee per month to me. If the time needed is less than 5 hours then no problem. If its more then I bill on a daily basis.
Rate depends on who gets final ownership of the code, ie can I resell it to another fund or is it theirs.
I get in that situation, but it can be very irregular. e.g., 20 minutes once off then nothing. Or 10 hours, then nothing for four months, then two hours.
Further, it's hard to break from this with existing clients to a retainer model when they know that most months they won't be asking for help.
50% of these brand new college students passed an entirely online course at a tiny fraction of the cost for the student, a tiny fraction of the cost for the university, at an infinitely increased level of convenience.
Does no one else see this as downright incredible?
Plenty of reasons. Firstly, look at how society interacts. "What do you do?" is a frequent conversation starter with new people, and already pigeon holes us by our employment. That starts to build a sense of identity with our work.
Then there's the vicious reward cycle. Do something right with work and you're rewarded with praise, with positive feedback, with kudos. Do something wrong and... well you see where it's going. It's more subtle than how I train my dog, but not much.
And then the tech world is in awe to entrepreneurs and startups, where long hours and being defined by passion for what you do and it being the sole calling in life are the norm. You or I, older now I suspect (I certainly am) may look at it and shake our heads and think of the failed relationships we've seen (the same in any high-powered area of work), but for people without that view it's not easy. I had the same way of thinking as the OP, and even now I still get jealous of those who achieve much by having their work as their identity and aim in life.
And finally society again. There seems to be a growing expectation this is the norm and the right way, like the acceptance that single parent families are normal and a good way for children to be brought up (don't argue with the subject, think about how long that's been an accepted view). For ambitious, maybe insecure graduates starting out in work, that's a huge sense of competing to 'get to the top'. Why they're not sure, but it sure gives one an identity... or does it?
I like the way you think, especially with regards to happiness, and I would love to hear more about this part:
> and for god sakes, travel
I'm very fortunate to have a position where I work exactly 40 hours (some of which is programming). This has allowed me the freedom to pursue other activities, such as meeting and developing an extremely deep relationship with my girlfriend, being an active participant in my church, completing Financial Peace University, joining a local Toastmasters club, and joining CrossFit and getting in the best shape of my life.*
However, I have not yet done any major traveling. Why do you put such high importance on it?
I'm not asking why traveling is generally good, but why _you_ specifically are recommending it so highly.
* [Edit: After reading this, it sounds like bragging but sincerely that was not my goal. I just wanted to say I totally understand and agree about what you said with regards to work and happiness.]
In context it was meant as reference to the story of Bangladesh, meaning you don't know how lucky you are until you travel a bit of the world.
My story however, is pretty typical, I worked through my 20s and didn't take time to travel then even though I had disposable income and more importantly was in charge of only myself. When I got married, got a dog and had kids, traveling increases in complexity at O(an^k) where k is the number of people traveling together and a is the number of people you have to arrange babysitting (or dogsitting) for.
Now travel seems like a giant luxury an I doubt I will truly enjoy it again until the kids are in college. By then we'll be so bogged down with college costs, there will be no money.
I had the opportunity to go to China for work and it really opened my eyes about how little of the world I have seen.
Instead of just dismissing an article for the obvious points, try to identify at least one idea that could be considered novel or worthwhile. In this article, the suggestion of "X will inevitably be part of the future, so I will build it" is a novel idea, at least to me, and especially with the list of real-life examples he gave.
That is completely different than building what people want. For example, a different color phone case for a new smartphone is something that many people want, but not a "future" idea as the article suggests. Robot butlers like in The Jetsons [2] will inevitably be part of the future, so there's an idea.
Learn to think positively and see the potential of all things, including "obvious" articles. I'd certainly recommend The Magic of Thinking Big [3], namely the example about prisons.
This article only exists because HN exists. It was frontpaged because it was written by a YC member and the YC network (probably) propelled it straight to the top judging by the 100% submitted-by-a-YC-friend-and-frontpaged rate the author's blog enjoys.
It didn't suffer the inconvenience of competing on merit and the substance is lacking. The best founders stayed on top of an emerging market they helped create? That's why they're successful not how and not useful, but thanks for the advertisement.
Middle brow dismissals matter. Insight is the result of accurate thought, if someone makes basic errors then they're unlikely to have any worthwhile insights. Consequently, people seem unlikely to hit on anything that's going to give them an advantage by semi-randomly walking through articles and thinking really hard about what the writter might mean. There's charitable interpretation and then there's just grasping at straws.
#
Take the article in OP for instance. I've no more idea after having read the thing about how to see what people will want in five years than I had before I read the thing.
'Building a great company is about predicting the future. You build something people want now and predict they'll continue to want it in the future.
Just think, if you live in the future, what does it look like? When you see it, that's what you should build.'
Well, gee, that's really useful advice.
Can you actually imagine reasoning that way?
"I think we should do this because in the future everyone will definitely want it."
"Why do you think that? ---"
"Because, uhm."
And then, at best, you just have the list of reasons that people use to select their ideas anyway, pain points and the like, predictions about how the marketplace will change and technology advance. At which point you're not using the supposed insight from the article to, 'Just think, if you live in the future, what does it look like? When you see it, that's what you should build.' you're just doing what you'd normally do under a different heading. You can drop the words 'in the future' from that entirely and you've got a run of the mill way of inventing things. The whole 'in the future' stuff hasn't added any information for you.
'Seeing the future,' by itself, is a terrible way to generate ideas anyway, even if you put that aside. The more obvious they are, 'X will definitely be part of the future,' the less probable it is that having the idea gives you an advantage. The less obvious they are, the less likely it is that you're going to see them and so the less effort it makes sense to sink into trying to do so - (indeed it becomes dramatically less likely that the thing you imagine will be in the future at all, so you're not so much seeing the future as day-dreaming.)
You need something where you have an information or thinking advantage, a way of predicting what your customers are likely to optimise along - a pain point, some sort of cost reduction, etc - knowledge about the world and human nature in other words. Otherwise you're just pulling stuff out of thin air. Which is a terrible business strategy and not even what the people in his examples did:
Job's support of no file system was based on itteration and the knowledge of the use of finder as compared to more traditional interfaces with the file system.
Dropbox was made to address the personal needs of the creator who kept forgetting his USB device.
Tesla's a very old idea at this point. People have been trying to use electricity and other forms of energy storage to address their transport pain for decades.
Microsoft was founded as a software company in a market where people were already making the same kind of programs - their first OS was a version of Unix for God's sake (Xenix).
Oh yeah, and there's Segway, which you know - still hasn't achieved any sort of dominance, so why that's even on that list.
It's just really poor advice that not even the people he seems to site have followed. They didn't see the future and build it, they saw a current problem or an opportunity and went for it.
#
So, yeah. Personally, I've found that articles that are so dismissed, even on close examination, rarely if ever benefit me in any way for having read them. You can generate a sort of fake wisdom from them, say something that seems profound, but I suspect that's more a function of our love for complex language than it is the underlying thought actually being insightful.
To be fair, most people misconstrue the moral of the fable as being about envy and bitterness, when it's mainly about rationalization to make one feel better about something unachievable or missed.
> Everything is insipid for me. I have no hobby, no programming idea, no desire to meet people, travel whatever. When I try to get a hobby, I m fed up after a few try. When I go to nice tech event, I'm bored.
Join a local church.
This what I have done recently and it has been amazing. Friendly people who are extremely caring, a welcoming environment, and a call to a higher purpose. I've instantly gained some new friends that I care about. You may find value in doing the same.
Stop worrying about startup ideas, hobbies, etc. Just get to know people and care about them. Find ways to help them. I guarantee everything will work out by following this simple rule.
It could be that your target market (people in debt) is one in which people have a lower ability (or willingness) to spend. (Google Ramit Sethi's Pay Certainty test.)
In that case, perhaps an alternate revenue system can be found. Maybe something like Mint.com.
I read (listened) to Chris Anderson's book Free: The Future of a Radical Price [1], which tackles this very subject of creating revenue from free products. (Chris Anderson is the founder of Wired.com and this book debuted as #12 on the New York Times Best Seller List.) You may find his book useful too. I highly recommend it. Best of all, the book is priced appropriately: Free.
Ironically, our target market is actually folks who are the top 60% income earners in the US. Debt and income are directly related, and higher earners have a majority share of the debt in the nation[1]. It makes sense intuitively because these are the people whom are more likely to have tertiary education degrees and a mortgage. So, I'm really trying to find the sweet spot of households with low debt-to-income ratios (high ability to repay), but also large amounts of debt (high need for a solution).
Lower income earners, with primarily unsecured credit card debt for example, are basically faced with two options - spend less or earn more. There's no panacea that software can provide, other than increasing awareness of costs and consequences.
I'm not really sure I have an answer to that as I'm just figuring it out as I go. The most typical customer would be a first-time homeowner, early 30s, and 18-36 months post-grad school. At that point, you've accumulated a lot of debt, but likely have a well-paying job and stable career.
Everyday, I question if the Internet is the best place to market something like this and if a price point in the $5-$15/month range is too low. Eventually you start to creep up towards the level of service that a personal financial advisor would offer. But, I have limited desire to support the asset-side of household balance sheets (401K, stock investments, cash, etc). It's not that I don't want to go down that path, it's just that there are many more variables once you start to incorporate investment objectives, risk tolerance, return forecasting, and stochastic outcomes.
The other marketing challenge is how to cater towards people outside the US. In Europe especially, there are some crazy forms of credit made to people which have all sorts of embedded optionality. I used to work for a bank, building models to forecast this kind of stuff and it was such a challenge looking at it from the lender's perspective, I can only imagine the confusion from the borrower's point of view.
I'm more interested in seeing Soylent succeed as a benefit to people around the globe who literally cannot afford (or don't have access to) a proper healthy diet.
How does this benefit people around the globe who can't afford or don't have access to a proper healthy diet?
Why don't we instead give money to the sensible things that the WHO does, like genetic engineering probiotic yogurts which produce all of the essential vitamines that humans need (which is something WHO has funded).
It makes an important point actually. Using joyless Soylent to alleviate lack of good diet leads to a larger population joylessly depending on Soylent. The situation is worsened.
I just wish they offered Two-Factor authentication for "360" accounts.
Relevant link: https://www.facebook.com/CapitalOne360/posts/101515573342295...