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How to Test Drive Your Business Idea Before Quitting Your Job

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Re: How to Test Drive Your Business Idea Before Quitting Your Job

#81
post #38

I gave a talk at Dropbox called "How to start a business without quitting your day job" that I think delivers a lot of the punch on this page without the weird culty vibe. Give it a watch (for free, obviously) if you like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8UwcyYT3z0

Thanks for that, I watched it and probably wouldn't have found it if not for your comment here!

I think that for a lot of people who might try small businesses, the "use of surplus energy" is intermingled. Maybe you want to make some cool piece of software (because you just want to); and you want to use it to do something creative (because fulfillment); and you want it to also be a business (because you want more money).

In that case it's much harder to focus on the "boring" part. (I am assuming of course that there exist things that are "boring" in the business sense but still allow for some satisfying creativity and/or fun hacking. For instance CoderPad gives you plenty of room to do cool programming things, if doing those will make you happy. You just might have to book them on the lifestyle/happiness ledger. The bingo-cards thing, maybe not so much.)

Re: How to Test Drive Your Business Idea Before Quitting Your Job

#82
post #45

I highly recommend considering consulting/freelancing when looking at starting a company. Hourly rates generally price in an expectation of not having work full-time, so you work less than 40 hours/week to begin with. Drop an hour or two of commute every day on top of that and it's a big win in terms of time that can be spent on a startup or side-project. Of course consulting requires more in terms of people skills -…

How did you get started in freelancing on the side? I've always wanted to do this but struggle to find clients.

Re: How to Test Drive Your Business Idea Before Quitting Your Job

#83
post #45

I highly recommend considering consulting/freelancing when looking at starting a company. Hourly rates generally price in an expectation of not having work full-time, so you work less than 40 hours/week to begin with. Drop an hour or two of commute every day on top of that and it's a big win in terms of time that can be spent on a startup or side-project. Of course consulting requires more in terms of people skills -…

hey man, can you give some advice about how to start consulting? My day job is a hardware engineer for a semicon company. I write software models for HW devices so we can estimate their performance before fabricating them. Mostly involves C++ and analyzing data. I am not sure most companies would hire some consultant as opposed to just hiring them in-house. Can you elaborate your field of expertise and how you got started? thanks

Re: How to Test Drive Your Business Idea Before Quitting Your Job

#84
post #38

I gave a talk at Dropbox called "How to start a business without quitting your day job" that I think delivers a lot of the punch on this page without the weird culty vibe. Give it a watch (for free, obviously) if you like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8UwcyYT3z0

Thank you for sharing. For quite awhile now I've had in the back of my mind that I want to develop some kind of side business. I'm perfectly happy at my full time job, and incredibly busy ... but I've always been the kind of person to spend my free time tinkering with hobby projects. It would be nice to pour that time into something that generates a little extra cash and has the potential to blossom into a small busi…

I have similar ideas, and want to start side businesses. I have succeeded a couple times. I'm about to launch a new one, send me an email (in profile) and I'll show you what I have, maybe we can bounce ideas or collaborate. I do software and certain types of hardware.

Re: How to Test Drive Your Business Idea Before Quitting Your Job

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree Running Lean is the go-to book and of all the credits, the author forgot to mention this book and the author as well despite using The Lean Canvas as a base for the entire blog.

Hey - author here. Fair point, all credit goes to the various 'lean' books; Lean Startup, Running Lean, 4 Steps to the Epiphany and Lean Analytics all come to mind when I think what inspired this. I didn't mention as I didn't expect anyone to think I invented these concepts, but I'll add a disclaimer. Cheers. :-)

Just updated the post to make credit explicit.

Re: How to Test Drive Your Business Idea Before Quitting Your Job

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for sharing. For quite awhile now I've had in the back of my mind that I want to develop some kind of side business. I'm perfectly happy at my full time job, and incredibly busy ... but I've always been the kind of person to spend my free time tinkering with hobby projects. It would be nice to pour that time into something that generates a little extra cash and has the potential to blossom into a small busi…

What are some examples of the ideas that need a new technology, if you don't mind sharing? I'm interested to hear whether the ideas are really pie-in-the-sky, or they're just a bit too tricky for practical implementation in the present day.

Latest idea I already posted about a few days ago: a keycard based doorlock with actual security (ed25519 based authentication, instead of the standard crackable 48-bit DES). Nobody really cares about that level of security.

A phone app that makes scanning documents stupid easy by using machine learning to identify when a document is on screen and automatically take a picture, and then use more machine learning to convert the picture into a cleaned up image. The concept to train the machine models is pretty easy; just print out a known document, take a bunch of pictures, and train the model to convert from the pictures to the original document. But it would likely require massive kernels to get enough context to do the necessary 3D transformations. Could probably reduce the strain on the algorithm by using traditional picture->document algorithms and then use the model to clean it up further. Either way, it's new tech that would require a lot of work.

Vocal isolator for extracting vocals from music, using a machine learning model. These tools kind of already exist, but they don't use machine learning, usually require user interaction to tweak knobs, and don't work particularly well. My bet is that a 1D conv network can do great, and generating examples for training is super easy. But, again, new tech, and as easy as machine learning sounds it usually devolves into long nights of debugging, tweaking, and banging your head trying to figure out why changing one hyper-parameter ever so slightly completely changes your results.

A hardware password manager. Like KeePass/LastPass/etc but as an actual hardware device, possibly a wearable/watch. The idea is that a hardware password manager provides more security than a software password manager, by virtue of not being susceptible to malware (though yes passwords can still be stolen 1 by 1 if used on an infected machine), and most importantly works with phones/tablets over bluetooth. Requires developing hardware, productization, etc. Not a big market; nobody cares about security.

I have a quiz website that I built for my wife, who's a teacher. It allows here to give online fill-in-the-blank type quizzes to her classes, with a set amount of time to take the quiz, and a set amount of time that the quiz is available. She's happy with it; I made it because she had something similar with Edmodo but the school dropped Edmodo. I can't imagine such a simple website is worth much though, and it's currently only designed for her and a bit rough around the edges. It'd take quite a lot of UI updates and a bit of backend tweaking to make it usable by the general public.

A couple game ideas, mostly geared towards programmers. Pretty niche, and games take immense effort versus profit.

A service to provide email to Bitcoin addresses. You authenticate yourself using your Bitcoin wallet's signature mechanism, and then can receive email like at e.g. 1p7H5w1LfgLT6tat951e85dFXEDQjNp8L@example.com. I got this mostly working, but rendering emails is super hard, who wants to use yet another mail client, how do I monetize, how do I fight spam, etc, etc. Lots of security and anonymity angles to this, but security is hard, so again lots of work.

NSFW: Machine learning based porn assistant. You thumb up/down images, it learns what you like, and finds more of it. Keeps learning as you thumb up/down its results. Classic machine learning model. Requires new tech, and it probably requires training a model per user (super expensive), or some kind of transfer learning.

Lots more beyond that, all very pie-in-the-sky, new tech related, or super niche.

Re: How to Test Drive Your Business Idea Before Quitting Your Job

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some examples of the ideas that need a new technology, if you don't mind sharing? I'm interested to hear whether the ideas are really pie-in-the-sky, or they're just a bit too tricky for practical implementation in the present day.

Latest idea I already posted about a few days ago: a keycard based doorlock with actual security (ed25519 based authentication, instead of the standard crackable 48-bit DES). Nobody really cares about that level of security. A phone app that makes scanning documents stupid easy by using machine learning to identify when a document is on screen and automatically take a picture, and then use more machine learning to co…

The quizzes one sounds like it could create the same kind of income streams (and fill the same kind of niche) as BingoCardCreator, which has been written about at length. http://www.kalzumeus.com/blog/

Re: How to Test Drive Your Business Idea Before Quitting Your Job

#88
post #38

I gave a talk at Dropbox called "How to start a business without quitting your day job" that I think delivers a lot of the punch on this page without the weird culty vibe. Give it a watch (for free, obviously) if you like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8UwcyYT3z0

Do you have the slides sitting around as a pdf or something somewhere?

Sure, I hacked em together in google slides so that's easy: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Vf2vPBlIInV792KOIiiC...

Re: How to Test Drive Your Business Idea Before Quitting Your Job

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some examples of the ideas that need a new technology, if you don't mind sharing? I'm interested to hear whether the ideas are really pie-in-the-sky, or they're just a bit too tricky for practical implementation in the present day.

Latest idea I already posted about a few days ago: a keycard based doorlock with actual security (ed25519 based authentication, instead of the standard crackable 48-bit DES). Nobody really cares about that level of security. A phone app that makes scanning documents stupid easy by using machine learning to identify when a document is on screen and automatically take a picture, and then use more machine learning to co…

A lot of your ideas involve machine learning. What's the hardest problem you've actually run to ground with machine learning?

The point being: most practical machine learning I've seen has involved a lot of effort chasing 75-90% precision, which means that a lot of commonly considered problems can only be aided by machine learning for human-assisted or human-curated tasks, or cases where precision can be sacrificed and benefit still derived.

If you haven't picked one idea and run it all the way through to a working solution, you have the choice of actually picking one and doing it, or not attributing more value to machine learning than it actually deserves.

It seems to me that innovative uses of machine learning are more around finding a user interface or user experience that compensates for inaccuracy than it is the sophistication of the algorithm itself.

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