It's almost December already and time for another episode on the journey to engineering independence. In this episode, I want to talk about community, specifically how to choose your community, and the mistake I've made so far in pursuit of paying customers. I also wanted to share a quick win for a pro-bono project I've been working on, as a case study that I am directionally correct in identifying my mistake so far. Plus, an update on my social media presence. Lets get into it;
I've been building an audience in the wrong direction - I should have been looking for non-technical communities whose lives I can measurably improve, but have instead been engaging with indie hackers and other software engineers whose problems and solutions align almost perfectly with my own. If you've seen the HBO show Silicon Valley, this feels like the 'in-breeding' of Huli designers with Huli engineers which ended up producing a terrible product (coincidentally this is not-completely-fictional occurance in the corporate world).
As a concrete example I thought about what it takes to be a (commercially) successful fisherman. The successful fisherman doesn't have a twitter account where they share tips and tricks with other fisherman. They don't have a weekly newsletter which describes the pros and cons of different machinery and tools. They have a network of restaurants who need fish, and who know that the fisherman is available to serve them. Don't get me wrong, the fisherman that has the twitter account and the newsletter is probably going to be a more expert fisherman in terms of their academic understanding, but does that actually matter? I don't think so, at least as long as the fisherman isn't pursuing tenure.
The perspective shift above has happened in the last 24 hours, and is a result of a small win from a currently-secret collaboration on a simple web project. The exact sequence of events was; 1) reach out to someone that needs a web app following a tip off 2) short discussion as to what they need to determine if I can build it 3) build a prototype using my existing infrastructure and tooling 4) get feedback for tweaks 5) done (and now it's an ongoing project). This entire sequence took less than 6 hours in terms of my time investment, but has already provided significant value to my counterparty and brought them out of a 10-year app development stalemate.
The problem then is how to reliably find people in these situations, and I think the best approach from my time on social media so far is actually just in-person and good old-fashioned networking. It sounds old-school, not scalable, and all of the things which social media promises to solve, but the reality is that everyone who posts on social media is ultimately either a) selling something or b) selling something (plus a sprinkling of toxicity/controversy/flaunting to boost their engagement).
So, with all of the above in mind, and 2 months in to the social media experiment, what's the plan? From what I've seen, social media as a tool can be very effective for businesses and entrepreneurs to get customers. However, the cost at an individual level is high, very high. In order to grow you must engage meaningfully and often with whatever content you can find, which is frankly not fun, and not particularly interesting 'work'. For large corporations with dedicated marketing teams this is a no-brainer given the possibility of massive returns, but in the extremely resource constrained world of solopreneurship I don't think it's worth the opportunity cost versus just going out and talking to people.
That said, it's free, so if you can do so with little effort/time investment then it's probably worth maintaining, like you might grow a small basil plant in your kitchen. Sure, you'll never get enough basil to make your own pesto, but it's nice to get a free leaf now and then. I'm not going to fold my social media presence, but I'm definitely not going to engage as much or as frequently (which given my understanding of the algorithm will tank my reach). But that's okay, the goal now is to find fun and interesting people to talk to with problems to solve, and solve them.
While proof-reading this I thought about the elephant in the room; can't you make an AI system which will do all this engagement stuff for you? The answer: yes, with language models in their current state this type of bot is very straightforward to make and deploy. In fact, they are already out there, many of them. This is actually part of the problem. In a world where attention is the currency, social media platforms are a form of entertainment, and unless you're an entertainer, your time is probably better spent elsewhere.
See you next week for more findings as I figure out what's going on out there and report back for your entertainment, oh wait... 😉
Thanks and all the best,
Oliver
Previous Episode: The Startup World