Christmas is near, and so are venture capitalists looking to cash in on the early stage growth of promising companies (not mine, yet). This week I want to cover how the pivot from generic product development to productionizing academic research is going, and my plans to push into the social good and sustainability space(s). I also want to cover a bit about what I've learned from the last few weeks in the field, so lets start with that...
If you've been following along for some time, you'll know that my venture into solopreneurship started with setting up solid data acquisition infrastructure, then a pivot into the indie hacking space, then to now with a mix of the two and one ongoing collaboration on a bespoke app serving the search, rescue, and recovery community. I've also had many discussions with VC types, some other indie hackers/solopreneurs, and a handful of influencers in the sub-1,000,000 club. One thing after all these discussions is clear; I strongly believe that nobody knows what they're doing .
The capitalists will stress the importance of product-market fit, go to market strategy, and more, yet historically have around a 75% failure rate , so is that all just busy-work to tick boxes? The indie hackers will hit one (sometimes several) successes and preach their approach as the way to do it, despite using a different approach themselves to those who came before. And finally influencers have probably the best deal; post generic platitudes or controversial opinions with a goal to post even more platitudes and opinions, to then leverage this strong distribution channel into products (crypto scams, todo apps, etc). Hmmmm, something isn't right...
There's a lot to unpack here, but I'm finding the simplest framing lies in my earliest academic study of complex systems and chaos theory. In short: something will succeed not only because of the properties of the thing itself, but because of the environment it exists within. To reference last week's episode; there can be two identical and brilliant fisherman, but in the wrong time or place neither will be successful.
So, what do you do? If a significant portion of your success is dependent on things you can't directly control, then is all hope lost, should we just sit and wait for the long night to come? No, I think there is some limited value in all the bullshit, but it's clear to me now that the main goal is to help people. And I want to be very specific so that I can come back to this episode; the goal is to help people, not to 'add value' or to 'solve a pain point'. I think this framing cuts very cleanly into the corporate world too, large companies do help people, but they also help their shareholders. I hope that in the long term I can help more people on the solopreneurship path than I otherwise could in the corporate world.
Okay onto something related but different, I've decided to stop doing any software engineering for the next week (maybe more). A related realisation is that in the age of AI, software isn't the bottleneck, it's finding people who need it, so by avoiding doing any engineering (okay not completely, I need to do it on evenings and weekends otherwise what's the point?), I'll be forced to focus on finding more people to help.
The main point of clarity this week, other than realising that everybody is role-playing outside too, is that for real impact productionizing academic research seems to be the fastest way to help people. Particularly in non-technical areas like the social sciences, law enforcement, etc. It helps the researcher to raise awareness of their work, it helps the government/companies/individuals use the findings in a tangible way, and on a personal level it feels good. It also feels like the best overlap of my skillset which is split between academia and corporate software engineering, so that's what the focus will be for the next few weeks. Also when it comes to choosing what to focus on specifically, research which has some form of social good or sustainability impact seems like a good choice. After all, I could focus solely on finance journals and write trading algorithms for stablecoin based toilet paper futures, but that wouldn't really be helping anyone.
That's all for this week, another short one. It's almost my last two weeks in Vietnam so please hold for a review episode in the coming weeks, and hope all is well wherever you are! Tune in next week to see how the academic arc is going, and the penultimate episode before travelling to Malaysia.
Thanks and all the best,
Oliver
PS: If you're interested in productionizing research, feel free to send ideas to oliver@ojsgroup.net
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