Welcome back to another episode and the longest one in some time! The festive season is firmly upon us, and this week I wanted to write the year in review since it seems like the right time. I wanted to break down the process I'd followed so far in my search for profitable activities, and share the main mistakes I'd made so that if you decide to follow a similar path you can save some time.
During the first two months my thinking was fairly simple; if I can provide data acquisition and analytics to other businesses, then I should (in theory) be able to both own my output and scale my income, while making the most of my existing skillset. These months resulted in many lessons and technical developments, including virtual private server (VPS) setups for data storage and retrieval, alerting and analytics capabilities, and some other addon bits like email alerts/reports and that kind of thing. In the trading world this could be a drop-in replacement for in-house teams, where beaurocracy, hiring issues, and long backlogs could make outsourcing this capability (even temporarily) an attractive option. It can also be convenient for sourcing datasets which for whatever reason are hard to find/access.
This approach is good if you have the existing connections and demand for this type of service, but as I found out there is a significant element of trust and reliability which have to be demonstrated in addition to just the technical capabilities. You also need the right contacts, and there is a fairly big question around sensitivity. Live trading teams (discretionary or quantitative) operate in as low a trust environment as possible. They don't typically want any random person to know exactly which datasets are being fed into their strategies, and much less anyone they don't have direct organisational influence over.
In addition to this, I found myself reading/writing different contracts and legal agreements, which needless to say is not the most exciting thing in the world, nor one of my strengths or passions. At this point, I made the call to pivot into what's best described as the 'indie hacking' space, where the emphasis is on wrapping technical capabilities up in standalone subscription products, thereby skipping (or minimizing) the admin overhead for this kind of 'product'.
The following two months coincided with my move to Vietnam, and the pivot into indie hacking. Approaching this world with as open a mind as possible, it was clear that social media played a huge role in most of the major player's successes in the space. So, as any aspiring solopreneur would, I took the leap and started posting across X and Threads, slowly building an audience and sharing what I was working on, which at the time was a social media scheduling tool. The trick in this space, is that it's not the best product that wins, it's the best distribution, and so it's okay and even encouraged to simply take existing products and duplicate their functionalities, whilst beating them on price. Distribution is still the bottleneck, but selling the same thing for less makes for an easy pitch.
As in the first two months, this period brought many technical building blocks I can use in other projects; such as user registration pages, payment integrations, and other tech bits that most 'proper products' have. However, after weeks of back-and-forth checking documents with meta's automated business detail verification system, the project ultimately ended in failure due to the fact that without meta verification the full release of my product wasn't possible.
All this to say; I'll never work with any Meta platforms again, and needed to pivot again to something completely independent of any one entity/process. In addition, over these months I learned a lot about invisible-but-essential things to do with selling anything online. This includes things like domain reputation, email deliverability, international payment processing, and more. So this venture into indie hacking wasn't a complete waste of time, in fact I think it was a time where I learned the most about technologies I hadn't used before in a very long time which was nice, but ultimately still not profitable.
So, the 'simple' approach was too much paperwork, the hacking approach hit some roadblocks, and so during month 5 I searched for other useful and interesting things to work on which could keep me moving forward both technically and distribution-ally (not sure what word to use there). It was around this time that I'd started work on a pro-bono project for a British Police officer and reseacher to do with search, rescue, and recovery. Using the technical building blocks from my previous setups I could put together an app in just a few hours which proved immediately useful - not profitable but very exciting. Having learned about email deliverability and the other things I mentioned, I also wanted to bring all of my internal alerting off the existing (reputation based) email setup to a different system; enter Telegram.
If you've spent most of your life in the west, you'll probably have used WhatsApp (by Meta) for most of your communication, but in other countries (especially India and Russia) Telegram is used instead, and I think (hope) it will replace WhatsApp eventually. Anyway the nice thing about Telegram from a business perspective is none of the verification overhead, clean and simple techical integrations, and crucially no reputation based deliverability, so my OJS Group data alerts are now sent as messages instead of emails.
This sounds like a low level technical detail but it represents a move towards more open technologies both for myself and my projects, and adds another distribution channel with no extra effort. This is on top of my existing super-lean (almost free) infrastructure described in a much earlier episode. The big problem now is; what's next? I have the technical infrastructure for retrieving and analysing data, I have skeleton apps for registering users and creating subscriptions, and I have alerting both using email and Telegram. I can also build and run Telegram bots (for integrating with anything else I build), but I'm not sure if that's relevant.
We're now in the middle of month 6, and as discussed a few weeks ago I'm interested in the productionization of academic research (that's what the Police app does at it's core), but finding similar opportunities has been challenging. On top of this I have this collection of capabilities which are ready to go, but no clear route to applying them. In a weird way, it's a full circle since it's back to the realisation that outreach and popularity is the issue, and that social media is one way of addressing it. But, the lesson already learned is that social media is for entertainment, not business, and that other channels like industry events, forums, and that kind of thing may be a better option.
Then came a splash of what might be a good idea; what if I continued my own research from all those years ago, before the hedge fund antics and before any mention of commodity trading? I would be spending time building behavioural profiling technology as described in my thesis, but bringing it into the 'modern' age (by applying all of the engineering tips and tricks from my time in industry). There is a big question mark as to who would benefit from this pursuit, as the main stakeholders of my research were government regulators, but it feels like there is at least a small angle for positive impact in harm prevention in the casino games industry.
I'm not 100% certain that this is the right direction to go, but it definitely hits most of the key things I'm interested in doing day-to-day, and so over the next few weeks I'll be scoping out what a jog in this direction might look like, and see if any of my contacts from the world of academia would be interested.
That's it for the year in review. Not as crazy or impressive as I maybe hoped it would be, but then maybe a different kind of struggle is exactly what I need after leaving the corporate grind. Anyway, I hope your last 5 and 1/2 months have been as useful/interesting, and I hope that as we near the end of the year you're getting ready for an incredible 2026. There will be one more episode this year, probably about Vietnam, so tune in next week for that, and wishing you a wonderful festive season wherever you are!
Thanks and all the best,
Oliver
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