Core goal to be achieved by end of 10-12 years

<aside> ⚡ Contribute in building an impactful, defensible SaaS business that solves a problem for the common folks at a national scale

Egs that inspired me: WhatsApp & Slack’s role-solving communication for their users, Figma’s role in solving designing, Zerodha/Robinhood’s role in investing, Khan Academy’s role in building a solution for maximum distribution of educational content

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What I want…

• A chance at understanding markets and problems (at an international level) so that I get good experience at product building and tech.
• To use this experience to build a sustainable (mostly software, but open to other ideas) business

Where I am at

What I’m good at

I love to build technical products & communities from 0 to 1, that contribute to society.

Here’s what I have been up to till now - Link

Alignment with team & vision is what I look for, irrespective what compensation or level I end up joining. Be it a project or a company.

I prefer software development to software engineering. Prefer generalist mindset over entire software architecture and its commercialization compared to specialist mindset of insights into performance of code and optimizations.

Projects and work in the past year

• I have been working on tinkering with ideas and products of my own since 1 year. Launched Coursemap at IIT Madras and got some 2500 people to use it. Had to move away from the idea since I couldn’t figure out commercialization
• Have built 1 product (Coursemap) that launched and worked at 1 point in time and that too I know people didn’t use extensively. I had to kill work in that direction just due to lack of business scope that it had. I think that 2.5 months of not having a direction there really hit me a lot and then I am scared and unsure of starting something and it not meaning anything
• I have tried to handle the commercialization of software as well, by working as a research consultant with a firm I wanted to sell my platform to. I ended up doing research to arrive at a product decision for them which majorly did match the platform I am trying to build. But, I majorly got demotivated because I wasn’t building or learning anything for a while. This is where I am at in March 2023 (I am now planning on just building the product w/o a green light from the client)

Now it’s 1 year since I’ve done worked with any company. I am starting to doubt my own skills as a programmer as the inertia has been building up. My DSA and Machine Learning knowledge is little. I don’t even know C++ that well. Why this felt imp to mention is because I am trading off investing time in becoming a good software engineer in the industry when I choosing to work on my startup. All this would require 2 months of balancing these skills part-time alongside my work to actually catch up, become a good software engineer.

The one thing I am still confident I can pull off is actually using the power of product, engg, launching, marketing, business that I have accumulated - to launch a basic product upto a set of 10000 target users, maybe even 100 paying ones

Opportunity Cost