So I was on walk the other day and was thinking about how we've seen lots of great technologies recently but that the best use cases hadn't been created yet. One idea that I had is a personal home AI device that is upgradeable, secure and mindful of your privacy. Connect your home and mobile devices to it and it can monitor all your files, documents and media without it being sent to third parties who might resell your data or use it for marketing. It could even do things we haven't trained it on like discover patterns in our walking habits, suggest we upscale or colorize old photos of family members using neural networks.
We re in the thick of redesigning onboarding for a new consumer app trying to make that first minute actually count. Not just informative, but compelling enough that people actually stick around and use it again.
Too many products treat onboarding like a tutorial. And it becomes easy for the user to view it as just another hurdle to get through instead of a moment to get set up for a positive experience. Swipe, swipe swipe, go...
Whether you're a maker, a founder, or an employee, I want to hear how your product is unique compared to the rest of the market. Why did you differentiate your product the way that you did?
In my opinion, the startup scene is not evenly supported, and some countries are not so passionate about business. I'm from Central Europe, and I don't feel any extra entrepreneurial spirit here. From my observations, countries like France, and Germany (maybe Poland) have always been mainly startup-oriented.
In terms of more favourable taxes for entrepreneurs, Cyprus and Estonia came to mind.
But maybe I'm wrong and I'm overlooking local communities.
Two of my favorites are: "Rome wasn't built in a day, but they laid bricks every hour." Had a launch day that didn't go as well as I'd hoped. But this quote has been bouncing around in my head, reminding me that constant and focused work will get me there. No matter how small. "Three foot world."
The only things I can control are within the three feet in front of me, so that's all thats worth my time.
I shut down a project last month that I d been working on for about eight months. It had a handful of paying users, a few nice messages, and growth that basically flatlined after the first launch spike. The weird part is I probably knew it wasn t working around month four. I just kept telling myself one more feature would fix it.
Talking to other makers, I ve noticed two camps:
People who give something 90 days, check the numbers, and move on without much drama.
People (like me) who hang on way too long because quitting feels like admitting the idea was bad.
