Stop building. Start learning. Most of my advice to fellow entrepreneurs boils down to these two statements.
It is tempting to build. The process of building is fun! For social approval, one can “build in public” for likes and retweets. With some (usually UI) flourishes, eliciting oohs for the pretty new thing can deliver an emotional reward.
If intra-community fame or reputation is the goal, this is a great plan. One increases marketability to employers and attracting inbound recruiters. Reputation is remunerative in the medium term.
However, I have seen a number of my fellow technologists ask if these projects could become businesses. A few can, but most cannot. The issue is that they did not start with a market need in mind. The odds that they solve a need with willingness-to-pay is no more than luck. Luck is a matter of ratios: the more projects there are in the world, the likelihood that a given project will win in its micro-market by chance grows smaller.
Learning, in contrast, focuses on creating new knowledge in the world, trapped, perhaps, in your head. This knowledge is a secret even if you publish every finding online: nobody will understand the interconnections as you do.
The secrets worth discovering take work to unearth. To my mind, there are two kinds: technical secrets and market knowledge secrets.
Technical secrets are deep areas of technology that few others understand. Ph.D.-level knowledge. It also tends to be most valuable as part of a greater whole. Bringing tooling or expertise to a venture is a solid growth play. The expert is with cash and equity participation at far lower risk than hanging out a shingle.
These kinds of secrets are compatible with night-and-weekends time allocation. This study is more (cognitive) work than the vast majority of side-hustlers are willing to do, so those who take it on are highly likely to get the reward. In both cash and equity participation, the highest-paid - people I know took this approach to become experts. Be here, and the world will beat a path to your door.
There are lots of tools and frameworks to make building various things more straightforward. Spending time on those is a siren song. You can always learn an appropriate tool later to apply knowledge. And tooling will keep getting better, so learning later will probably generate more returns for application than learning now.
Almost always, going deep into an area of expertise will return more significant value. It’s just a lot harder and often lonelier because expertise necessarily means knowing what others do not. In our more connected world, one need not be alone. Micro interest groups have an easier time connecting thanks to the magic of virtual meetups and social networks.
But it still takes work, and if you are climbing the knowledge ladder to join the elite, there is a period where you are no longer among the cool kids and not yet among the nerds. Keep climbing! Contact me directly, and I will celebrate your transition too.
Understanding markets in a way that nobody else does is the second type of secret. One can gain this knowledge in a couple of ways. First, one can be from that market oneself. So, for example, the daughter of a restauranteur might know that business inside and out, bringing hard-won technical knowledge to bear on where the most profitable problems are.
Second, one can immerse oneself in a market to understand it deeply. The critical skill for this approach is listening and empathy. Listening lets you download information from the market participants - you can’t do that with closed ears. Empathy allows you to see beyond their words to the intent and emotion that go into being a participant in that market. One can put together patterns that even the market participants do not see. These patterns are the market secrets.
From either perch, one can take market knowledge and see which technologies can create outsized value that the market is ready to receive. These are the theories of value, distribution, and monetization.
As knowledge professionals, it seems intuitive that learning is going to create value. Most of the time, we learn from reading knowledge and listening to people who know what we do not. Learn deeply, and the world will be your oyster.
Stop building. Start learning. And then tell me what you’ve learned! I would love to hear from you.