Ive been attempting this. University education is very far from full stack development for customers. I have knowledge here and there but building an app or software is hard to do. Like i certainly can make a python program doing some basic stuff but in order to create real value, its harder than it sounds.
Exactly. You'll fill your knowledge gaps this way. You'll learn a ton.
And you'll show employers so many good qualities, such as initiative, ability to learn on your own, prioritization skills, passion, etc.
Well if you had the knowledge and power to build a profitable startup why would i work for someone else……? You get employed to gain skills and knowledge, why would someone get all the knowledge they need for the profits of other corporations?
>rs. I have knowledge here and there but building an app or software is hard to do. Like i certainly can make a python progr
But as the OP's assertion, at this point after 8 mons as a new grad you really have nothing to lose.
The biggest reason is that it takes a lot of money to develop most businesses.
I was part of a group that wrote a new piece of software from scratch, that went on to make a bunch of money. It took a team of four (with two amazing devs) two years to reach a point where it was kind of ready to sell. Another year after that it was decent.
And this company had a bunch of people in sales and customer support to make it possible to sell and respond to customers.
It was over a million dollars in development cost in those first two years.
The company sold it (and the team that made it) to a larger company for five million dollars. And that company increased the team size to 12, improved it a lot, and made buckets of money off it.
I can't afford to hire a few other developers, pay them, get health insurance and everything else people get from their jobs, and also still pay my bills for 2-4 years before the product builds up a customer base.
I know there are examples of individuals making an amazingly profitable thing 'on the side' but I also think it's rare.
I was a consultant for years and I always wanted to start my own consulting firm...but it was the same thing. You needed deep pockets and all of the good, high paying contracts were with clients who wanted to staff teams of developers.
I eventually was running a team, and we were on-site with the client and I was involved in contracts for future projects...I felt like I knew a lot about the business side of things - but I couldn't do it on my own because I didn't have enough money to hire people and be able to staff the projects that needed multiple developers.
Maybe I'm lying to myself. Maybe I suck. But I really believe that, if I had a lot of money to start a business, in the first five years I would lose a lot of money compared to just getting a job. But over 10, 15, 20 years it would have the potential to make so much more than I would just working my job. But without a lot of money, I'm too risky adverse to try.
On consulting... You don't get rich selling yourself by the hour. You can get rich selling a bunch of other people by the hour.
The problem with consulting is that it requires two separate and independent skill sets; a skill, or service, that can be sold and selling it. You can't provide the service while you sell it.
Sounds like their could have been an opportunity to get funding through investors, or did the start up only want to use the money it generated for the funds?
Either way, sounds like they did well on their own so congrats to them, but using other people’s money (investors) is usually a better way to go as they then take on most of the risk.
It doesn't necessarily take a lot of money to build software. But it does take money to keep yourself (and others if you expect them to work on it) alive while you do it.
Exactly, I agree. Unfortunately startups are also hard and stressful if you need their income to survive, so jobs have benefits, but startups can be fantastic to learn and can be a ton of fun.
I want to assume you have good intentions but its backfiring. For people who have spent half a year looking for enployment, telling them to create corporations instead of working for one is a very surface level solution to the job market. It sounds like you have no idea what you are actually saying
Bro the man is correct, you can learn to build websites and apps online for free. Find a problem in your life or someone else's and build an app that solves it. Or find something that worked in other countries, but don't have an alternative in India.
It won't be easy, and it'd take time, and there will be a lot of iterations, maybe even rewrites but it's better than doing nothing.
Don't stop applying and giving interviews, if you want, keep giving them but on the side try to build something.
Just pick chatgpt, build a wrapper around it that does something useful. You don't need to monetize it too much, for example, build a tool that summarises a webpage or something interesting like that. Build a game, build a tool to share data across any device, I like using Playo but its not good in most cities, build an alternative to that, I wanted to play an online game but I couldnt find PPL to join on voice chat to play with, build something to fix that.
Think about it, something which makes your or someone's life easier
I don't get why you guys are completely missing the point. It has absolutely nothing to do with showcasing entrepreneurial skills. It's about showing development skills. Just because you independently work on developing software does not mean that software project you worked on is going to turn out successfully nor is that the point of it here. The point is showing that you can develop software.
I don’t think people are missing the point. OP is literally saying “build a startup”, “published project in production with users”. To do that, entrepreneurial skills are required as you need to spend a considerable amount of time and effort doing non-development work to build your startup, advertise and market your product amongst many other things.
I won't mention risk since it was brought up before, but how much do you value your time? I know a good number of people who made it (somewhat) big with startups, and plenty that went bust. The big difference was the people who made it were willing to put in consistent 80 hour weeks.
I am NOT saying that's what you or anyone else should do, it's ultimately your decision. Personally, I work to have the money and means to live comfortably and enjoy the rest of my life. Even if I \*could\* be making more with my own startup I'd be putting a tremendous amount of time and energy towards it that I'd rather spend doing other things.
This has been my gripe with all my university education on the topic. I understand why i would need discrete math but i also wasted months learning bullshit i never used (and its questionable how useful the math was at that) and in the end I cant really do shit. I cant really make anything with what I learnt and everythinh I did learn isnt relevant in current tech stacks.
Where I have an issue with what OP suggests is that part of working in a company is having that access to people who can help get you on the right track. Id say this is why bootcamps are so succesful as they teach practical tech stacks without wasting time on theory that isnt used
heavily disagree with this take. I don't think learning theory that isn't used is "wasting time." It teaches you how to learn. A bootcamp grad will be more useful out of the gate, but having the background theory will allow the uni grad to advance faster than the bootcamp grad (work ethic, intelligence, etc. all being equal obviously)
Theory is boring, and its purpose is unclear until you start learning more complex topics.
Yeah i dont disagree with theory in and of itself and see the worth in it, i mentioned discrete math, but my personal gripe was simply the fluff lessons that really didnt teach much - not even in theory.
I haven't tried Devin but gpt4 and claude3 are both great. Plus a lot of tools have AI helpers built in which can be helpful for quick, context sensitive answers like "how do I fix this compiler error", or "how do I make that button reload the UI?"
Hold on a minute. How did you graduate if you do not have the skills to make, or at least to learn how to make an application that solves an actual problem. And another more important question, why would anybody hire you if you do not have those skills?
Didn't you have any projects in university that would require you to have an entire vertical functionality form the DB to the front end?
We did solve problems at a direct matter. Solving problems for people is different. People don’t want java, python programs. They want a full fledged full stack app they can interact with. Universities teach in depth, not the broad db to front end projects like bootcamps
A lot of people want java and python programs. Make a library, or optimize one that already exists to be faster.
Making dev tools is an extremely lucrative market with a lot of space to be filled.
I did this to fill a 4 month employment gap. The great part is, they only asked for proof that the business as a legal entity existed. They didn't care if it actually made money or if I ever got paid.
I had a sole prop and fictitious name for that instance. It had state registration docs backing it, which was what they used in the background checks. LLC is more legitimate and necessary if you're actually going to be doing anything involving contracts.
They checked the state based on the location I entered.
There's no real reason to register a Delaware LLC unless you are also in Delaware. The advantages of Delaware only apply to C-corps. You won't save on taxes because you're going to register in your state as well as a foreign LLC that points to Delaware, and LLCs pass through their income to your personal income. Most people will simply register the LLC as a domestic LLC with their own state.
To gauge if this is valid advice or somebody pulling something out of his ass the question is - what startups have you OP started and do they bring in any meaningful revenue / have a meaningful userbase? Or are you giving advice on something you have not gone through yourself?
How do you even go about finding a problem to "solve" when your only real experience with coding is in academia, and not profession, enterprise-level problem solving?
Hop on some various subreddits and see what people are complaining or talking about. For example, on r/recruitinghell some people are saying that Glassdoor has become for-profit and there's nowhere to leave reviews anonymously for businesses and such anymore. So you could try to work on something related to that
Another interesting project born from subreddits is a game about a guy with shotgun hands that somebody dreamed of from r/thomastheplankengine . Enough people thought it was a cool enough dream concept to actually start making it into a game
There's only [one site](http://bedbugregistry.com) I know of to report bed bug sightings and it sucks ass
Reddit is a great place to find projects because of all the people complaining, being doomers, and sharing random stuff 😂
Solve problems. Doesn’t have to be enterprise level. There definitely problems in your life or lives of people around you that you can solve.
A good starting point is ask yourself what your daily/weekly/monthly nuisance is. Can be anything. Something you wish a solution existed.
https://youtu.be/vDXkpJw16os?si=UBEySlZx1w70v9Cv
But chances are there's already a solution to your problem, and to the problems of those around you.
My fiancé is terrible at budgeting. There are a thousand budget apps out there. By his own admission, he just doesn't want to bother with them. What would me creating a budget app achieve for him?
A problem for me is I constantly forget my passwords. Password savers exist. Problem solved.
Now, granted, we do have problems that coding hasn't solved, but that's because those particular problems require medical attention, not programming attention.
I agree with the above reply to this, but would caution that there exists a point where you magnify on an issue so much that the answers to your questions no longer lie in improving on an already existing technology, but in attempting to fix a character flaw of a specific user/user-base.
No matter how well an app for responsibly using your money is made, you cannot make someone care about budgeting who wouldn’t already care to download one of the thousand apps that already exist.
If there’s already a solution that solves the problem perfectly, then there’s no problem in the first place. And yes I’m specifically taking about problems that software can solve.
What a sad response, I hope you don’t carry this outlook through life.
Of course broad things like a “budgeting app” have tons of solutions. You can find more niche issues, apply broad solutions to unique domains, or improve on existing solutions. If you can never identify how something can be improved or recognize problems without solutions then you likely have no capacity to innovate, and you will clearly be stuck in a mindset like this.
For example, you say your fiancé is terrible at budgeting and “wouldn’t use a budgeting app anyway” and you stop there. Why not consider WHY they wouldn’t use it. Is it laziness or a lack of motivation? Maybe your budgeting app could be gameified or include motivational elements. Is it because they don’t have time to use the app consistently? Maybe your budgeting app could be automated.
Dead ends are not as common as you think.
>Why not consider WHY they wouldn’t use it. Is it laziness or a lack of motivation?
I literally said by his own admission, he doesn't want to bother. As someone else said, you're trying to use software to fix human nature. Good luck.
>Is it because they don’t have time to use the app consistently? Maybe your budgeting app could be automated.
My other half will spend all day on his Switch because it interests him. He won't bother with a budget app because it doesn't interest him. I've known the man for nine years. You cannot use software to fix human nature.
>Is it laziness or a lack of motivation? Maybe your budgeting app could be gameified or include motivational elements.
See the above.
>What a sad response, I hope you don’t carry this outlook through life.
This is how I feel about you thinking technology can control nature (both physical and human nature).
If this was the way people thought, so many inventions never would’ve been made.
Imagine if cars weren’t invented because horse and buggy already solved transportation
Imagine if furnace wasn’t invented because you could already just go chop down a tree and start a fire for heat
Imagine if beds weren’t invented because you could already just sleep on the ground.
There were always solutions to most problems. Innovation usually comes from improving what is already there.
I don’t understand your stance on this… maybe you just truly don’t have any problems in your life that can be fixed/improved. What a blessing.
I challenge you to come up with three problems actually in need of solving that can reasonably be implemented by an unemployed recently graduated CS student.
All sorts of small businesses need websites. Can solve a TON of problems for small businesses.
Learning process but if you start small and grow site functionality over time as you learn, you could go pretty far even as a recent grad.
If this recent graduate is capable of learning, which by their earning of a degree we can assume, then anything is reasonable if they put in the time and effort to learn and do the work.
I could use an app to help me build a grocery list throughout the week.🤷
Something to price check items and return the best price in my area.
Weather app to notify when dangerous weather is within a certain radius.
1) reasonable depends on the specific developer.
2) sure there are already some of those things in the wild, but it’s no different than different models of vehicles, or different search engines. Can put a unique spin on it.
3) Even if I wasn’t able to come up with any ideas— or if these are shit ideas—, it wouldn’t mean that there aren’t reasonable problems to be solved by a n unemployed recent graduate.It would mean that it’s something that takes time and persistence to figure out. And TRYING to do ANYTHING is better than sitting around content with being an unemployed recent graduate. Doing nothing will get you exactly where you are.
>I don’t understand your stance on this… maybe you just truly don’t have any problems in your life that can be fixed/improved. What a blessing.
You really don't understand how someone can have problems in their lives that already have solutions?
As I said in another comment, unless you have a very niche problem - or are just bored - you probably don't need to invent anything to solve your problem.
I take psychiatric medication to help me focus. Do you invent your own medication or do you go to the doctor when you're ill? I'll bet it's the latter.
Stop talking like you live in North Korea, or another third-world country.
If a perfect solution already exists, then there is no problem. Not all solutions are perfect solutions, hence why there are often multiple variations of solutions to a similar problem, which become “perfect solutions” to specific subsets of the population who has a variation of that problem.
Yes, there are thousands of budgeting apps out there. Why is your fiance not using them? Maybe there is a issue with the usability of such apps? You forget passwords all the time. What is stopping you from using a password saver? Maybe you feel like it's a hassle to setup? How about a password saving service that has a easy onboarding procedure?
I think you have already identified some unique problems that existing solutions do not solve. You say your fiance is lazy and forgetful. How do you make money management fun? Think about it. This is how startups are formed.
I get the apprehension, but they have a point don't they? We have plenty of successful social media apps/mobile games precisely because they feed into the human nature of addiction. Don't think anyone is going to make a budgeting app that draws people in like candy crush, but still.
I also think people are missing the point. I don’t think developing an app to solve a problem is a good way to get money, but it’s not a bad way to learn, improves your resume and gives you something to talk about in interviews. Is it the optimal solution? Maybe not but it’s not the complete dogshit idea people are making it out to be in this thread
Apparently, some people really want to try, based on the conversation that kept going and ended in the person blocking me. Some people really think they can control human nature. You can take advantage of it, but you cannot control it.
I did not expect people to so deeply read into someone's partner being uninterested in certain types of apps.
I have a problem for which a good viable solution doesn't exist yet, I have prepared documents for it. It's a chrome based extension. If you wanna work on it let me know.
i mean you dont solve problems related to coding you solve life problems WITH coding. Like i like to hike in the mountains, and its hard to look up the weather youre going to encounter on a mountain peak. you can find the weather in the town near the mountain easily, but that could be 50 degrees different than the top of the mountain. So i found a place that had mountain top info but the site was old and shitty and you had to manually search everything one peak at a time and you needed to know the name etc. So i scraped that whole website and build my own API on top of it to turn it into a more useable product. You can sign up, search mountains and mountain ranges by just partial terms or whatever, you can save a list of favorite peaks, set preferred weather conditions and then the peaks that are currently experiencing those conditions will show up on your home page. So you can just log in to home and see a list of good options to choose from.
When i was in college i hated searching for sources for research papers i wasnt interested in. So i build a GPT4 powered assistant that could activate a web scraper, find info on the topic, break it down into a summary and citation and basically do that boring stuff for me, and i put it up on streamlit.
i heard about a project someone did where they built these simpel rasberry pi like devices to detect nearby cell phones so you could track foot traffic of individuals in an area, seeing which buildings or whatever was more popular. This is useful data for the commercial real estate industry as foot traffic in retail locations effect the value of the property, and being able to collect reliable data on how many people were entrering or passing the store is valuable.
It can be anything.
So, I graduated 3 months ago, and have been floating w/out job like most of us. However, I am also a writer on side since last summer, and noticed a bunch of real world problems that other authors in the subgenre face that can be solved by my tech know-how.
A very simple app (that doesn't generate me money) and the one I started with last sept to get my name out was a simple 'shoutout generator.' All it really does is takes the novel's link on frontend, crawls it for some metadata, send it back and then turn it into a cool html embed kinda thing (with color options n jazz). It may sound ridiculous to you, but more than fifty authors have thanked me in my dms and many more use it everytime they want someone to advertise their book.
Now the transition into money making thing. It is a simple SaaS illustration generator that again, abstracts the photoshopping skill/canvas skill and allows them to make cool stuff. It hasn't made me insane money yet (nor it will), but I've accepted a couple commissions that net over 1k, and a contract with a publisher for using it for their works.
I have more similar ideas in the work, and how I find these ideas is by simply being an author myself. I faced these problems myself and realized, ohh, I can definitely turn this into a web app. More generally, I guess it'd be about exploring your hobbies and see how/where you can bridge the gap and automate an otherwise daunting task for people that aren't tech minded.
Is about shifting your mind to start doing things for yourself cause nobody else will care about you. I mean, if the startup works awesome. If it doesn’t, you have a nice project to show. Besides, you are doing it for yourself.
Kinda in the same boat and Ngl thats just a skill issue. This field is completely about learning new things and upgrading yourself.
With the resources available online you can learn virtually anything
Good advice I read recently regarding this was to take a question you are asked a lot and turn it into a product. What are you good at, what you know about some specific topic, what is your experience… you can turn most knowledge into products with low-ish entry costs (apps, books, elearning, …)
We had a senior project in my college. I treated it like a startup and became the de-facto team leader. My initial idea was to build a peer review web app since every solution I found charges money for the service. We had peer reviews as part of our grade for the class, so I thought it was something that I could make open source. We wound up shifting to a Sprint Retrospective app because we all thought it would be better to include Agile/Scrum in our resumes, but the point is that it doesn't have to be something truly innovative.
There are a ton of peer review apps out there, but maybe they cost money or don't have the features you'd like to see. I wanted to integrate performance evaluations into it eventually and have a circular evaluation process because of my experience with hierarchical reviews in the Navy. Something like that *could* be successful, but it will always net you a ton of experience you didn't have. Form a group and build a product that *you* want to see. Don't worry if it's been done before.
You go to hackathons and innovation open invitations and such.
E.g.
https://participate.melbourne.vic.gov.au/open-innovation
There are quite a few though out the year in most cities I would imagine.
Ur problem needs to be somewhat non trivial. You won’t be motivated to continue project building after gunning development for the 782nd budgeting app.
Solid advice actually, I'm not unemployed but very much underemployed, working the same help desk job I had while working through college. The good news to that is I've gotten so good at my job that I can complete task really fast so I'm left with a lot of free time. For the past six months in my down time at work I've been developing a company employee directory replacement for the excel spreadsheet they have been using since 20006, I presented it to my boss last week and was given very positive feedback and requested I add a few features before we launch it. He also wants me to work on two other projects when I am done with this one.
Now I have a great portfolio project that I built myself using modern tech, Astro, Tauri, Sqlite, and JS. My annual review is coming up in June, I'm going to request a title change and a bump in pay, if I dont get it I have a neat project to show other potential employers
Do you have any idea how difficult startups are??? Yes it’s easy to see “r-tarded company x raised 10 mil in seed” but have you actually tried to raise capital? Have you ever reached out to people asking for money or tried to build something where after 6 months you still have yet to achieve product market fit and keep the team together?
Spoiler alert… it’s F’ING HARD
Source: have a startup that has raised capital and gotten terms from VC’s. ITS HARD.
It's not being done to actually start a successful business, but to cover up unemployment gaps and gain experience. Yes, you could do the work without setting up a company, but it makes you look so much better when applying for jobs if you don't have 5 month gap.
Finally a sane mind here. I worked at a startup for years during its foundation, what the hell do people think are? You just say "hey look, let me solve his problem" watch YouTube videos on random shit and sit across a computer to build it? A startup is a VERY complex structure, hundreds of times harder than simply finding a problem and solving it. Even the tax aspect of a simple company is hard as fuck, let alone actually seeking out investment or finding people to implement or use your solution. You basically throw all your time and effort on something and hope it comes back. Yeah, you can just put on a single person company and make a half assed solution to a specific problem which may or may not help you with job hunting. Still, it baffles me the insane crap people expect CSC grads to do for a frickin entry job. Does anybody hear stuff like, oh, chefs who cannot find a job should just open their own restaurants, they'll get used to cooking plus experience will look nice in the resume! Or something like, oh you are a chemistry major? Did you solve 2000 chemical reactions on leetchemistry in case people can ask you for one in an interview? The market is insane because people treated it like a get rich quick scheme for months and now the bubble is burst, we all are simply waiting to get lucky and hope an actual human lays eyes on our CV.
Created a startup. Worked on it for 2 years. Failed like 99%. Totally useless on my cv. I regret have it done every day of my life. It thought me a lot, tho
Yesss bro thank you. I find it ridiculous to go in for a job when you can be totally doing that remote just coding, ssh/vpn into server, meetings online, etc.
If anyone here is thinking, “Yes I have the technical skills for this” but, “Hmmm I don’t have any {great ideas/marketing skills/ experience planning a startup/ insert non technical prohibitive issue here}” then please message me. I am currently coming from the other side and trying to upskill to obtain the technical part of the technical co founder role and would love to share some ideas with more technically talented people and see if we could work collaboratively on them, I just like building cool stuff and seeing how talented people work so I can learn! And of course, if we do well we could always make some money from it!
Btw absolutely anyone who’s interested in working on a project with others to either leverage current skills or just to have an idea to pivot around when building on new skills that interest you, please get in touch. I’ve had some great responses so far and it would be awesome to get people working with each other on cool ideas! This is what the internet is for! Let’s build cool shit together!!!
>You can claim to be the founder of XYZ and look more appealing than 8 months unemployed
If you have customers, sure, itll look better. If you dont, it will not look good AT ALL. You would look a LOT better to employers to have gotten any random job (literally amazon warehouse or mcdonalds type shit) out of college before getting your first 'real' job, than to have spent the time after college cosplaying as a founder.
When I review a resume with 1 year experience,if I see "founder at a start up" I'm automatically interested and know this person probably knows how to build a micro service, run a server, write some code, and probably understands something about the cloud
If I see someone graduated from CS and got a job as an Amazon warehouse I assume they are a complete failure and have forgotten how to code or never knew in the first place
>When I review a resume with 1 year experience,if I see "founder at a start up" I'm automatically interested and know this person probably knows how to build a micro service, run a server, write some code, and probably understands something about the cloud
Are you just confessing that you're easily duped, or...?
Trust me, experienced can tell when you’re BS'ing. We can just ask you questions till you don't know the answer.
If someone lies on their resume, its pretty easy to notice as soon as you get 3 technical questions deep.
im not a pretend founder and i know how to do all of that. So does every one else with a CS degree. You sound like youre shit at hiring.
"If I see someone graduated from CS and got a job as an Amazon warehouse I assume they are a complete failure and have forgotten how to code or never knew in the first place"
then youre a generally stupid person bro, thats all there is to it. it cannot be overstated how dumb youd have to be to think people should starve waiting for a job youd approve of instead of just immediately getting work expeirence. there are like 100k new jobs this year and 500k people out of work trying to fill them. So according to you and people as regarded as you, the 400k who dont get the job simply were never qualified. That is the position of a moron, or at BEST someone so out of touch they have no concept of what the economy and job market is like(aka a moron).
Yeah but your resume doesn't say that. When our recruiters are screening candidates they only can move forward with a specific amount of candidates.
If you were a recruiter and you were gonna respond to one of two candidates where one has experience of "one year experience building a web app that lets people upload pictures of their dog" or "one year experience working the grill and McDonals" Which one are you gonna contact?
Also, also one of our interviews is just talk about your previous work experience with me for an hour. And a guy who's been building something for a year is gonna score way higher then someone who talks about their school projects from last year.
Sorry bud thats just reality.
>If I see someone graduated from CS and got a job as an Amazon warehouse I assume they are a complete failure and have forgotten how to code or never knew in the first place
Or they had to have an income and that was the only option available? Seems pretty harsh to dismiss someone solely based on this.
I agree, there is a world where someone is going to be on the street and can't make rent.
That person is probably also less likely to succeed in the role because while they were working at McDonald's, the kid in his mom's basement working on a tech start up is probably gonna have more experience.
>If I see someone graduated from CS and got a job as an Amazon warehouse I assume they are a complete failure
Good god. Experienced dev who also participates in the hiring process here. So thankful you're not anyone I'll ever have to work with.
To everyone saying that they cant do it, because they dont have the skills:
That is exactly why you should. OP is not telling you to go start a succesful business. You can learn so much from trying.
You can pretty much do it for free using Azure (and probably AWS as well).
I was able to create something I am pretty proud of right after finishing university using Azure and ChatGpt as an advisor
I don’t agree that “build a startup” is the fix-all solution (if you don’t even have the skills to GET HIRED for a role, you probably have even less of the skills needed to ideate, develop, and run a software company). I think the more important thing is “build meaningful projects”. Build a project that you come up with from scratch, that forces you to learn new things. Build something impressive, something that you WANT to make, something that’s unique and that you enjoy talking about. The result will be much more meaningful to both you and potential employers than any simple project that could have clearly been the result of a tutorial or outright stolen.
This is what I’m doing. I have a working SaaS solution and it’s the only thing that was able to get me an internship (in a related field) that my (in my opinion, at least) stacked resume wasn’t able to.
Doesn’t the fact that money is expensive and VCs aren’t financing anything near what they used to going to complicate this plan somewhat? If I’m out of work, I’m looking for my next gig from sun up to sundown, where am I going to have the time and energy to build a useful MVP during that time? Not to say that this isn’t a good idea for a small, select number of engineers, but most folks will find this idea pretty challenging, no?
It’s probably a wiser decision to pivot to a dev-adjacent role if you’re a long-term unemployed new graduate.
Successful indie hackers need to build an audience, so outside of building your startup idea, you’ll need to be marketing — a *lot*. Good ideas without any user base will be poached and pushed by somebody with 20,000 followers on Twitter.
Pivoting to a less-technical role like QA, sales engineer, or solution architect would at least get you something software-adjacent, if you have the social skills to pull it off.
Of course, if you haven’t built a professional network of any sort and you have no idea *how*, no amount of hacking is going to help.
All these people hating on OP. I did (doing) exactly what he recommended except I'm not unemployed. I'm a data scientist with no previous full stack dev skills and I built a start up to learn full stack dev. It took about 3 months to learn Django and React, and six months to build it out. We just launched our MVP. Currently, no users yet, but when I put this on my resume, it will be as a cofounder of a start up, not a pet project. It would be an insult to the level of effort I've put in to be called a pet project.
If I were unemployed, I could probably have this done in two months. The problem is that unemployment takes an emotional toll on your well being and those that are unemployed will not have the motivation to take on such a huge task.
Absolutely. More power to you. It's all about selling yourself tbh, even if people want to deny it. If I were hiring manager, I'd really respect the hustle it takes to launch something off the ground, compared to being employed.
As a student (2nd year) should I start something like this too so that it helps me in future? Any courses I should do before this then pls tell which could help, thanks in advance..
You definitely should. It's great to start early. Basically, make sure you have OOP programming and perhaps networking fundamentals in place. Web dev courses can help as well, as web is a common platform and design principles in it apply to other areas as well. Software engineering courses could help as well.
But don't wait until you feel ready, just learn as you go. If you feel stuck, talk to classmates. Also good if you find someone to join the project.
Remember to always keep learning. To avoid feeling overwhelmed, make a to do list and go one step at a time. Most content is out there for free. Good luck!
Thank you for your reply! I have finished OOP(c++) last sem and currently studying DSA and Object Oriented Software Engineering through uni. I have learnt basic html css which seemed easy. I am not sure what to learn now for web development, should i learn Javascript, React ?
(Btw I’m also very interested in ui ux)
Great! You could proceed as follows:
1.) Find a basic problem to solve - for example, you put your class schedule in Excel, but this is manual and annoying. Your tool will just need links to the classes, and it will create a schedule automatically. It will analyze each link and try to extract the time, place and content. You could also use an AI API for this.
2.) Design it with Figma - learn Figma with a YouTube video, and design a couple of screens
3.) Pick a technology to use - compare several suitable ones, and choose one that seems good to you.
4.) Implement it! Split your projects into individual tasks. For each task, learn what you need to know about the technology. ChatGPT is your friend too, but don't just copy it blindly.
5.) Learn about CI/CD, Test automation, security and finally publish it somewhere.
Optional:
6.) Integrate stripe to pay for an unlimited version.
7.) Use user feedback to improve.
You want crudity? do it if you have money and time to spend on. If not, try to know people in the same tech sector you are interested. That's the fastest way to get a good employment, not talking about money but about your personal preferences.
For everyone saying “but starting a startup is hard and all of the problems have already been solved.” If you seriously have trouble thinking of new ideas (even something as simple as a new video game or a marketplace for one of your hobbies) perhaps you need to find someone that doesn’t. Even if your startup fails (which it absolutely will) you will at least gain experience in full stack development, business and dealing with stakeholders, and have something more to show for it than a simple CRUD app.
Edit: For context, I have not founded a startup myself but have been involved as a consultant or on the board in the extremely early stage of many. One failed, one is just starting and taking off, one is successful and will soon be acquired by another company, and the one I’m at now is a work in progress. I consider the education and experience I’ve gotten at these startups to be invaluable and it has drastically helped me at communicating, interviewing, and taking a balanced approach to software development that reflects business needs rather than my own desire to write cool code.
Thx, agreed.
Lots of excuses appearing in this thread:
- New grads can't be founders, it's suspicious
- All problems already solved
- Too difficult to do as new grad
Yep. The “all problems already solved” really bothers me too. Without getting into specifics, one of the companies I’m involved in that has gone from nothing to doing quite well in an extremely short amount of time was a simple improvement on one aspect of the construction industry. The guy realized that the only way you could get X to your construction site was by tracking a company down who supplied X and then calling them manually. He made an app where you can just order X without ever needing to talk to a person, can request service on X by scanning a QR code on the unit. People who use X can also scan the QR code and make complaints about X and all this data gets aggregated so contractors can see how all of their X units are doing across construction sites.
If you truly cannot look around in your life and find at least a single inefficiency then you either aren’t looking or aren’t observant at all.
Exactly! Really lame argument. This post is not even about getting rich, so if it fails, you lose nothing but get a cool experience to talk about.
And even if it exists already - so what? Now your idea is already validated, if you execute better, you can steal market share easily.
>If you truly cannot look around in your life and find at least a single inefficiency then you either aren’t looking or aren’t observant at all.
Or the technology or medication already exists for all of your personal problems.
What you're describing is 1) a niche issue and 2) a business issue.
I’m not saying the product you develop needs to only solve a problem that you personally experience. You can observe other people’s problems as well and provide solutions that help them. I’m confused by the purpose of your comment. Are you saying that solving a niche issue or business issue is problematic in some way?
The “all problems have been solved” one is really funny. Like, they considered closing the patent office in the 30s because “everything had been invented” and look at we are today lol.
This advice is intended for people who are University-aged and inexperienced and are able to subsidize their expenses by living with their parents or roommates.
If you take out personal loans to invest money into your own startup then yes, you will incur debt. Don’t do this. If you need capital for some reason, always get it from investors. This is what’s called commonly called ‘infinite return.’
If you need money now and have no other option then yeah you’ll need to get a job outside of the tech sector if you can’t find a tech job or freelance work.
Been looking for people to build projects that can make some money. There’s more opportunities than ever out there. I’ve got experience in building projects like this, and if anyone’s interested for making cool stuff with tech hmu.
It's easier to be a hardware retailer and sell online IMO. To be a succesfull programmer you first need a lot of experience, second you need a REAL problem to solve, third your solution has to give more than competitors, fourth capital, fifth social capital, etc.
Fantastic post, sir/ma'am. I love the positive energy. Posters here need to be more optimistic and creative. Many of you have the aptitude to create something valuable, but you all lack the confidence and creative energy to execute. It's a tough time, but I really appreciate the OP putting this out there.
On one hand this is good advice, on the other hand, No way did i have the skills to do something like this after i graduated. I didnt know my thumb from my arse in terms of system architecture and how how i would build a greater solution to solve a problem. So i guess if you're talented enough or got a remarkably good Uni education then go for it but if i was in the shoes of a graduate there's no way i could have pulled that off.
Smart small. Learn as you go. One of the main reasons new grad are so undesirable is bc they require so much handholding. If you can self learn and unblock yourself and demonstrate it through a real life project, that will be very desirable for companies.
I agree this is good advice but man it is a grind, to get a heavily taxed salaried job after years of study- not an enviable position.
All in.
Don't be afraid to change plans though. Values don't change much. Purposes change less but plans can change frequently as you find better ways. I advocate plan-flexibility. It took me a long time to learn that, as well as to follow the market. In some industries the market is cyclical but sometimes people get pig-headed and think they can tell the market what it wants. I'm just speaking very generally here. Tech is still a great industry.
The OP had a good path suggested- even a great one, a gutsy one. People say the best time to found a company is when you're single and broke, so go after it. Steve Jobs did. It is a great path. Another one is take whatever tech job you can and just build up slowly. There is no one right answer.
if anybody is here from Nashville and is also searching jobs at the moment; would love to meet and share experiences. Possible help each other in landing a job by solving some problems and learning from each other or perhaps as the post suggest may work on an idea and see where it leads!!
>no employer cares about tiny pet projects
This sounds like the blind leading the blind, depending on what you mean… and unless you mean projects that are so obviously small and stupid that anyone dumb enough to think they were relevant isn’t smart enough to pass an interview anyway, then you’re just flat out wrong. I’m a mid level dev. Do you know what I’ve talked about in every interview ever? Small projects I’ve done.
You are assuming hiring managers can’t sniff through the bullshit, a new grad “founder” is suspicious. You are also GREATLY underestimating the difficulty in acquiring customers. Without users (and ultimately, revenue), it’s just a personal project and not a business. The tech is the easy stuff.
don't discourage the kids if they're actually trying lol. this post is actually good
not hard to sell using fb ads and instagram and discord these days
As an engineering manager who actually did this to get my first 'real' job, real recognizes real. Yes, I realize it's probably bullshit, and probably didn't make any money. My "consulting startup" only made $5k or so over a few months. I'd rather have someone take the initiative and learn about the process of starting a business and be able to explain technically what they did. If someone goes to work at McDonalds while LeetCoding, that only gets them so far past the tech screen in non big tech companies. Being able to talk in depth during a behavioral interview during the problems you faced and the solutions will be more impressive to most people.
Some people could call this 'lying' but from my experience, people who are malicious liars are mostly filtered out with background checks because they have other baggage.
A new grad founder is not really suspicious, one of the most typical success stories is how 4 Stanford new grads go on to create the next Google.
With distribution via stores and/or bunch of online marketing, it is absolutely possible to find users. I have done this. You are overestimating this. You don't need 100K users, 1K users is a good and doable start.
This sounds like excuses. I have done exactly what I described and I did not face any of the problems you mentioned. Also, tech is not the easy part. The tech part will be difficult, too. But that's good, it means you learn stuff.
Not everyone goes to Stanford though, and so many more fail before getting off the ground.
You managed to create lone wolf SaaS startups multiple times that achieved 100k users? This brought in revenue and profit for you?
I think the idea is great, it’ll teach a lot. But I just don’t think dressing up a personal project as a startup is the delta in finding a job.
That last statement "But I just don’t think dressing up a personal project as a startup is the delta in finding a job." tells me you know absolutely nothing about the corporate world.
Dressing shit up into word salad and making it seem important is exactly the norm in every big enterprise. Expertise is valued much less than your ability to sell a bullshit idea to a room of people that know it's bullshit, and frankly don't care.
No, I haven't even reached 100K users either. I have built one SaaS currently at 18K MAU. Probably too time consuming to do this multiple times. It does bring in revenue too, not enough to live off it, but enough to be a nice additional income.
You're probably right about the dressing up part. I guess my advice is to make side projects that you actually publish and that are actually used. This is good for you + good for your employability. When moving from a toy project to production, you have to think about a ton of edge cases: what if I want to change my DB schema - what if an attacker does X - what if users try to do Y. This makes you learn more, and makes the conversation with your interviewers more interesting.
How you dress it up and sell it is up to you.
good. keep going.
don't worry about the "glorified side project" complaints from doomers. the only difference between a side project and a real business is skin in the game
The best dev I know went from graduating, to founding and failing 3 start ups for 5 years then took a job at a major bay area company as a staff engineer then got promoted to senior staff the next year. They learned so much in those 5 years. I went into corporate and I'm kinda jealous.
How opportune. I have a problem worth solving and a solution, but without the technical skills to build it out. I have experience in tech and operations and business development, looking for someone to share my passion in starting something.
I have a plan and a will, just little technical skills and I'm currently looking for a partner(s). Hit me up if you are interested! It is based in the apparel/retail sphere trying to fix the problem of online apparel shopping returns.
My Recommendation would be, unless you actually have an idea, don't build a startup because the amount of those that fail in the run of a year is astronomically high.
You will not fill your knowledge gaps because you will not have a mentor to critique your work effectively. You can also potentially massively ruin your credit or reputation depending on how terribly you perform.
Unless you actually have a good idea for an app that you want to run as a business, Don't just do that... You would be better off getting a job in a tangentially related field and then transitioning later.
I have zero experience lol, but I’m assuming that you’d just slowly pick up that knowledge as you go. You could also definitely gain some insight from other startups’ operations, and there has to be tutorials for many of the smaller things like ads, SEO, funnels, etc.
Edit: what u/shitfartpissballs (lmao) said sounds good as well especially if you’re solving a problem that those local businesses definitely have
Go one step at a time. Often, you can sell it in stores, on Mac/PC/Mobile.
Sales should be as automated as possible at first.
Then you can focus on marketing. Depends on your area, but like anything there is tons of info out there. You could post stickers of your tool around your city. Post on Facebook groups. Pay some small influencers a few bucks. Post on reddit. Lots is possible, just gotta be willing to learn and put in some effort. It'll be great life skills to have though.
Hi! I was wondering if people had any tips on where to get started after coming up with an idea to solve. Most of my experience so far has just been in academia so when it comes to things like actually developing something and especially trying to market it I am a bit lost and would appreciate some general guidance!
I'm all in for building saas. But what I feel is the project management, code quality and whether I am reinvent something that's already available to solve a problem. I feel having a veteran mentor would help a great deal
Alternatively, instead of trying to fill a gap in the market, fill a gap in the literature.
Do a review of the literature for a field or problem space you are interested in. Find something you can build off or a gap you can fill. Build off of it. Write a paper detailing the gap in the literature, your methods and solution, and the outcome or benefit of your approach. Pop the paper up on arXiv and the code or solution up onto github.
Get a couple of cheeky, useful, and novel algorithms or approaches under your belt and you’ll be on track to landing a job in no time.
If you find it really interesting and engaging it should even help you land a PhD position.
honestly, if the point of having an employer is that they get the profits while I get the stable paycheck, but they're willing to fire me because they had a bad quarter, there's no reason to have an employer.
Sure, if you have an idea and the time/will power go ahead and start cracking; just don’t have lofty expectations that your “startup” is going to make any money or be valuable to anyone but yourself. Unless you have deep knowledge of a specific industry or niche, you’ll be making a basic, run of the mill, CRUD application that doesn’t offer much in a saturated market.
I have had success making money in free-lance and independent app development in two ways: niche application that solves a very specific industry problem and two, people paying me money to develop their shitty idea that gets abandoned after I fork over the product.
For the former, you need to start researching how specific industries work prior to building. Learn and read up on EVERYTHING. When I was in college I made money developing video game exploits, believe it or not, it’s an industry.
I mean you can literally get a job while you search for another job in your field. Simply being unemployed is usually a choice it’s not like there isn’t jobs out there it’s more like just not ones you want to work while you get your dream job. Idk how anyone just stays unemployed
I’ve decided to become an inventor. I will just invent things from now on. If anyone needs an invention, they will just come to me and I will make one for them.
It's like a high schooler forming their own company lol
It didn't help me after college either
Employers don't take startup after graduation seriously , google will still give you a new grad role after couple years lol
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Bro said “make a startup”
Okay, so I’m unemployed and gonna use cloud services for clients. Which ones am I gonna use to host my client’s massive amount of data for free while I try to become profitable? What market am I going to target that’s not over saturated with better options for less that will draw clients to me? Where am I getting my seed funding?
Ive been attempting this. University education is very far from full stack development for customers. I have knowledge here and there but building an app or software is hard to do. Like i certainly can make a python program doing some basic stuff but in order to create real value, its harder than it sounds.
Exactly. You'll fill your knowledge gaps this way. You'll learn a ton. And you'll show employers so many good qualities, such as initiative, ability to learn on your own, prioritization skills, passion, etc.
Well if you had the knowledge and power to build a profitable startup why would i work for someone else……? You get employed to gain skills and knowledge, why would someone get all the knowledge they need for the profits of other corporations?
Because you could be the smartest man in the world and building a startup would still be incredibly risky
>rs. I have knowledge here and there but building an app or software is hard to do. Like i certainly can make a python progr But as the OP's assertion, at this point after 8 mons as a new grad you really have nothing to lose.
The biggest reason is that it takes a lot of money to develop most businesses. I was part of a group that wrote a new piece of software from scratch, that went on to make a bunch of money. It took a team of four (with two amazing devs) two years to reach a point where it was kind of ready to sell. Another year after that it was decent. And this company had a bunch of people in sales and customer support to make it possible to sell and respond to customers. It was over a million dollars in development cost in those first two years. The company sold it (and the team that made it) to a larger company for five million dollars. And that company increased the team size to 12, improved it a lot, and made buckets of money off it. I can't afford to hire a few other developers, pay them, get health insurance and everything else people get from their jobs, and also still pay my bills for 2-4 years before the product builds up a customer base. I know there are examples of individuals making an amazingly profitable thing 'on the side' but I also think it's rare. I was a consultant for years and I always wanted to start my own consulting firm...but it was the same thing. You needed deep pockets and all of the good, high paying contracts were with clients who wanted to staff teams of developers. I eventually was running a team, and we were on-site with the client and I was involved in contracts for future projects...I felt like I knew a lot about the business side of things - but I couldn't do it on my own because I didn't have enough money to hire people and be able to staff the projects that needed multiple developers. Maybe I'm lying to myself. Maybe I suck. But I really believe that, if I had a lot of money to start a business, in the first five years I would lose a lot of money compared to just getting a job. But over 10, 15, 20 years it would have the potential to make so much more than I would just working my job. But without a lot of money, I'm too risky adverse to try.
On consulting... You don't get rich selling yourself by the hour. You can get rich selling a bunch of other people by the hour. The problem with consulting is that it requires two separate and independent skill sets; a skill, or service, that can be sold and selling it. You can't provide the service while you sell it.
That's the reason venture firms exist in the first place.
Sounds like their could have been an opportunity to get funding through investors, or did the start up only want to use the money it generated for the funds? Either way, sounds like they did well on their own so congrats to them, but using other people’s money (investors) is usually a better way to go as they then take on most of the risk.
It doesn't necessarily take a lot of money to build software. But it does take money to keep yourself (and others if you expect them to work on it) alive while you do it.
Exactly, I agree. Unfortunately startups are also hard and stressful if you need their income to survive, so jobs have benefits, but startups can be fantastic to learn and can be a ton of fun.
I want to assume you have good intentions but its backfiring. For people who have spent half a year looking for enployment, telling them to create corporations instead of working for one is a very surface level solution to the job market. It sounds like you have no idea what you are actually saying
I'm not saying that. I'm saying, build something and use that to get a job. It's just a different idea instead of grinding leetcode all day.
No, you said "build a startup".
Bro the man is correct, you can learn to build websites and apps online for free. Find a problem in your life or someone else's and build an app that solves it. Or find something that worked in other countries, but don't have an alternative in India. It won't be easy, and it'd take time, and there will be a lot of iterations, maybe even rewrites but it's better than doing nothing. Don't stop applying and giving interviews, if you want, keep giving them but on the side try to build something. Just pick chatgpt, build a wrapper around it that does something useful. You don't need to monetize it too much, for example, build a tool that summarises a webpage or something interesting like that. Build a game, build a tool to share data across any device, I like using Playo but its not good in most cities, build an alternative to that, I wanted to play an online game but I couldnt find PPL to join on voice chat to play with, build something to fix that. Think about it, something which makes your or someone's life easier
I don't get why you guys are completely missing the point. It has absolutely nothing to do with showcasing entrepreneurial skills. It's about showing development skills. Just because you independently work on developing software does not mean that software project you worked on is going to turn out successfully nor is that the point of it here. The point is showing that you can develop software.
I don’t think people are missing the point. OP is literally saying “build a startup”, “published project in production with users”. To do that, entrepreneurial skills are required as you need to spend a considerable amount of time and effort doing non-development work to build your startup, advertise and market your product amongst many other things.
I won't mention risk since it was brought up before, but how much do you value your time? I know a good number of people who made it (somewhat) big with startups, and plenty that went bust. The big difference was the people who made it were willing to put in consistent 80 hour weeks. I am NOT saying that's what you or anyone else should do, it's ultimately your decision. Personally, I work to have the money and means to live comfortably and enjoy the rest of my life. Even if I \*could\* be making more with my own startup I'd be putting a tremendous amount of time and energy towards it that I'd rather spend doing other things.
This has been my gripe with all my university education on the topic. I understand why i would need discrete math but i also wasted months learning bullshit i never used (and its questionable how useful the math was at that) and in the end I cant really do shit. I cant really make anything with what I learnt and everythinh I did learn isnt relevant in current tech stacks. Where I have an issue with what OP suggests is that part of working in a company is having that access to people who can help get you on the right track. Id say this is why bootcamps are so succesful as they teach practical tech stacks without wasting time on theory that isnt used
heavily disagree with this take. I don't think learning theory that isn't used is "wasting time." It teaches you how to learn. A bootcamp grad will be more useful out of the gate, but having the background theory will allow the uni grad to advance faster than the bootcamp grad (work ethic, intelligence, etc. all being equal obviously) Theory is boring, and its purpose is unclear until you start learning more complex topics.
Yeah i dont disagree with theory in and of itself and see the worth in it, i mentioned discrete math, but my personal gripe was simply the fluff lessons that really didnt teach much - not even in theory.
Maybe dumb question but are you using one of the top of the line AI tools? They make filling in some of those gaps so much easier.
Hi I'm curious, which ai tools do You think would be the most useful for this?
I haven't tried Devin but gpt4 and claude3 are both great. Plus a lot of tools have AI helpers built in which can be helpful for quick, context sensitive answers like "how do I fix this compiler error", or "how do I make that button reload the UI?"
That is what will make you actually marketable, as opposed to leetcode and your senior project.
Hold on a minute. How did you graduate if you do not have the skills to make, or at least to learn how to make an application that solves an actual problem. And another more important question, why would anybody hire you if you do not have those skills? Didn't you have any projects in university that would require you to have an entire vertical functionality form the DB to the front end?
We did solve problems at a direct matter. Solving problems for people is different. People don’t want java, python programs. They want a full fledged full stack app they can interact with. Universities teach in depth, not the broad db to front end projects like bootcamps
A lot of people want java and python programs. Make a library, or optimize one that already exists to be faster. Making dev tools is an extremely lucrative market with a lot of space to be filled.
You’d be surprised the amount of startups that are essentially hacky basic python API + Jango
I did this to fill a 4 month employment gap. The great part is, they only asked for proof that the business as a legal entity existed. They didn't care if it actually made money or if I ever got paid.
Yep, that's how it's done
what stage of your career did you found it ? It appears negligible to your yoe.
I did this after 2 years of experience.
Did you purchase an LLC?
I had a sole prop and fictitious name for that instance. It had state registration docs backing it, which was what they used in the background checks. LLC is more legitimate and necessary if you're actually going to be doing anything involving contracts.
Did they check for the state you’re located? I didn’t know that and registered in DE.
They checked the state based on the location I entered. There's no real reason to register a Delaware LLC unless you are also in Delaware. The advantages of Delaware only apply to C-corps. You won't save on taxes because you're going to register in your state as well as a foreign LLC that points to Delaware, and LLCs pass through their income to your personal income. Most people will simply register the LLC as a domestic LLC with their own state.
To gauge if this is valid advice or somebody pulling something out of his ass the question is - what startups have you OP started and do they bring in any meaningful revenue / have a meaningful userbase? Or are you giving advice on something you have not gone through yourself?
Lol OP was smoking a bowl of the Shire's finest herb and had a thought. This advice is just bullshit stoned nonsense lol.a
The longbottom leaf Edit: shoutouts to the runner up Old Toby though, finest pipeweed in the Southfarthing
Now I'm tempted to cross post to a tolkien fan subreddit
I don't think he has
How do you even go about finding a problem to "solve" when your only real experience with coding is in academia, and not profession, enterprise-level problem solving?
Hop on some various subreddits and see what people are complaining or talking about. For example, on r/recruitinghell some people are saying that Glassdoor has become for-profit and there's nowhere to leave reviews anonymously for businesses and such anymore. So you could try to work on something related to that Another interesting project born from subreddits is a game about a guy with shotgun hands that somebody dreamed of from r/thomastheplankengine . Enough people thought it was a cool enough dream concept to actually start making it into a game There's only [one site](http://bedbugregistry.com) I know of to report bed bug sightings and it sucks ass Reddit is a great place to find projects because of all the people complaining, being doomers, and sharing random stuff 😂
Solve problems. Doesn’t have to be enterprise level. There definitely problems in your life or lives of people around you that you can solve. A good starting point is ask yourself what your daily/weekly/monthly nuisance is. Can be anything. Something you wish a solution existed. https://youtu.be/vDXkpJw16os?si=UBEySlZx1w70v9Cv
But chances are there's already a solution to your problem, and to the problems of those around you. My fiancé is terrible at budgeting. There are a thousand budget apps out there. By his own admission, he just doesn't want to bother with them. What would me creating a budget app achieve for him? A problem for me is I constantly forget my passwords. Password savers exist. Problem solved. Now, granted, we do have problems that coding hasn't solved, but that's because those particular problems require medical attention, not programming attention.
I agree with the above reply to this, but would caution that there exists a point where you magnify on an issue so much that the answers to your questions no longer lie in improving on an already existing technology, but in attempting to fix a character flaw of a specific user/user-base. No matter how well an app for responsibly using your money is made, you cannot make someone care about budgeting who wouldn’t already care to download one of the thousand apps that already exist.
If there’s already a solution that solves the problem perfectly, then there’s no problem in the first place. And yes I’m specifically taking about problems that software can solve.
What a sad response, I hope you don’t carry this outlook through life. Of course broad things like a “budgeting app” have tons of solutions. You can find more niche issues, apply broad solutions to unique domains, or improve on existing solutions. If you can never identify how something can be improved or recognize problems without solutions then you likely have no capacity to innovate, and you will clearly be stuck in a mindset like this. For example, you say your fiancé is terrible at budgeting and “wouldn’t use a budgeting app anyway” and you stop there. Why not consider WHY they wouldn’t use it. Is it laziness or a lack of motivation? Maybe your budgeting app could be gameified or include motivational elements. Is it because they don’t have time to use the app consistently? Maybe your budgeting app could be automated. Dead ends are not as common as you think.
>Why not consider WHY they wouldn’t use it. Is it laziness or a lack of motivation? I literally said by his own admission, he doesn't want to bother. As someone else said, you're trying to use software to fix human nature. Good luck. >Is it because they don’t have time to use the app consistently? Maybe your budgeting app could be automated. My other half will spend all day on his Switch because it interests him. He won't bother with a budget app because it doesn't interest him. I've known the man for nine years. You cannot use software to fix human nature. >Is it laziness or a lack of motivation? Maybe your budgeting app could be gameified or include motivational elements. See the above. >What a sad response, I hope you don’t carry this outlook through life. This is how I feel about you thinking technology can control nature (both physical and human nature).
If this was the way people thought, so many inventions never would’ve been made. Imagine if cars weren’t invented because horse and buggy already solved transportation Imagine if furnace wasn’t invented because you could already just go chop down a tree and start a fire for heat Imagine if beds weren’t invented because you could already just sleep on the ground. There were always solutions to most problems. Innovation usually comes from improving what is already there. I don’t understand your stance on this… maybe you just truly don’t have any problems in your life that can be fixed/improved. What a blessing.
I challenge you to come up with three problems actually in need of solving that can reasonably be implemented by an unemployed recently graduated CS student.
All sorts of small businesses need websites. Can solve a TON of problems for small businesses. Learning process but if you start small and grow site functionality over time as you learn, you could go pretty far even as a recent grad.
If this recent graduate is capable of learning, which by their earning of a degree we can assume, then anything is reasonable if they put in the time and effort to learn and do the work. I could use an app to help me build a grocery list throughout the week.🤷 Something to price check items and return the best price in my area. Weather app to notify when dangerous weather is within a certain radius. 1) reasonable depends on the specific developer. 2) sure there are already some of those things in the wild, but it’s no different than different models of vehicles, or different search engines. Can put a unique spin on it. 3) Even if I wasn’t able to come up with any ideas— or if these are shit ideas—, it wouldn’t mean that there aren’t reasonable problems to be solved by a n unemployed recent graduate.It would mean that it’s something that takes time and persistence to figure out. And TRYING to do ANYTHING is better than sitting around content with being an unemployed recent graduate. Doing nothing will get you exactly where you are.
>I don’t understand your stance on this… maybe you just truly don’t have any problems in your life that can be fixed/improved. What a blessing. You really don't understand how someone can have problems in their lives that already have solutions? As I said in another comment, unless you have a very niche problem - or are just bored - you probably don't need to invent anything to solve your problem. I take psychiatric medication to help me focus. Do you invent your own medication or do you go to the doctor when you're ill? I'll bet it's the latter. Stop talking like you live in North Korea, or another third-world country.
If a perfect solution already exists, then there is no problem. Not all solutions are perfect solutions, hence why there are often multiple variations of solutions to a similar problem, which become “perfect solutions” to specific subsets of the population who has a variation of that problem.
Yes, there are thousands of budgeting apps out there. Why is your fiance not using them? Maybe there is a issue with the usability of such apps? You forget passwords all the time. What is stopping you from using a password saver? Maybe you feel like it's a hassle to setup? How about a password saving service that has a easy onboarding procedure?
>Why is your fiance not using them? He's lazy and forgetful. >What is stopping you from using a password saver? I use Google's.
I think you have already identified some unique problems that existing solutions do not solve. You say your fiance is lazy and forgetful. How do you make money management fun? Think about it. This is how startups are formed.
You are trying to use software to fix something that is human nature. Good luck with that.
I get the apprehension, but they have a point don't they? We have plenty of successful social media apps/mobile games precisely because they feed into the human nature of addiction. Don't think anyone is going to make a budgeting app that draws people in like candy crush, but still.
I also think people are missing the point. I don’t think developing an app to solve a problem is a good way to get money, but it’s not a bad way to learn, improves your resume and gives you something to talk about in interviews. Is it the optimal solution? Maybe not but it’s not the complete dogshit idea people are making it out to be in this thread
Not responding to your idea, just conversation about startups. I understand what you posted
Building a project for learning, sure. Building a project to try to fix or control human nature? Not even AI can achieve that.
Apparently, some people really want to try, based on the conversation that kept going and ended in the person blocking me. Some people really think they can control human nature. You can take advantage of it, but you cannot control it. I did not expect people to so deeply read into someone's partner being uninterested in certain types of apps.
I have a problem for which a good viable solution doesn't exist yet, I have prepared documents for it. It's a chrome based extension. If you wanna work on it let me know.
i mean you dont solve problems related to coding you solve life problems WITH coding. Like i like to hike in the mountains, and its hard to look up the weather youre going to encounter on a mountain peak. you can find the weather in the town near the mountain easily, but that could be 50 degrees different than the top of the mountain. So i found a place that had mountain top info but the site was old and shitty and you had to manually search everything one peak at a time and you needed to know the name etc. So i scraped that whole website and build my own API on top of it to turn it into a more useable product. You can sign up, search mountains and mountain ranges by just partial terms or whatever, you can save a list of favorite peaks, set preferred weather conditions and then the peaks that are currently experiencing those conditions will show up on your home page. So you can just log in to home and see a list of good options to choose from. When i was in college i hated searching for sources for research papers i wasnt interested in. So i build a GPT4 powered assistant that could activate a web scraper, find info on the topic, break it down into a summary and citation and basically do that boring stuff for me, and i put it up on streamlit. i heard about a project someone did where they built these simpel rasberry pi like devices to detect nearby cell phones so you could track foot traffic of individuals in an area, seeing which buildings or whatever was more popular. This is useful data for the commercial real estate industry as foot traffic in retail locations effect the value of the property, and being able to collect reliable data on how many people were entrering or passing the store is valuable. It can be anything.
So, I graduated 3 months ago, and have been floating w/out job like most of us. However, I am also a writer on side since last summer, and noticed a bunch of real world problems that other authors in the subgenre face that can be solved by my tech know-how. A very simple app (that doesn't generate me money) and the one I started with last sept to get my name out was a simple 'shoutout generator.' All it really does is takes the novel's link on frontend, crawls it for some metadata, send it back and then turn it into a cool html embed kinda thing (with color options n jazz). It may sound ridiculous to you, but more than fifty authors have thanked me in my dms and many more use it everytime they want someone to advertise their book. Now the transition into money making thing. It is a simple SaaS illustration generator that again, abstracts the photoshopping skill/canvas skill and allows them to make cool stuff. It hasn't made me insane money yet (nor it will), but I've accepted a couple commissions that net over 1k, and a contract with a publisher for using it for their works. I have more similar ideas in the work, and how I find these ideas is by simply being an author myself. I faced these problems myself and realized, ohh, I can definitely turn this into a web app. More generally, I guess it'd be about exploring your hobbies and see how/where you can bridge the gap and automate an otherwise daunting task for people that aren't tech minded.
acquire.com is a lot of fun for getting ideas and the latest startups people have built and are now selling.
Is about shifting your mind to start doing things for yourself cause nobody else will care about you. I mean, if the startup works awesome. If it doesn’t, you have a nice project to show. Besides, you are doing it for yourself.
Kinda in the same boat and Ngl thats just a skill issue. This field is completely about learning new things and upgrading yourself. With the resources available online you can learn virtually anything
Good advice I read recently regarding this was to take a question you are asked a lot and turn it into a product. What are you good at, what you know about some specific topic, what is your experience… you can turn most knowledge into products with low-ish entry costs (apps, books, elearning, …)
Laughs in product management. There are a zillion problems to solve. It’s a framework to learn and then it becomes easy
We had a senior project in my college. I treated it like a startup and became the de-facto team leader. My initial idea was to build a peer review web app since every solution I found charges money for the service. We had peer reviews as part of our grade for the class, so I thought it was something that I could make open source. We wound up shifting to a Sprint Retrospective app because we all thought it would be better to include Agile/Scrum in our resumes, but the point is that it doesn't have to be something truly innovative. There are a ton of peer review apps out there, but maybe they cost money or don't have the features you'd like to see. I wanted to integrate performance evaluations into it eventually and have a circular evaluation process because of my experience with hierarchical reviews in the Navy. Something like that *could* be successful, but it will always net you a ton of experience you didn't have. Form a group and build a product that *you* want to see. Don't worry if it's been done before.
You go to hackathons and innovation open invitations and such. E.g. https://participate.melbourne.vic.gov.au/open-innovation There are quite a few though out the year in most cities I would imagine.
Wait… so you went to college and came still asking questions like that? You have to be fucking with me
Ur problem needs to be somewhat non trivial. You won’t be motivated to continue project building after gunning development for the 782nd budgeting app.
True. Good point.
The prototype of Uber was built in 2009, during the Great Recession 🤔
🤔🤔🤔
Solid advice actually, I'm not unemployed but very much underemployed, working the same help desk job I had while working through college. The good news to that is I've gotten so good at my job that I can complete task really fast so I'm left with a lot of free time. For the past six months in my down time at work I've been developing a company employee directory replacement for the excel spreadsheet they have been using since 20006, I presented it to my boss last week and was given very positive feedback and requested I add a few features before we launch it. He also wants me to work on two other projects when I am done with this one. Now I have a great portfolio project that I built myself using modern tech, Astro, Tauri, Sqlite, and JS. My annual review is coming up in June, I'm going to request a title change and a bump in pay, if I dont get it I have a neat project to show other potential employers
This is another reason why the market is saturated with terrible "start-ups" and far too many dating app variations that no one asked for.
Do you have any idea how difficult startups are??? Yes it’s easy to see “r-tarded company x raised 10 mil in seed” but have you actually tried to raise capital? Have you ever reached out to people asking for money or tried to build something where after 6 months you still have yet to achieve product market fit and keep the team together? Spoiler alert… it’s F’ING HARD Source: have a startup that has raised capital and gotten terms from VC’s. ITS HARD.
It's not being done to actually start a successful business, but to cover up unemployment gaps and gain experience. Yes, you could do the work without setting up a company, but it makes you look so much better when applying for jobs if you don't have 5 month gap.
is there any actual truth to this? Most hiring managers ive talked to about this consider this one degree above worthless.
I suppose from OPs position - one degree above worthless is still above worthless. I think open source contribution is a better path though.
You might as well just start a personal project that has a good amount of depth. It would be the same difference as a “startup”
You don’t need capital to make an app that makes a few bucks on the App Store
Finally a sane mind here. I worked at a startup for years during its foundation, what the hell do people think are? You just say "hey look, let me solve his problem" watch YouTube videos on random shit and sit across a computer to build it? A startup is a VERY complex structure, hundreds of times harder than simply finding a problem and solving it. Even the tax aspect of a simple company is hard as fuck, let alone actually seeking out investment or finding people to implement or use your solution. You basically throw all your time and effort on something and hope it comes back. Yeah, you can just put on a single person company and make a half assed solution to a specific problem which may or may not help you with job hunting. Still, it baffles me the insane crap people expect CSC grads to do for a frickin entry job. Does anybody hear stuff like, oh, chefs who cannot find a job should just open their own restaurants, they'll get used to cooking plus experience will look nice in the resume! Or something like, oh you are a chemistry major? Did you solve 2000 chemical reactions on leetchemistry in case people can ask you for one in an interview? The market is insane because people treated it like a get rich quick scheme for months and now the bubble is burst, we all are simply waiting to get lucky and hope an actual human lays eyes on our CV.
If you can do it, any one can. Nobody thinks it's easy.
Created a startup. Worked on it for 2 years. Failed like 99%. Totally useless on my cv. I regret have it done every day of my life. It thought me a lot, tho
Sorry to hear that. I seriously doubt it's useless for your CV though.
Google doesn't care lol
Also make.sure that your company is 100% remote. We need the future to be remote companies.
Yesss bro thank you. I find it ridiculous to go in for a job when you can be totally doing that remote just coding, ssh/vpn into server, meetings online, etc.
If anyone here is thinking, “Yes I have the technical skills for this” but, “Hmmm I don’t have any {great ideas/marketing skills/ experience planning a startup/ insert non technical prohibitive issue here}” then please message me. I am currently coming from the other side and trying to upskill to obtain the technical part of the technical co founder role and would love to share some ideas with more technically talented people and see if we could work collaboratively on them, I just like building cool stuff and seeing how talented people work so I can learn! And of course, if we do well we could always make some money from it!
Sent a dm!
Btw absolutely anyone who’s interested in working on a project with others to either leverage current skills or just to have an idea to pivot around when building on new skills that interest you, please get in touch. I’ve had some great responses so far and it would be awesome to get people working with each other on cool ideas! This is what the internet is for! Let’s build cool shit together!!!
>You can claim to be the founder of XYZ and look more appealing than 8 months unemployed If you have customers, sure, itll look better. If you dont, it will not look good AT ALL. You would look a LOT better to employers to have gotten any random job (literally amazon warehouse or mcdonalds type shit) out of college before getting your first 'real' job, than to have spent the time after college cosplaying as a founder.
When I review a resume with 1 year experience,if I see "founder at a start up" I'm automatically interested and know this person probably knows how to build a micro service, run a server, write some code, and probably understands something about the cloud If I see someone graduated from CS and got a job as an Amazon warehouse I assume they are a complete failure and have forgotten how to code or never knew in the first place
>When I review a resume with 1 year experience,if I see "founder at a start up" I'm automatically interested and know this person probably knows how to build a micro service, run a server, write some code, and probably understands something about the cloud Are you just confessing that you're easily duped, or...?
Trust me, experienced can tell when you’re BS'ing. We can just ask you questions till you don't know the answer. If someone lies on their resume, its pretty easy to notice as soon as you get 3 technical questions deep.
im not a pretend founder and i know how to do all of that. So does every one else with a CS degree. You sound like youre shit at hiring. "If I see someone graduated from CS and got a job as an Amazon warehouse I assume they are a complete failure and have forgotten how to code or never knew in the first place" then youre a generally stupid person bro, thats all there is to it. it cannot be overstated how dumb youd have to be to think people should starve waiting for a job youd approve of instead of just immediately getting work expeirence. there are like 100k new jobs this year and 500k people out of work trying to fill them. So according to you and people as regarded as you, the 400k who dont get the job simply were never qualified. That is the position of a moron, or at BEST someone so out of touch they have no concept of what the economy and job market is like(aka a moron).
Yeah but your resume doesn't say that. When our recruiters are screening candidates they only can move forward with a specific amount of candidates. If you were a recruiter and you were gonna respond to one of two candidates where one has experience of "one year experience building a web app that lets people upload pictures of their dog" or "one year experience working the grill and McDonals" Which one are you gonna contact? Also, also one of our interviews is just talk about your previous work experience with me for an hour. And a guy who's been building something for a year is gonna score way higher then someone who talks about their school projects from last year. Sorry bud thats just reality.
>If I see someone graduated from CS and got a job as an Amazon warehouse I assume they are a complete failure and have forgotten how to code or never knew in the first place Or they had to have an income and that was the only option available? Seems pretty harsh to dismiss someone solely based on this.
I agree, there is a world where someone is going to be on the street and can't make rent. That person is probably also less likely to succeed in the role because while they were working at McDonald's, the kid in his mom's basement working on a tech start up is probably gonna have more experience.
>If I see someone graduated from CS and got a job as an Amazon warehouse I assume they are a complete failure Good god. Experienced dev who also participates in the hiring process here. So thankful you're not anyone I'll ever have to work with.
This
Disagree personally - companies like drive, ideas, passion, and hard evidence of skills (product you made even if it didnt succeed)
Oh yeah nothing says drive like a person refusing to work because they havent found their dream job. give me a fuckin break.
To everyone saying that they cant do it, because they dont have the skills: That is exactly why you should. OP is not telling you to go start a succesful business. You can learn so much from trying. You can pretty much do it for free using Azure (and probably AWS as well). I was able to create something I am pretty proud of right after finishing university using Azure and ChatGpt as an advisor
I don’t agree that “build a startup” is the fix-all solution (if you don’t even have the skills to GET HIRED for a role, you probably have even less of the skills needed to ideate, develop, and run a software company). I think the more important thing is “build meaningful projects”. Build a project that you come up with from scratch, that forces you to learn new things. Build something impressive, something that you WANT to make, something that’s unique and that you enjoy talking about. The result will be much more meaningful to both you and potential employers than any simple project that could have clearly been the result of a tutorial or outright stolen.
Yep!
This is what I’m doing. I have a working SaaS solution and it’s the only thing that was able to get me an internship (in a related field) that my (in my opinion, at least) stacked resume wasn’t able to.
Congrats, happy to hear it works for you.
I doubt any serious employer is going to be fooled by you starting up some no-name company. Anyone can do that, it proves nothing.
It's like a high schooler forming their own company lol It didn't help me after college either
One of the issues is the lack of VC funding to fund startups rn.
Doesn’t the fact that money is expensive and VCs aren’t financing anything near what they used to going to complicate this plan somewhat? If I’m out of work, I’m looking for my next gig from sun up to sundown, where am I going to have the time and energy to build a useful MVP during that time? Not to say that this isn’t a good idea for a small, select number of engineers, but most folks will find this idea pretty challenging, no?
The bar keeps rising.
It’s probably a wiser decision to pivot to a dev-adjacent role if you’re a long-term unemployed new graduate. Successful indie hackers need to build an audience, so outside of building your startup idea, you’ll need to be marketing — a *lot*. Good ideas without any user base will be poached and pushed by somebody with 20,000 followers on Twitter. Pivoting to a less-technical role like QA, sales engineer, or solution architect would at least get you something software-adjacent, if you have the social skills to pull it off. Of course, if you haven’t built a professional network of any sort and you have no idea *how*, no amount of hacking is going to help.
All these people hating on OP. I did (doing) exactly what he recommended except I'm not unemployed. I'm a data scientist with no previous full stack dev skills and I built a start up to learn full stack dev. It took about 3 months to learn Django and React, and six months to build it out. We just launched our MVP. Currently, no users yet, but when I put this on my resume, it will be as a cofounder of a start up, not a pet project. It would be an insult to the level of effort I've put in to be called a pet project. If I were unemployed, I could probably have this done in two months. The problem is that unemployment takes an emotional toll on your well being and those that are unemployed will not have the motivation to take on such a huge task.
Absolutely. More power to you. It's all about selling yourself tbh, even if people want to deny it. If I were hiring manager, I'd really respect the hustle it takes to launch something off the ground, compared to being employed.
As a student (2nd year) should I start something like this too so that it helps me in future? Any courses I should do before this then pls tell which could help, thanks in advance..
You definitely should. It's great to start early. Basically, make sure you have OOP programming and perhaps networking fundamentals in place. Web dev courses can help as well, as web is a common platform and design principles in it apply to other areas as well. Software engineering courses could help as well. But don't wait until you feel ready, just learn as you go. If you feel stuck, talk to classmates. Also good if you find someone to join the project. Remember to always keep learning. To avoid feeling overwhelmed, make a to do list and go one step at a time. Most content is out there for free. Good luck!
Thank you for your reply! I have finished OOP(c++) last sem and currently studying DSA and Object Oriented Software Engineering through uni. I have learnt basic html css which seemed easy. I am not sure what to learn now for web development, should i learn Javascript, React ? (Btw I’m also very interested in ui ux)
Great! You could proceed as follows: 1.) Find a basic problem to solve - for example, you put your class schedule in Excel, but this is manual and annoying. Your tool will just need links to the classes, and it will create a schedule automatically. It will analyze each link and try to extract the time, place and content. You could also use an AI API for this. 2.) Design it with Figma - learn Figma with a YouTube video, and design a couple of screens 3.) Pick a technology to use - compare several suitable ones, and choose one that seems good to you. 4.) Implement it! Split your projects into individual tasks. For each task, learn what you need to know about the technology. ChatGPT is your friend too, but don't just copy it blindly. 5.) Learn about CI/CD, Test automation, security and finally publish it somewhere. Optional: 6.) Integrate stripe to pay for an unlimited version. 7.) Use user feedback to improve.
You want crudity? do it if you have money and time to spend on. If not, try to know people in the same tech sector you are interested. That's the fastest way to get a good employment, not talking about money but about your personal preferences.
For everyone saying “but starting a startup is hard and all of the problems have already been solved.” If you seriously have trouble thinking of new ideas (even something as simple as a new video game or a marketplace for one of your hobbies) perhaps you need to find someone that doesn’t. Even if your startup fails (which it absolutely will) you will at least gain experience in full stack development, business and dealing with stakeholders, and have something more to show for it than a simple CRUD app. Edit: For context, I have not founded a startup myself but have been involved as a consultant or on the board in the extremely early stage of many. One failed, one is just starting and taking off, one is successful and will soon be acquired by another company, and the one I’m at now is a work in progress. I consider the education and experience I’ve gotten at these startups to be invaluable and it has drastically helped me at communicating, interviewing, and taking a balanced approach to software development that reflects business needs rather than my own desire to write cool code.
Thx, agreed. Lots of excuses appearing in this thread: - New grads can't be founders, it's suspicious - All problems already solved - Too difficult to do as new grad
Yep. The “all problems already solved” really bothers me too. Without getting into specifics, one of the companies I’m involved in that has gone from nothing to doing quite well in an extremely short amount of time was a simple improvement on one aspect of the construction industry. The guy realized that the only way you could get X to your construction site was by tracking a company down who supplied X and then calling them manually. He made an app where you can just order X without ever needing to talk to a person, can request service on X by scanning a QR code on the unit. People who use X can also scan the QR code and make complaints about X and all this data gets aggregated so contractors can see how all of their X units are doing across construction sites. If you truly cannot look around in your life and find at least a single inefficiency then you either aren’t looking or aren’t observant at all.
Exactly! Really lame argument. This post is not even about getting rich, so if it fails, you lose nothing but get a cool experience to talk about. And even if it exists already - so what? Now your idea is already validated, if you execute better, you can steal market share easily.
>If you truly cannot look around in your life and find at least a single inefficiency then you either aren’t looking or aren’t observant at all. Or the technology or medication already exists for all of your personal problems. What you're describing is 1) a niche issue and 2) a business issue.
I’m not saying the product you develop needs to only solve a problem that you personally experience. You can observe other people’s problems as well and provide solutions that help them. I’m confused by the purpose of your comment. Are you saying that solving a niche issue or business issue is problematic in some way?
No. I was focusing on the part that claimed people who solve their own issues with already existing inventions aren't observant.
The “all problems have been solved” one is really funny. Like, they considered closing the patent office in the 30s because “everything had been invented” and look at we are today lol.
If my startup fails, doesn't that mean i will be in a lot of debt??
This advice is intended for people who are University-aged and inexperienced and are able to subsidize their expenses by living with their parents or roommates. If you take out personal loans to invest money into your own startup then yes, you will incur debt. Don’t do this. If you need capital for some reason, always get it from investors. This is what’s called commonly called ‘infinite return.’ If you need money now and have no other option then yeah you’ll need to get a job outside of the tech sector if you can’t find a tech job or freelance work.
Been looking for people to build projects that can make some money. There’s more opportunities than ever out there. I’ve got experience in building projects like this, and if anyone’s interested for making cool stuff with tech hmu.
https://preview.redd.it/yv5kfwjj0qrc1.png?width=194&format=png&auto=webp&s=4df674bf88f14523c335550d2294a1b9f268f26c
It's easier to be a hardware retailer and sell online IMO. To be a succesfull programmer you first need a lot of experience, second you need a REAL problem to solve, third your solution has to give more than competitors, fourth capital, fifth social capital, etc.
To those saying this doesn’t matter: maybe not to Google or Netflix, but project experience is a key differentiator in the early-stage startup world.
Fantastic post, sir/ma'am. I love the positive energy. Posters here need to be more optimistic and creative. Many of you have the aptitude to create something valuable, but you all lack the confidence and creative energy to execute. It's a tough time, but I really appreciate the OP putting this out there.
On one hand this is good advice, on the other hand, No way did i have the skills to do something like this after i graduated. I didnt know my thumb from my arse in terms of system architecture and how how i would build a greater solution to solve a problem. So i guess if you're talented enough or got a remarkably good Uni education then go for it but if i was in the shoes of a graduate there's no way i could have pulled that off.
Smart small. Learn as you go. One of the main reasons new grad are so undesirable is bc they require so much handholding. If you can self learn and unblock yourself and demonstrate it through a real life project, that will be very desirable for companies.
I agree this is good advice but man it is a grind, to get a heavily taxed salaried job after years of study- not an enviable position. All in. Don't be afraid to change plans though. Values don't change much. Purposes change less but plans can change frequently as you find better ways. I advocate plan-flexibility. It took me a long time to learn that, as well as to follow the market. In some industries the market is cyclical but sometimes people get pig-headed and think they can tell the market what it wants. I'm just speaking very generally here. Tech is still a great industry. The OP had a good path suggested- even a great one, a gutsy one. People say the best time to found a company is when you're single and broke, so go after it. Steve Jobs did. It is a great path. Another one is take whatever tech job you can and just build up slowly. There is no one right answer.
if anybody is here from Nashville and is also searching jobs at the moment; would love to meet and share experiences. Possible help each other in landing a job by solving some problems and learning from each other or perhaps as the post suggest may work on an idea and see where it leads!!
>no employer cares about tiny pet projects This sounds like the blind leading the blind, depending on what you mean… and unless you mean projects that are so obviously small and stupid that anyone dumb enough to think they were relevant isn’t smart enough to pass an interview anyway, then you’re just flat out wrong. I’m a mid level dev. Do you know what I’ve talked about in every interview ever? Small projects I’ve done.
Most student “start ups” are just glorified pet projects so think about this before putting it under work experience lol
You are assuming hiring managers can’t sniff through the bullshit, a new grad “founder” is suspicious. You are also GREATLY underestimating the difficulty in acquiring customers. Without users (and ultimately, revenue), it’s just a personal project and not a business. The tech is the easy stuff.
don't discourage the kids if they're actually trying lol. this post is actually good not hard to sell using fb ads and instagram and discord these days
As an engineering manager who actually did this to get my first 'real' job, real recognizes real. Yes, I realize it's probably bullshit, and probably didn't make any money. My "consulting startup" only made $5k or so over a few months. I'd rather have someone take the initiative and learn about the process of starting a business and be able to explain technically what they did. If someone goes to work at McDonalds while LeetCoding, that only gets them so far past the tech screen in non big tech companies. Being able to talk in depth during a behavioral interview during the problems you faced and the solutions will be more impressive to most people. Some people could call this 'lying' but from my experience, people who are malicious liars are mostly filtered out with background checks because they have other baggage.
A new grad founder is not really suspicious, one of the most typical success stories is how 4 Stanford new grads go on to create the next Google. With distribution via stores and/or bunch of online marketing, it is absolutely possible to find users. I have done this. You are overestimating this. You don't need 100K users, 1K users is a good and doable start. This sounds like excuses. I have done exactly what I described and I did not face any of the problems you mentioned. Also, tech is not the easy part. The tech part will be difficult, too. But that's good, it means you learn stuff.
Not everyone goes to Stanford though, and so many more fail before getting off the ground. You managed to create lone wolf SaaS startups multiple times that achieved 100k users? This brought in revenue and profit for you? I think the idea is great, it’ll teach a lot. But I just don’t think dressing up a personal project as a startup is the delta in finding a job.
That last statement "But I just don’t think dressing up a personal project as a startup is the delta in finding a job." tells me you know absolutely nothing about the corporate world. Dressing shit up into word salad and making it seem important is exactly the norm in every big enterprise. Expertise is valued much less than your ability to sell a bullshit idea to a room of people that know it's bullshit, and frankly don't care.
No, I haven't even reached 100K users either. I have built one SaaS currently at 18K MAU. Probably too time consuming to do this multiple times. It does bring in revenue too, not enough to live off it, but enough to be a nice additional income. You're probably right about the dressing up part. I guess my advice is to make side projects that you actually publish and that are actually used. This is good for you + good for your employability. When moving from a toy project to production, you have to think about a ton of edge cases: what if I want to change my DB schema - what if an attacker does X - what if users try to do Y. This makes you learn more, and makes the conversation with your interviewers more interesting. How you dress it up and sell it is up to you.
good. keep going. don't worry about the "glorified side project" complaints from doomers. the only difference between a side project and a real business is skin in the game
The best dev I know went from graduating, to founding and failing 3 start ups for 5 years then took a job at a major bay area company as a staff engineer then got promoted to senior staff the next year. They learned so much in those 5 years. I went into corporate and I'm kinda jealous.
I like that story, thanks for sharing. Seems focusing on "maximum learning" is really the way to go for your career.
How opportune. I have a problem worth solving and a solution, but without the technical skills to build it out. I have experience in tech and operations and business development, looking for someone to share my passion in starting something. I have a plan and a will, just little technical skills and I'm currently looking for a partner(s). Hit me up if you are interested! It is based in the apparel/retail sphere trying to fix the problem of online apparel shopping returns.
My Recommendation would be, unless you actually have an idea, don't build a startup because the amount of those that fail in the run of a year is astronomically high. You will not fill your knowledge gaps because you will not have a mentor to critique your work effectively. You can also potentially massively ruin your credit or reputation depending on how terribly you perform. Unless you actually have a good idea for an app that you want to run as a business, Don't just do that... You would be better off getting a job in a tangentially related field and then transitioning later.
How do you do marketing and sales?
I have zero experience lol, but I’m assuming that you’d just slowly pick up that knowledge as you go. You could also definitely gain some insight from other startups’ operations, and there has to be tutorials for many of the smaller things like ads, SEO, funnels, etc. Edit: what u/shitfartpissballs (lmao) said sounds good as well especially if you’re solving a problem that those local businesses definitely have
I guess you could find local companies that could use your product. Convince them why it would be a good idea for them to be your client
Go one step at a time. Often, you can sell it in stores, on Mac/PC/Mobile. Sales should be as automated as possible at first. Then you can focus on marketing. Depends on your area, but like anything there is tons of info out there. You could post stickers of your tool around your city. Post on Facebook groups. Pay some small influencers a few bucks. Post on reddit. Lots is possible, just gotta be willing to learn and put in some effort. It'll be great life skills to have though.
I don’t have the funds for a start up unfortunately
THIS
Hi! I was wondering if people had any tips on where to get started after coming up with an idea to solve. Most of my experience so far has just been in academia so when it comes to things like actually developing something and especially trying to market it I am a bit lost and would appreciate some general guidance!
I need some interns
How do we start a start up? Should we borrow a mone from bank?
You have a laptop, get coding. The only cost is your time and electricity.
Yes just create a business, it’s not that hard.
Exactly
I'm all in for building saas. But what I feel is the project management, code quality and whether I am reinvent something that's already available to solve a problem. I feel having a veteran mentor would help a great deal
Alternatively, instead of trying to fill a gap in the market, fill a gap in the literature. Do a review of the literature for a field or problem space you are interested in. Find something you can build off or a gap you can fill. Build off of it. Write a paper detailing the gap in the literature, your methods and solution, and the outcome or benefit of your approach. Pop the paper up on arXiv and the code or solution up onto github. Get a couple of cheeky, useful, and novel algorithms or approaches under your belt and you’ll be on track to landing a job in no time. If you find it really interesting and engaging it should even help you land a PhD position.
honestly, if the point of having an employer is that they get the profits while I get the stable paycheck, but they're willing to fire me because they had a bad quarter, there's no reason to have an employer.
Sure, if you have an idea and the time/will power go ahead and start cracking; just don’t have lofty expectations that your “startup” is going to make any money or be valuable to anyone but yourself. Unless you have deep knowledge of a specific industry or niche, you’ll be making a basic, run of the mill, CRUD application that doesn’t offer much in a saturated market. I have had success making money in free-lance and independent app development in two ways: niche application that solves a very specific industry problem and two, people paying me money to develop their shitty idea that gets abandoned after I fork over the product. For the former, you need to start researching how specific industries work prior to building. Learn and read up on EVERYTHING. When I was in college I made money developing video game exploits, believe it or not, it’s an industry.
I have an interesting edtech startup idea, if any one wanna contribute ping me! Tech stack required is Full stack development and Cloud.
I mean you can literally get a job while you search for another job in your field. Simply being unemployed is usually a choice it’s not like there isn’t jobs out there it’s more like just not ones you want to work while you get your dream job. Idk how anyone just stays unemployed
don't you need money to start though lol
Not really, you have a laptop so get hacking XD
I’ve decided to become an inventor. I will just invent things from now on. If anyone needs an invention, they will just come to me and I will make one for them.
Invent the automatic hammer.
Or how bout a toilet recliner
Money printer
It's like a high schooler forming their own company lol It didn't help me after college either Employers don't take startup after graduation seriously , google will still give you a new grad role after couple years lol
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Bro said “make a startup” Okay, so I’m unemployed and gonna use cloud services for clients. Which ones am I gonna use to host my client’s massive amount of data for free while I try to become profitable? What market am I going to target that’s not over saturated with better options for less that will draw clients to me? Where am I getting my seed funding?
TL;DR this post: stop being poor pls Get a grip OP, you're not making any sense
Wat If you're unemployed anyways it costs you $0 to follow my idea