Board

So while the dream is composability through open-source, the reality seems to be interoperability through APIs

In my opinion, this is how the ecosystem comes together. Companies/people with motivation to build/connect to better unlock financial accessibility/compatibility

The other comes from within. This is what drives me to do things when there isn’t a carrot or a stick. Hobbies are one activity driven by this. But what I was looking for was something that I could do for a living that was also driven by this type of motivation: the intrinsic kind.

Regarding the $1,200 per month limit, I'm not sure what the rules are, but perhaps you could set up a corporation that takes on the freelancing jobs and then pays you a salary of $1,200 a month? That way you wouldn't have to turn down a job for paying too much.Maybe have the corp owned by a trust rather than you personally?I wouldn't want you to get in trouble and lose the disability, though, so talk to somebody who actually knows what they're talking about before doing any of this stuff.

In NextJS v13, the framework's compiler got 17x faster. Why? An extensible Rust-based platform for JavaScript compilation and bundling called swc. The compiler went v1 in 2019, and Vercel hired the lead developer in 2021.

For those of you who find yourselves feeling skeptical of this kind of "heat seeking," you should ask yourself what kind of investor are you? What kind of founder are you? Are you more focused on building long-term business value? Or are you focused on getting as wealthy as possible, as quickly as possible? Because those are not necessarily the same games. And whether its building long-term business value, or getting rich, it's certainly possible (even most likely) that you'll lose one of those games. But if you don't know what game you're playing? Well, then you're sure to lose.

In some cases this isn’t possible. If it’s not, then ask yourself what is the minimum work you need to do to get to a product you can test with customers. For example, maybe you can make the algorithms work well for a narrow set of users, rather than solving the general case.

Once you know the minimum work, try to break it down into discrete steps, as many as possible. Your estimate of the time for the project will be more accurate if you evaluate each step and then add them up, rather than trying to estimate the whole thing at once. Having discrete steps with time estimates allows you to have checkpoints throughout the project so you can see if you are falling behind expectations. Tracking measurable progress frequently is the best way to stay on budget.

The latter is usually the most eye opening for founders when they finally ask themselves this honestly. Most of the time, the features asked by customers are not ones that they’d leave over if not built immediately. They’re nice to have, not need to have. When resources like time and energy are limited in a startup, knowing what not to do becomes invaluable.

Sometimes the answer is clear and it’s obvious that you must fix a critical bug over everything else. Boom, easy win. Sometimes it’s not as clear and your gut tells you that the feature no one asked for but is in your vision is the idea that will make the most impact on growth. That is where you, the founder, earn your equity. Time to make that tough decision! It may or may not work out, but at least you’re not making the decision arbitrarily. If it doesn’t work out, learn from the mistake, resort and move forward quickly.

“Several distinct problems manifest themselves as delays in launching: working too slowly; not truly understanding the problem; fear of having to deal with users; fear of being judged; working on too many different things; excessive perfectionism. Fortunately you can combat all of them by the simple expedient of forcing yourself to launch something fairly quickly.” —-Paul Graham, The 18 Mistakes that Kill Startups

Our MVP gestation time kept shrinking, from three months, to one week, to one day, down to a few hours. In the end it was our most minimal release, a single page that submitted a file and an email address to our inbox, that got us the most traction.

Sometimes our features were so ridiculously basic that as soon as we released them, everyone complained about the lack of functionality. However, this was great: We’d wasted zero effort, and quickly knew that customers wanted that feature.

The main downside to this approach is that your product will feel less mature and polished than it could. But the feedback, data, and learning you get from releasing v0 features far outweighs the minor early reputation damage you may incur.