Category: Uncategorized

A swing and a miss

This is a follow up to the post – For fun and exploration. I made the following graph in that post –

impact_vs_fun

So there’s good news and bad news. Bad news first –

Assume that Fliptrazon was the golf ball in the above gif. This is exactly what happened when I took a swing at it. So, it seems that Fliptrazon has been forever ordained to the mildly fun and pointless category. No real startup coming out of it.

The good news is I didn’t waste too much time and money on it. I was able to make an MVP, test my hypothesis, try it out on a few known and a few unknown customers and get a reasonable idea of whether or not to make this a full time business (The business part of Fliptrazon was a b2b product). If anyone is interested, I could write a separate post on what I was trying to do with the b2b product and why I thought it did not work out etc.

Anyway, I plan to keep it up and running, now that we’ve built it. It does not cost much to keep it up. And a number of users have started using it fairly regularly as the coupon search engine part of Fliptrazon has some strong user retention. We also made an app which we’ll put up on the play store shortly, which will make it a lot more easier to try out coupons if you’re on Android.

On that note, I’ll go back to trying to figure out what to do next! Cheers.

Pessimism

Going into something unknown, one of my instincts is to think about what all can go wrong. I may take it to extremes in some cases too (like what if.. death!). This is often taken as me being a pessimist. A friend of mine hinted at the same conclusion just yesterday and I mumbled something about me being an unlikely pessimist, after all I like to pursue lofty goals, try things that may be unlikely to succeed etc.

I thought I’ll put down a better articulation of why I (and others who do the same) think like that. It is easy to brand it as “negative thinking”, but hear me out..

Continue reading Pessimism

Noun Project mac app: drag drop on sketch not working (png instead of svg)

This had been bothering me for a while. Hope this helps if you’ve been scratching your head over it too.

The noun project app was dropping raster (png) instead of vector (svg) when dragging from the noun project mac app to Sketch. Simple solution.. just uncheck the “enable png” box in the preferences dialog (keyboard shortcut – ⌘,)

enable_png_nounproject

Of engineering and its under-rated value

Yesterday my friend @arunsdevine was lamenting how some of his friends make twice or thrice what he makes (income). Obvious professions that came up were banking and law, and we wondered why one would ever want to do a software engineering or product management job.

Either one works 80 hour weeks and earns millions. Or one keeps it sane and lives a healthy life (and probably earn a little less). It is of course a personal choice. Some of my friends apparently love the banking lifestyle. I thought about why I never found it attractive going after banking. I had all the access I needed, yet I chose to become an engineer/entrepreneur. Just thought of putting it into words and the answer came to me as quite simple.

If earning a few million dollars is your aim, then you might be better off doing investment banking. The probability of success might be higher than say starting up your own business and making an exit / earning that much income from it. But there’s also a more fundamental difference as to how you want to acquire money. Do you want to acquire money by cutting a percentage out of the existing pile. Or do you want to create money by generating value. I think bankers, lawyers usually do the former, while engineers, designers, creators have a higher potential to do the latter (not that we necessarily do).

I just feel that it is an under-valued skill to be an engineer. I often notice a lack of pride for their profession in many engineers. And if creating value beyond a few million dollars is the dream, it probably gives creators an edge. The mindset is different – acquire vs create.