Comment by leros
12 days ago
Looking back, how do you feel about your slate of past projects?
I'm curious as TinyPilot is your most successful project and it looks like the most business-oriented thing you built: as in, its a product aimed at serious businesses. Whereas Zestful is a niche micro-saas and Is It Keto is a niche website. Perhaps I'm characterizing things wrong, but that's my rough perception.
Thanks for reading!
>Looking back, how do you feel about your slate of past projects?
I feel like I learned something valuable from all of them.
The ones I'm most proud of are TinyPilot, my book, and my blogging course (in that order). Those are, uncoincidentally, the ones where I found product-market fit, whereas the rest never really achieved that.
TinyPilot was business-oriented by mistake. When I initially made it, I thought the market was entirely hobbyists who would rather make a DIY KVM than buy a $600 enterprise-y device. As I continued working on it, I found that my customers were much more interested in paying a higher price for a pre-made device than saving money with a DIY solution.
But yeah, I think the fact that it appealed to businesses made it more viable than my other business attempts that were consumer-focused.
>> I found that my customers were much more interested in paying a higher price for a pre-made device than saving money with a DIY solution
This could have been a 50-yr-old comment about the Apple I computer! Lol
>> Wozniak intended to share schematics of the machine for free; however, Jobs advised him to start a business together and sell bare printed circuit boards (PCBs) for the computer, without any components soldered on.
...
Terrell told Jobs that he would order 50 units of the Apple I and pay $500 each on delivery, but only if they came fully assembled – he was not interested in buying bare printed circuit boards with no components.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I