Everyone questioning why you’d do that.

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I sold a company to a competitor I made friends with years ago.

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in the end your Business relation are what you make of them.

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but don’t give them your trade secrets.

Am an employer with a remote team.

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its a mixed bag.
Started with the pandemic, then people moved away.

pros:

- no office expense.

- flexibility

- no commute

- saves a pile of time getting things done

- can hire people from anywhere

cons:

- creativity is harder

- people who slack are harder to recognize

- mental health toll of being solo

- getting together is hard

- requires certain kinds of personality to work Well.

i do like our remote setup, but am aware it limits us in some ways.

Kids today. Pfft.

I started entrepreneurship at 36 and didn’t fail the first time until almost 40! Lost so much of my family’s savings too.

You had your first start to end experience already. You’re ahead of me! Next time you’ll probably get a bit further because you’ve learned.

I’m in the minority I think, but I’d say yes.

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I went back to school for the MBA, best thing I ever did. There are so many elements of business to understand, learn about , get exposed to. So many people with different experiences that you work with in a structured environment. Plus there is, you know, actual research that you learn about. I’m sure there’s been more since I did my degree, but everything from organizational behavior, activity-based-accounting, use of stats….

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is it everything you need to be an entrepreneur? No.

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but it’s really solid for someone with lots of experience in a different field to get into business.

Someone told me once “I keep a very short list of people I could cofound with” when I asked him how he found his cofounders.

This was not helpful in the moment but stuck with me over the years. There’s no quick fix to finding cofounders. It’s a process of connecting, finding similar vision, complementary skills, and building trust. It’s a bit like dating, and honestly, the technical cofounders are the “pretty girls” in the platform. It helps to have money and an attractive profile, and even then expect to get ghosted a lot.

People seem to be coming down hard on you here, and they make some valid points. I’d chalk it up to inexperience that is showing through. It doesn’t mean you can’t make it, experience is something that you learn by doing, after all.

What I’d recommend: you’re better off spending time building whatever you can on your own. You don’t need a fully functioning app that will go viral. Build a community. If you want people to talk together about subjects and answer questions and meet each other, do it using told you have before you start building your own. Connect on WhatsApp. Host meetups in person or virtual ones on zoom. Start a discord or twitch stream where you put into practice as many pieces of what you envision as you can.

It will be so much easier to build an app for a preexisting community that knows you and that you understand well than it will be to attract an audience to an app you build no matter how clear your ideas are. The community building is the hard part. And the fun fact is that if you get good at managing that community, it will become much much easier to attract people to your team.

I think the reason you’re being downvoted is because you seem like you didn’t employ any sort of methodology to your “study”

It’s not bad to look at elements of different successful platforms and imagine how they could be put together or recombines to make an appealing product.

But the way you are speaking about it suggests you have unrealistic expectations of how well you understand your target market. For example:

1. You could have done focus groups and explored different metrics to measure engagement with different social media elements.

2. You could have made prototypes in Figma, or just with pen and paper and done user experience testing with groups of people, so that you’d at least have fully fleshed out screens and user flows to start from.

3. You could have run offline versions of what you describe, to iron out the wrinkles in real life before committing it to code. Like running a meet up where people debate topics and answer questions in a similar way as you describe.

4. You might have made a questionnaire with self-reported data from your target gen-z group about what they liked and didn’t like about different platforms and then conducted 3 surveys a day for a year to get 1000 replies.

It may be that you’ve done some of this, but if so, it doesn’t come across. It sounds a bit more like you tried using different platforms for a year, and then made your own design based on your impressions. It’s not impossible that it could work, but is far from guaranteed. Even with more methodological approaches it’s far from a sure thing. Companies employ armies of people with decades of experience doing exactly this and have failed to achieve success. There are tens of thousands of people employed by the biggest social media companies in the world who have both the experience and desire to build the next big thing who have raised significant money to try, and have still failed.

Not attempting to be discouraging, but just to reflect back as to why it comes across as a bit self-important to assume your app would go viral from the idea stage alone.

wrong thinking Here.

1. marketing a product includes promotion but is not only promotion. Also think product, price, place.
2. if ads, salesmen, etc didn’t work people wouldn’t use them.
3. what people rail at the person promoting the product? Have you experienced this or is it just a meme? Are these people your target market?
4. Properly positioning your product means understanding the customer, thinking where they will be, and communicating in a way that addresses their issues in a language they understand. It might include ads and sales people. It might not.
5. I don’t get annoyed at sales in general, I get annoyed at cold calls specifically. They’re usually for highly competitive products and services that I’m not in the market for. They call me, don’t immediately say why they’re calling, which is a dead giveaway, and ask questions about me to get me talking and waste my time. Does it work? It must. But my annoyance is because I get like 15 calls a week about software development, recruiting, SEO, etc. it’s a crowded market and I’m being interrupted. So if you’re afraid of annoying people, avoid products with crowded markets That rely on cold outreach.
6. I get annoyed with ads that block me fro m what I want to read or see. Not ads in general. It’s 2023, content has a price, and free content means the price is ads. It’s fine so long as they don’t spam my email, prevent me from closing a window or tab in my browser, etc.
7. with that in mind, what’s the product, who’s the audience, where do they spend time and attention, and what type of language do they use? Fit those criteria and you’ll probably be fine.

Do you have a specialization?

The more specialized you are the easier it is to charge more and stand out to the target group.

If you don’t, you could just choose the project from the past for years that was the easiest to do that also made the most money and focus on getting a few more of those.

The concept is that a generalist video studio might charge say $1000 for a video production package but a boutique video studio specialized in sales training videos for pharma companies, for example, might charge ten times that or more.

The key is making sure the niche exists.