The Bootstrapped Founder

I think there are two great arguments here: nobody needs tools that perpetuate a vanishing system and there are lots of interesting things happening in EdTech. While I am grateful for your example, I would like to offer a different perspective.

I know of a university teacher who is looking into solving the arduous task of grading without going crazy. I approve of a tool being built to facilitate this.

I am torn on this issue as well: I strongly dislike formal education, with it following a metric of "teaching to the test" and "learning to test instead of retention." I wish that there was more systemic change towards a different way of assessment.

But not for one second will I assume to know what is best for the teachers in that space. If building a pre-grading (which is merely an example here) can help them shave off an hour of tedious work a day, I think it's a valid side project idea. It may even be a valid business idea.

The project that changed my life[1] was an EdTech productivity system that generated student feedback for online teachers working with young students in China. Student feedback as text-only is a horrible way of communicating individualized instruction. Yet we help teachers speed up that process, which allowed them to do one thing: teach more. Be more present in the classroom. Foster stronger relationships.

I would argue that making anything nominally more convenient is a good thing: it removes an inconvenience so that things that matter can take…

From here:

https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/why-founders-end-up-unemployable/

"It probably won’t surprise you that instead of being praised for creating something that could be rightfully considered a piece of written art, I got reprimanded for not following the structural expectations of the task. The story that was a deep and honest expression of myself received a failing grade. Over-delivering was punished, and severely so."

The enterprise, like the school, don't want to see creativity. Unfortunately, just by revealing you started a company, you are telling the employer what they don't want to hear. This author is mostly putting the blame on the founder, but clearly that isn't the whole story.

He goes on:

"And generalists are not sought after by employers, particularly not in the lower rungs of the corporate ladder. Solopreneurs end up being overqualified in the most confusing sense: they have too much interdisciplinary knowledge to fit into well-defined roles."

So, unemployability isn't just about the attitudes of the founder.

I was just reading the beginning of Arvid Kahl's Zero to Sold. He recommends using a tech stack that you already know and have lots of muscle memory with. I couldn't agree with him more. [1]

This tech stack looks over-engineered upon first glance, but I don't know much about the author or his product.

I use Kubernetes a fair bit whilst developing OpenFaaS and teaching people about K3s, but there is a whole world of development teams who aren't prepared to consider it as an option. One of the reasons we created "faasd" [2] (single-node OpenFaaS) was to help people who just wanted to run some code, but didn't want to take "Kubernetes mastery 101"

For a small app using a managed service like Cloud Run plus some cloud storage should get you very far. I saw that Heroku is still popular with the indie community, with the author of Bannerbear getting a lot of value from the managed platform.

[1] https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/
[2] https://github.com/openfaas/faasd

I can strongly recommend https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/

There's also a Podcast, Newsletter and the creator is active on Twitter and responds to questions.

In short:

- packed with first-hand experience

- easy to follow

- instantly useful

- the best advice for making something with actually returns money: find and solve a "critical" problem. Learn how to look & find them.

Start small while listening to it.

Also, I've found "This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn To See" by Seth Godin to be really helpful. It changed my mind quite a bit around the topic of marketing (Ads != Marketing; love the concept of "find the Minimum Viable Audience").