On the current state of affairs in my startup journey:

  • Who seems my ICP thus far? A company for which their APIs (externalized or otherwise) need to be operationally healthy for their business success.
    • One possibility is that this is a search problem (like that YC video mentioned). So, I could keep searching and, if I find a few such customers, I could work on making them successful and go from there. This implies that I should approach this solely as a search problem right now and improve my prototype only if I find some interest.
    • If I don’t find any potential customers, I could do the following later:
      • Pivot, obviously. (Could start now itself in parallel.)
      • Open-source my skills.
      • Reach out to potential partners.
    • My assumption has been that I can expand to internal APIs in future. But I realized today that we don’t even have synthetic monitoring for internal APIs at work - in fact, the systems were so complex that the interfaces itself were ill-defined - so what’s the probability that I’ll find customers for internal APIs?
  • Building any kind of coding agents might be a losing proposition. For example, I have a nagging feeling that if someone found out the core of my solution, which is skills, they’ll find it too easy to replicate. I could argue that my solution looks wonderful only until you find out how it works. The problems I was recently running into in a work project were mostly organizational and, therefore, surmountable, not technical.
  • Building something in the infrastructure space is hard. Maybe I’ll have a better chance of success in building something on top of an established cloud (e.g., AWS).
  • Should I build a deep tech instead, something that can’t be replicated easily or, if replicated, can’t be operated easily.
  • Better to build something that helps someone make more money than save. Similarly, solving a recurring problem is preferable to solving something one-off/ad-hoc.
  • Inventing something new seems glamorous or smart but that could also imply that my ICP is ill-defined or I’ll need to educate potential customers; unnecessary overhead on top of other hard things (such as sales). It’s probably better to enter an existing market where non-ideal solutions already exist. (Maybe you bring a usability improvement or bring a new insight for a niche among that market.) This implies that the market exists and you now need to convince people to switch from their existing solution. Next order of question would be, the size of the budgets.
    • Painful problems with budget.
    • Industries where people are managing $5–10M+ businesses in Excel and constantly complaining about manual processes - maybe search for companies that don’t have a CTO.
  • ICP should be clear and likely narrow. If it isn’t, I should probably fix that before writing a single line of code because I’d anyway need to talk to them and validate the problem before building.
    • Picking a niche we could reach directly and talking to 20 people in that space before building anything.
    • Pick an industry you can access - what other than the software industry?