Any advice for a software engineer in a peculiar position?
I'm looking for something interesting to work on. I sit in an interesting intersection between tech and sports. My bro is a pro NFL player and I essentially have direct access to players, agents, etc. I feel like the obvious answer of what to work on is right in front of me, but for some reason I don't see it. Thats why I'm here looking for some advise or suggestions.
The past three years I've worked remotely to help clients launch their projects, and now its time to launch something of my own to be featured on Indie Hackers.
** If you need any assistance with your project let me know! **
My advice would be to look for pain, and then think about how you can build something to address it.
In general, successful products do a good job of identifying popular problems and solving them. The extent to which they need to be the best solutions or the only solutions to those problems largely depends on how widespread the problems themselves are.
Given your tech experience (assuming you can develop) and your "backroom" access to the world of sports, you're in a unique position to identify problems that many others aren't even aware of. So that's the route I would take: to talk to people your brother puts you in contact with and keep your antennae raised for small annoyances, complaints about the industry, insights that are open secrets among sports insiders but that people on the outside — e.g. football fans — often gripe about not knowing.
What's operative in all of this is that the pain should already be expressed by some group of people. You probably want to avoid building something "cool" that people might want, but that you're really only speculating about.
Real good points you made. There are a few things I've heard players griping about. This may sound crazy but a lot of them look for non-contract related income like marketing, promo deals, and merch sales. I've got a few ideas jotted down
You need to pick a lane.
"now its time to launch something of my own to be featured on Indie Hackers."
"If you need any assistance with your project let me know!"
Choose one
You're right I'm always trying to manage many things at once
Off the bat:
Keep in mind that if your target market is NFL players, you've got a pretty low natural ceiling of customers.
College football might be an interesting space to play in. So many big college programs with deep pockets. I wonder if there's some tool for scouts/recruiters that you could build.
My tip would be to do some research on sports-related forums. Using my example above, I would start with forums where high school football stars and their parents are posting for tips on how to pick the right school/navigate the recruiting process.
Hey Fahzee.
Saw your email, and see that you're getting input on things to thing about. Also saw you stated to let you know if one needed help/assistance on a project.
However, you neglected to post your contact email/data!!
Get to me and we can discuss what you're doing, what we're doing..
Thanks
-bruce
badouglas@gmail.com