I have a huge idea that will take forever, but I can't help working on it. What should I do?
TLDR: It's hard waking up every day and not knowing if I'm crazy for even attempting this product. Any support or feedback would be very helpful. Sorry for the long post!
I've felt very strongly for years that eventually privacy and data ownership were going to make their way to becoming market forces for products. Now it seems every day there is news that pushes the average consumer towards a more enlightened position on their personal data (Equifax, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, etc.).
I'm working on a product that will let users own their data and get paid for it, instead of that money going to data monopolies in exchange for software of questionable utility.
Unfortunately, the importance of this task is equaled or dwarfed by the effort it will take. It's essentially a bunch of products working together:
- Data locker (secure and private store of users' data)
- Marketplace (where researchers and companies can buy user's data)
- DRM (a fingerprint for a user's data to give them legal recourse if their data is stolen)
- Mobile data collection (surveys, device integrations)
- Business intelligence for data gathered (maps, charts, etc)
I have a stair-step plan in place to bite off a small piece at a time, and potential customers. My employer is letting me work on it here and there as a marketing effort, but at most it gets 10 hours a week. It seems like at that pace it will just never reach its full potential.
I don't want to take VC money, and I'm not sure I have the charisma it would take to get a Kickstarter or crowdfunding campaign off the ground. I'd like to run this as a non-profit or employee-owned coop. In other words, I'd like to make enough money from it that I don't have to work on anything else, but I'm not trying to get stupid rich. It's just something I think needs to exist.
My current plan is to just wait and see and try to onboard one user at a time, then implement some pricing plan when it finds product market fit. I'm hoping the community here can give me some feedback on the idea and the strategy.
Most big ideas start as small-but-viable ideas. You say you have a stair-step plan to bite off a small piece at a time, but is each individual piece you're building viable on its own? This image illustrates the right and wrong ways to go about this.
One thing that's important to do is a founder is to take a small win in one area and parlay that into the next thing. Indie Hackers was just interviews before it was a mailing list before it was a community, and each step was necessary fuel for the next step. Even if you have a big ultimate vision, the best path to get there is almost always a windy one.
Thanks Courtland! IH and your podcast have helped keep me on the stair-step path, and there are lots of pieces of this that could be products of their own. I don't doubt I could stumble on a smaller piece that gets traction and takes over, but my passion is really for the larger vision. So I guess my anxiety is something no one can really answer: Is this too big an idea for me to realize and bring to fruition on my own?
And that leads me to think I need to search for people who believe in the same vision so we can support each other motivationally and materially.
Thanks for everything you do with IH!
I've been down your road. I was building The Best Programming Language Ever, and I worked on it in my spare time for about 5 years before shelving it. It was a good way to learn and practice some new programming ideas, but that's pretty much it.
One of the biggest reasons my project failed is because I just didn't have the necessary programming skills. I wasn't a bad programming, but I still wasted heaps of time experimenting and rewriting things and it could've been avoided if I'd just been working with someone with a different subset of programming knowledge to myself.
If you really want this idea to be successful then you need to force yourself to go through the normal steps of Validation and then building an MVP, not just so that you can monetize, but because you need other people with different experiences to be motivated tojump on board and help you.
Thanks for the cautionary tale. That's exactly what I'm worried about happening. As I've discussed elsewhere in the comments, I think there are smaller products here that can be validated and iterated on before the full vision is realized. And at that point the concern becomes getting so involved in these smaller ideas that the big vision is never realized.
I'd be interested to hear more about the language you built. Did you ever write a blog post or documentation?
It's a very common approach to fund both the first round in VC type company and in non VC companies to get to profitability.(Note, the latter often locate outside SV, since lower cost of living is more important than access to funding. There are 100 mil ARR companies built on credit cards and family funding alone. Your search terms are Atlassian, automattic(Tim ferris), profit withholding, 3f (families, friends and fools) Angel Investor pitch (treat the money out the family tree like a proper angel investment), "customer dev labs"I would also suggest checking out the codingvc, while a VC a lot of the stuff applies(up until seed stage (at which point hopefully you are profitable) You might need a LTV:CAC ratio greater than 7 though.
Ah, great. Lots of stuff to read about here. Thanks for the tips!
https://pillarproject.io/ !!
Thank you! Very cool resource. I signed up for their mail list.
Check out Urbit, its a different approach similar to what you are talking about
Wow, what a rabbit hole this is. This was more what I had in mind before I had the marketplace idea. Going to see if I can get one up and running. Thanks a bunch!
I have a similiar app that I'm working on, but I don't feel like it'll be a huge load of work if I reuse technologies that already handle most of those things you want to do. Most of my time is spent thinking about what's already out there instead of how I'm going to do X because it's so huge.
Let me know if you want to have a chat about it.
This is a really good point, and I should do more research about the libraries that are out there that could just be drop-in functionality. Sounds Social looks really cool and I'd be interested to hear about your vision for it. DM me on Twitter if you want to discuss further.
I think you really ought to take a step back and figure out if this idea is workable, especially from a single developer, bootstrapped perspective.
No doubt data privacy is a problem, but a bigger problem for you is how you collect this data in the first place. Users are creating data on other platforms through their actions, but they aren't primarily in control of how or what data is collected. They are using Facebook and Google and data is created as a by product. How do you insert yourself as a middle man in that equation? I don't see how you become an honest broker for that data without a wholesale change in user behavior or without becoming a platform yourself.
Is this idea really viable as a bootstrapped business? I don't think it's viable even with a mountain of funding because you don't control the data collection platform.
Yeah, my anxiety comes from the sense that it is too big for myself as a bootstrap app, so I hear you there.
The other stuff can be handled with service APIs in the short term. I'm imagining Google, Twitter, and Facebook integrations, or maybe just an IFTTT/Zapier integration. Then all that data goes into a private data locker that the user can host themselves. SurveyExchange doesn't store any user data, it just keeps a meta index for what kinds of data a user has, like heart rate, GPS, etc.
Eventually one hopes that the decentralized internet is realized and users will have control over the origination of these data streams before they hit a corporation. That way they could go directly into their data locker and SurveyExchange will just have categorical and temporal meta data.
employee-owned co-op
Do you have friends and family money to finance the MVP and first couple of employees that makes it smaller
Hmm, I hadn't really thought of that, but maybe! Time to shake the ol' family tree :)
Hi Keith,
It's my opinion that this is the NUMBER ONE problem that currently needs to be solved on today's internet. This WILL be a product offered to users in the future, it will be an incredibly valuable interface, not only for how it allows users to interact with the world, but also in regards to the role it might play in helping people live a superior life.
Think about how having all your medical records tied to one digital ID, which you control explicitly, would change the way you interact with the medical system. How it would allow your doctor (and your doctor's artificial intelligence) to collect insights about your health. That health data would be intertwined with your other data, maybe the emotional tone of your social media posts could one day play a role in diagnosing your hypoglycemia. Who knows how "non-health" data could one day be used for health management.
What's most central about this is that it only makes the most sense for you to own your data. Not someone else. You could lease it, you could sell it (although, if I were architecting this system, I would only ever allow short term leasing for the same reason I would prefer if laws had a mandatory sunset clause - humans are easily forgetful, prone to inertia, and status quo bias) and then the power balance would shift from the large corporation back to the user and the "price of usage" that Facebook (and others) charges would become much more transparent and substantive.
If you haven't already, check out www.openmined.org, they are using decentralized applications to solve the problem of training an AI on hidden data. Their site explains it better than I, and I'm sure you'll see how they fit into what you're talking about building immediately. My favorite part of their site is where it says, "Will there be an ICO". The answer is, "No." I have no affiliation with them, but for one tweet I sent.
I think this is such a fundamentally important idea that it must be built, and it must be "free" meaning freedom. The social capital you build from creating something like this makes you the Linus Torvalds of our era, maybe that partially offsets the enormous industry you're destroying 😉
In terms of Bryan Burke's response, that is a good point. This is an enormous undertaking. I don't even know if this could be built as a business (I hate myself for this, but this seems like a great candidate for some sort of crowdfunding like nopleasedontsayitICO), or perhaps people purchase their account for $1 to begin with, not sure. Seems like it does need to be built as a non-profit or the like. Incentive alignment seems like a really critical problem to solve.
It really makes me wish I could just wrap myself in a protective bubble when I go to websites, and somehow I could store my data and metadata on their server in the same way I store my password there - as a functional but unreadable hash.
The problem is, it seems to me that websites need to be incentivised to build for that kind of structure, and right now that's just not possible because they would prefer to have your data than to let you have it.
I don't think any of my ramblings have gotten us any closer to the solution, but hopefully this is encouraging! This is a super important problem, one that other people including at least MoonBeast and I are thinking about it (solid sample size right there). I'm willing to be your #1 fan, maybe literally. I'm happy to play with the product and use it. I am really concerned with the incentive structure (I think most users will be), so maybe there's a good conversation to have around that. But all in all, if you can even make a dent in securing user data, and unlocking my data for my benefit, I'm in!
edit: words and wording
Wow, thanks for the support! This really means a lot. I've joined the OpenMined Slack and that looks like a really great community and product suite.
The early prototype of the product can be found here:
surveyexchange.net
The focus on ocean biologists and fisheries may seem odd considering what I wrote above, but that's where I know there are customers who need data collection solutions right now.
Find me on Twitter if you want to continue the discussion! @kaxline
You are in a golden position, if your employer lets you work on it!
I would take a long thinking session and break the service down to it's bits, try to identify what an MVP might look like. It's probably going to suck compared to that grand vision that you have, but it's okay.
When you know what a MVP would look like, plan for it and start working on it. After or close to when you have that product you can start showing it off. Either as a way to draw in beta customers or maybe VC's, at least you have something to work from at this point.
Otherwise you will just keep working towards a grand idea, keep filling the backlog and never finish. All of a sudden you will see a MVP of what you are trying to build, racing past you.
MVP = product, idea = nothing in most people's eyes.
Thanks! This got me thinking that maybe I could break it down into several MVPs and try each one on its own. Then if one doesn't get any traction, I can move on to the next. Since it's such an expansive product idea, I can see which parts are most interesting or useful to people now.
Sounds awesome!
Hehe your product looks similar to mine :)
Ah cool! What are your main use cases?
It's a good question that I'm still looking for the answer to :)
I read your post again, more carefully and see that we are not competitors :)
I allow users create their own data and work with them, not to sell :)
What are yours?
Right now it's mostly crowd-sourced data collection. Like putting researchers in contact with data collectors that don't previously know each other.
Eventually I'd like to allow users to store all their data that currently leaks to other companies: browser history, purchase history, health stats from FitBit or Apple Watch, etc. Then researchers can see anonymized indexes of that data on the marketplace and pay for access to it.
Researchers here could be NOAA, Nike, Google, Facebook, NIH, etc.
Ah, okay. Yeah, it's different from mine.
As a marketer I hire Facebook to serve ads because I can target based on customer data and get access to huge audiences.
Where do you fit into that equation?
As Facebook the deal is access to the service for data harvesting. If a new customer says 'no, access my data through this thing', Facebook says no, go away.
Where do you fit into that equation?
As a marketer you would use SurveyExchange, as I'm calling it, to get large data sets from consumers on the marketplace. You'd pay them for it and the access would be windowed to an agreed upon time limit. The data owner can break the contract at any time and forfeit any payment.
SurveyExchange is designed for a world where there shouldn't really be Facebook, or predatory display advertising. The data you generate throughout the day from your thoughts and actions should be your property. Anyone who wants to use that must pay you for it or at least explicitly request it.
Right now we're just giving it away in exchange for talking to our remote family members and friends. I think that's a steep price to pay and there are better ways to stay in touch that aren't incentivized by keeping you on a particular site.
The main use case for the moment would be users participating in research. Organizations in health, policy, and consumer marketing would be interested to know things about me like browsing habits, purchase history, and driving patterns. On SurveyExchange they could buy that info across large groups of people.
Does that get at what you're asking?
I think the recent events with Cambridge Analytica kind of proves that targeted content delivery is one of the most powerful tools to influence gigantic groups of people that currently exists. I don't think should or shouldn't is irrelevant. Can and cannot will dictate it's use.
Tracking is so baked into the fabric of the internet I think it's literally impossible to prevent the already existing data attached to your digital fingerprint from growing ever larger.
Pretty cool - but I wonder how easily accessible this information already is. Lord knows https://myactivity.google.com/myactivity knows everything about you from your allergies, to your political beliefs, to how many times you've been worried that she might be pregnant.
I like the idea of what you're describing - but how do you offer consumers actual ownership of their data when our ISP's are tracking network behavior on a network infrastructure level?
Yeah, the cat's already out of the bag for our data that's already out there. I'm mostly thinking about moving forward in a more sustainable way.
I do think we'll eventually see some lawsuits and settlements regarding this data that may allow it to be fingerprinted and transferred to its rightful owners. You're never going to stop people from stealing data, but with some sort of DRM you could at least have recourse and be able to prove ownership.
And yeah, Google already has most of the data I'm talking about collecting, but they're not interested in monetizing it for us and so we need to take control of it.
I know it's a trendy topic right now, but I actually think this is a legitimate use case for blockchains and the decentralized web. Blockchains could provide a proof of ownership mechanism, and if applications are on public blockchains rather than centralized, corporate-owned servers, users own more of the infrastructure.
I don't have all the answers but I just have this spidey-sense tingling that these are the big problems I need to be working on to be part of making the world better.
Hey Keith - read this article this morning: https://www.fieldboom.com/blog/startup-ideas/
Could you do something similar to validate demand and get paying customers prior to building it?
That would be the smart thing to do! I'm concerned that people won't really get it until it's close to fully realized, so might give false negatives by only exposing a partially baked idea to users/testers.
Also, this compulsion I have to pursue it is making me go against all the best practices espoused on IH, and things that previous to this I would've said were no-brainers. It's kind of like that kind of girlfriend or boyfriend that you told yourself you would never date but can't stop seeing.
I think it's really important to get user feedback continually through the build process, especially since it's complex.
Drew Houston started dropbox with a video explaining how it worked iirc. Maybe some animated wireframes with a voiceover to start building an audience?
That's good advice. The initial phase is mobile data collection for researchers, specifically ocean biologists and fisheries managers since that's where I know people:
surveyexchange.net
So I'll be getting feedback from them for that portion. Through these smaller surveys, I'll be on boarding data collectors who can then participate in the marketplace. The hope is that eventually there would be enough data collectors on there that other researchers could come to the marketplace and hire them.
And this is all before we get to the data locker and passive data sales. But this is my idea of bootstrapping a good selection of data collectors to avoid the chicken or the egg problem of marketplaces.