I wrote this and shared it with my coworking community this week…
https://www.indyhall.org/10k
I wrote this and shared it with my coworking community this week, as a sort of “North Star” for what I think I am working on over the next 10 years, which is centered around a goal to help create 50,000 jobs. (That number is specific and explained inside).
I have a feeling that my “reframing” of entrepreneurship in this article/essay/manifesto will resonate with a lot of Indie Hackers, so I wanted to share it here.
There is also a video/audio from our first community town hall about this idea that I shared here: https://youtu.be/qaSKvIDHg_I
Hi Alex, I enjoyed reading your proposal. Your views and thoughts resonate a lot with me. The goals seem ambitious, but I like ambition, so...
The math part seems a bit over optimistic and too simplistic in my opinion. But well, what are models for? They should be useful and valuable for your context, right? So as a vision guideline, and your North Star it’s probably alright ;-) Given the abstraction level and the very limited number of parameters you consider, I don’t think it’s detailed and realistic enough to give a reliable estimation of the outputs. Anyway, it’s a good start. Refinement can come later ;)
One part I was missing is numbers on how long people that start a business stay self-employed. Do you have numbers on that? Like from 100 people that start a business, how many are self-employed 5 years down the road.
In general, I love your vision and idea. I would love to stay in the loop and hear more about your project.
Thank you! If you haven't already put yourself on the list, I added a signup for updates/following along as we make progress. :)
It's ambitious but I also don't intend to do it alone, so the way I see it, the goal needs to be big enough to fit lots of people and efforts inside with comfy breathing room. The very early feedback from our own community has been extremely positive, both with people bringing great ideas and enthusiasm for getting involved.
It also started seeming a lot less big once I broke it into smaller parts, and realized a) how many of those things we already do, just not as intentionally as we could and b) how many people we've already been able to help with extremely limited resources. With Stacking the Bricks alone we've been able to change thousands of peoples' career paths in a range of meaningful, measurable ways.
The math is meant to be overly simplistic - it's just there to paint a picture of what's possible, not what will actually happen. Totally agree that it will be refined over time.
Finding out how many people stay self-employed over time is def on my research list, as well as getting more info about WHY people go back to traditional jobs. In the US, healthcare is hands down the leading reason people close up shop and go back to a traditional job. This is extra-true for people with families. That's a big, systemic problem but I think we can help move the needle in a real way both by helping people learn to be more effective with their independent earning potential, so they can afford the rising costs of our shitty healthcare. We can also aggregate data that could help others who are working on policy reform to better support independents, including (but not limited to) healthcare. I've first hand seen this done for independents in other countries - see COHIP as one example. But again, it's just one small piece of a much bigger thing.
Thanks again for taking the time to read and share your thoughts!
Sounds like Michael Gerber to me!
“goal needs to be big enough to fit lots of people and efforts inside with comfy breathing room. ”
That’s a great way to look at it. As a group effort it becomes definitely realistic.
Just subscribed to the updates!