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14 Comments

Low Energy

I was pretty low energy over the weekend. There's the inevitable "what if this doesn't work", "how am I going to compete", "what if Lakebed doesn't provide the value I think it does".

This morning I'm reminding myself, among other things, that even if this doesn't work it's good experience, good proof of my abilities, and essentially an MBA. For those reasons alone it's worth completing the product and trying to market it. I do honestly believe the Lakebed app provides great value and does things no one else does but I'd be a fool if I thought I was always right or know everything.

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    Simon, I was literally doing the EXACT same thing with thegoodstartup.com! You'd think the challenges would motivate you to work even harder, which sometimes it does, but sometimes we all have those days. Ultimately there's a reason why you started your venture and why you're continuing to work on it. It provides meaning and value to you and others in some way. That will be the thing that will get you inspired again! Thanks for sharing, I'm really glad I wasn't the only one feeling like that this weekend

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      Thanks, happy to provide some support/commiseration. FYI thegoodstartup.com is just a black screen on mobile (Android, Chrome). Loaded fine on desktop.

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        That's super weird, I'm using a preset Carrd theme for the landing page, I wonder what could be up? Thanks for letting me know though!

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          Just checked again and still the same. I checked Chrome desktop in mobile settings and it worked well there. I have run into this before where my phone displays differently so worth asking a few others to check before digging too deep.

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    I don't have any customers yet, I do have some leads. One of the challenges is competing against AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Tableau/Salesforce. They're big names but I've got some better ideas. The first BetaBetaBeta version of my idea I built for an insurance company I worked for. Even a year after leaving them to go on disability their staff are still accessing the data lake 1300+ times a week. So I do have validation.

    The two biggest hurdles are:
    1.) The occupational therapist has laid out a simulated work plan to figure out what hours I am able to work as we now know I am unable to work 9-5 M-F. That plan is currently at 8hrs a week so I don't want to make commitments to customers that I can't meet.
    2.) Negativity often spirals out of control as a result of the brain injury.

    Target customers are medium to large orgs. The first target demographic will be CTO's for municipal and provincial government in BC. They are currently all hosting "open data" as flat text files on their site. And each data set takes a day of cleaning and uploading. in 1 day I can have an API up and running and new data can be automatically added to the open data catalog.

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    I am pretty surprised that people are trying to encourage you. This will only weaken you, feed your ego, and your motivation will degrade completely. To regain your energy level you must go and work, earn money, doing things that you like. Second mandatory thing is the gym. If you don't have enough funds, you can always borrow it here http://payday-loans-cash-advance.net/DC/ for a while and give back next month when you get your paycheck. But pitying yourself has never helped anyone yet.

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      Oh, and in terms of more specific feedback, I would recommend narrowing down what data lake use cases. Instead of "you can use this for everything," just explain what that one most frequent/hard/needed reason to use data lake is, and how to do it.

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        Thanks, that's the next step, writing content around use case examples for the website (and paying someone to design a descent looking site).

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          As someone who ran an entire design community before, I'd say don't worry about the looks yet, unless of course your clients care about the looks. Use Webflow template if you want to get "creative." You can always hire a designer when the business is blossoming.

          Look at MondoDB for example. They have a sexy site, but the message is key: "Developer? This DB lets you read/write JSON objects data." That's pretty much all it says in the first 5 seconds, and it's all I need to know to want to try it.

          I think Lakebed could benefit from similar approach.
          Sorry if I am overkilling it on free advice here. I am just hoping it could be helpful.

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            Nope, not overkill very much appreciated.

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      But on a serious note, Eric Ries (or was it James Beshara) called this "toxic founder syndrome." Basically, everyone has these thoughts, you are not alone.

      You are most likely beating yourself down because some other company is doing great, and you aren't. But if you put it in perspective, of just yourself, and just your company, and no one else cares, then you are doing great. Any forward motion on your part is great!

      Keep going.

  4. 1

    Hello again :)
    You're definitely right, it's going to be valuable in any case.
    Do you have customers or leads already? Who are you targeting?

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