Easy Image to Text

I quit my job, without any regret. I realized I have been wasting time and eventually wasting life in a job where I didn't have a sense of ownership.

I'm a web developer basically, front-end focused. The fascination about AI and how as a developer we could exploit the AI APIs to build something was always there in me.

I casually set up a React.js project "Playing with AI APIs", and started playing around with the openAI API endpoints.

Too many ideas have been thought of already, but no execution yet. I then made up my mind, to build something simple, and just go as deep with it. The motive was to go in depth, and get a clear or at least a better picture of what it takes from ideation to monetization, so that when I built my next tool I would have these learnings to apply.

That's how I started with "Easy Image to Text", a simple tool that basically extracts text from image. I knew this wasn't a great idea or a unique tool, but I was surprised to notice that the output from my tool's MVP was better than many "image to text" tools appearing in the first page of the google search results. This was a motivating factor.

A big factor that keeps me and I guess any solopreneur going would be the like-minded people. When I mean like-minded people they need not be real people around you, but virtually, like for me it was rich minds like Naval Ravikant, Sridhar Vembu, Elon Musk, etc. Vibing in the wavelengths of the like-minded people is a key factor, as it tunes your mindset, which I think is more important than hardwork.

I'm still a work in progress.. and I'm sure I'm gonna see the results one day. I believe success has 5-6 factors, and hardwork is just one among them.

I believe SUCCESS = Mindset + Clarity + Strategy + Hardwork + Patience + Sacrifice

So hardwork is just about 20%. Currently I'm going good on hard work, sacrifice, mindset. I think I need to be more patient. Probably I'm going through what they call the "valley of despair", where you tend to give up and get to a new idea. I have the app ready and set for use anyway, so no issues on that. I've just planned to do the necessary marketing to be dome with diligence, and just move on to next steps.

I recently also launched an extension on Google Sheets for my tool, named "Image to Text OCR for Google Sheets", which I can proudly say outperforms the top extensions in the Google Marketplace in terms of user experience and quality, though it is new.

So overall I would like to say it has been an intense journey I would remember or lifetime, and I'm proud I have tried the last 4 months like never before, and my future self is gonna thank me for doing this and having kept trying.

For those who are reading this and resonate with this, I would like to share some tips which I think works for me:

1. Cut out all the non-sense from your life when you want to be a creator. This includes non-essential social media engagements, friends, etc. This is basically what they call the "dopamine detox"

2. Forget the "self" for 6 months. Quite tough, but I think the secret lies there. Becoming objective gives you more power while marketing especially. The more you worry about yourself, the less productive your output is gonna be, and vice-versa.

3. Insight is 1000x more important than mere effort. Learn to be "still" for a long time if needed. Let the brain process. If you attempt to do some work out of compulsion, often it turns out to be not ideal.

4. The mind at any time in this journey just needs to be in any of these 3 states - Idle (processing), Learning (input) or Application of what you have learnt (output).

5. Some feedbacks are like GET requests, which we can get immediately without any effort. But some feedbacks are like POST requests, and we get it only when we send a payload from our end which we can say is the payload of "effort". We either get the result or get a feedback, both of which are beneficial.

6. Last but not least, if you tend to get serious about this, it is not gonna work. Often I tend to get into a flow state only when I think of this like a video game like GTA vice city, and that you are just playing the character that is you (kind of spiritual insight here). Just enjoying the game, and learning to play it better!

If you were patient enough to read through this, I really appreciate it! While I write this I doubt whether even I would read through this again. But I would love to hear your feedback and suggestions if you have any. Cheers!