So get crackin'!

The solution to layoffs

I’ll start with the conclusion: The solution to layoffs is starting your own company. It is not as difficult as people think. You do not need (or want) VC funding. You do not need (or want) a large, complex product or to solve a huge problem. You do not need AI. (Remember, you’re not selling to VCs, so you don’t need a buzzword-based product.) You do not need millions in revenue—replacing your salary is enough.

Solve a tiny problem that impacts your actual life.

Don’t wait for a Great Idea!!!!!! You don’t want a “blockbuster” product. You don’t even need a business plan. (Remember, no VCs.) Things like risk don’t matter—you don’t have anything better to do with your time if you’re not working.

Then build it in the simplest way possible—no need for elaborate frameworks or a 100K-customer architecture (but you do want an architecture that can grow incrementally over time—take a look at DDD). You probably don’t even need a database, at least not at first. Make it web-based because that runs everywhere (you do need it to look good and work well on a phone, though). By all means, use AI to help write the code if that speeds you up, but we’re talking small, here. An AI assist won’t make that much of a difference.

Then get it out there. Use social media. Go to meetups. Find people who have the same problem that you do. Give your solution away (once you have customers who can give you feedback, and you improve the product based on that feedback, you can think about selling it). Many engineers are scared of “sales” and “marketing.” Don’t be. Talk to friends. Write about your problem and how to solve it.

The smaller the problem, the sooner the revenue.

One of my role models for working this way is Marcus Frind, the founder of PlentyOfFish (a dating site). He built it in his free time over a couple of months to learn .NET, and ran it from a server in his closet. The site was Spartan, but it covered the basics. People could meet each other. (One of my favorite bits of corner-cutting was that all the photos were square—if you posted a rectangular image, it was squished along both axes to be square. That resulted in many football-shaped 🏈 heads. Nobody cared.) Revenue, at first, was entirely Google-Ad-based (interestingly, the ads were mostly for competing dating sites—people would click on a Match.com ad just to bounce over to match.com, giving Marcus a few cents for what amounted to a link). The company did grow beyond one person, but it was never that large, and that was _after_ he had the revenue to pay for it. He eventually sold it to the Match group for $575M.

So, get started! Now’s the time.