In short:

“Idea guy” gets used to describe different types of individuals, some of whom have experience that’s valuable as a founder, but think they don’t bc they’ve written themselves off as “idea guys”.

In long:

The “idea guy” has been a punchline for as long as tech has existed. The traditional idea guy is someone who has vague product ideas, but no specific expertise, who thinks they just need hire programmers by the pound to build out their brilliant ideas. I’ve seen this type of idea guy in practice, and it’s a disaster.

But I’d argue that the negative concept of “idea guys” has been too successful. Too many people who have experience and contacts in a specific industry, but no tech experience, think that they are just idea guys, and have nothing to offer.

As an indie software developer, my skillset is building and deploying tech quickly. But I lack deep experience in non-software domains. This is a common issue among indie developers, which, I assume, is why so many developers try to start companies that sell to other indie developers.

I would love to partner with someone who knows the ins and outs of an industry, understands common pain points, and has a strong network. If they have those assets and are enthusiastic about finding a problem worth solving, that is absolutely worth my time and consideration as a partner on a project.

I’ve developed a simple heuristic for whether an “idea guy” is someone I’m interested in working with:

1. Can they articulate multiple valuable problems and propose concrete solutions.
2. Assuming we develop a product concept, are they confident they can get five advance commitments to buy the product on a trial basis?

Hearing their problems/solutions is unlikely to yield the actual product, but it lets me see how deeply they understand the problems, and whether they’re the kinds of problems I can solve with software.

Asking them about pre-selling is vital bc early sales will be 100% dependent on them, and is a “rubber meets the road” moment. If they get scared off from reaching out to their professional contacts, it tells me they aren’t ready for the project. Ditto if they realize they don’t have enough decision-maker contacts to make five advance sales.

I want someone with a background in design (both UI and UX) to create design resources targeted at developers.

The goal is not for us to become designers, but to create designs that are good enough to show to early users without embarrassing ourselves.

Put differently, I want enough skill to design products that can grow to the point where I can hire a freelance, professional designer.

Why I care about design as a developer

1. I want to build my own products quickly and without having to either pay thousands to a freelancer on an unprofitable idea, or try to “partner” with someone who may not be up for the slog of a startup/micro-saas.
2. When I used to freelance, my customers didn’t want to pay for a designer for the internal dashboards, but I wanted to still give them something that looked and felt professional enough.
3. When building internal tools for my W2 jobs, the ability to efficiently build well-designed tools would limit the need to bring staff designers into the process, and reflect better on me while helping us move faster.

Developers are willing to pay

There is a relatively large market of people who sell educational resources to developers, indicating a general willingness from developers (and their employers) to pay for education.

Wes Bos is likely the best example at the level of an individual creator + a small team. One of his courses, Fullstack Advanced React and GraphQL claims to have 31,000 sales at a price of $82.

In my experience, this pricing is actually on the low end of developer resources, and given that developers normally charge $100+/hour, it’s easy to justify this expense if something saves even an hour or two.

The Competition

The excellent Refactoring UI is basically the only prominent “design for developers” resource nowadays; their site claims to have sold 20,000 copies of the book, which start at $100 for “The Essentials”.

Refactoring UI was written by Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger, who also who designed TailwindCSS, which spawned TailwindUI (their paid product). TailwindUI started as predesigned components and has recently added fully designed templates.

I’ll expand on this idea in the next section, but Adam and Steve’s work is, in my opinion, the strongest validation of the demand for better design resources.

The Opportunity

RefactoringUI, TailwindCSS, and TailwindUI are all addressing this problem via low-touch solutions that lower the bar for accessible design resources. This is valuable, but not sufficient to become a competent designer/developer.

Their tools and resources address the issue broadly; the opportunity exists to address design education deeply.

The best education involves regular feedback, and this is where I think the big opportunity exists to provide paid feedback while also creating content you can share publicly.

Things you can do that I would pay for:

1. Product feedback videos. This can be public or private. I’d happily pay $30-50 for you to do a 10-minute breakdown video of my existing products and give constructive feedback.
2. Similar to the product feedback, I’d happily pay for a short video coaching session where we discuss a design challenge I’m trying to work through.
3. Cohort-based coaching. I’d pay $300-500 for a 6-8 week course where each week we discuss a different aspect of design, apply the principles in our own work, and share with each other and the instructor for feedback.
4. Private coaching. This one is self explanatory, and is probably out of my price range, but there’s likely demand here, which is worth mentioning.

I may not have hit my Goodreads goal during 2020, but I read some fantastic books. Here are five of my favorites.

Kochland

The best business book I’ve read in several years. It details how Koch Industries was built and grew into one of the biggest private companies in the world. It demonstrates that Charles Koch is a brilliant entrepreneur and executive, but also takes an honest look at his ruthless (and at times illegal) business dealings, as well as the destructiveness of his political operations.

The Radicalism of the American Revolution

Modern critics typically view the actions of early American leaders through the lens of contemporary values and norms. While I understand the desire to push away from the “Great Men of History” version of events, there has been an overcorrection that vilifies individuals and focuses solely on some of their, admittedly frequent, moral failings. But the American Revolution was radical in ways we no longer appreciate. The Founding Fathers don’t get enough credit for some of their actions, because the radical beliefs they championed have become commonplace.

I was most interested to learn that they still pictured a distinct ruling class of individuals, only to learn that it isn’t feasible to partially adopt populism.

Definitely the most academic book I read, and a lot of it went over my head, but it gave me a new appreciation for the magnitude of the cultural change the Revolution brought about.

The Name of the Wind

I don’t read much fiction, and even less fantasy, but this was the rare book I was sad to finish. The characters were engaging and the plot moved in directions I didn’t anticipate, which is rare in most novels. The world was described in detail without becoming self indulgent. Certainly my favorite fiction book I’ve read in several years.

Midnight in Chernobyl

Beyond the specifics of the meltdown, Chernobyl is a sobering picture of what occurs when institutions and individuals give up on doing their jobs well. The villain here isn’t malice but cynicism. Communism fails because it disregards human incentives, and as people acclimate to a world that neither values nor notices hard work or quality, the quality of their work declines. This is particularly problematic when those folks are tasked with building and running nuclear reactors. Midnight in Chernobyl is an entertaining history of the events surrounding the meltdown. I didn’t finish the book scared of nuclear meltdown though; I left scared that the same cynicism lurks within the American government.

All the Shah’s Men

All the Shah’s Men has the same shortcoming as many books about CIA operations: it’s impossible to believe in the character or competence of the agency’s leaders after finishing the story. The book tells of the 1953 CIA-backed coup that overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh’s populist government in order to allow England to retake control of Iran’s oil industry. The coup belongs with the invasion of Iraq and the Vietnam War as the biggest foreign policy failures in United States history, and the region has yet to recover. The story itself is entertaining and well told. It’s a piece of history not often taught in schools, but of enormous consequence both in the region and in the US.

I was recently working on a user-to-user messaging system for an e-commerce site, and couldn’t help but reflect on how unnecessary it was for sites to build their own messaging systems. That’s the current state of web, where many components of websites are built in-house due to custom requirements, but the core pieces of the system (messages, threads, alerts, etc.) could easily be generalized across any number of sites, with custom functionality handled as a simple extension. It’s only the site-specific behaviors of how the message system integrates with the rest of site that truly need to be custom.

Of all current industries, web is probably the one most insistent upon generalizing common problems and pushing once-custom components beneath the API. We see this in different forms with language-specific web frameworks, as well as tools like Shopify and Stripe. In a somewhat different form we see it in website builders, such as Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace, although these sites are more WYSIWYG design editors than component builders.

This tendency to build profitable companies out of generalized components is an interesting lens through which to look at possible web companies. What problems are companies solving independently that could effectively be rolled out into their own companies?

Here’s my cursory list of possible candidate components:

1. Messaging systems.
2. User alert systems
3. The entire user event pipeline.
4. Content management systems that take the place of the backend (this may be a bit unclear, because I have a specific implementation of this in mind, which I may write about in future posts. Or I might build it).

I’m sure there are plenty of other candidates, I’ve simply lived in the user space long enough that that’s where I’m most aware of opportunities. The additional caveat is that existing companies are almost certainly taking on different aspects of these problems already. But there’s a handful of technical and product requirements that make it hard to convince existing companies to use an off-the-shelf solution instead of building exactly what they want in-house.

When the majority of these components are finally built and reach maturity, we’ll start to see a truly drag-and-drop web. I’m convinced that the next Snapchat (or maybe the next, next Snapchat) won’t have any programmers of their own. They’ll simply log into Squarespace and assemble an app.

If this seems ambitious, keep in mind that Stripe has been able to do it. How many other Stripes are out there, just waiting to be uncovered?