Lessons from my first exit

Great writeup. The writing was clear and engaging that it made me want to read it, even though I'm not in the industry. I have a question that is adjacent to your experience, but not specifically about the post. But hopefully your experience of founding a company for four years could shed some insight. Some background: I'm an incoming medical school student, and sometimes I wish I went into tech rather than medicine. My question: would it be worthwhile for a medical student to invest time to learn programming in order to potentially found a software company (I know you founded a hardware company, but previously worked as a software engineer)?

Now I know this is such a broad question, with many factors that could influence whether this pursuit is worthwhile, but maybe your experience could point out whether this is even something to consider. For example, would I even gain the necessary skillsets required to found a company whilst pursuing medicine? Would knowledge of tech compliment a medical-related company, or would I better spend my time working on the non-tech side of a company?

Your writing is great to highlight the complexities in the world of indie businesses. Thanks.

Thanks for reading and for the kind words!

First, a meta comment is that I've found that you should weigh advice based on how similar the advisor is and how closely their success matches what you want. So, given that I came in with a background in software already, my advice might not be a good match for you.

I feel like I went down a lot of misguided paths as a founder following advice of people who were successful but were very different from me (e.g., their goal was to reach $1B in valuation, they love pitching to customers).

That said, the thing I recommend to a lot of people curious about starting out with an indie business is to create a course or a book. People call these "info products" and that term has kind of a stench to it, but I think they're a great way to learn. I prefer the term "educational product" because there's less of a stigma. I created a video course in year three of going off on my own, but I wish I'd done it sooner.

I think people feel reluctant to create an educational product because they feel like they're not an expert at anything, but you don't have to be the world expert on something to make a course. You just have to know enough that you can get your students from level N to level N + 1. You can take something that you recently learned and make a course that you wish that you'd had that would have let you learn the same information in 5 hours rather than 50 hours. And you don't have to be the world's greatest teacher as long as you can find some people who enjoy the way you explain things.

Creating an educational product is like a microcosm of the full experience of launching a business. It forces you to think about what customers want, build something that fills the need, and then market it to find customers who want it. And all that stuff is hard, but it's much easier to do with a course. If you spent 50 hours making a course and find out you can't sell it, you lost 50 hours. You can learn from the failure and try a new course or product the next month. If you spent 2 years learning to code and building a tech product and find that nobody wants it, you'll feel very tied to that idea and have a hard time pivoting to another idea.

I have my issues with Pieter Levels, but I think he's a great case study in trying businesses rapidly and then doubling down on the ones that work. When he started, he didn't know how to code well, so his early products would just be like a Google Sheets spreadsheet that he sold access to.