It's full of great advice...but I think one of the key take aways is to "find a market" before you really "have an idea"...and he walks you through some really good ways to do that (using real world case studies of people that are doing it)
"Collect 500 emails and then email them about your startup"...that's specifically why I ended up building https://conversationlist.com (it helps you skip the step of collect 500 emails and just jump right to the email everyone you have a pre-existing relationship with step).
Amazing how well that old-school growth hack still works...
I've played with it and hacked together a very generic app just to see how it was...so I can say that I think it has much potential and an exciting future...but...
1. Amazon is still pushing out it's own ideas and features for it...they haven't fully released it to the wild west of developers (many have learned to wait until the dust settles before wasting time/energy on potential features that will be blocked or taken over by the powers-that-be).
2. The speaker bit is cool, but really it's just Siri in a speaker instead of a phone (very cool but not a "wow" out of the box)...it's the next gen. that I think everyone is really excited about and waiting for (when the SDK, and api access, is baked into more than just one stand alone speaker - that is, if/when it becomes the voice interaction for the internet of things; that becomes super exciting and interesting)
3. Not an adoption limitation, but I can say that having worked with the v1 of the tools for building on this stuff...it's still pretty clunky and painful. I think they (AWS) are adopting and upgrading that quickly...but there are some hurdles there as well before "anyone can build a voice powered/interactive thing" can become a reality (and that's the HUGE sensation IMHO)...
I think the trick isn't so much in the down time (or the length of it)...it's in what you do with any free time.
Burnout is generally a result of getting stuck doing lots of stuff you don't want to the majority of your time...and generally very little of what you do want to be doing...
So in my experience you only get over burnout by focusing and rediscovering what you were truly passionate about in the first place (or at the very least what you are insanely passionate about now).
Then, once you can figure out what excites you, start getting small wins in that direction however you can...and before you know it, you'll be full of energy and near impossible to stop again.
It's very rare that "going back" ever turns out well or as people hope (there are a few exceptions).
Keep in mind that you left for a reason...and the only thing you can really change is you...have you changed so much that you are missing it? That you can't move on without it?
My advice, as long as you have other reasonable options, take one of those paths instead...
I think this is an important concept for discovering happiness overall. You can work on this by keeping a rough journal of how you spend your time and then reflect on whether they are important/enjoyable.
Then try to increase the amount of time you spend on those things that important/enjoyable and decrease the others.
This is neat. (but when using it, it kinda feels like I could get as good or better results with just Math.random & a large collection of words each assigned a random value)
True. I think it's a size problem. It would be interesting to have a bigger vocabulary and play with the distribution to allow rarer words in it. Without grammar, though, a random selection of words would look like in libraryofwords.com, i.e. most of the time non-sensical
Language comparisons are equiv. to religion comparisons...you aren't going to find a universal answer or truth, it's an individual/faith sort of thing.
That being said - all the serious math/data people I know love both R and Python...R for the heavy math, Python for the simplicity, glue, and organization.
A couple of people I trust with inside knowledge of the deal (sorry can't provide specifics, been awhile and I didn't realize that the selling price was not public knowledge when I posted this).
Gotta respect Marco for all the success he's had with Tumblr, InstaPaper, (briefly) Peace, and of course Overcast so far...but I kinda feel like he is worried about the wrong thing/people here.
Who cares if other devs. or companies don't like his business model? Does that affect his users or potential customers in any real way? I don't think so.
Also - the patron model is super interesting and I'm excited to see people continue to play with and test it...but I'm not sold that it's a sustainable solution either.
The question to me is: Do people care enough to pay for podcasts? And for those that do, in their mind are they actually paying for the content or the experience/environment? What pain is this specific app itself actually fixing or removing compared to my alternatives?
Marco has proven he's amazing at building experiences and environments people love...and I think he can continue to do very well down that path...but without owning/controlling/providing the content or the 'talent' on the client side he'll never break out of being just one of the middle-men in that part of the ecosystem (and thereby evaluated and paid by users as such).
I think he cares about other devs because he respects them and considers them his peers.
That aside, I agree with him that the small circle of podcast devs have much more to fear from oncoming train of podcast success. That success is bringing money, and money is attracting media conglomerates with money to burn. If they spend their time bickering with each other they will be a smear on the tracks. App markets develop and business models mutate, regardless of how much developers like it or not.
Just one persons experience, obviously, but I have paid for podcasts before. Free podcasts are by far the majority of what I have listened to, but I pay to get the full episodes of "The NoSleep podcast", and have donated to other podcasts when they have the option there and I have liked them enough.
Cool - but do you feel like you are paying for the content or are you paying for the experience/environment that you listen to the podcast within?
My point was just that when people do pay, in their mind I think they are paying for the podcast itself...and don't really care all that much about the middle men (same basic thing with music really -- there are, of course, exceptions)
Oh, I see. No, I am definitely not paying for the experience/environment per se, but I did pay for a podcast app that had features that I wanted. I.e., the most popular free podcast app on Android (Stitcher) didn't have any way to speed up the audio, cut silence, etc, so I paid for an app that did have those features.
It's full of great advice...but I think one of the key take aways is to "find a market" before you really "have an idea"...and he walks you through some really good ways to do that (using real world case studies of people that are doing it)