Am I onto something, or do people just like free stuff? Since my last post, I’ve been putting in some effort to improve the user experience of coverletter.me by taking in feedback from the users and making small tweaks to the app. Not any major changes, but small things like making the length of the cover letter more customizable and allowing the input text boxes to resize so the input is more readable....
How I got started with coverletter.me Around Christmas 2022, I had just moved myself and my family across the globe, from Denmark to Australia, and I was about to be in-between jobs. Turns out it’s hard to work for a company in Denmark while living in Australia. Having been self-employed for the past 6 and gotten my job before that through references, it had been about a while since I last had to write a job application, so I was honestly a little rusty....
It’s hard to come up with things to write about and actually follow through with them. I tend to get lots of ideas, mostly useless. But they live on for a little while, and then I tire of them and they go in the lost and found. This time, I hope to actually follow through, though. This time, I don’t really want to write about ideas or advice, but just document my journey....
One of the big lures of startups for many, I think, is the sort of American-dream, rags-to-riches stories of the many startups that minted billionaires through sheer grit and “hustle”. I think this lure has become particularly big in the last few years, given that the number of unicorn companies has seen incredibly growth over the past decade. Having been through startup funding and valuation negotation myself, I thought I’d share my learnings on how to figure out what price tag to put on your company....
TLDR: If you want to turn it into a successful business, I believe the best time to pursue an idea is when there is an overlap between the following three areas: There is market demand for a solution to the problem your idea solves. You are particularly well suited to solve the problem, i.e. you have some edge over others who also want to solve this problem. You want to use your solution to fix your own problem....
Mingly - My First Real App In 2014 I was 25 years old and a newly minted programmer with approximately 12 months of programming experience. Having recently switched career path from Economics to Software Development, I had just started a graduate job in a big Scandinavian bank working as a software developer in the Capital Markets IT department. Sefkan, a former colleague I had worked with briefly as juniors at a management consulting firm, had just spent a year studying in New York, living the metropolitan life first-hand in The Big Apple....