Henry Ma's Website

About initial huntings

15 Jan 2019 - Henry Ma

Here’s what in my mind on the initial huntings for Go F:rocket:cking Free.

TL;DR

The Starting Point :mountain_bicyclist:

Inspired by Pieter Levels @levelsio and his success as an indie maker, it takes not long for me to give myself the permission to have a try on such career path, which would also be a life path if I could manage to succeed.

One of the key factor and pillar for making the decision is my software engineering background. I have a master’s degree of computer science, majored on software engineering. And I have pretty good knowledge in combination of breath and depth, together with about 10 years’ experience in the industry. I worked as a software engineer for about 3 years, then was busy on a typical career path of being leader, manager and senior manager for about 5 years. In recent years, I have been doing startups, mostly as a solo maker who paradoxically has never believed that one single person can build out a successful software business yet. There’s a yet here because there’s a Pieter Levels and I’ve seen stuff like Product Hunt since I slightly shifted my perspective.

Later on, I found myself in intensively seeking free but great stuff to facilitate building and running software business, again. There’s an again there because I have been doing this in recent years. You know, ‘startup’ means you have very limited resources from all kinds of perspectives, especially when you are solo at the same time. Github, Material Design, …, all kinds of great free and/or open source stuff have already enabled building startups easy, fast and with almost 0 physical cost. Meanwhile, the time/energy cost to search/research for the best(fit) ones could easily go extremely high.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…”
– Charles Dickens

“This is a world of fuzzy business, this is a world of freely greatness…”
– Henry Ma {No One} :notes:

Question, which starts quest

:bow: How can I better appreciate the great findings, and the effort I have been putting in?

Journey

TL;DR <3

A conversation between me and self :speech_balloon:

=> Now, you are inspired by Pieter Levels as a successful indie maker and decided to try to work out a similar path. Moreover, you have started with an idea of ‘Free Hunter’ based on your problem of frequently hunting for free valuable stuff on Internet which is both very time/energy consuming and usually annoying. After working out a draft MVP with simple website, you find yourself in a situation of ‘Hunting for free web hosting’. However, you are hesitating to do it.

=> Why hesitating???

=> Does it really make sense? I mean, hosting is essentially physical resource sensitive and thus should not be completely free somehow. Let’s be more specific here, by comparing it to the letsencrypt.org which is not physical resource sensitive and completely free. Right, the giants are the sponsors, but I believe you probably will like it once you go for a check. Assuming a counterpart web hosting solution out there, there wouldn’t be any question to go for hunting it down.

=> Then the question becomes what if there’s only some sort of compromised ones, which probably would be true according to past experience?

=> So, what’s important here is what exactly I am looking for? And which leads to what can be compromised?

=> Okay! First and foremost, a place for hosting the upcoming ‘Free Hunter’, which would be a website being minimum. Secondly, I will keep doing the ’52 Weeks 52 Huntings’, which means continuously building content of the site and probably the site itself. Of course, I wish to know whether and how other people are using it.

=> Now, there are bunch of options to get the things done.

  • VPS(Virtual Private Server), and I have a Linode up and running already.
  • Cloud(AWS, Heroku, …), which would be a good choice in case of going bigger and bigger.
  • Website Builder(Wix, Weebly, …), which may be the best for a personal one.
  • More… Refer to Web Hosting Service

=> It’s kind of obvious to see the reason of hesitation, since the hunting would be very time/energy consuming regarding the complexity and the rather low chance of a worthy result.

=> One thing to remind is the journey of trying to be an indie maker. From this standpoint, in long term, it would worth the effort to exercise such hunting as part of building a fundamental technology stack.

=> Should I do it now? I have promised to ‘keep it simple’ and putting two tasks intertwined is not belong to ‘simple’.

=> The decision is to focus on building and shipping the 1st MVP of ‘Free Hunter’ first. And to come back later to do the hunting exercise. If the result happens to be positive, it’s sure to put it as one of the ’52 Weeks 52 Huntings’.

=> Note: There is similar hesitation on shipping the website and 52 huntings itself. One factor is my fear of failure(what if ending up with no significant audience?). Moreover, I think ego at play here. “It is low…” Right???

PS: I have actually ended up with a happy result of finding Github Pages, JSON Server and jsDelivr as a hybrid hosting solution which is a bit over my best expectation. :whale: