| The key for me to being my own boss has unfortunately just been being willing to be poor. Because my own startups or other people's self funded startups that I end up working on when I have to take a contract quickly because I am too broke usually don't make much money. One way to meet lots of people who have problems to be solved is on Upwork. Of course most of those are not opportunities to be co-founders and actually could easily bankrupt you due to the slave-labour type atmosphere there. But some of them are real opportunities for sure if you can avoid that. My current startup (which again I am just _barely_ scraping by) is built on a less popular cryptocurrency called Algorand (actually afraid to mention it, that one or cryptocurrency in general seems to be hated here). I did a project for someone from Upwork (self funded startup, subsistence level pay) and then just started hanging out in Discords and such. I directly asked the community what sort of new tool they thought they needed. The few responses seemed to be "we have good tools already, don't need". So then I kept hanging around and found out that most of them were hiring a programmer for every art project. Even though the programming task was mainly just running the same script. So I built a web application and then had many people (who I thought I had already asked if they needed a tool) come on my Discord server and tell me how much my tool had been needed. But I think it boils down to picking up some hobby or business as if it was your actual job and then trying to make tools to facilitate it. In general the users for some reason can't or won't give you useful advice about what to build. Although actually they may be able to tell you what problems they are having if you can get them to talk. But don't listen to their solutions just their problems. |