I feel like I did something stupid

[anon1253]

In December I quit my job to start on my own, with no real funding. After working on the same project for five years I felt things were out of place. It’s probably a feeling of the times, things just didn’t feel right anymore. It was a project about applying natural language processing and machine learning technology to biomedical literature. The idea was solid, still is, in my head: apply named entity linking using ontologies, and use embeddings of those ontologies to analyze, navigate and recommend literature. Basically a search engine. It just kinda never took off. These problems are hard, harder than I expected them to be. Technically challenging, sure, marketing wise: darned near impossible.

I wanted to do something on my own, disrupt the academic publishing industry. And slowly an idea formed: build an academic reference manager, integrate ActivityPub for collaboration, and then add IPFS for sharing documents. As a desktop app, so as long as there were peers: it’d be very hard to turn off. If it would be a joy to use it’d be a triple whammy: great platform for the organizing references, social features to discuss and collaborate on published and gray literature, while transparently building a peer to peer network of those files and discussions. Monetize it with a subscription fee.

The idea mostly came out of sheer spite. Academic publishing felt like a scam, publishers take money from publicly funded institutes, never pay the authors, never pay the reviewers, and never contributes anything back to science except for conjured-up self important metrics like “impact”.

I romanticized the idea, thinking it could be done by myself. And it be done, just not by myself in the time I have before I’ve eaten through all my savings. Just some musings of someone who got sucked into the whole “just say its AI and they’ll throw money your way”-hype. That’s not how that goes. Somewhat stuck now.

[blackcats]

You are short on cash, Take freelance project. With money in the bank you can think without fear.

Don’t try one idea, try ten. It’s like dating, you don’t have to always win. Market every day, twitter, web

In general, It takes 12 months before you have any noticeable traction. Find customers or people interested every day. Every single day. Build your followers

[lmiller1990]

Work on it in your free time while you work a day job to keep the $$$ flowing.

Also spend more time validating if people will pay for your product.

[chrisrickard]

Good for you taking the leap, it wasn't stupid.

It sounds like you still feel it's a valid idea right? And you undoubtedly got more headway on the project being full-time for the recent months, so don't be so hard on yourself.

Go and get just enough contracting work so you can pay for your lifestyle, and keep working on it. Talk to your previous employer and mention you now have a couple of days free a week and if they are interested you could help them out ;)

[treis]

Stupid is a bit harsh. I mean, your idea is not good and unlikely to make significant money ever. But there's no shame in trying something.

Just polish up ye olde resume and start applying for jobs. Nobody is going to fault you for quitting your job and trying something.

[new_guy]

If you left your previous job on good terms, just contact them and ask if you can go back.