Soldering and like just enough experience with an Arduino, electronics, and Ohm's law to not hurt myself.
I replaced USB ports of some DJ equipment that became unusable after a USB cable got yanked.
I clip off annoying USB lights.
Instead of throwing away my MX Master mouse I gave it another life as a backup. This involved me trying to replace the battery but completely man handling the delicate tiny port, and still make it work.
Once I got comfortable opening up the guts of electronics I also got comfortable with general repairs.
My only exposure to Coqui was their text to speech software. If I remember correctly the website was a commercialized service with TTS and probably some other related things. I hope the software work continues in the open.
I spent a bit of time thinking over this for back end code but decided not to pursue the idea.
If you are careful with the clients you bring on it can be lucrative. But it didn't seem like it would be easy to begin delegating the coding work quickly. My wife and like to take nice vacations and that would be a big conflict. Additionally at a personal level I believe it would have taken me a long time to build the staff and actually free my time up as I don't have recruiting or management experience. At the start it would take up a considerable chunk of the day. Considering all this we agreed this was not worth it.
Maybe it will work for you, especially if you have the prior management experience or timeline to begin delegating.
Nice points. I do work from home right now remotely.
So I do have some extra time as I don't have to commute anywhere. Plus, at some point after 3-4 clients it won't be feasible to work alone, hiring and delegating tasks will be better.
I'm also thinking about how many clients can I take if I work full-time on Pentaclay. Maybe time and experience will say.
Ban IPs. If they are largely coming from a country you are not marketing in, consider blocking off that country as a "stop the bleeding" measure.
See what other patterns you find and ban IPs based on those.
Edit: I also remember people putting in fake fields that are not visible to the user. If they have any value in the form submission they are scripts and can be rejected.
After reading "The Mom Test" I took a step back and tried to first figure out if the thing I was building was really needed. Now I don't start off immediately writing code for an idea (which I have a bunch) and instead try to focus more on researching if the problem is a real one in the first place. Turns out some of mine are not.
Another reason is my next solo adventure would be bootstrapped. So some types of SaaS are out of the picture.
This is mostly true, but there is a case where you use your transfer pool.
From their product docs:
Droplets have their own transfer allowance, independent of Spaces. Traffic from Droplets to Spaces does not count against your Spaces transfer allowance (because inbound bandwidth to Spaces is free), but does currently count against your Droplets’ outbound transfer allowance.
