2023년 3월 5일 일요일 – Mountain View 생활 73주차

tl;dr

The weekly log discusses the writer’s February activities, including traveling and coffee chats. They also mention their interest in chatGPT technology and IoT startups. The writer abandoned one of their side projects and struggles with keeping up with current work pace. They also mention their promotion efforts and experience with speaking English while living in the US. For March, they plan to continue working, coffee chatting, and journaling while improving their knowledge through YouTube videos and applying for more coffee chats.

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Days, weeks, and months seem to go by faster and faster. At times like this, I think it’s important to get into the habit of summarizing what happened and what I learned.

Traveling

In February, we went on family trips almost every weekend. Even though we live in a place with great weather and scenery, I hadn’t traveled for various reasons. After my layoff, I changed my mindset and realized that tomorrow is never a given and that I shouldn’t put off the things that are important to me because I can’t see a single day ahead.

Coffee Chats

In February, I didn’t do a lot of coffee chats, just the regular ones I do every month and one with a new person I connected with. We mostly talked about what we were doing, items. We talked a lot about the market. I think it’s really nice to have coffee chats with people who are different in what they do and how they live.

chatGPT

It’s amazing how far this technology has come. With the recent release of version 3.5, it has become 10 times better in terms of cost. I think it will take about a year at most before it is applied to various fields because it is easy to use. I think there will be a lot of startups using it in the second half of the year.

If you look a little further into the future, I think IoT startups will rise again. If you can define the 70s as ‘electricity’, the 80s as ‘TV’, the 90s as ‘automobile’, the 2000s as ‘computer and internet’, and the 2010s as ‘smartphone’ in the history of technology diffusion to the masses in Korea, I see the next generation as ‘artificial intelligence’.

If everyone has an A.I. that assists and protects them, I think we can dramatically reduce costs and provide real help to the elderly and vulnerable. For this to happen, lightweight and low-power models are essential, and I’m looking at a timeframe of five years.

Side projects

I ended up abandoning one of my side projects, mainly because it was too much work for me at the moment, and it seemed uncertain when it would become a product.

When I started working on the side project myself, I realized that there were some differences between it and my real job. I think it’s difficult to keep up with the pace of the current work because everyone is investing their spare time, and there are also problems that arise because everyone’s interest and contribution to the side project is different.

I’m still working on the side project with people I’ve known for a while, so it’s less of a problem, but I’m still not sure what to do when the speed isn’t as fast as I thought it would be.

Promotion.

Sometimes on the weekends I try to build the simplest implementation of an idea I’ve been thinking about, like the survival calculator (http://survival-calculator.flutterflow.app/) I posted on Discord, and this week I built a service (https://www.referralhive.net/) for job seekers to get references through interviews.

I’ve been referred to ProductHunt, but I don’t feel like I’m getting that much exposure, and the community I’ve marketed the most so far is Blind. The survival calculator still got good traffic in the first few days, but for referrals, I don’t get any visitors at all because it’s a community.

If you can recommend any books/online courses on promoting your service in the early days, or if we can do a coffee chat, that would be great.

English.

I think the best thing about living in the U.S. is that I’m always exposed to English. When I was working in Korea, all the members were Korean, so we spoke Korean in meetings, so it was really hard from the first day here. I also had a lot of xenophobia to begin with, so for the first six months, lunchtime was the hardest part of every day.

Chinese and Indians are almost the absolute majority here, and Indians rarely struggle with English, but there are a lot of Chinese people who have similar experiences to mine. Like Korea, China is a country where people who are not born in the U.S. go to graduate school first, get a degree, and then start working, so they have a lot of stories of struggling with English.

For example, I’ve had experiences with small talk when we’re all having lunch together, or small talk at the beginning of a meeting. Of course, the longer I’ve been here, the less I seem to have that problem. I think the fastest way to solve any problem is to keep facing it rather than avoiding it.

March Goals

In March, I’m still going to do the same thing: work, coffee chat, and journal. In addition to that, I’m going to watch videos on YouTube from channels like EO and Y-combinator.

I hate rejection, and I’m going to try to make more of an effort to apply for coffee chats first, even if I get rejected.