Screw Ramen Profitability, I hate Ramen.

I thought about writing a "new" year blog post reminiscing the past year. But that didn't seem fun. I kind of didn't want to look back at 2023 and talk about it.

Seemed boring to read.

Also, I didn't have anything to write about apart from that. Or I didn't feel like I had anything significant to say.

I was stuck on Nous and had a lot of ideas to try and things to experiment with but I had a difficult time trying them out. My input into things started being bottlenecked by other problems I wanted to solve.

The biggest problem is runway, no fuck that word; money.

I don't have a runway, for the last 6 months I've been on money I've borrowed from my parents and whatever savings I had left from my internships in college.

While I could borrow more from my parents, it wouldn't have been sustainable. It would not be a viable option if I didn’t know precisely what that would help in.

As much as I'd love to be able to vacuum myself from something that people on the internet seem to come by very easily, «insert MRR twitter here» the truth is,
I can't.

The last 6 months have changed my relationship with money. In many ways, it's good. Paul Graham would be proud that I can "be a cockroach" when needed. But in other ways, it's been bad. The cockroach mindset takes a toll on you.

So, with the intent of solving this $ problem, I started finding a solution.

I came up with my non-negotiables.

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An indie hacker's non-negotiables

I had some prerequisites and requirements for what I did next.

1. Whatever I worked on, it had to be something I learned something new from.

2. I wanted to have more creativity and autonomy in what I did. I needed to take part in the idea -> code -> execution -> iteration loop

3. (Optional / Good to have) It would have been great to take on something that gives me a little bit of assurance of work. I've always been bouncing around on different things. This time I wanted to be sure it's something I wanna work on for at least 6 months. It's fine if that changes down the line.

4. I had to believe or be indoctrinated into whatever I was putting my efforts into.

5. I want to be as close to the "problem" as possible.

6. Allows me to live in Bengaluru. (I love 'uru but it's expensive to live there)

Farza talks a lot about your work "serving" you. If I'm putting my efforts into something, it has to satisfy the above requirements to "serve" me. Otherwise, I don’t want to do it.

This "filter" really rules out most freelance gigs, side projects, etc one could do to get a quick buck.

I was fine with that.

With this filter in mind, I started looking at where I could take on cognitive load.

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What Nous?

I also didn't like being married to Nous when I knew I had to cheat on it to pay the rent.

Ugh, that’s a weird sentence.

It was also a good exercise to determine what my end goal with Nous was.

$1M in the bank, I'd continue working on Nous.
Make it the ultimate Perplexity for your brain.
Open-source it, and allow self-hosting.
Make personal knowledge retrieval as intuitive as Google's search bar.

Those would be cool ambitions that I know would continue serving me throughout my 20s.

But in reality, Nous failed on the 6th requirement.

I love Bengaluru as a city. It's a place I want to dig some roots and make a social circle around myself.

I love that I'm constantly surrounded by amazing and smart people. Living in an environment where I see people hack on random projects every week is a huge motivator.

Great energy to be around.

It's served me quite well and hacking on this was an amazing experience.

I picked up Nous as a project. Not as a project to learn React or Python, but rather as a project to learn how to make something people might use.

Given all this, Nous is gonna be on the back burner for a bit.

I'm not shutting it down right now. I still have achievable goals for it.

To be fully honest I don't know when I'll start working on it, but it's a side project I wanna keep spending some energy on.

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For the last two weeks, I’ve joined the incredible people at Julep AI.

Been reading about LLMs, transformers, AI agents, and gonna be learning a lot more stuff.

I’ll still be shipping, launching and posting.

Next one coming up on Sunday.

Stay tuned <3

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