The plans in 2022 are pretty straight forward, at least as of now (who knows what may change.)

• Put out content centered around software engineering
• Develop an audience
• Validate business ideas with audience

My thinking goes something like this:

• Investing in business ideas can be expensive and risky. A sellable product needs to be polished so it takes a considerable amount of time (and money).
• We can mitigate this risk in a number of ways. The primary ways I've seen it done by other creators is: 1) ask people what they want before investing in ideas, and 2) have people who trust you to sell the product to.
• This means developing an audience for the community you want to solve problems for is at the crux of mitigating risk.
• This means developing content for the community is where to begin, since it's virtually free to develop content and is an effective way to garner trust.

Therefore, I mitigate financial and effort risks by putting in the effort of developing an audience.

Q1 Objectives

Working backwards from the goal of developing content this year, I've chosen three objectives, two of which are about developing habits instead of a more concrete objective.

Become a prolific writer for the community I want to serve

Everything starts with writing.

In order to scale ourselves, we have to write. In order to teach others we have to write. Even in verbal forums ideas are refined in writing. Videos and podcasts have complete scripts or highly distilled, concise outlines. This all comes from the act of writing.

The second habit is to learn how to utilize and maximize the leverage I have with my time.

Become Ruthless With How I Spend My Time

I have two little kids and a marriage that I'm proud of and am happy in. I would never sacrifice the quality of my relationships with my family for anything else. I also still work a full-time job which leaves a lot less room in my schedule for developing a business.

This ultimately means I have to be ruthless with how I spend my time. I won't waste any of it.

These habits will ensure success in every facet of business development going forward.

Produce Content on Data Structures and Algorithms

Lastly, the final objective is to produce content on data structures and algorithms as an incision point for developing a niche audience. There are several topics I could have chosen to do this with, but I specifically chose the most niche topic (a specific topic within software engineering,) to try to find a very niche audience.

The people who are looking to study data structures and algorithms fall into one of these buckets:

• CS students supplementing their understanding
• Self-study coders who never took a CS class looking to gain an understanding on this stuff
• CS students preparing for job interviews
• Professionals preparing for job interviews

I feel that, with a niche topic like data structures and algorithms, I can focus on the quality of the contents of the materials presented in the video instead of the quality of the video production, while trying to appeal to a wider audience (say anyone looking to get into coding,) would require more effort on the video production front.

I think the best place to start for this would be to start publishing educational YouTube videos because:

• It's more about how the concepts are explained and presented, rather than about the video production. (Video production can get expensive.)
• I have the most experience with educational materials since I was a lecturer and a technical mentor at Hack Reactor.

Conclusion

I'll check in at the end of Q1 to see how I've done on these objectives.