Hey. I’m Saïd. I’m a software engineer turned project manager that eventually made the switch to product management.
The switch to product management has been extremely rewarding as it led me on a detour through the world of business where I spent a few years researching and deeply understanding strategy.
I’m currently trying my hands on a few side projects as an indie hacker.
In 2016, I wanted to create a side-project that would blossom into a software tool that hopefully other people would pay me to use—what is popularly referred to as a SaaS (Software as a Service). The tool would use AI/ML to make stock recommendations, but with a small twist—the tool would not track companies publicly traded on stock exchanges i.e. mature companies, it would only track nascent companies, young companies that announce their capital raises publicly i.e. startups.
My investment thesis then was that if you could figure out a way to reliably identify a handful of startups that are started by strong founders that attract incredibly well-run teams, you could invest in them early, long before they become whales, long before their stocks become expensive. To me, this was the ultimate kind of long-term outlook for stocks as an asset class. Pick and hold them when they are nascent, then profit handsomely when these startups move to the public markets.
Building the tool would also fulfill a secondary goal: it would afford me an excuse to use a subject-matter with readily available data to learn first-hand how AI works in practice. Also, once I’d learnt the right incantations, I’d be able to jump in to help on any software project and sprinkle the right amount of AI to the feature set. (For most people, AI is essentially magic that no one fully understands excepts the computer, so being able to add just the right amount of it—not too little, not too much—would be a highly desirable skill on any software team.)
In order to build a tool like this all by myself, there were a couple of questions I needed to be able to answer honestly.
If you stick around by signing up for my newsletter, you’ll learn about these questions and the answers I arrived at.