Yesterday, when I was preparing lesson materials for next Sunday “skill exchange” session, a kid came up to me on discord, “hey, do you want to collaborate?”
“What?” I responded.
It turns out that he wants to create a meme site, where people can read memes and upload their own. He wants someone to work on it with him.
“Oh, it is cool,” I said, trying not to discourage him at the very beginning.
But in my mind, I knew it wasn’t a great idea to begin with. “If people want to read memes, why can’t they just go to Reddit?”
“So you are trying to build a social media for memes, and a social media’s fate depends on the quality and quantity of traffic. If there are already existing platforms that provides quality service and a large audience and content, why would anyone wants to move to a new, empty site? Gaining your first few users would be a nightmare.”
So I suggested something else. Speaking of memes, I was reminded of the “elderly memes” makers I saw online a year ago. The idea was that nowadays, more and more old people get access to the internet. However, their tastes are different from the majority of young people. Seniors enjoy images with colorful background, a large chunk of words packed together, rather than the minimalist styles that kids love. So they created a meme maker especially for old people, which is relatively easy to use as well.
“If you love memes, what if we create a meme maker?”
I did a quick Google search. The keyword meme generator produces 44,200,000 results.
Result counts are usually not a good indicator of how many relevant pages are there, as some of the search results might be something related to making memes, but not really a meme generator.
I went over the 3 pages, and nearly all of them are actual meme generators.
I went into the 6th page. There are still meme generators, as well as articles that tells you where are the best meme generators.
It is not surprising to find out that, we already have a surplus of meme making sites, and it is unlikely that we can compete with these sites, since they already gain a lot of traffic, regular users, as well as articles featuring them, unless we have some fun and unique features, we are behind the game.
At that time, I was trying to find a platform where I can do “skill exchange” with strangers. I want someone to teach me design, and I can teach him/her programming or English in return, for free.
But I couldn’t find a active ones. Not even subreddits. What if I made one?
That’s what I suggested, and he agreed. I told him that I plan to make this site a real thing, for real people to use, not just a random school assignment your teacher doesn’t even try to use. It would be impressive to his college applications, if he could tell people that our site has <insert number> active users.
I don’t know how it is going to be like. What he is looking for at the beginning is a web development project. But what I am looking for, is probably a potential business. I asked him to think about it, how we can market the site, are we going to use ads on it, or create some premium service to cover the costs of hosting.
He said we are going to do that. I’m not sure whether he knows what it means. I’m not sure whether he knows that there are responsibilities associated with it. He seems to take it too easy. He said he could finish his part in a few weeks. “That’s easy. I can do it in minutes perhaps.” is his buzzword. I added that we need responsive layout, support mobile devices, etc. He just responded, “oh, then that takes more time.”
He asked me to create a Google doc for planning. So I did it. After 30 minutes, I came back with a err… “business plan”, with goals, target audience, how we can monetize it, basically an extension of what we have previously discussed.
To be honest, I have no experience making software for production. I would love to do so. I have talked to so many early stage startup founders, but they are reluctant to take me as “well, we don’t take high school students”.
I have a lot of concerns if I am really working with this 10 year old kid. He doesn’t seem to have the skills and maturity, but at the same time I feel the huge pressure as he claims to be able to finish everything so fast.
Anyway, seeing him having more passion than me, tagging me a thousand times asking for progress, I feel the passion coming out.
“Are we going to start this project?” I picked up my phone.
“Yes, sure.”
The lesson is, try, even if you think you can’t.
