I left full-time employment at a startup after facing burnout. After taking a few weeks to recalibrate, I'v decided to make a go at building a business from my home office.

I have taken my skills and experience as a startup product manager and packaged them up to help early stage startups ship incredible products.

Would love to hear HN's feedback on the value of this type of service offering.

Thanks, that's good feedback to make sure I'm more clear about my offering.

My goal is not to be a full-time outsourced product manager. Instead I'm trying to fill the gap in early-stage startups that don't quite need a full-time product person.

Founders of early-stage companies must carry the vision, but sometimes they need some help in execution. My goal is to help them execute on a monthly basis.

Some ideas from my experiences.

1. Take a deep breath.

2. Take a walk and regain some perspective.

3. Do something that makes you feel successful.

4. Tackle one of the biggest concerns of your product head on.

Market research is imperative to success, but it may not always look like you'd expect. Note that I come from a B2B software product management background. Market research is a major part of my job, but I don't think I have ever called it market research.

Big companies often place a lot of value in more formalized research studies to drive corporate strategy. This is very top-down.

I prefer, and often drive, more lean research initiatives. Working in startups, there isn't budget or time for formalized research studies. Instead I have often used more scrappy methods of customer development to test ideas with prototypes.

A one hour conversation with 10 people in your target market will likely give you enough information to form a hypothesis about what problems people are willing to pay to have solved.

Thanks for the great insight and a really good point on the wording "market research". Would there be another specific term that you use to describe your task?

For your leaner research initiatives, do you ever leverage high-level customer or country profiles?

Steve Blank calls it Customer Development in his book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. I highly recommend reading his book.

This is great work! There has been a recent shift in the last few years of limiting customization to "cover photos" instead of full backgrounds. In the Myspace days, this would have been a goldmine.

Twitter still allows this type of customization and I see many marketers customizing profile backgrounds as another way to push their brand imaging.

I wonder if there's value in using this for editing of cover photos for various social platforms like Twitter & Facebook.

yeah, first thing I had in mind when developing was profile customizations. This widget works more like input providing image data-uri. That piece can be used anywhere you could use a pattern: profiles, postcards, email backgrounds, etc

This is something I have been pondering for a bit now. As the chair of my church's outreach ministry, I struggle with church communications. The church is a unique community of groups, sub-groups, etc. And the activities are just as varied. There are many activities that need to be communicated and only so many channels available to do so. Not to mention making sure that everyone is connected and "plugged-in."

You touch on some good points on how to monetize and build a for profit company that is theologically sound. I have this idea that I'm considering for my next venture.

The idea is to build a self-funded startup with a mix of talented developers, designers, and product people. The company would not ever take outside investment so that the focus is never on dollars and return. Instead the focus is to build awesome software that makes a difference (inside and outside the church), grow our craft, and enjoy life. Nobody will earn millions, but we'll sure have fun making a living to support our families.

Ah, welcome to a dilemna I've been wrestling for a couple of years. I actually have an idea/product that has started/stopped a few times that's geared for missionaries, pastors, evangelists, etc.

I just need to find someone smart like the OP here to help execute the vision.

What types of roles are you looking for?

Agreed. That is my next step. I know there will be restrictions and limitations.

Any recommended resources?

If you're in/around the Bay Area, try Gene Takagi - http://www.attorneyfornonprofits.com/

Similar, but focused on the people close to us. Our friends, neighbors, and coworkers.

Upvote for presenting a hypothesis and then committing to testing it. The only way to know for sure how well something works is to test it.

This calculator is crap. Expect to shell over the full price of the car in cash or pay $1k per month.

Aside from gas, the remainder of the "savings" are BS attempts to get the "effective monthly payment" as low as possible.

I think it's fair to count the tax credits too, at least the state one. Although many people considering it are probably hitting the AMT . . .