Sounds like you could target a small niche that is currently using a broader more generic product.
I'm always surprised by things like the fact there are several software solutions for managing gyms, but there are also specific solutions for rock climbing gyms, yoga studios, etc. I know a guy who builds rock climbing gym software and he's got a team of 20+ employees.
Making friends is a lot of work, can be uncomfortable, and it takes time.
One cool thing about university is that there are lots of clubs you can join. I'd suggest you go find a club you're interested in and participate every week. Talk to people when you get the opportunity. I've read it takes around five times attending a group before people start taking your attendance seriously enough start investing time in getting to know you. Give it a few months and I'll bet you have some acquaintances that could become friends.
I haven't used StackOverflow hardly at all since ChatGPT came out.
Unrelated to AI, I haven't really had a positive experience on StackOverflow in 7+ years. The way they aggressively close questions as duplicates despite the previous questions having incomplete or outdated answers was already making it a much less useful site.
At your size, I would think bringing payments in-house would be financially worthwhile. I worked at a company doing less than $1B in revenuesand we had our own payment processor integrations. It requires some work in each country/region. In the US our partner was Chase.
I've gone through some shenanigans like with AWS. I now have a rule that I don't use any cloud providers where I can't get proper customer service which rules out the main big clouds.
Here's the thing: It doesn't matter what you do. It matters what other people know you did. You've got to be a self-promoter to get places. You might get lucky occasionally and have a manager who does this for you, but you generally have to do it yourself. It's like marketing yourself and then selling yourself to others.
Not sure if this meets your criteria, yet iNaturalist [1] is kind of "gamified". Has a rather large "bird" taxon observation amount. 38,393,861 observations, 11,165 species, 1,130,700 observers, 188,988 identifiers (people who identify species from your pictures)
When Romania announced that the Lesser Kestrel had returned after 100 years iNaturalist actually had several of the observations in the nearby area. [2]
I'm always surprised by things like the fact there are several software solutions for managing gyms, but there are also specific solutions for rock climbing gyms, yoga studios, etc. I know a guy who builds rock climbing gym software and he's got a team of 20+ employees.
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