Few years ago, I was looking for my first internship. This is the first adult experience for most people, before having to file taxes, buy houses etc... you know the kind of stuff I'm talking about.

It's not that it's tough, **you have to hack your way around to find the best response rate**. That's marketing and personal branding in some way. It went well, not that great but my response rate wasn't what was important to my eyes. **I always got the chance to focus on the wrong thing**. This experience made me think: there are so many websites for job seekers, often full-time/part-time positions, and they are perfect for that, but they also contains offers for internships and apprenticeships. And they're not caring that much about these targets so the experience is not designed at all for these positions.

This is how I decided to start building a job board aggregating internship offers all around France, with an experience specifically designed for student usage.

### The beginning

The first thing I did back then was coming up with what I call a *funny name*: **Internland, the place where you can land your perfect internship**.

I benchmarked what was already existing in the market to identify competitors and come up with a unique angle. **It turns out there was really awesome experimentations, but none were scalable to my eyes, and I was looking for a very automated product**. This is probably a mistake: first, solve an important problem for one person then grow, and not the opposite.

From the benchmark, I was able to ideate more about the product and its roadmap. A roadmap that would become reality if the mvp would have caught great interest from the target audience.

As we often say in the maker community: go for the quick & dirty and put out an MVP centered on a specific feature as soon as possible.

### The execution

With that in mind, I started desigining a one-page-fits-most landing page/app with a very Googlish UX.

![Internland website](https://backoffice.joshuatabakhoff.com/backoffice/storage/uploads/2023/06/17/internlanding_uid_648dbdd327208.png)

Then I wrote scrappers' code to gather data from reknown sites as much as pure players. I put all this data into a serverless database called Fauna and synced it with a search engine SaaS called Algolia. As tech students, we have lots of perks notably with GitHub Students.

The scrappers were running cronly on a Raspberry Pi at my house, I tried to set up them on Heroku or in Lambda functions but Puppeteer gave me a hard time on this one. Yes, setupping a Raspberry Pi was easier, maybe it's the time for me to turn into SysAdmin?

![Sysadmin expert](https://media.giphy.com/media/3oKIPnAiaMCws8nOsE/giphy.gif?cid=ecf05e47tyb3lfp1q5vq7zbna67j52xd43gprbeyu1f4tgfw&ep=v1_gifs_search&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g)

Everything synced pretty well, even if I got some *(many)* little *(huge)* issues with the scrapping part. Indeed, uniformizing external data into what is interesting for you is one of the toughest step of scrapping data. My goal was to have the smoothest experience to quickly find out the internship offer fitting your precise needs, and to do this you have to setup very specific and precise search filters.

Once everything was ready, up and running, I decided to ignore the "beta" phase as it was already the internship season (aka late-spring/early-summer) and **rushed into the release with little to no plan. Neither for my upcoming internship nor the launch of Internland**.

![I don't know what I'm doing](https://media.giphy.com/media/P95m1RXNmJpVmJHnXS/giphy.gif?cid=ecf05e47tyb3lfp1q5vq7zbna67j52xd43gprbeyu1f4tgfw&ep=v1_gifs_search&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g)

*Narrator: You can imagine nothing happened.*

Turns out theres' no magic traffic coming up, no overnight success. The world wide far-west web. To share this exciting new project for the French market, I was very lost. Every side-projects I used to work on were in English and released in English, where I know a bit more about launching something online (Beta List, Product Hunt, my Twitter account...). 

However, when it comes to the French market it was a very new way of approaching this wild life. So I decided to use my most French social media: LinkedIn, and wrote a small post to announce Internland. Most of my network on LinkedIn is people like me, meaning students probably also looking for an internship by the time.

I was pretty new to LinkedIn copywriting, and it was way before the bullshit storm we live through now, but the stats and the reach of the post were pretty encouraging so far. 

The website got some views and Algolia stats were very *talkative* about the need of a product like this. I was finally very excited to work on something useful and already bringing value, or at least interest. **But after the initial launch, I got little to no any idea about how to keep getting traffic. As we say, "you can't forecast stats based on the initial launch week".**

### Stay motivated

It was time to get back to the workbench: how to grow the traffic? Why not launch a media focusing on tips to land an internship from 0 to 1 with do's and don'ts? It could be a great *growth relay* for constant traffic and social media posts.

But do you feel the paradox of me looking for an internship and giving tips simultaneously? If a recruiter passed by and would not be aligned with my words, I'd have been rejected instantly and put on a blacklist. What a great way to dig your own grave.

**I defintely think that fear, being paralyzed and not having strong conviction is what loses you when working on something.** I think we have to be bold, and to this date I still think that I'm not ready yet to wear this cap.

This is how I let the project live its life by itself for few months first, then for a year or so. But **my intuiton told me I couldn't drop this sideproject without much marketing effort.** Funny that I've said it's all about personal branding earlier, right?

After a while, I invested some time to rank on Google on other keywords than just "internship" and "internland". To do this, I fetched cities with over X inhabitants and created a specific page with auto-filtering so I could reank up geographically. Pressed **Push**. Waited 1 week, 2 weeks, 3, 4... Nothing. This made me kind of sad and desperate on how to create awareness around this project. And I decided it was time to move away and work on something else, something new.

### Stay hungry, stay foolish

This is the end of the story, no fancy outcomes except that it was a great opportunity to learn a lot. I'd have loved to build what was on the intial roadmap, such as a way for students to select their favorites offers and build alert on new results. Or even better, pick offers and batch apply in one click with a custom application such as a variable-based cover letter. No AI involved.

Oh and I've almost forgot to say: Internland got good SEO results about 3-4 months after the update, getting organic traffic thanks to the geo-based page. But definitely not enough to get back on it, especially that I was convinced it was time to move on. 

**What would you have done in this case? Move on or get back on it?** [Tell me on Twitter](https://twitter.com/joshtab_)

The last lesson I've learnt: invest time on your SEO early on, it takes time to get results and it could help driving traffic organically to test out your ideas.

Internland: the rise and fall of a sideproject

It's widely known: everybody is different and difference is the key to a successful society. Uniqueness drives you to happiness. What's less known is that uniqueness is not appreciated and tolerated by most children, they can be really and awfully cruel. Therse incorrect behaviors can come from different sources but it's not the point here, what's important here is that most of us have faced them at least once. They often create deep troubles in adulthood, and some times, lead to unexpected and irreversible actions. This is what Hugger is about.

![hugger-logo.png](https://backoffice.joshuatabakhoff.com/backoffice/storage/uploads/2020/10/04/5f79ea22aefcbhugger-logo-blog.jpg) *Our awesome logo designed by [Orelia](https://dribbble.com/Orelia)*

### Context

Back in December 2019 at [HETIC](https://hetic.net), we had two weeks dedicated to work on a project in team related to the topic "tech and human". We were a team of five friends ([Orelia](https://dribbble.com/Orelia), [Constance](https://constancehochberg.com), [Nour](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nourmct/), [Elouan](https://www.linkedin.com/in/elouanbegue/) and me) and wanted a project that would be really meaningful and impactful. Two weekds to find an idea, do market research and make a working prototype.

### Why?

After many discussions and brainstorming for almost two days, we all shared personal stories of more-or-less important case of harassment we faced. One point was clear: everybody was saying about themselves that it wasn't "real harassment" while others told them it was so. Even during interviews. It was clear that the vision of harassment was either it leads to suicide or it's not harassment. Our first mission was to make that **there is no distinction between harassment cases, they all are as much important**.

In France: 1 out of 10 children is victim of violent harassment leading to disastrous action and 1 out fo 3 children is victim of harassment.

I have a friend who wrote a book about it, if you read French, you definitely should buy [Au nom d'un harcelé](https://www.amazon.fr/nom-dun-harcelé-Arthur-Lambert/dp/2354858337).

![IMG_7487.jpg](https://backoffice.joshuatabakhoff.com/backoffice/storage/uploads/2020/09/29/5f72ecf50028eIMG_7487.jpg) *Trying to define the on-boarding*

### How?

It was clear that something must be done. We had to think: what would be the best solution? We found out that most children get their first smartphone at age of 11-12 so we decided to make an app. But you can't forget 8yo as much as you can't have the same behavior pattern with them so we decided that under a certain age, the child would talk with a chatbot (on the familial iPad for instance) and that the parent would indirectly control. The child would be able to customize the mascot to their preference and to reflect their personality. 

For older children, they would be called *Huggy* and talk to *Hugger*, a list of hand-picked students in psychology or medecine, everytime they'd feel the need to. As the *Hugger* can't handle everything, they have a emergency button to call either the firefighters, the police or the school principal.

![hugger-palette.png](https://backoffice.joshuatabakhoff.com/backoffice/storage/uploads/2020/09/29/5f72ec9b19035hugger-palette.png) *Mockups of the app*

### Close to presentation

We made the choice not to prototype the chatbot as it would act like a classic bot behavior. The app was built day and night, almost no sleep in the last three days before presentation.

For those interested, the tech stack is React Native and Firebase.

The app worked correctly: from signup to manual approval of *Huggers* and instant messaging with mood alert. We were only missing Push Notifications to be a real app.

### Why we haven't continued?

It was the first time in my schooling where I spent that much time without sleeping, completely devoted to the project and the cause we tried to solve. We tried to continue the app but when we called the legal authorities to know what's legal and what's not, it was clear **we had to dedicate more time than few hours a day** to make it legal and above all, safe from predators. We spent hours of discussions with GDPR representants and school principal to know if the problem was correctly addressed and how they could help us to promote the app inside their building. 

I'd like to give a huge shout out to the whole team for their awesome work, we've shared really good insights during this week. Thanks [Orelia](https://dribbble.com/Orelia), [Constance](https://constancehochberg.com), [Nour](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nourmct/) and [Elouan](https://www.linkedin.com/in/elouanbegue/)!

Have a look at their work, they're really good at what they do. 

Case Study: Building Hugger, a Tech for Good app here to listen and prevent harassment in school

I say these words regularly. Why not write about it?

You may have noticed, that I don’t like to fit in a box and love moving from one environment to another even if I’m not a fan of moving from all to all but I rather prefer this than staying idle.

As this post may be a bit long, here’s a the list of topics so that you can directly go to what has a meaning for you:

1. Life
2. Walk
3. ClearList
4. Now what


### Life
The last few months were really... interesting. No need to remember what went wrong in the world lately, life is really tough sometimes. Never forget all the *privileges* you have, give back whenever you can and help make the world a better place. 

I’ve been reading *Becoming Steve Jobs*, which is a book I recommend even if you don’t like the man. You see all the things he went through to become the leader he has been. 

My 2nd year at my college HETIC ended in late June, it was a cool year spent there with mindful people, both students and staff members. I love spending time there, the place is really motivating and push us to go higher.

I also had my first internship which is a really nice experience into the professional world. I’ve learned many things, and taught them few others.


### About Walk
Back in 2017, I thought about an app that would promote local tourism. I had a little thinking about it and made the decision that a webapp or an app would be the perfect fit for it: suggest monuments around your location based on a free time parameter. It then would generate a circular walk. You can read more about it here.

After a really nice Product Hunt launch *(pro tip: don’t launch publicly when your hosting provider is doing a planned maintenance* 🙃 *)*, with few anecdotes I should be sharing one day around a coffee if we meet, I was not seeing all the issues that might be existing.

The most obvious one was the UX, what a mess to have to sign up for this! **I was thinking from the developer side and not the user side anymore at some point while building it.** Moreover, when I came back to the user-side of the product, I’ve seen how hard it was to keep the benefits of actual walks when using it: having to use a defined, imposed path over a free path was the opposite concept of the problem I tried to solve. 

#### How have I tried to fix it?
At first, I did nothing. 

I thought “well it’s over, the product is done, now **let’s wait and see where it goes by itself**”. After months, I was demotivated. **It was going nowhere.** I was a bit disappointed but mostly careless, I was focused on something else now and Walk was secondary. 

Then, I thought of by-products, which are derivate products with the same idea but for a different use case. The idea was *Placeez*, a real-time shared walk to meet new people. Hard to think today in a coronavirus-related environment but back then, it had more sense. 

Based on my motivation I knew it would go nowhere as it needed some technical aspect of a real-time secured place. So I thought: what about Walk but for going from A to B by car? Planning some kind of road trip. It was logical: each year, I go on holidays in the south of France and we cross a well known bridge called *Viaduc de Millau*, there may be other really cool things to see when going there?

#### Nothing went anywhere. 
I preferred walking in Paris and seeing where it drives me instead of a predefined path. **I was not motivated by the idea anymore.** 

As a last run up, I wanted to make a Walk 2.0, Walk Nearby. Rebuild everything from the ground up, no more friction. Just insights. Walk, go where you want to go and if we detect a cool monument nearby, we send you a notification to tell you “turn right, here it is”. 

#### Postmortem
At my college, the story made some noise as two other students built a similar app, it was both frustrating and motivating. Back then, this felt like the Facebook story. I know I haven’t reacted/acted correctly with them and I’m now trying to behave better with them. Congrats to their work, they’ve done something great and they are now working each on their own path which is really driving them in a cool place!
 
In this area, there are many competitors but nobody had this search engine approach we had (crowd-sourcing data to make it more powerful and reliable). 

I should’ve stopped earlier if I were honest with myself and acknowledged that I was not motivated anymore. 

I wanted a dead-simple app with not too much options for the user *(I still think **too much options is showing your lack of decision** as a product owner)* but my first vision deviated into something too different from my needs, and so for the market too.  **I ended forgetting the user part for a developer easy-take path**. 

When I’ve seen many reactions on my Product Hunt launch (#5 Product of the Day, up to #3) and in my KPIs (740 downloads, 308 sign ups within the first 2 months (this feature has been deleted after), 1200 walks created), I’ve hesitated between continuing or stopping. **Was it the correct KPIs? Real feedback?**

**Adding features as a way to gain traction is a weak product management strategy.** First find your market, make the product useful, pivot if needed, rewrite from the ground up if you’re motivated but don’t add 20+ features if your core feature is not what people are looking for. 

I’ve learned many things, from preparing a launch to listening to more real feedback and testing the product as a user point of view (don’t lose this!)

### About ClearList
I started ClearList in 2018 as a way to learn Node.js by myself and get more autonomous with it. 

It was few months before I get into HETIC college as a freshman and **I needed a relaxing side-project from the main one**.  

In summer 2019, I implemented Stripe as a way to make ClearList my first paid product (at least to cover costs, nothing more), bought a domain name and then launched on Product Hunt. 

This one went well, no downtime as it was hosted on Heroku. 
It went so well that the free tier of the database provider was not enough and I received many emails noticing me the database writing were disabled. **I did the database migration from my phone**, in Spain as I was having a day off-site for holidays. 

The product was not meant to last. I had no product evolution strategy, it was all about: put your links, set your schedule and boom. People made feedback, so I implemented Pocket and other little features such as reschedule.

I’ve learned how to use environment variables and GitHub Actions for Continuous Deployment. The whole project is [open-source, you can have a look](https://github.com/satwa/clearlist)!

### Now what?
Many updates on this post! It’s been a while since my last post. I should also update my website as it’s full of old informations. 

Now, I’m looking for more human in my work. I love to work alone and rely on myself only (better for deadline for instance) but I need more interaction. I don’t want to be seen as the developer only. Now after my internship, I’m sure that being behind a screen all day long is not what I want. I need human, I need interaction, I need to know more and do more!

I’ve started thinking about a new project, called [Internland](https://twitter.com/internland) which you can follow on Twitter. I’ve nothing to share about it for now, still doing research about how it could work. Stay tuned!

In October it will be time to go back to school, I’ve worked on different projects related to my college and I’m impatient to know how people will react to them. Everybody involved in these projects are kind and motivated people I love to work with. 

> I won't find my way 'cause I’m 'bout to rebuild it 
> — Riles

Move on (S2020): lessons learned from my last sideprojects

Often I hear people saying that prototyping an idea should be done in days or so, else it's bullshit. I don't agree because it doesn't make sense. This is just nurturing the startup myth of overnight success and blocking many people from actually taking their chances. It's almost the first time I prototype in 8 days and the only bullshit I see here is the technical debt created and the excessive fatigue.

### Context

The idea can be summed up as Kitchen Stories meets Houseparty.

I remember a late night ideation we got with friends after college where we threw ideas at first and then focused on what topics we know so that we can be relevant in this field. On this night, I pitched an idea that is a by-product of an older product idea I've had. 

Basically, TeamCook *(caught the joke here?)* is just about cooking in real-time with a friend or a group of friends. One of them is the chef showing how to follow the recipe's steps (or you can all be experimenting). At that time, we were not so excited by the idea but with quarantine, we just got a momentum. When lockdown started, a friend started every day to send us video of her cooking something different and teaching us how to do the same and so I thought: what if I revive this app idea?

### Why?

There are many reasons for building TeamCook. The first one is obviously to focus my mind every day during lockdown because going roughly from 1 to 0 in a day was a huge punch in the face. Another one is to master [react-native](https://reactnative.dev) and make sure the template I made is adaptive. This also allowed me to learn more about WebRTC and it's always useful to master new technology as it pushes back our capacities. And well, it's always a good idea to keep learning, it's good for our brain!

Last part is that it forced me to start cooking and experiment.
<center>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">One of my goal when I started living alone was to learn cooking, in fact I wanted since day 1 (= since mid-2018) but couldn’t “find” time for it <a href="https://t.co/fyzfP1GDQv">pic.twitter.com/fyzfP1GDQv</a></p>&mdash; Joshua Tabakhoff (@joshtab_) <a href="https://twitter.com/joshtab_/status/1248695415387684864?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 10, 2020</a></blockquote> 
</center>

### How?

When I start working on a new idea, it's good to do some researches and look for similar apps on App Store, Product Hunt, GitHub... The aim is to simplify your tasks, look for different approaches and improve our UX/UI.

I've looked for existing repo, libraries, documentations, etc. Then I wrote a list of basic features required: authentication, friendship, recipes database and live videoroom.

By cross-checking needs and research data, I've been able to gain a lot of time where I'd usually have wasted hours coding useless and overdone things.

Once these steps were done, I was able to fork my react-native template, remove the unnecessary parts and start adding UI and features. The tech stack is react-native for the app, Firebase for authentication and Node.js server for backend with Socket.io. I also had to find recipes index, which was already done thanks to prior research.

![teamcook-mockups-720p.png](https://backoffice.joshuatabakhoff.com/backoffice/storage/uploads/2020/04/19/5e9c60fb95e77teamcook-mockups-720p-2.png) *Mockups of TeamCook running on an iPhone*

Recipes are picked accordingly to your phone local language in a specific index, both in French or in English (as the fallback language).

Quickly, I added in that order: authentication, friendship system (search user and friend request), recipes (search and details) and then video WebRTC.


### Problems

What's missing now to be a real production-ready app is a true design, push notifications and socket permissions.

WebRTC has been a real challenger here. I've been reading dozens of papers, documentations, tutorials and existing code to make it work.

### Now what?

Good question! The prototype is now sleeping on my computer and on my phone. I'm not sure if it's going to be released anytime soon as I'm taking a break from the maker universe. Maybe the app is going to be open-sourced, maybe it's going to be changed to adapt to the main app idea I have for years now. We'll see 🤷‍♂️
_________________

Thanks for reading, please reach me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/joshtab_) or by [mail](https://joshuatabakhoff.com/contact) if you have any feedback!

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Case Study: Building TeamCook app in a week

This is the first time the uncertainty I’ve been feeling for a long time is becoming real. Society, life, environment, all never appeared that much unstable in scenarios my mind could ever imagine. And the most magical thing, if we can say it like this, is that all the world balance has been swept by basically one person, not even a group of wealthy people, hateful people or anything. Just one person who, by only one action, basically overturn the world we used to know.
As Jeremy Rifkin said, time has come for the Third Industrial Revolution.

The Covid19 pandemic needed big actions: a global lockdown. Our generation wasn’t ready for that. Many people thought that being digital native would help to solve most of the isolation feeling issue. It’s not.
Nobody was prepared, neither our grandparents who lived the war nor us. Neither the politics or the health services. Let me be clear: I’m not a doctor, a scientist or an economist. I’m only accountable for what I live, see, experience and how I feel. This paper won’t contain any numbers, statistics or remedies. Most of us are anxious, and this is a completely normal feeling. We just must not give up to our fear, anger or other bad thoughts.


I read a lot of tweets talking about taking our chance, flipping a coin and start a business because every other businesses are closing so it’s time to gain acceptance. Let me quote Justin Jackson: 

<blockquote><p>“We’re learning how frail the economic system is. Millions of people are out of work. It turns out, all those small businesses provide jobs for a lot of people”.</p></blockquote>

How can someone who just lost their job and is now forced to stay home and think about all the negativity around, again and again, can just take their chance?
Of course, there are two types of people: those who complain and those who act but both can behave like the other depending on the momentum. It’s not a time to blame or put people in stressful position.

<center>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">To all the fine young folks who became VC associates in 2019: You joined at the absolute peak of an asset class bubble and it’s not going to be fun for at least 24 months.</p>&mdash; Geoff Lewis (@justGLew) <a href="https://twitter.com/justGLew/status/1247854286220013569?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 8, 2020</a></blockquote>
</center>

There is no perfect way to act. You can, if you have the energy, find and reveal your secret power. Either by creating content, experimenting or following your gut and your dreams. But you can also rest, consume content: read, listen, watch, cook, work out, sleep. Just take care of yourself.
The situation is already stressful, don’t let others put pressure on you. You’re not forced to follow some privileged advice from people preaching the good word.

As of me, here’s an update on what I’ve done so far during the confinement and what I plan to do next.

 - The first weeks were easy, we got lectures so I got no time to worry

 - next came holidays so I got an app idea that I prototyped in a week. I’m going to write about it soon. This allowed me to focus on something and not worry about what’s going on outside

 - now, I want to take a break from the digital world. I started cooking for the first time, you can follow my journey on Twitter (gif posted daily during the lockdown)

 - next, I think about working out a bit just to be tired at the end of the day. I also plan on singing and recording something (that will be anonymously posted on SoundCloud), don’t ask why, I don’t know.

If you’ve been following me for a while now, you already know that I love the Cost Zero that is offered by tech, by learning, by experimenting and by meeting new people. 
Also, just before the lockdown, I bought a bit (less than an euro) of crypto (Bitcoin and Ethereum) and invested in the stock market through Revolut.
Here are my thoughts on this, and why I think nothing will change in a short-term period:

 * as of crypto, I think people will lose all their faith in the current economy so they’ll invest in crypto, but like the stock market, prices will heavily increase and then everybody will want to sell until the valuation reach 0. The main cryptocurrencies are not ready for a daily usage as the main currency. We need to wait for a stable coin.

 * as of stocks, it’s getting easier to invest so stock will get even more volatile as more and more people will buy and sell some. I think the stock market won’t change that much from what we know until the day, it will probably be faked from the inside to be maintained for a while.

<center> 
 <blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The stock market seems to be saying that the outlook for our economy is about the same as it was last march.<br><br>Personally I feel like something has changed. idk.</p>&mdash; Jerry Neumann (@ganeumann) <a href="https://twitter.com/ganeumann/status/1247932535298015234?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 8, 2020</a></blockquote>
</center>
 

My theory isn’t a truth, my theory doesn’t have an overview of the situation, or the required knowledge or even previous events. Help me get a clearer vision.
    
That’s it for my words, I needed them to be spread. Feel free to [reach me on Twitter](https://twitter.com/joshtab_) to debate on this.


Please stay safe, take care of you and your loved ones! ❤️

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Cost Zero, Recession and Global Lockdown

I’m an 19-year-old guy with 10 years of programming experience and 5 years of project management. When I talk to people about my experience and how I’ve come here, they often feel surprised. Sounds crazy, right?
I know you may be able to relate to this as well because we all share a different path but our uniqueness gathers us.

We say everybody’s unique and to be truly unique you have to be different. Be, Think, Handle differently. How? You simply need to find yourself, don’t force it, it’s gonna come with your different actions and experiences. Do you feel like you’re thinking as &lt;Insert name&gt;’s PoV? This is the way to build your unique and global vision over a problem.


Back to my past: I’ve grown mainly in the countryside and who says countryside says gap between the latest news and current life. Let’s say I’ve lived in a big city before but I was really really young so it doesn’t count. My mother taught us how to use computers because she knew it was going to be mainstream, nothing too complicated: only how it works like moving a mouse, opening a text document… What almost everybody should master today. She always taught us the Internet is not the kindest place to be but she never acted like it was the worst thing the world invented and where people reveal their darkest side. She taught us it was an awesome tool that could lead to dramatic events.

Moving to the event I want to share: back in school at 4th grade, other children knew I was playing with computers, and as they don’t know how it works and what it is, plus I was starting to program, they thought I was a black-hat hacker doing bad things online. Once, a so-called friend of mine told the school principal that I tried to hack their email address (remember this anecdote from October’s post?). This was the first time I understood I was different and that people fear difference. That’s also the first time I understood people can be harsh.

Fast forward to the totally opposite event of my life where you’ll see how the Internet is powerful: back in 2011-2012, I joined a forum of game makers where I met Samuel, long-time friend now. He was making a game that I found really awesome and then we talked in 1:1 chat. We both discovered we were the same age, what a coincidence! Since then, we played together, we learned together, we built things together. In short, we’ve grown together by sharing our different experience. 
 

### Now what?

I want to show to the youngest one that being and feeling different is the best strength you can have early on. I know how difficult it is to not be like others in the playground, that doesn’t mean you’re sad, unassociable or anything. You’re just too early in the process.
Look, I’m on Twitter since 2011 (yes, I shouldn’t say this but let’s say I wanted to be a youtuber during a part of my life and well let’s forget this). Back then it was not the place we know today with memes and anything: it was really really professional. I was like a boat sailing on the sea with fog everywhere going to the closest island. It’s not being lost, it’s feeling like you’re the only one being like this.

Hopefully, 3-4 years ago I discovered I was not alone. In fact, we all are not alone. I discovered the maker community: Product Hunt, Makerlog, Telegram & Twitter groups… And inside this big community, there is the student makers.
It’s like finding your tribe, all over the world!
What’s wonderful in this community is that we don’t judge the other, quite the opposite: we all help and support each other. You can finally show this part you had to hide because people around you used to not understand. You can finally meet awesome people that will be there when you need them.

Also, I’m sure in your life you faced people yelling “you’re too young to understand, to do this, to have the gut to handle everything”. I met them, you may have encountered them.


### Being different and building your uniqueness early on

This is the part I dedicated to young people that has the ambition to build the next unicorn.
This is a list I made for you, with the lessons I learned from my experience.

**Dream big, keep being enthusiast —** The bigger you dream, the more you’ll want to have success. Define what success means to you and don’t let other people's noise take over you. Is it money, acknowledgement, family, happiness, doing what you love? Find your macro goal, your life dream and then find how to get there and climb the steps?

**Be realistic with your expectations —** It takes a lot of time to be the next Steve Jobs, you can’t be there in two weeks. Just like sports, it takes some time before being world-known. Keep your enthusiast to consume it bit by bit and take shots of it when hitting launch day and small success to never run out of it. Also, it’s fine to feel the project you’re working on doesn’t make sense anymore. Just don’t create a vicious circle. Share your achievements every time.

**Never drop —** You’ll be disappointed, something being too difficult, something not turning well, feeling anxious and ragged… It’s fine to take breaks, it can be days, weeks or months long. It doesn’t matter how long it is as long as you take care of your health and well-being. Don’t be broke or at least to stay in that zone. My advice here is to move to something else when you’re running out of motivation: learn a new thing that is far from your current area, this is good for you and your brain as you keep it learning new things.

**Entrepreneur? Learn to be independent —** Learn. Learn to code or no-code (coding may sound hard but as a student, it won’t cost you a penny to host it while no-code can rapidly be expensive), learn design (UI/UX), learn communication and marketing (master social medias for instance). Learn to write, it will always be a skill that matters in every area. Learn to be accountable, if it goes wrong you are the only one in charge of it. Don’t be afraid, most people are kind when it comes to makers. As I said, nowadays most things can be done for free if you do some research, don’t spend money when it’s not needed. 

**Meet people —** Being alone doesn’t make sense in a world where we now are all connected. Send emails, DMs, mentions, call… You can’t be auto-sufficient, at some point you need other people’s insights to move forward. You may be shy, so you have two choices from now: find someone that will unlock you or find the momentum you say fuck-it-i’ve-nothing-to-lose. It can IVL reach or IRL even if IRL is much harder, it can bring much more value. Take the leverage of virtual to reach to everybody around the world. Be kind, don’t be an asshole and ask for feedback and meaningful contact, not unilateral things.

**Build your personal brand —** I’ve learned this only lately but it will be a powerful tool for you so that when you multiply projects people will then think “Oh it’s from X, I remember he/she did this and that and once I talked with him/her”. It doesn’t have to be too complicated: just set up a website, an almost-identical profile on every platform you’re on and you’re ready to go.

**It’s never too late —** I’ve heard people telling me “it was easier back then when nothing existed” Yes, and back then everything was way more difficult to master and way more costly. You can always find excuses but if you can’t beat the leader now, be the must-see that will be the leader in the future. Maybe change the scope of your project to focus on one feature that will be so better than your concurrent you will trigger their focus.

**You are early in the process —** It’s time to share your creations (Dribbble, Behance, SoundCloud, GitHub, Instagram…). We are in a world where we need evidence to show your journey so don’t be afraid to share everything. Even if it looks ugly in 6 months, leave it here so people will see your progress and you will be happy to see from how far you’ve come.

<hr>

Now you get my point, I want to tell you this: if something makes you curious, even just a bit, go all in and discover, learn, share it. This is going to make you happy!

I hope this helped you get started in the maker journey because that’s what I would have loved to hear back then. Good luck in being yourself!
Feel free to contact me if you have anything you would like to ask, it’s a pleasure to answer!

*Thanks to [Minal C.](https://twitter.com/thoughtbar_) and [Romain Penchenat](https://twitter.com/romainp_design) for proofreading this article.*

Waking up as a student maker

*DISCLAIMER: This article talks about a mental breakdown which is a lot different from the disorder, therefore I should probably apologize for the misleading title and lower the expectations of people suffering of this. I send you all my love and best wishes.*

![Express yourself, you deserve to be happy](https://backoffice.joshuatabakhoff.com/backoffice/storage/uploads/2019/10/12/5da22c9927688mental.png)
*Don't overthink, be happy! — Photo by [Austin Schmid](https://unsplash.com/@schmidy?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/)*

*This is targeted towards student-makers and teen-makers. Even more for the misfits, the rebels and the troublemakers as Steve Jobs would have described. For those who started understanding personal differences and extraordinary abilities very early-on in life.*

You may have felt like being misunderstood by everybody in your circle, even more in society and ostracized. I vividly remember back in elementary school being identified as a “hacker who entertains by hacking friends’ email addresses” (that’s what said the school principal). If you know me a bit, you know I don’t know even a bit in hack and even less when it comes to SQL injection and everything (thanks we know have automate ways to secure backend nowadays). This was the first time I truly understood that being different is a superpower but an incredible weakness in some cases.

Fast forward, I’m now in a way better environment where most people are kind and curious. We all share some empowering energy. Why would I write this article if everything’s great now? Well, you know it’s not all bright. Let’s dig into this

### What can cause the kind of mental breakdown I’m facing?

I must define what I call a mental breakdown, far from the real definition of mental illness (where I want to spread love and energy to every people out there facing this 🙏). I define a mental breakdown (or an early-stage one) as a state where you want to do anything at all and you are looking for a meaning. It’s a unexpected state that can last where you feel like you’re a piece of shit and what you do is useless. Some kind of adolescence crises that's happening lately. 

What does this state lead to? You start isolating from others, you start from spending more time in your thoughts than in the real world and above all, you start listing everything wrong in your life. Negative self-talk. You stop thinking of what’s positive in your life and just become another pessimistic person. This is the worst thing to do both in your life but also to leave this state of mind.


### How to stop thinking this way?

**Identify the root cause —** Weariness? Looking for results but still nothing? Love? Lack of meaning? Doubts (will I regret, am I wrong...)? Whatever the root cause is, you can move away from this by figuring out a way to externalise and find a new focus point in your head.

**Materialize your thoughts —** All your thoughts are flying randomly in your mind and the best way to sort them is to externalise. Draw, paint, sing, compose, write. Do your thing but externalise as much as possible. Don’t be shy to yourself, this can be shared if you want but it’s easier to know you keep these for you as long as you don’t find yourself having silly thoughts. 

**Talk —** You shouldn’t keep everything for you, you will just  get even more overwhelmed so find someone (maybe more than one person) to talk and express how you feel and have their experience on your doubts. You can talk to close friends, family members, Twitter friends (Minal is the best 😍) or a specialist. Find what works best for you, and feel free to only talk about one of your problem to each person so that you don’t have the feeling of being too weak, I know this can happen.

**Document —** Do you know how frustrating it is to have something you don’t understand? You’re here, trying to figure out what didn’t work on this try but you’re at a stage where it’s too early to understand the exact break point that caused all these dominos to fall. You definitely should read scientific papers, books or blog post or listen to podcasts, TED Talks. Learning from previous experiences is the best way to understand it’s not your fault. You are more valuable than what you think you are right now.  It’s the perfect time to get back on track and start discovering something new!

**Break the routine —** As said by a French singer: “how do you want to heal if you’re around what makes you sick?”, do you see how true this sentence is? You have to break the routine, do different things and do things differently. 

**Sports —** Without talking about all the long-term benefits you read everywhere, in a short-term point of view it will bring you a lot of happiness and wellbeing. Above all, you will have more self-confidence. Talking self-confidence, it’s great to work on this so you should go to events that makes you uncomfortable. Don’t go to an event you pertinently know you will be uncomfortable the whole thing but find one you don’t really like but can be great. Like going to an afterwork!

### What you shouldn’t do except if you want to keep being in a vicious circle

**Work all day long —** I know focusing your brain on work removes all the unwanted thoughts you can have but in the end, you will just emphasize your mental state. Plus you will bring tiredness from your work (and passion in my case).

**Keep your routine —** Why would you do this? This is what caused this breakdown, you must absolutely try to get rid of what led to this. I know how easy it is to stay in your comfort zone, but I know how dangerous this is.

**Isolate yourself —** It’s great to isolate when you want to have time to think and let your brain breathe and be creative. What isn’t great is isolating yourself because you think nobody will understand how you feel. Seeing people and your environment is a powerful tool to refresh your brain. Go for a walk!

**Forget, Forgive and rebuild —** “Errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum” as we say, it’s really kind from you to forget and rebuild on the same pattern but the same pattern will lead to the same point. I mean, taking the same people, acting the same way, repeating everything… You know how it will end. This isn’t true when it comes to business but when the break point has been reached, you should be aware that you have to take a step back to not be affected the same way. If you want to take this path anyway, be sure to have the distance and this will make you more powerful than before.


You should know that this is temporary and it takes a lot of work to get back on track. See the good point, in the end you will have learned new things and have a lot more distance. In my case, it was related to both human and work. If you’re in this case, cut toxic relationships, take a step back and move on. You are more powerful than you can think! Be kind with others, you will win the long-term race!

*Thanks to [Minal C.](https://twitter.com/thoughtbar_), [Ali Salah](https://twitter.com/alisalahio) and [Romain Penchenat](https://twitter.com/romainp_design) for proofreading this article.*

Dealing with an early-stage mental breakdown

![As cofounders, you need to be looking in the same direction — Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash](https://backoffice.joshuatabakhoff.com/backoffice/storage/uploads/2019/09/20/5d84cf548d6d8cofounder-2.jpg)
*You all need to be looking in the same direction — Photo by [You X Ventures](https://unsplash.com/@youxventures?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/)*

As a maker, there is a very familiar question we all have at least once in a lifetime. *Should I have a cofounder?* 

Granted, this is a great question to ask when starting a new project but isn't it not better to ask you why?

### Why would you want a cofounder?
Having one or more cofounder is great if everyone shares the same vision of the product and you don’t deal with a crisis every morning.

First, it depends who. Who should be your cofounder? A friend, a family member, a random person? You shouldn’t choose a cofounder based on sentimental connection with them. Questions like: Is this person reliable? Does this person have a core understanding of the business and can fill a gap with their skills?

It also depends on the project size: if you’re just getting started with a side-project, it may be great to just keep doing your things on your side and not spend time looking for someone to depend. Do your best. If you think you’re going to grow quickly and you need someone to be there for you and deal with your potential mental breakdown then yes, it’s way better to have someone on your side. This someone must be someone you trust, deeply trust (don’t lie to yourself). It must be someone  physically available for the business too, not just to getting entitled but also getting their hands dirty when it comes to working. Having the opportunity to divide tasks and responsibilities can be crucial at some point.

My best advice is to try. If you think you won’t be able to do everything by yourself then go, find someone you trust and think will be a great partner.

### Different cofounders
Throughout all my projects, I've met different people and different characters. Here’s a list of what situations you may encounter.

**The useless —** it’s the kind of cofounder that is not doing much. They think they are doing a lot of work or even never finds the time when it comes to the project but has plenty of time when it comes to shitty activities. Identify them early on and move fast, they can make you loss your motivation.

**The entitled —** it’s the kind of person who needs a title to shine. Basically, they come to you when they see there’s an opportunity to be recognized by its pseudo-peers in a community. They act like they are interested in what you do and understand your mission/vision but once they’re in, you may even forget they are part of the project. This is also the kind of person that will stab you in the back sometime. It’s easy to identify them, they are mostly inconsistent and unstable. Don’t let their reality distortion field reach you.

I’ve quoted the worst cases here but I’ve also met truly unique and awesome people.

**The twin —** This is one of the best one, you know without any doubts that you will progress both in life and in the business with this person. It is or will be one of your closest friends. With all the ups and downs of this kind of journey, you will cross all these problems. Sometimes you already are friends and you might have faced issues but they’ve been overcome. You know both the darkest and brightest side of the other so you know what to expect and how the other will behave.

**The catalyst —** This might not be your cofounder. You have this project in mind since weeks, months or years but have never executed. It’s the person that will tell you “What do you need? How can I help you getting things done?” and there you go. It’s the person validating your idea (for the better or the worse) that will push you one step forward. As an opportunity, you don’t necessarily look for it but when it comes you get it and act.

### Take care of the noise
Throughout your journey, you will meet a lot of people. Some in real life, others virtually. Most of them are, in my opinion, good people with great intentions but you will meet inevitably wrong-minded people. Now that you have overcome most of your early problems and that the project now shapes itself, they’ll come up to you and try to take a seat inside your rocket ship. Be aware of them, most of the times close people will try to do this without you even notice while you’ll notice more easily when it comes to new connections because you’ll be more aware.
Be meticulous when looking for new profiles to join your product, this can run against you: you may try to pull up someone and they’ll just pull you down.

In the end, don’t worry that much about finding a cofounder. Start alone and then find people to fill the gaps in your skills. You already know it’s going to be a great journey, don’t have any fear and one project will lead you to another one and so forth. You’re just getting started, gather all your own experiences to find your perfect fit.

*It’s been a long time since I wanted to write this article and I’m proud to finally have done it. If you want to learn more about cofounders, I really like [this video from Startup School 2019](https://www.startupschool.org/videos/71).*

*Thanks to [Minal C.](https://twitter.com/thoughtbar_) and [Ali Salah](https://twitter.com/alisalahio) for proofreading this article, they both did an amazing work!*

Should I have a cofounder?

Keep learning, no one can do it for you

![It’s all about organizations — Photo by [Daria Nepriakhina](https://unsplash.com/photos/zoCDWPuiRuA?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/search/photos/learning?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/8064/1*rYqxGE8b5_lxlvF4OoE_AA.jpeg)*It’s all about organizations — Photo by [Daria Nepriakhina](https://unsplash.com/photos/zoCDWPuiRuA?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/search/photos/learning?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)*

Listen to your inner voice… What does she tell you?
Mine tells me to keep learning, crafting, enjoying.
> Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.
> — Pelé

### Let’s talk with your problems

**Procrastination —** it doesn’t come from your inner voice, stop searching excuses. It’s your voice, not your inner one that tells you to do it tomorrow.

**Fear —** It’s one of the cause of procrastination, the fear of not having the wanted outcome or not having instant result. You need to know that overnight success doesn’t exist *(except for a funny tweet — maybe — )*

**Excuses —** It’s another cause of procrastination, saying you don’t have money *(it seems like you have a computer, you can buy books, etc.)*, skills, time *(that’s the worse thing I hear, you have time to watch TV but not for learning)* or anything else such as network.

### Let’s talk with yourself

Now the question is, how can you avoid this? Easy, **learn.**

**Learn by reading —** You can read books or articles. Many resources are available, for articles you can read here on Medium and I can tell you we learn a lot from others’ stories! Books too are interesting too, many advices you can’t think of before reading something, somewhere

**Learn by playing —** Yes, videogames is a way to learn, it helps for cooperation but can also expand your skills with specific games *(there are games to learn to code for instance)*. You see, playing is a powerful way to learn

**Learn by practicing —** Working on true project is the best, project you love is even better. You’d love making music? Compose. You’d love drawing? Draw. There’s nothing better than making to progress!

**Learn by failing —** It’s the best way to learn, ask “why did I fail?”. Don’t fear of failing, everybody fails everyday and you can learn from it

**Invest in your hobbies —** Also called *Learn by making. *It’s all about designing, drawing, singing, playing games, music, etc. Hobbies are the best thing that can happen to you. Let me tell you this: for me, coding (by itself) isn’t cool anymore, so I decided to begin writing and do other things to keep learning!

### What to learn, and where?

What to learn, you’ve understand that it’s your choice. The best to learn is what you dream for.
Where? Search on the Internet, there are plenty of resources online. With an easy research I can find whatever I want to learn, so do you!

### Either personal or professional​, it’s all about learning.
> Stay positive and happy. Work hard and don’t give up hope. Be open to criticism and keep learning. Surround yourself with happy, warm and genuine people.
> — Tena Desae


Blog

Internland: the rise and fall of a sideproject

2023-06-30 — 6 minutes

Case Study: Building Hugger, a Tech for Good app here to listen and prevent harassment in school

2020-10-13 — 3 minutes

Move on (S2020): lessons learned from my last sideprojects

2020-09-23 — 7 minutes

Case Study: Building TeamCook app in a week

2020-05-08 — 4 minutes

Cost Zero, Recession and Global Lockdown

2020-04-10 — 5 minutes

Waking up as a student maker

2020-01-13 — 8 minutes

Dealing with an early-stage mental breakdown

2019-10-23 — 6 minutes

Should I have a cofounder?

2019-09-25 — 5 minutes

Invest in your learning

2024-05-31 — 3 minutes