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How I stay motivated as a solo creator

herman.bearblog.dev

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Re: How I stay motivated as a solo creator

#111

Post by iquatemb »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #13

> For one, my income is somewhat tied to my productivity, and my productivity highly correlates to my state of mind. What it highly correlates to is your health - mental and physical. I have a friend / colleague who is a successful creator. YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. He does well. But the stress is endless. Being solo, pardon the cliche, but he's like a rat in the social media platforms' wheel. There's no room f…

A youtuber I follow took a week off recently after several years and apologized a lot for it, even though his followers encouraged him to do it. He was frightened about loosing his user base

Re: How I stay motivated as a solo creator

#112

Post by Scubabear68 »

ttymck wrote: post #41
Scubabear68 wrote: post #28

I think it’s interesting that the author has the following mindset about non-solo jobs: “You're going to work. The choice has been made. The structure around that work, and the underlying purpose are set by others and you just need to make it happen”. This is not always the case. For example, I work in a midsized consulting firm at a fairly senior level. While I have a line manager, he’s only there to give me corpora…

This is really enticing. Any chance you've written more about your career path somewhere? Or any other reading you would suggest to get a better sense of the work you do and how to seek it out?

No, I haven’t written it down anywhere.

Was a developer for many years, but I transitioned to more strategic roles after I took a bit of a personal detour in 2026. I got involved in a major environmental movement and ended up in a grassroots leadership role. That lead me to doing meetings and presentations with a number of local, State and National politicians and their staffs, along with senior folks at certain state agencies, like NJ DEP. That helped me to think more strategically, to be flexible and be able to think on my feet, and how to talk to some very senior people on complex topics.

That experience translated into the ability to speak to large crowds on technical matters, to converse candidly with C suite folks (technical and not) about their products, and still be able to chat with front line developers, QA folks, support and the like, and how to craft visuals and presentations to convey complex technology decisions to different kinds of stakeholders. I am a mix of developer, solution architect, Enterprise Architect, product strategist, and marketing/sales rolled into one.

Re: How I stay motivated as a solo creator

#113

Post by ekanes »

sph wrote: post #72
dtran wrote: post #12

>Working solo has its difficulties. For one, my income is somewhat tied to my productivity, and my productivity highly correlates to my state of mind. Since going back to being primarily a maker after organizing my days around being a manager[1], and being an avid runner, I've redefined my relationship with "motivation" in a way that can be summed up succinctly by author Brad Stulberg: "You don't need to feel good to…

Good advice. Re: body doubling, I think I would benefit a lot from that, but I hate having a webcam turned on all day with strangers. Or even a microphone. I feel these body doubling apps focus too much on neurodivergent extroverts, and it's a damn shame. Honestly, if I need strangers around, I'd rather work in a coffee shop, but ideally I just want something no more intrusive than an IRC chat to shoot the shit while…

Hmmm, what if you had a simple concept of pushing a button that's asking the other person, "hey, you still going?"

(I'm kind of reminded of video games where there are some "canned lines" that you can click on in the middle of the action and your character will "say" them to the opponent.)

Still going! Still going? 10 mins more and let's break! I think I'm done Thanks for playing Ok Hmmm Never!

etc. :)

Re: How I stay motivated as a solo creator

#114

Post by hyling »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #49
packetlost wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same boat here. I've yet to find something that I feel warrants full attention. It's sort of opposite to the common SV "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" attitude. Maybe I'm just too distractable and pessimistic.

I have a very definite demographic that I understand very well (being in it, myself), and write software to Serve it. Problem is, no money. I don’t mind, really. But I treat every one of my free, open-source (or proprietary) projects as if I am delivering for a Fortune 50 corporation. Lots of boring bits, but the results speak for themselves. There was a Show HN, some time ago, where someone made a Web site that cata…

I'd love to find that Show HN post. Any help would be much appreciated. I've search for it using a variety of keywords but still can't find it.

Re: How I stay motivated as a solo creator

#115

Post by pcdoodle »

rrishi wrote: post #106
pcdoodle wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple streams of income / selling your skills until you can work exclusively on what you want. Lowering overhead helps too: Learning to love what you have and another thing i learned on HN: for everything you buy, you buy it twice.

> for everything you buy, you buy it twice. I didn't understand what you meant by that? Care to elaborate?

The simplest way it was put was like this: you buy a book and pay the initial price. Then you pay with your time to read it. Simplified but gives you an idea because everything we bring in, needs something else from you at some point in the future.

Re: How I stay motivated as a solo creator

#116

Post by sph »

ekanes wrote: post #113
sph wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good advice. Re: body doubling, I think I would benefit a lot from that, but I hate having a webcam turned on all day with strangers. Or even a microphone. I feel these body doubling apps focus too much on neurodivergent extroverts, and it's a damn shame. Honestly, if I need strangers around, I'd rather work in a coffee shop, but ideally I just want something no more intrusive than an IRC chat to shoot the shit while…

Hmmm, what if you had a simple concept of pushing a button that's asking the other person, "hey, you still going?" (I'm kind of reminded of video games where there are some "canned lines" that you can click on in the middle of the action and your character will "say" them to the opponent.) Still going! Still going? 10 mins more and let's break! I think I'm done Thanks for playing Ok Hmmm Never! etc. :)

Eh, not sure I want body doubling to peer pressure productivity.. mostly should be a way of very low key socialising and venting about code not compiling.

Re: How I stay motivated as a solo creator

#117

Post by chiefalchemist »

iquatemb wrote: post #111
chiefalchemist wrote: post #13

> For one, my income is somewhat tied to my productivity, and my productivity highly correlates to my state of mind. What it highly correlates to is your health - mental and physical. I have a friend / colleague who is a successful creator. YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. He does well. But the stress is endless. Being solo, pardon the cliche, but he's like a rat in the social media platforms' wheel. There's no room f…

A youtuber I follow took a week off recently after several years and apologized a lot for it, even though his followers encouraged him to do it. He was frightened about loosing his user base

They might say that but it's more about the revenue. Certainly the overseers at YouTube, etc tune the algorithm to " encourage" a steady stream of content.

When, for example, the YT'er you follow steps away, the platform has to have some idea that traffic (read: revenue) to the platform will also dip. Sure, some followers will consume other content. But if the content creator was your initial "gateway" to engagement and that isn't there then you might not engage the platform at all. The platforms know this and make it far too difficult for the CCs to say "No, I need a break."

Sadly, the rest of us fellow proles are the key enablers of this paradigm.

Re: How I stay motivated as a solo creator

#118

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

hyling wrote: post #114
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a very definite demographic that I understand very well (being in it, myself), and write software to Serve it. Problem is, no money. I don’t mind, really. But I treat every one of my free, open-source (or proprietary) projects as if I am delivering for a Fortune 50 corporation. Lots of boring bits, but the results speak for themselves. There was a Show HN, some time ago, where someone made a Web site that cata…

I'd love to find that Show HN post. Any help would be much appreciated. I've search for it using a variety of keywords but still can't find it.

Well, my C. R. S. is kicking in, so I can't remember that well, but the gist was that it scanned ratings sites. I'm not sure if it was just app stores, or also included things like Amazon.

It looked for products with a lot of ratings and mediocre levels, which indicated a market that wasn't being satisfied.

The middle of the bell curve would be an app that had 10,000 3-star ratings.

This excluded products being "hate-bombed," and ones being "gamed."

It suggested using the list as a starting point for finding poorly-served markets.

It was fairly clever.

Re: How I stay motivated as a solo creator

#119

Post by ThinkBeat »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #79
ThinkBeat wrote: post #74

To pay the bills, food in the fridge, kids: school, food clothes, organized activite s gas / electric for the car (if you need one) your software subscriptions (if any). Health insurance (if one is needed where you live). Pay taxes and so on.

I think this makes more sense as a wagie. If you're doing solo work, it's fairly often you make huge lumps of money, and then nothing for months on end; or you're making money passively through existing accounts that use a service you're running that doesn't require much daily upkeep, etc. There is not such a clear relationship between putting in work and making money in the same way showing up at a job has. The effe…

No matter how you decide to make an income, your primary motivation will be to have money so you can eat, feed your family, and have a place to live. etc.

If the person is already independently wealthy than that person has those needs covered already.

A solo creator can be a musician or art painter, or web developer. Quite often they are not independently wealthy (yet) and most never are.

Re: How I stay motivated as a solo creator

#120

Post by hyling »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #118
hyling wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to find that Show HN post. Any help would be much appreciated. I've search for it using a variety of keywords but still can't find it.

Well, my C. R. S. is kicking in, so I can't remember that well, but the gist was that it scanned ratings sites. I'm not sure if it was just app stores, or also included things like Amazon. It looked for products with a lot of ratings and mediocre levels, which indicated a market that wasn't being satisfied. The middle of the bell curve would be an app that had 10,000 3-star ratings. This excluded products being "hate…

Thanks for the details! That's a cool idea. Were you thinking of this one? It was posted 10 years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5680011
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