41–50 of 154 posts
I used to have trouble doing the work. But when I got honest with myself, I had a very specific problem that was preventing me from doing the work. Once I fixed my problem, I was able to do the work. My side project pays salaries now. "Everyone has at least one big thing that stands in the way of their success; find yours and deal with it" Ray Dalio
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That's exactly the reason why the indiehackers website is going circles publishing products which are used within their own audience. If you are building something not targeting this demographic, that's not going to help you get more customers.
I think that might be a generalization and likely provably not true (in the larger context of the site). https://www.indiehackers.com/products?sorting=highest-revenu...
A lot of the highest revenue products (with a few exceptions of course, I'm not saying it's only that) on this website from this list are SAAS targeted at the startup world.
>Unexpected life events. Like a world-changing pandemic and riots? I'll be honest, it is getting hard to focus on building my cute little software bullshit project when a voice in the back of my head is telling me to spend my time prepping for social collapse.
That can be your new side project.
I've found myself stuck in that endless cycle for years. I find myself highly motivated for the first few weeks, thinking about a future where I can work on this full time. As the project shapes up, I lose interest and start to doubt my idea, wondering why people would ever pay for this. Eventually I work on it less and less until one day I decide to not work on it anymore.
It sounds like working on something full time is what motivates you. To get people to pay for anything is usually a different side project. If you can't see the path to profit no one probably will pay. Find people who will pay and use that as motivation and product guidance.
I think thinking that people won't pay for it has more to do with self doubt and lack of confidence in myself.
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Relatedly, it’s about working on something that will be useful quickly and you can polish after you’re already using it every day. E.g. I got really fed up with how clunky the AWS assume-role workflow was at work with multiple AWS accounts so I wrote a little tool using Lispworks’s CAPI for a GUI that would handle authentication and embed a webkit browser so I could control the cookies more precisely. I got an MVP th…
I would absolutely love a browser extension version of that. Current using Last Pass and searching for the accounts to switch to.
My solution was an app with a minimal embedded webkit browser, so that I can programmatically clear the cookies every time I login to a new account: that way, the sign-in link works first try. Since then, it’s grown the ability to list Cloudformation stacks and their parameters and outputs.
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It sounds like working on something full time is what motivates you. To get people to pay for anything is usually a different side project. If you can't see the path to profit no one probably will pay. Find people who will pay and use that as motivation and product guidance.
My ultimate goal (like many) is to have a lifestyle business, or at the very least, be able to work full time on my project. I think thinking that people won't pay for it has more to do with self doubt and lack of confidence in myself.
My main quest is my day-to-day life. When I'm feeling bored, bogged down, and tired of the daily grind -- I head out in search of a side quest.
A side quest can be easy (1 hour), or hard (14 days). But the goal of a side quest is to distract me from my daily grind, and help keep me learning and motivated.
While this difference in perspective is subtle, I feel like it's enough to give me the headspace to stay more deeply engaged with interesting topics I'm trying to learn or understand.
I wrote a related blog post last week on related thoughts, if you're interested: https://jakedahn.com/2020/06/23/its-not-a-side-project-its-a...
One brainhack I like to use on myself is to think of them as "Side Quests!" rather than "Side Projects." My main quest is my day-to-day life. When I'm feeling bored, bogged down, and tired of the daily grind -- I head out in search of a side quest. A side quest can be easy (1 hour), or hard (14 days). But the goal of a side quest is to distract me from my daily grind, and help keep me learning and motivated. While th…
Sometimes it's worth remembering that side projects can be "just for fun", and it's okay if you're going to spend a few dollars on it. The value can come from the learning process, and creative input/output generated.
My completed side projects have been the one that took me less than a week. Some of them was less than 100 lines of code.