Why my projects keep failing
adayinthelifeof.nl
Why my projects keep failing
1–10 of 58 posts
Re: Why my projects keep failing
#2I personally love being singularly focused on a passion project / labor of love, and try not to spread myself thinly across multiple projects. I have recently given up research-and-development type scenarios where I tinker with new toy languages, frameworks, tooling, etc
I mean it's important to explore and toy with new ideas, but the real quest is to stick with a project and see it out until its death. The caveat being, the project could end up being another ephemeral flash in the pan (depending on what timescale you cast as ephemeral).
I try to build & contribute to projects that will outlive me. Think of all your code commits on Github or other projects: you essentially write code that could last centuries, because you're contributing to something bigger than 'you' or your own pet project. This is why I love open source - it doesn't forget.
Re: Why my projects keep failing
#3Almost by definition, most new projects in software are failures. The reasons are simple.
1. Incumbents benefit from network effects in users, and integrations.
2. Due to 1, most software markets consolidate around a top player and a list of 2-10 second-tier players. The top player will hold 90% market share and the remainder will split the ~10%.
3. It costs only slightly more for a top-player to keep staying on top as it does for a second-tier player to keep being second-tier.
This all means that if you want to become an incumbent you need to be early for any market, and that market can't be a feature of an existing incumbent. A good example of the latter was the push for "Cloud operating systems" back in the early 10s. As it turned out standard linux distros worked pretty well in the cloud.
You also never know if you are early, late, or if the problem is too big until you try. The more times you try the more likely you are to succeed!
Re: Why my projects keep failing
#4Glancing through the project ideas.
The market the author is trying to target in each of their ideas is hard to monetize without sales engineering.
Selling OS and programming language is impossible today and was hard back then without significant moat into a niche field. Think of wolfram alpha.
I suspect timing may have been an issue for Author's e-commerce idea. The craze for drop shipping and operating your own store is recent. You need logistics, manufacturing, etc on demand services to make it possible. Similar situation on payment, tax, etc side. It became much easier and hit mainstream somewhere around 2010.
The primary target for assessment tool is in edu or enterprise. Both of which are hard to get in without competent sales.
Dating and job board do not mix well. Monetizing any dating style app is hard without being a little unethical.
E2E email service is not big of a sell given the protocol doesn't support it and most people will use unsupported mail service. It is not the primary reason people use protonmail or fastmail, may have been a positioning problem.
Re: Why my projects keep failing
#5My personal projects fail most of the time, unless it is a side gig where I have to deliver to someone.
I think this is quite common, after one learns what we wanted to learn, e.g. how a tile engine works, then the interest is lost and we move on to the next challenge.
On the positive side, some of them can be used as portfolio for HR.
Re: Why my projects keep failing
#6I'm impressed most of the projects got to the point of functional application and the problem being lack of customers.
That's a wild success for a side-project IMO.
My side-projects average about a long weekend length in commitment before I give up. There's just not a strong enough need to overcome the effort. Given extra time, I do other things. EXCEPT right now.. I moved to a new city and have no friends and dislike my day job, so I've got some spare time and coding-energy to spend.
Re: Why my projects keep failing
#7The hardest lesson I struggle with is the Pieter Thiel line "the something of somewhere is always the nothing of nowhere". It is easy to see something that can marginally be improved or copied to perfection but this does not give you automatically the customer base and history that made the original work as a business.
Re: Why my projects keep failing
#8The hardest lesson I struggle with is the Pieter Thiel line "the something of somewhere is always the nothing of nowhere". It is easy to see something that can marginally be improved or copied to perfection but this does not give you automatically the customer base and history that made the original work as a business.
> "the something of somewhere is always the nothing of nowhere"
Never heard this one, what does it mean?
Re: Why my projects keep failing
#9I can relate to a lot of things he said, but one thing i used to pass through that was to dedicate myself to a bigger goal.
I've started a side project that took me some years (at least 4), a lot of perseverance, because there are a bunch of things that are actually quite boring to implement. (You actually need to create some thick skin to overcome those boring tasks that sometimes can take weeks)
Lost basically all of my friends in the process (i'm a social person actually), with the exception of a few who kind of understood it.
No weekends, working from 12 to 14 hours a day, having to mix and deal with already bigger and established codebases.. its the loneliest job in the world and you need a lot of mental balance and good mood to go through it.
But some special spice that actually helped me going on was that there is a social goal in the project and the idea is to provide a way out of the FAANG centralized and controlled world.
People are mostly unaware of where we are heading it as long they have cool gadgets to play with, and governments might only act when its to late. So while everybody is enchanted with this brave new world, the way the things are heading is actually a pretty dangerous one (and i really hope to be wrong on this).
This was a very special reason that keep me going even in the hardest parts (as for instance when i lost my dad to COVID).
Its not really finished yet as it needs some polish, but giving it needs just a little love, at least now i'm able to do interviews for steady jobs (specially now with more remote ones) and get out of this life of doing freelancing work which sometimes is not very fun.
Anyway, my point being, that maybe there's a need for something else, as in my experience, just intellectual curiosity wont do the trick.. (I`ve had some of those too)
For instance even with burnout (which i kind of postponed to the last moment), i'm motivated to go through it all to see this project have at least the (little) recognition it deserves and i don't care to have recognition myself nor i've done it to become rich, as there were much better and easy to implement ideas to that goal, but i just want to see it "on track", having a way to evolve and become a viable alternative road to another kind of future giving us back the power that is actually ours in the first place.
Re: Why my projects keep failing
#10The hardest lesson I struggle with is the Pieter Thiel line "the something of somewhere is always the nothing of nowhere". It is easy to see something that can marginally be improved or copied to perfection but this does not give you automatically the customer base and history that made the original work as a business.
> "the something of somewhere is always the nothing of nowhere" Never heard this one, what does it mean?
Another way of saying this would be "it is harder to copy something than it is to make something". For example try building a successful search engine today, to beat Google at their own game, you need to solve all this technical problems plus beat a heavily intrenched incumbent. You can point to something like duck duck go and sure they did find a successful niche of privacy aware people that want to "degoogle" their lives, but even this doesn't mean that you can just be DuckDuckGo yourself.