How to choose between ideas to focus on and stay motivated

I have work on a few ideas in the past. I usually more motivated and persist longer (ranging from 3 months - 3 years) if one or more of the following criteria are met:

• I have plenty of ideas, but I refrain on working on those ideas immediately. If one of the idea keep coming back to me after a few months, I might pick them.
• I only choose to build something I am interested to use fairly frequently (at least once a week). I am probably the only active user for a while, so I need constant feedback to improve the product.
• I will try to limit the scope of work, meaning I make sure I can come up with a MVP (meaningful usable version) within 40-80h of productive hours (if you are working 5h per week, it will take you at least 2 months). Anything longer than that without actual delivery will probably lead to indefinite delay. That is the main reason I didn't build a game, it's just too time consuming.
• I get more motivated when the product gets more successful (users or profits), but that may come 3 months to 2 years down the road.

I shall skip on routines to be more productive.

Hi Dan,

RE: motivation:
"(maybe because I'm constantly tired, being a father of two and working 9-5 normally; or maybe I'm just lazy and not putting in the efforts and sacrifice I'm expected to)."

Given your situation, I recommend a project that:
a) Enjoy building and provides stress-relief.
b) Solves an immediate problem that you have.

Sacrifice is a cliche that gets thrown around but I don't think it's necessary. If you find a project that meets these criteria, you may get more natural motivation.

RE: The project choices
Is the geo-specific nature the niche? If so, what prohibits competitors from entering the market?

On #2, what web sources are you using? There are many tools in the auto industry that provide similar data at high premiums so it's a proven model. (https://publish.manheim.com/en/help/mmr.html) If you can find a competitive edge, it's easy to generate revenue.

Take a look at Justin's article on product ideas
https://justinjackson.ca/ideas/

Hey Dan,
in terms of your idea its hard to make a call. Both seem to focus on your local region? Any chance to facilitate the car algorithm (which already exists?) for other regions and offering it to already existing car portals? This could be done even without any more work than reaching out to existing car related platforms - right now.

About motivation, I tend to have high-energy motivated phases about one project and then loose it after a while. One thing which helps coming back is a clear roadmap of small (tiny!) tasks you need to do to reach a specific point (i.e. having the smallest possible version to get feedback, having responses from 10 car platforms, etc.) So once the motivation fades you can recover by doing another tiny step every day.

• It sounds like you are quite busy during the day - might help to schedule regular timeboxes where you CAN work on something of your own. (i.e. in the evenings from 10-11pm every or every 2nd day) Treat it like a sport course you signed up for and the team expects you to show up...

Hey Dan,

To stay motivated, I try to chop tasks up as small as possible. Then I’ll use something like Trello to track all the current tasks I need to get to my next milestone.

One night after work I’ll spend 20 minutes doing that. The next night I’ll pull off a task and try and finish it. Nights where I’m more exhausted, I’ll pick a fun task.

Basically, I pick a milestone that feels achievable then take baby steps towards it. After a few months I’m always surprised what I’ve accomplished.

Hope that helps!

Hi @drgomesp, I think your ideas need a little bit of love. The ideas you mention are actually solutions. Maybe this article might help picking the most promising idea.

https://medium.com/we-are-builders/the-4-ingredients-every-startup-idea-should-have-e3683593c3a2

And, from experience, traction should keep you motivated. So picking the best idea is important.

Good luck 👍

Regarding your second idea - my agency worked with a Swedish company for many years that did something similar. It was called Bilpriser (Swedish for "car prices"):

https://www.bilpriser.se/

Bilpriser collected a huge amount of data about specific cars over time to create a site where people could enter their registration number and get a suggested price for the car. It was incredibly popular, since it helped people sell and buy cars. Perhaps you could do something similar?

Essentially, they made their money the following ways:

• Ads. These were all sold to businesses in the field and came in many variants.
• Subscriptions. Businesses could buy premium services for a price.
• Lead generation. After a while, this business was sold to another business who sold used cars. They used this site to generate leads for that business.

It was a lot of effort by many people - not least their sales people - but the site was really successful for a long time.

When it comes to motivation, I like Patric's suggestion to create roadmaps with small tiny wins. Being a new father myself, I also want to ensure you that no one expects you to sacrifice family time to do this. Maybe you can start change your employment a bit? Over here it's pretty common to work 75% instead of 100% to get time for other things. The feasibility of this probably depends on where you're located.

@drgomesp I wrote an article on how to choose an idea and stay focused on that one idea. May not work for everyone but it as certainly helped me focus!

https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/the-green-label-how-to-break-your-idea-addiction-c3b56ccf1b

Regarding motivation perhaps someone else can weigh in on this point :)

On the 2nd idea you have; is this something independent used car dealers would pay for? Or if certain vehicles are cheaper in certain locations they may find this useful for sourcing stock.

I gave up trying to work on one idea at a time. The truth is that there’s no better way to get traction than to give yourself an arbitrary end date and launch with what you have, rinse and repeat. So 12 projects in 12 months @levelsio or 6 week long release cycles like basecamp does are both good examples. The hard deadline does two things really, it forces you to limit the scope and lets you move on to a new thing guilt free and get all that movitation that comes from starting something new.

If you have zero traction and zero following you won’t find product market fit quickly launching one polished thing a year, I’m convinced the only way is to shotgun a bunch of very minimal products every few weeks, the less code the better in this stage.

I suggest forming or joining a small (3-5 person) accountability group.

Have one 15 minute call per week, on Mondays, where you open a Google doc and each person enters their plan and goals for the week, looks at last week's goals and plan, and can get a bit of feedback or advice. Monday is your time to pivot, then you have to execute until next Monday.

You could probably get a group like that together easily on this post or by writing another IH post.

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