Where do you find inspiration for your side projects?
Often I struggle to come up something worth working on or if I do find something worth working on initially, I very quickly find someone doing it much better than I. At that critical junction, do you think it would be worth continuing work on said side project even though you have a very low chance of it being successful at all?
I always plan to fail. I dont ever think im gonna create anything some one else will think is neat. But i build stuff for me. Stuff i like and i will use. I typically dont even look to see if someone else has built it better becuase i just like building things and learn so freaking much each time.
For me, I needed to discover what things are important to me and what the source of my dreams/goals are before I could choose ideas I would stick with. By source I mean what did I really want when I fantasized about having a lot of money, for instance, or having a large successful business?
The answers were not immediate and took a lot of introspection and getting past quick assumptions. All in all it took a few years if I'm being honest with myself, and the answers were not always intuitive, though some were.
My dream about having money wasn't actually about buying all kinds of stuff. Instead it was largely about removing fear and anxiety related to paying bills, providing for myself and a future family, and debt. The second part was being able to use that money to make changes in the world that I want to see. Those are pretty common source reasons for a lot of people I think.
Having a large business was another, but I eventually realized that the source of that dream was that I wanted to feel important (ego) and have the money I mentioned above. Neither of those were a very good reason to have a large business, so my dream actually changed permanently. Instead I want a small organization (probably a business, but maybe not) where I can make enough money to not worry, and that lets me effect positive change on the world in the ways I care about. There are more specific beliefs and goals that I have that help me decide exactly what projects I want to take on, but those are unique to me, as yours will be.
Anyways, this long winded and self centered response is all to say that you should find what matters to you and then create ideas to fit that, rather than trying to find the business idea with the best chance of success. What gives something the best chance of success will be you having an intrinsic motivation to see it done and done well. External motivations usually are not enough unless you're really really lucky. Or should I say unlucky? What would you call spending a large portion of your life devoted to something you don't care about?
I can definitely relate to how you think about money. For me, I want to have the money so I don't have to constantly think about it. Considering the fact that my home life is unstable and my parents barely make ends meet with no clear retirement plan, that scares the ever-living shit out of me (pardon my language). So, for me, financial success is a way for me to help those around me as well because I am the first person in my immediate family to go to college and I will be graduating fairly soon with my bachelor's in comp sci. Ultimately, my goal is to have stability financially and I appreciate all of the insightful comments I have received as well as this one!
At the end of the day, most ideas are hit or miss. Most founders who've succeeded, have failed before. The way to find out is to build an MVP, push it out, and guage the response. Consistently.
Best of luck 🤞
Ideazap is a great idea!
Thank you 🤗 we should be shipping out a super beta version by the end of the week.
Can i ask how did you get that nice dancing bearded guy animation (gif), which show up after subscribing? (Ideazap is a great idea is subscribed for updates BTW!)
Ignore competitors. Put your heart into what you are doing and you will beat all of them.
I think you shouldn't be discouraged.Working on side projects can bring you more confidence. As to finding inspiration, you can learn from your life and experience.Also , you can look at something on quora.Reading more successful stories can make you motivated and creative. Follow some indie hackers.I build http://www.servicesfordd.com as my side project and i think it make my life more interesting .
Usually from a pain point I have discussed with someone or that I have experienced!
You need to define what success is.
If success to you is generating a billion dollars with your first project, you'll probably fail. If success is learning a new skill or experiencing something for the first time, you can achieve your goal even if you don't get millions of users.
Re: coming up with ideas. I make a note on my phone whenever I have an idea for a project. If you do this regularly you might be surprised be how much you come up with.
Good points, I do think there is value in working on a side project for the sake of learning, but for whatever reason, I believe that the project needs to be a good idea as well.
I actually just put an evernote widget on my phone's homepage and I write down anything worthwhile as soon as I can.
Ours was spawned from a clients need and us not being able to find any suitable existing options. Could be a good or bad thing(there are a couple but they are VERY expensive).
We estimated we could build their required features in 2-3 weeks and get them into production and they agreed to become our first subscriber. We estimated 3 months of dev time to get to MVP and we're around 4mo and releasing in literally 3 days.
Where we started and what we ended up with I think is far more amazing.
I can't wait to release it and see what people think.
That is very impressive how quickly you can create a product! That leads me to another question that I wanted to post, but I'll just ask you; how long did it take for you to develop your programming/design skills to get to the point where you could create a functional product in two to three weeks? I feel like my skills are light years away from that point, but I make sure to work on improving my skills everyday.
I'm 35yo and I've been coding since I was 15. I started with Turbo Pascal and QBasic. The first thing I ever built was using Line to and Move to in QBasic to recreate the star wars opening theme.. Ah a kid of the 80's.
I try to learn a new thing every project and have built up an arsenal of tools over the years and continued to refine those tools. I know my stack going into every project, i've worked with most of it 1000x's. If i'm adding something new, I add 1 thing at a time. Never more.
Try to engage with friends and family. Sometimes as an entrepreneur, in order to generate new and fresh ideas you have to change your inputs. Listen to other peoples problems and see how you can improve on what someone is already using.
When working with our entrepreneurs-in-residence @Btwinz.com, we always like to participate in trade shows of various industries or tech meetups (more suitable to side projects), bottom line, know how to find pain points when talking to others.
Always scratching my own itch.
Basically, just start working on a problem. As you're working on that problem, you'll come across a ton of other problems that you need to solve. For example, I started selling on Amazon. Tons and tons of people that do it. Along the way, I found out printing labels is hard and annoying. So I built AZLabels (azlabels.com) for myself and now it gives me a decent income as well.
I'm reading Rework by Basecamp. This is an incredibly inspiring book for me.