After years of loathing - I might be about to do something I haven't done for the last 18 years. To jump into the unknown. !rant!

I have been a lurker and I'm thankful for this space 'indiehackers', it has let me connect with wonderful people from around the world and I have learnt a lot from here. I have cheered for people who launch wonderful products and the posts about their first sale, their small wins, and the happiness of getting their product out there. Which has all inspired me. But I have never been able to push myself to do something on my own, though ideas are the only thing that I have worked on. It would usually be, I do research, I do everything and when it is time to do the thing, I get cold feet....usually it is just that "I don't have the resources or time or anything to get started, I'm not good enough to do that, I have so much to learn... etc and then I just fall into the abyss of every day" and other times it is "this is a shitty idea, how on earth do you think this would even work". And I see someone doing that and running it successfully :|. Every time I wanted to do something, I wanted to make it big, big ambitions and that too is a hurdle, when the ambitions are quite high.

Though, I have co-founded a few stuffs that went on to do well and are sustainable, which I just didn't want to be part of and just did my own thing, in my own sweet time - freelancing. Even in my freelancing career, I helped launch a couple of products, built brands that still exist and some which got sold and I have been part of startups that failed.

As a freelancer, I have put on every hat from the early days of working on PostNuke websites as an asst. web designer to Google Certified Adwords Professional to Advertising and Creative Director and Consultant and so on, from product design to crafting a brand from scratch to everything in between. I worked with some great companies and loved the journey but in the last 6-7yrs. Especially, in the later 3-4yrs, I have been tired of working on projects where I know they are just wasting time and money and where they don't hear what I have to say and I'm almost working like a robot in a deeper sense, personally, I try my best to give the best advice but then I have been in situations where the owners/stakeholders are so engrossed with their idea and vision which is not practical. Marketing would not yield anything, yet they would want to go forward with it - why would they listen to a freelancer like me, who does not have a portfolio or a website or anything at all, no social media presence - who goes onto say this is how you can leverage on social media and yada yada.

I have been in situations where I have worked hard to bring in projects, pitching, Zoom meetings etc and then when the deal is sealed, I would get de-motivated and wouldn't do anything at all, which has hurt me financially and otherwise as well. Which was a shitty thing to do on my part but then I couldn't help. I, at one point, thought the logic side of my brain was not functioning as I wouldn't care about the hard work I had put in to bring in the projects which would take 10-15 days of toiling and whatnots to get 3 projects and one by one, I would just let them all slip. At that point, I was depressed in a dark place, I didn't know what I was doing and I thought my brain did not believe in the logic of 2+2=4. I tried therapy, but it didn't quite work or maybe I didn't put in the work or whatever it was, it didn't work. I was suicidal, feeling worthless, feeling that I couldn't do any shit but just some wanna-be smart ass with big ambitions and just criticizing every other thing. Everyone, my friends my relatives, and the other guy whom I mentored, was moving ahead and thriving and I was just managing life somehow. I did turn into an alcoholic and my relationships and everything else was screwed big time with my friends, my partner, my family - literally everyone. I had this feeling that I could do so much more and then I was not able to and that bitterness was eating me inside out and that bitterness spilled everywhere else as well.

Thankfully that phase kind of ended, the phase of me being an alcoholic and being bitter.

In the last 10 years, I have worked for a maximum of 1-3 months in a row, which would occur once a year, and I would occasionally do some work in between. The rest of the time, I would spend chilling, smoking pot and spent much time learning about myself - how my brain functions, trying to understand myself and over the years it has been tremendously helpful - I would read so many Self helpful books, books on habits, how not to procrastinate podcasts, psychology and whatnots. Then spirituality, diving deeper into myself with spirituality and some entheogens kind of helped me, to understand myself better. Plus, human design sort of helped me as well, to understand how I function. As a byproduct of reading psychology books and looking inside and understanding what makes me - who I am, the character in this world helped with what I do as a designer - empathizing in the truest sense.

So now, I'm at a point where I need to find a full-time job, which I think would kill me, and no one would offer me a role where I could be - me and in a meaningless job where I'm just making a beautiful tapestry of pixels has lost meaning and jobs where I could use my brain, with my past and erratic work nature and everything, no one would hire me and on top of it, I don't even have a college degree, which I deliberately opted out of. So, the only option now is to work on any of my ideas, I have more than one of them out of numerous ones that I scraped. So, being me (trying to keep things simple), I choose the most frictionless and easy-for-me thing to do. Which is a mixture of physical products and services. I can't think of anything without some visual side to the business, I mean visual design. So this is something that aligns with me and ofcourse it is a market I don't know much about but with all these years of experience working in different industries, I have a gut feeling and confidence that I can crack it. I have always had this inkling, urge when working on client projects where I felt that I could do so much more but then I never could somehow spread my wings wide. Now it is time to experiment.

A few things I want to experiment with are.

• If asked if is design important. I say no, but the thing is everyone makes purchases based on that. I believe in it, design can make or break a product and the overall experience is visual. Though people might not discern a good design from bad when it comes to purchases based on the subconscious exposure of designs from brands they adore or brands they are on their wishlist or use, they have already built their biases. So this is one thing, I want to experiment with.

• I have always believed - there's no one prescribed way to do something. There are so many gazillion ways of doing the same thing, differently. There is no one formula or any formula that worked for someone that I can replicate. I can learn from it but then I have to devise my formula.

• I plan to spend no more than $200 (that too in the most deliberate situation for paid social media advertising). I plan to spend some on the website, much of the work I would do myself and the product manufacturing/shipping, I plan to outsource. I have no network, no social media presence - nothing. I will be doing it all from Zero.

• I plan to launch something in a market that I don't understand much nor have done much research on how big it is, possibly it is much bigger than I can fathom or maybe not. I'm not doing anything different and I'm going to keep it simple but just do it my way. And go along with my gut feeling.

I have never had the fear of taking up huge challenges when I'm working for my clients but then when it comes to doing my own thing, I get shit terrified and I poke the idea so ruthlessly and when it does not break, I somehow loathe and just put it on pause mode and come back and I make it more challenging with high ambitions and then somehow it does break down, so do I. But this time, I'm trying to just jump into the unknown and face the fear for once and want to experience the feeling of the first sale. To see my idea being validated in real-time outside my mind, with that first sale and hopefully countless more. And possibly see what lies beyond this fear that has paralyzed me for this long.

I plan to launch by the end of January. Let's see how the journey unfolds. Either I will learn or I will earn :).

*This is just a rant, I could go on and on with my meaningless rant but then I had to vent this out. I'm having second thoughts about posting this but then what the heck, let it be. It is what it is phew