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Ask IH: Anyone have inspiration for the overly-committed, easily-distracted hacker?

I love IH! This community is chock full of inspirational stories and people who successfully built a side project into a revenue driving biz. Just getting that far seems like a massive accomplishment to me, but so many of them are like +$50k/mo businesses! Again, that is super awesome and inspiring, but for many of us (god, hopefully I'm not alone) it's a little hard to relate to.

If your story matches the above description, please don't stop sharing! It really is amazing. But this is a call to all my fellow hackers who have a new half-baked idea every week. The ones who probably have at least one project they've been working on for months, and who need the inspiration, motivation and feedback from peers to get it out the door. Speak up, I'm here with you!

My passion project for months (who am I kidding, over a year) was a data analytics dashboard for ESPN fantasy football league decision making. I wasn't necessarily trying to turn it into a $MM business, I just wanted to launch a product that had low maintenance costs and at least a handful of people would use and love. Well, after working on it nights and weekends with not a lot of real urgency, 2 weeks ago ESPN shut down their old APIs and though there are new ones that have some of the same functionality, the historical data I was building my dashboards on appears to be mostly gone :/ ...depressing? Yes. But also, a great lesson in getting shit done and shipping product while you have the chance!

So if anyone is interested in forming a group to keep one another accountable for making progress day in and day out, and launching that project you've had on the back burner for months or years, holla atchya boy!

P.S. if anyone has any new #free-ideas, I'd appreciate those too

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    Consume less media, cut out the news completely, set up a minimum amount of hours of goal achieving work you want to get done in a year, and extrapolate from a week, a month, a quarter, up to that year, and make sure you hit those targets. Never read the news (repaying for emphasis). Cut out reading or listening to too much ‘inspirational’ content.

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      Thanks for the advice. I especially like the idea of working backwards from a specific amount of work hours in a large timeframe. I'm not sure consuming media is as much of a problem for me as is saying yes to too many things (usually work related, but also otherwise) but still the idea rings true for ruthlessly prioritizing time to achieve a project goal and not overcommitting to unrelated things. Thanks!

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    Hey Luke, I like the idea; I'll join this group!

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    Oh my, that does sound depressing :( Glad you are trying to keep positive!

    And yes to the sharing of all kinds of stories, big, little, bad or good, sometimes we don't realise that the sharing really helps the community move forward.

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    I'll join though I have no products under way currently, but perhaps when losers unite we can turn into winners? lol. Where can I reach ya?

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      hmm good question! I just realized IH doesn't have DMs...well you can DM me on Twitter (link in profile) and if it makes to start an email thread with you, I and @Chris24 then we can do that!

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        I don't think you have DM enabled on Twitter. You can email me gene at unity dot studio

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