Better to ditch my idea and work on a product where I know the industry very well?

Hey @sterling729 👋

I've just been through the same line of thoughts myself for a couple of weeks, and it's been destroying me. I'd like to respond to your question with my story, because I feel like I've managed to get on the other side and is now feeling optimistic again.

TL:DR.

Work on something you love, anything else will fail in one way or another. Keep at it, pick some future dates in your calendar to reflect on your doubt and success then and not now. Show it to people when possible, the feedback will make you sad and happy, but also increase your spirit going forwards.

Until then, enjoy the ride, otherwise you'll never see opportunities that lies ahead of you.

The long story.

Maybe this is jibberish, but anyway, here's my story that led to some advice I carry with me that enables me to continue the work on my "so far no income" product, that I truly love.

Around 6 years ago i made my first indie product called "epocu", at the time I was working in a company that relied heavily on SEO, and a friend was into computer games. So I boiled down some principles from the SEO industry and made a platform similar to something called thunderclap. The idea was to help indie game developers who were low on cash and marketing experience, to expose their game to the masses through social media.

It worked very well, and within 2 months we've had 40.000 visitors. Some games where shared organically to 72.000 people on twitter and facebook.

Users wrote emails all hours of the day with requests for new features and reported bugs, people discussed it on reddit and blogs would write "How to: add your game on epocu" tutorials. Even blogs authors would call me at night for interviews. It seemed like success, but I just, didn't feel it.

I'm not really that interested in games, so all these "opportunities" instead became workload, and I quickly felt like I had planted myself in a never ending wheel of work, and on a product I wasn't personally that interested in.

I closed down epocu after 4 months, despite the success. Some developers reached out and told us their appreciations for what it had meant to their success, but I just couldn't work on it anymore.

Fast forward to today, after spending the last 6 years working for software companies, I again quit my job to do something on my own, but this time I promised myself to avoid the mistake of building a product i wasn't personally interested in. And like you, I went with a subject I love. My love is skateboarding.

I've always wanted to work with skateboarding in some way. I even finished an education in clothing design and production when i was 17 so I could potentially make my own skate brand someday.

I'm now 30, and I launched http://ripn.tv a couple of months back, I love working on it, I'm building the streaming platform of my dreams for skateboarding! A few people have reached out telling me that they love the website, but I'm having such a hard time getting any traction at all. It's very niche, and it's a totally new industry and community for me.

So the last couple of weeks has been very difficult. I've had no income for 8 months, I have no to little experience in marketing. I have no pre-existing online audience who skates. My closest has began asking what my plans are. My head has been filled with questions like; am I wasting my time and money? Would I have more success building a SaaS for an industry I already know? Heck, how does marketing on instagram even work?

I've kept working on it every day despite my doubts, and meanwhile I've been listening to podcasts like indieHackers, but I would constantly have a tiny voice in the back of my mind, telling me that I need to find a way to make some kind of income.

But suddenly it hit me, that in order to find new content for Ripn, I had built quite a few tools that automates the process of finding new skate videos released on Youtube on a weekly basis.

By automating content search, I made sure there was no way that I'd ever miss a video, and as I'm improving my tools for automating content search for other things like articles and posts from brands and skaters, I began wondering if other people who are curating and creating content has the same challenges with keeping constantly up-to-date.

I'm now making a product/market fit analysis and interviewing people to learn if the content search tools has value enough to become a standalone SaaS product so it can help others while improving Ripn as well, in parallel.

Then just an hour ago, I called an old friend who started a small successful indie SaaS product to brainstorm on the content search idea. He told me out of the blue, that his daughter loves Ripn, the skate videos site, and that she had shown it to people at a well known indoor skatepark, and that they now use Ripn to show skate videos on a tv in the skatepark instead of swapping old VCR cassettes they have watched to death. That's a major success for me, and it has increased my spirit tremendously.

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I really hope you'll overcome these doubts and in time, will see the opportunities only you can see. You are passionate and obviously have knowledge of pain points, existing text editors don't address today.

I've myself have been working on a markdown based text-editor using Monaco, running in electron when i was an employee to help people write more consistent, precise and gender-neutral, and creating a text editor isn't trivial at all. It's takes a lot of clever engineering and creative solution, which I'm sure you will get through given the time and focus needed.

I wish you all the best, and don't hesitate to get in contact if you'd like :)

You can find me on twitter as: "@emilrmoeller"

Hey 👋

Obviously guessing here, but I suspect you’ll have more success with the trading tool. Having previous and ongoing contact/inroads with the customer segment and insightful prior knowledge of the topic sounds like a great start.
Perhaps whack together a decent mvp and try to measure the response?

Would it be possible to explore both simultaneously? I know that focus is crucial for building early products, but maybe you could devote a weekend or week to working on this statistical tool. Could even just be meeting up with those former colleagues and see what they think. If it seems like you're on to something and it's exciting for you, then you can explore it more. If not, you can cut it all there.

I don't think switching to another idea makes you a quitter. It's just about what has the most potential and what is the most motivating for you.

A word processor is a colossal amount of dev work, and as a category of tool, everyone has their favourite custom set up. From a cost/benefit point of view I would do anything else!