How many of you are just waiting for an idea you care about?
I'm a programmer, and I'm pretty confident that I could make whatever I'd care to make, given time. But I find it hard to find things I truly care about.
Given limited time and a family that I also want to spend time with, a personal project kind of needs to feel important enough to be worth my time.
Sure, I could probably take an established product, make a smaller and more specialized version of it and try to market it towards a specific niche, but I'd hate every single second of it. I need to feel that it matters to me, and is useful to others. Because I don't really need the money.
How many of you are / were in the same boat? Is it just me?
You and the people who answered have it backwards. You care about the things you give your time and effort.
Putting the time and the effort comes BEFORE the passion. Everything starts as a curiosity, a spark of interest and the more time and resources yoy spend in to it the more you will care about.
Clearly you can't develop passion for everything, a bit of initial interest is required, but after that is your job to make it a passion.
Right now you have two obstacles to overcome:
100% agree, you probably have lots of ideas but some doubts about all of them. Pick one and start working on it, once you have some momentum the passion will start growing along with it!
This actually makes a lot of sense. I've had loads of ideas for small apps that I could probably make i a few days, but I never started on them because it never felt quite right.
The fact that the problems were small and at least interesting to "solve" in my head ought to be enough to just start.
Silicon Valley makes it look like you have to build something incredibly success to have a positive impact on society. If you look at what works there, you will see that companies that solve small problems that lots of people have done extremely well.
Honestly, most of the today huge corporation started with a small problem. Amazon made easier to find books, now it's one of the largest companies in the world. Facebook basically added accountability with the real name and the photo to the chatrooms and first social networks. Google made search faster. Whatsapp made SMS free. Slack added to Whatsapp a better way to find old data. Uber made taxis cheaper and faster. And I could go on.
None of these can be considered a big problem, but it is a small problem that lots of people had and pretty frequently. You can never know what is going to be a huge company, even professional VC are super happy if they get one unicorn out of the investments.
My suggestion is to start from an app that has a market right now, so that you are sure that people are interested in what you are offering, and that you are to develop in a better way than the competition or for a specific niche. It's all that you need to build a small-medium size business.
I think there's two types of people:
I totally hear you, Kasper. I really don't want to spend a crazy amount of time on something i don't care too much about. Since it sounds like you don't really need the money, perhaps just take some time off from building and read and explore. An artist needs his inspiration just as much as he needs the time to build.
I think my main issue is that I find it really hard to find problems to solve. I wouldn't even know how to find them, but I also know that unless I change something I will never find them either.
I could easily find an hour per day to spend on doing something wothwhile. I don't know how to find worthwhile things to spend my time on.
Meeting in real life with people may be helpful. I plan on starting a meetup which is basically an introvert's way of hacking life.
I hear you. One thing is that we often don't know what's worth spending time on unless we jump and just start doing stuff. A lot of times we'll hit dead-ends or end up 'wasting' time, but by getting in the habit of taking action on a regular basis, we end acquiring new skills (both technical and mental) along the way - stuff that we could never theorize about before taking the action.
As to what to work on, my advice is to start by focusing on the stuff that pisses you off in your own life - look at how you can solve those problems and optimize processes in your day-to-day.
Then, theoretically, you'll develop something that can at least help you a bit and may have the potential to help others too. At very worst, it would be just a solution that helps only you, but you theoretically would have learned from the experience and something in your life will have also improved.
Then rinse and repeat until you stumble on something that others find valuable as well (this could take quite a while with you creating lots of things that help no one but you - just keep in mind it's a marathon, not a sprint and you are growing along the way).
Hi Kasper! I actually quit working on a lot of projects because they didn't provide enough meaning in my life. I learned that 1/3 of people feel the same way, so now I just write about companies saving the world at thegoodstartup.com!
It doesn't need to be a personal interest, it need only be an interesting challenge. In fact, I would say there are good reasons to reconsider working on things you're personally passionate about. Now, I don't actually believe that to be always true, not even close, but in some cases it is. I speak from personal experience; you want to do it so badly that you start to gloss over the shortcomings of the idea just so you can satisfy yourself.
This is all to say, try considering things you aren't immediately passionate about, maybe something that you find silly or ridiculous, there may be an interesting challenge and opportunity waiting for you there!
Same boat as you except for the family part. I decided that I can't discover what I like doing without sampling what's out there and also talking to people. See it as an investment in your future, and perhaps devote a 30 mins to a few hours a week doing just that. You learn something at least.
If you can't figure out what's worthwhile to do each day, then spend that time figuring out what's worthwhile to others - by reaching out to folks and talking to them (meetups, fb groups, bars, strangers, coffee shops). Then you might just find something worth your time.
I like this one.
Yeah, I’m in the same boat, Kasper. I’m a quality grinder — longtime designer, developer, marketer of both digital and traditional realms, tech-chasing mofo...but find it rather ball-breaking to come up with a product or service that truly solves problems to the point where it’s worth sacrificing family time to build a dream. I’ve worked with startups for the last decade and the last five years my day job has been with a small SaaS team, but still no dice in figuring out my own path.
It’s mentally exhausting to watch myself stagnate, but it is what it is. I’d rather spend all of my time with my wife and son than focus my free time on building a shitty product or service that makes peanuts and has no true potential at worthwhile gains. I’d “risk it” for a good reason — not a pipe dream.
Since my day job provides me with great pay in a remote environment, I finally cut all personal contracts and removed myself from external work outside my 9-5 to focus on my own long term plans instead of a couple hundred bucks here and there. Hopefully that decision will be more empowering as the years progress.
Hope things work out on your end! :)
You took the words right out of my mouth, Kasper. I am in a pretty similar situation as you. I'm a software engineer with certifications in game development and UX design. In my free time I have written a book, launched a game on Steam, and designed an app prototype. These were all passion projects that made very little money, but taking that in addition to the fact I have worked as a web developer for 4+ years I am pretty confident I can make a huge range of products.
Yet here I am, with the free time at my disposal, and I struggle to even write 1 blog post a week. It is immensely frustrating because I know if I could just think of a single product that could make money AND that I believed I could actually complete without getting distracted by my million other interests , that I was passionate enough about to see it through, I would have done it by now. I guess for you it's a little bit different because I don't know if you have any passion products that you do without the monetary appeal. But for me the money and the passion always feel like they are at odds with each other.
Hmm well I actually can't relate too much to that - although I def understand that there's people like that - nothing wrong with it anyways. For me I just honestly love and get excited about anything - Football Sundays, quiet reading time - The Smiths and Jadakiss - opposites are the same to me.
I find that translates to my hobbies and work interests too - I have tons of apps I'd like to work on, but like I posted earlier - I think a lot of my projects fail because I'm always off to the next idea too quickly.
I'm trying to change that fault of my now - hopefully I'm not 10 years too late.
You. My friend, are in a very special situation. Not many people have the skills but not a problem they want to solve.
The best thing I can say it to build things for your personal use that you feel no existing solution helps you with. Its would be a software thing or even a hardware/IoT thing if you can.
I am sure that you must have faced times when you didn't like the existing solution for a thing and thought they should be something better. Hold that thought and solve your own problem. Don't focus your self for ideas.
You can always help and join others whose solution you use and like.
P.S: I would really appreciate if you can help me with my landing page ( https://www.indiehackers.com/post/c9ccd0a126 ), thanks