How to finish a project after many failures?
What's the best way to get yourself motivated into starting a new project and actually finishing it? Due to previous failures, I feel a little unmotivated now. What advice you guys recommend?
What's the best way to get yourself motivated into starting a new project and actually finishing it? Due to previous failures, I feel a little unmotivated now. What advice you guys recommend?
Don't trap yourself into that motivation thing
Survive! As long as you survive you can always try again.
For me, the most motivating thing is knowing that people can gain from the project
Try and do the smallest bit of it that you can, and make sure you're building something you'd actually like to use and do use, that way even if it doesn't work out in getting people to use it right away ... YOU will still enjoy using it.
Being selfish in this way also helps clear your mind in making tradeoffs about what to cut so you can launch.
This really helps me with motivation, when I think about gaining users and trying to get them to pay for what I'm building, then I have anxiety, and sleepless nights, but when I focus on what I'm building and how much I enjoy using it, then that's just not the case ... as much 😅
I just finished and launched an MVP after MANY other ideas were started and not finished. There were a couple of things that I think helped me this time. I've heard most of these a thousand times but it seems to be true for my case.
TLDR:
Start with as little a feature set as you can. I tend to overthink and dream of all the features that would make the product great but in the end, start with just the bare minimum. I believe it doesn't matter if you look like the other 1,000 competitors to start out with, just launch.
Set for yourself a difficult deadline. I did mine from start to MVP launch in about 6 days. I flew through it and it jarred my perfectionism to the core. And that was a good thing.
Perfect is the enemy of launched. Also, make it a hard deadline. You're launching no matter what. Even if you have to scan your hand drawn wire sketches and make that your website when your deadline is reached, you are committed to publishing ON THAT DAY. This will help you be honest with yourself later and create good habits and build confidence that you will do what you say you will do.Lastly, get a friend , spouse, partner or whoever cares and tell them that your are definitely launching on that day. Let them keep you accountable, especially if you are a solo founder.
Your case may be different, but this JUST worked for me and is fresh in my mind.
Shameless plug (https://jobd.io)
Just stay positive and always love your work...
I’ll let you know when I finish one ;)
I've found these moods come and go. One day I might be feeling like nothing is working out, but then I think of some new idea or a new way to approach an earlier idea, and get a massive energy boost and I'm back into fight mode.
In the beginning I used to come up with really huge ideas, which led to self doubt and doubt about the project (I would seriously self sabotage my own projects). What I did to overcome this was shorten the development cycle so I would not have a chance to ruin it for myself. In practice this means going for some small engineering project like a browser plug in or small mobile app that you can put together in a couple of days. After I successfully completed a few smaller projects, it made me more confident and less likely to self-sabotage even on bigger projects.
Think back to what has worked for you in the past and where do you find energy. It will be different things for different people so hopefully some of these ideas helped.
If you lose motivation about something it just means that you really don't need it.
You really don't need to start any new project.
Try to do something else.
Only if you feel you can't not to do something, do it. But in this case I believe, you wouldn't have any problems with motivation...
Good luck!