I'm a wantrepreneur

I feel you! You’ve summed up a lot of my own internal dialogue. My suggestions for you based on my own experience…

1. Try time boxing. I.E. give yourself X amount of time to research and then force yourself to make a decision or figure out a solution using the information you have + your intuition. If you set a deadline at which point you turn off your wifi, stop researching and have to take action, you will realize you have enough information to take the next step. This has helped me a ton!

2. Use a decision making framework like a SPADE, to help you feel more confident taking action while time boxing. Here’s a great article on this - (https://review.firstround.com/square-defangs-difficult-decisions-with-this-system-heres-how) The key is to be clear about your criteria and what you’re optimizing for upfront and how you prioritize those criteria… As a maximizer (rather than a satisficer), this has helped me make decisions more efficiently under time pressure.

3. I need to continually remind myself that in order to build an MVP it takes sacrifice and sacrifice is hard. But also I try to remember that I will have the opportunities to redo / rebuild as I learn… most of the decision I will make are not one way doors. (Basecamp has rebuilt Basecamp 4 times!)

4. Find a partner that is biased towards action. It’s really helped me to work with someone who just by the nature of the way they work has forced me to move out of research mode and into action mode.

Hey amalafrozalam, When reading through your post I found that you have in process of telling your problems also laid down what you could do as solutions

Some of them are:

• Instead of searching just work with what you know best
• Don’t aim for the best architecture but working architecture
• Relax and enjoy the process

You have also acknowledged the problems to yourself and found a way I think that means a lot. Know that you are not the only one feeling this way. There are many other including myself that can relate to you. I wish you all the best and look forward to your next post which I hope will be about finally having getting past what you have mentioned here today 👍

Stolen from some podcast notes:
"Better ignorance on FIRE than knowledge on ICE."
I like it as a way to get out of your own controlling mind and become action-oriented but ultimately knowledge on fire makes the most sense.

I have been part of 2 big acquisitions, both YCombinator startups, in both cases the codebase was a joke, the most "successful" of the products we had was written with a JS framework that was obsolete 3 years later (backbone js 😓). Both of those startups had huge exists, 8 figures both. The company who acquired those products had to invest a ton of resources making sense of what we had. If you are building something for the long term, that you wouldn't sell because is a business you really enjoy, then maybe makes sense to stop for a little while, to think about what tech stack to use, otherwise just pick Django, RoR, or a javascript full-stack framework and start writing your product. Delegate work you don't know how to do , and focus on the parts you can add value on, ship often, and learn.

DO WHAT YOU LOVE
There’s little point in going into business simply to go into business. You have to have a passion for your product or service and to know it inside out. Once you have your eye on a niche in the market, you’ll need to come up with a Unique Selling Point that nobody else has. Whatever you do, don’t fall into the trap of believing that you can apply a ‘scatter-gun’ approach to the market. You need to specialize.

Keep learning, keep building and think less.

I recommend finding technologies and patterns that work for you. Stop trying to "find the best architecture" and just ship something. Even if it's dog water.

You're going to fail a lot, we all are. The key is to fail faster and learn the most when you do.

This "wantrepreneur" stuff is a bunch of BS IMO. If you're trying to do it (and in your case, if you've done it before), then you're an indie hacker and an entrepreneur in my book. What's the point in diminishing the effort you've put in? You've done it before and you'll do it again. Congrats - that's more than most! Keep up the good work.

Don't beat yourself up too bad. It happens, and it's no big deal. Sounds like you already acknowledge that you need to get started, and that's a good realization to have.

Learning to code is tough, but its not impossible. Look into boilerplate sites that will save you a lot of time as far as authentication and creating other necessary aspects of your app.

I would encourage you to learn agile methods (Scrum in particular). It will help you coping and organizing your project while facing uncertainties, be it business needs and technological changes. You are probably excessively worried about making a wrong choice at some point. It would be critical in a V-model project development but not so much in a Scrum method.

Nice neologism by the way ;)

Joining a supportive community can help you stay accountable to your goals. Sharing your goals and progress with others can help keep you motivated and on track.

Hi Amalafrozalam!

Being public about your goals helped me stay productive, so congrats on that step! I hope you’ll do well.

Thank you to everyone for all your advice and kind words! I didn't think this would get so many responses, but glad to know it resonates with people and I'm not alone!

Sometimes I think shiny object syndrome and the desire to research the best tools ad-nauseam fills a thinking person's need to have a puzzle to solve. I think this is one reason makers gravitate to coding & building vs. marketing and selling.

Some people do actual jigsaw puzzles as a mental challenge, read books, do woodwork, etc. Others gravitate towards implementing new tech, adding new features, coding challenges and the like. And often when implementing a piece of new tech, it is done only to a point where the mental curiosity is satisfied, and which time you find yourself moving on to something else. Essentially you got what you needed from the mental exercise.

I'm speaking from experience here, of course, and it has helped me to identify when I'm in hobby mode so to speak - looking for the puzzle - vs. entrepreneurial mode - building a product to sell to a market. Each mode has different expectations, outcomes, and requirements. For a puzzle, I can pursue perfection until I hit mental satisfaction. For a product, releasing a sufficient but not perfect solution early is the goal, as is making quick decisions, and staying engaged for the longer term.

It's simple. Just start doing, less thinking and planning. Keep the vision in mind but start a task and finish step by step.

Maybe you need the stronger WHY.
The way I approach it is:
what is >IT< I'd like to contribute to the marketplace; IT may not exist or IT exists in a form I do not like, how the thing I would like to build will make the marketplace of choice more efficient, funnier, or easier for other fellow humans?
The difficult part is to be able to map the white space intelligently and be excited about providing the missing piece that will work.

I am in a similar situation. My shiny new object has always been a new programming language. I am like a kid in a candy store when trying new languages and their related technologies and libraries. One thing I learned is that this is fine when programming as a hobby. Reality kicks in when you try to get users/traction in a world hundreds of millions of active websites to compete with. The point being, a person can build the best mousetrap in the world, but if nobody can find it, what's the point?

So, I decided on ...JavaScript (note the spread operator pun) and its related technologies, then decided to really focus on the other 'non-fun' (to me) aspects of the business, like marketing.

As Tennyson said, we continue "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." (from "Ulysses").

Agree with @Sbalen, I think you've made the right step. Also, I feel your pain about the constraints of our own expertise and all the uncertainty before you see your first positive results. Actually many other founders feel the same:)

If you really consider Building in Public, you can check out https://tokenhunt.club - this is where solo founders unite to build in public and co-achieve goals together

I also have similar thoughts.

I think rephrasing MVP to MVV (Minimum Viable Value) has helped a lot.

MVPs are used to validate that the problem you are trying to solve or the need you are trying to satisfy exists and that there are enough people who have this problem/need. I found when building an MVP, I was focusing too much on the product and worried that my audience may disappear if the MVP wasn't what I deemed good enough.

Reframing MVP to Minimum Viable Value allowed me to cut a lot of the self-sabotaging thoughts, focus on what's actually necessary and cut a lot of the bullshit. I ask myself what is the easiest/simplest/cheapest/fastest solution I can build to satisfy the problem (I think exists), if it doesn't work, I build the next e/s/c/f solution or iterate the existing one until we find a good fit.

Learn to code! There will always be more no-code tools. Develop generalizable skills that you will use in future, not just six months from now.

Hi amalafrozalam, when I read "I've come to the (obvious) conclusion that I need to start somewhere. I've decided that I'm going to finally learn to design and code" I thought Oh No! He/She is doing it again!! Of course, learning how to design and code is important, but it looks like you can already do it. So don't spend too much time in the tutorial hell and start building something.
Spend some time deciding the architecture, but then just build it. You'll be able to change most of it anyway in the future, if needs be.

OMG I've been there but more recently I've started to think about this differently. Maybe this will be helpful to you as well.

I realised that I'm just bad with a real and or metaphorical blank page. I find starting a new project to be difficult but once a really rough version exists I can run with it without much emotional baggage. Initially there are to many options and I'm overthinking every single choice I make. Once version 1.0 exists however, I can make more informed decisions because I've got something to work with. I can collect metrics to help me decide if something is working or not and then adjust accordingly.

I think this is essentially due to overchoice when beginning and is much more common than I initially thought. This mental shift help to remove any potential self blame for failure and instead helped me recognise it was just a part of being human. That meant I could just get on it with.

Now I kind of set myself a challenge when I'm starting something new. It's become a sort of race to mvp 1 for me and this has really helped my productivity. The emotion is gone, it's just about the race.

Anyway this change it thought patterns helped me. Maybe it will help you in someway as well.

Good luck and you're being to hard on yourself :)