My motivation, experiences and learnings so far from building in public on YouTube.

Hello Indie Hackers! Great to see you in "Building in Public"!

I want to get this group going by sharing my story and learnings from the ongoing creation of a side project in public. I hope you follow the suit!

The backstory is relatively trivial: as a developer working in various startups, I always liked the idea of creating a cute, tiny project of my own, which I can take care of and nurture to profitability. Some elaborate Tamagochi, if you will. But such that can also take care of me when I am old and grumpy by earning me some pizza money.

And, oh boy, did I try! Full of enthusiasm, I would start working on my Unique Ideas at least once a year! As soon as I would come up with one and decide to work on it, I would get such a spike of motivation that sometimes I wouldn't be able to fall asleep - dreaming of making it BIG and famous and with all the features I can only imagine, and wow it is actually also possible to integrate a marketplace into it, and a native app is a must-have, and everyone will be using it - even my nasty neighbor from the first floor who never closes the back door... omg Omg OMG!

Well, you get it, right? I cannot be alone.

Do you know what would typically happen next? I know you do, don't pretend to be different!

I would submerge into the warm and cozy womb of language and framework selection. Clojure? Yes! Scala? Of course! Typescript? Why not? React, Vue? Absolutely! Give me three of each!
I would configure my editor a little bit to "be more productive with my new project." I would do a lot of things. Such a lovely phase. Worth it.

But that's just the beginning. Because now I would dive into the programming. Immediately. It's better than orgasm and pancakes and all the kittens on YouTube combined, I swear! I am the Demiurge, the Creator, the Zuckerberg in his dorm when he still wasn't the evil Martian. I am just two steps away from becoming filthy-rich in my intricate plan:

Start coding
....
Filthy rich!

Except that I never finished.

I never progressed further than a monstrous version of a pre-pre-pre MVP.
You know that version. It's the one with ugly fonts and stock illustrations with faceless people. The one you feel so sorry for that you decide to kill it right there to stop it from suffering.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

At some point, I got tired of this vicious circle. I decided that even if I do any coding - it will be the absolute minimum, with the boring set of technologies, for an unambitious idea. I don't care if I have only one customer in the end, and that's my mom. Because I must go through the whole damn process. I need to learn to take it from the beginning to the end.

And I must stick with it. I must make it so impossible and embarrassing to quit that if I were to quit this time, I would need a new passport from DarkNet, a surgery, and spend the rest of my life as a shepherd in the Carpathian mountains.

So I started a YouTube channel.

On that channel, I share my journey, and to be able to focus on all the aspects of product creation and to learn before I even attempt something more ambitious, I've picked a relatively simple idea.

And let me tell you, even that is hard.

Everything from setting up the light, the composition, recording the video in a non-native language, and all the way to editing that video in software with thousand little bells and whistles and to making such thumbnails for the video that even people with the attention span of a 5-years old want to click on it.

It's hard to research the market; it's hard to find potential customers to talk to; it's hard to write an appealing text for the landing page. It's all hard, but it's been so gratifying so far!

Even though I am at the very beginning of this journey, it's such a rewarding, out-of-the-comfort zone experience that I want to run around, convincing everyone to give it a try, too.

Because when you share it publicly - it forces you to think about all the questions people will ask you. It forces you to condense and filter the information down to the main message. This process makes it so much easier to see yourself from the outside. You can typically fool yourself, but you cannot fool your audience.

So here I am! A couple of weeks in, no single line of code written yet. Sitting with my coffee and trying to figure out how to reach out to potential customers. What questions to ask them so that I can learn about their real problems, and not about the problems I imagined they might have.

Wish me luck.

And subscribe to my channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwEzHQF-0lUNfYEL2vVGJFA