Pause & Pivot

In retrospect, when I started working on the first idea of what mortar.fm could be, I was doing so for the wrong reason.

Pause

I had a sense that dual podcast and newsletter media content creation as a business model was a growing field, and I thought that I could build a tool at the intersection of those fields. And so mortar_v1 was built.

This is probably still an area ripe for innovative tools from indie hackers.

I could not get excited about working on mortar_v1 every day. I've figured out now that this was because the need that mortar_v1 was solving for users wasn't a need that I had. And so, mortar_v1 just sat silently running with no active users and no maintenance burden for almost two years.

Pivot

I am a creature of habit - almost to a fault at times. I wake up at the exact same time every morning, regardless of when I ended my previous night. I then have exactly two hours of uninterrupted time while the rest of the house is asleep. I put on my headphones, turn on the day's FT News Briefing podcast episode, start brewing a pot of coffee, grab my laptop, and post up on a stool in the kitchen. I work on whatever task most needs my singular focus until my two hours is up. That is until I'm distracted by needing to fiddle around with my phone to get the next daily podcast I listen to playing - Wall Street Breakfast.

This got me thinking one day that it might be pretty easy to build a simple web app where users can enter a few podcast show feeds and get a daily playlist of only those show's episodes that had been published that day. Maybe something like this already exists in Airr the podcast player that I use, or even within Spotify. However, I don't want to encourage Spotify's walled garden approach to podcasts by consuming podcasts through them, and I use Airr solely for the audio clipping feature since it integrates so nicely with Readwise (which I use as my singular collection point that funnels things right into Obsidian).

So, I spent one evening setting up an idiomatic flask app, following the tutorial in the flask docs. By the end of that first night, I had user registration and authentication working and more importantly, I understood how they worked. Then for one whole week, I didn't write any code. I had a week of final projects and final exams for the two graduate programs I'm doing simultaneously and so thinking about this personal daily podcast feed aggregator got relegated to the background.

And then, just like that, In three days I had something functional that checked every box on my lean feature list. This list had been pared down to the barest essentials over the week of thinking about what the smallest working solution would look like while doing my finals.

While listening to my morning podcasts today using the tool that I just created I realized that I was able to build this so quickly and enjoy the building process so much more because I was building for a need that I actually had, instead of just a need that I theoretically understood to exist but hadn't experienced. It seems like all of my entrepreneurial efforts involve me learning this lesson over and over again, that I do my best work when I'm working to solve a problem that I have.