Today I had an epiphany! And it changed me forever.
Epiphany is an experience of a sudden and striking realization.
I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, and had many side projects. All failed: bad idea, wrong partners, terrible/no execution etc.
I reckon I wasted too much time because I always started coding and building the product itself. But I never tried validating my idea despite it being a startup 101 . Coding always seemed to be the easier path...
Two weeks ago I started working on Coolboard. A lightweight whiteboard application for ad-hoc technical discussions. This time I wanted it to be different and decided to focus on marketing, community and validation. Btw, if you're interested in shoot me an email
I felt and still feel an internal resistance. After some self reflection I realized that I am too attached to my ideas. I wanted them to be the best idea in the world, and I was scared to be proven otherwise. Because somehow I see them as part of me.
Sometimes I didn't even wanted to google my idea. Because I might find something that shows that either the idea is bad or someone already created it.
The epiphany came today: I'm not my ideas, and if one is not excellent, that doesn't mean that I'm stupid or worthless. Moreover I can start it over as many times I want and nothing too bad will happen to me. There is no need to be afraid!
This gave me a great consolation and I am sure that now I'm on my way becoming a real indie hacker.
Did you have similar realization that helped you to become a better entrepreneur? If yes what was that?
Love this man. We are our own worst enemies, gotta get out of our own way.
I had a very similar realization that allowed to me to be more open to critical feedback. I always felt that whenever I came up with something, that that idea had to be the best idea ever and immediately started to work on it. Everytime I would mention it to someone and I didn't recieve the right feedback, I would lose interest fairly quickly. I felt invalidated because of that. However, I've managed to look at it differently and actually challenge people to invalidate the ideas I come up with before I work on it. I write them down and see how I can improve the idea I had with the given feedback. Often this has lead to eureka moments and started working on something much better than I intially thought of.
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Hey Patrick,
good point! The exact same thing happens to me all the time.
I was thinking about this, and I decided to stop coding until I will be able to get at least 20-30 opinions on my project and will spend at least half of my project time on non-development activities. I've just started putting together a questionnaire about these online whiteboards, and am going share it on relevant forums. And then will see :)