What keeps indie hackers motivated? 🤔

I guess I'll start 🙃

Here are some ways I keep myself motivated.

Listening to music 🎶. My preferences are rap (Jack Harlow/John Wolf anyone? 😄), lo-fi, and seasonal music. Doing this helps me stay focused and motivated. It hypes me up and keeps me on track. It's not fun listening to the noises around you or being in a completely quiet room. You'll be less productive and more annoyed, making you less motivated and will end with making a lower-quality product.

Working on something fun 😋! If it's not fun/or helpful to my learning, why am I doing it 🤷‍♂️? Okay, okay. Learning essential skills are necessary, but always try to start a practice them in real-life by working on something you enjoy and love to do. For example, I made an Emoji-Searcher with React 🦄 to develop my skills and because it was super fun to do!

Lastly, have make sure you have a balance between coding and regular life. Coding shouldn't be the most important part of your life. Balance it with other important parts to your daily-lives whether it be family, chilling with friends, going for a walk outside, or practicing a new hobby! It's important that you make sure you have this balance in order to be happy and have a better outlook on life. Programming 12 hours a day won't do that for you. 😉

okay, okay you hard-core devs... don't act like you didn't know that 😅

Reading or hearing inspirational stories, especially on podcasts. Bouncing around ideas with other indie hackers, including people I interview for my own podcast. A few talks, like DHH's at Startup School '08.

my community — they are teh reason i do this.

I like to keep a small backlog of todos labeled "easy wins". Then on days where I'm feeling unmotivated, I take care of a quick "easy win" or two and that generally gets me back in the mindset of "doing" and I'm able to start making progress on the task I was putting off for lack of motivation.

What I've found is that usually the feedback that you get around user's minor annoyances with your product make good "easy wins" - things like "this spacing feels off" or "it is annoying that I have to click two buttons to do this one thing".

Part of solving that user's annoyance is also getting back to them that their annoyance is fixed. One would assume that this kind of outreach to a user can only positively impact their relationship with you, so there are some positive knock-on effects of solving "easy wins" besides just getting back to the main task at hand with increased motivation.

Reading user’s reviews/feedback and know that your product help making their life easier🙂

In general, good results of my folks or some success from guys with "from zero to 90000000 dollars" helps me a lot. I just see that everything is possible and find some energy to continue pushing my way.

Visualizing the good stuff that will happen if I complete what I started, pushes me to go back to the field and start running again.

For me its traffic and payments. I have not had a successful payment based app yet, but I get pretty good traffic on a few. When I see a distinct upward trend in weekly traffic I get excited.

It's fun building stuff for people. There are ups and downs though, when I spend a long time on something and it flops it can feel pretty terrible.

Well, sometimes knowing that you are about to hit the floor helps. It's like life and death, the reflex just kicks in.

It doesn't have to mean that you are strapped financially. Perhaps you have this goal in the future that you'd like to achieve, but are running short of time. Perhaps a baby is on the way and you need to work hard to provide a good living for your new family.

It helps to step back and look at things from afar. The big picture view makes our hurdles look tiny.