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Would you work on abandoned Side projects you started at an impulse?

Hey Indiehackers, I have been avoiding this forum for a while, purely due to Imposter syndrome, but Now I a goal to be socially active before 2020.

The What

I am working on a project called Crazy Ex Project. It's a telegram bot reminds you of all the abandoned repos on GitHub, and nags you to work on them, and the way it does is, similar to a crazy ex who wants to gets back together, and you clearly have moved on.

The Why

I work on silly scripts every now and then, to post on my instagram, and sometimes on the twitter as well,

and one such tweet caught 13 people's attention and they decided to like the tweet.

I took it as a sign and started making a web app out of it.

Let me know if you'll use it.

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    Interesting idea. I'd like to understand the core problem that you are trying to solve. My reasons for abandoning side projects are generally...

    1. Lack of time
    2. Other priorities popped up and I'm not able to allocate bandwidth for the project anymore
    3. Laziness
    4. Felt a little discouraged for various reasons - progress, competition, realized that the project is too big for myself and will take a lot more time to build, no demand/usage for it, etc

    Each of these have different triggers other than reminders that push us to resume working on the projects.

    Except for laziness, I wouldn't want to get reminded of getting back to my projects, unless it is a few years apart, in which case I'd want to revisit it for a quick revaluation (eg., new tech might make the idea more feasible to implement).

    Laziness is a bigger problem. The user would want a more direct solution to that problem.

    About getting reminders a few years later, it's hard to figure out when to set the reminder for because these revaluations are generally triggered based something that we learn which makes us think - "I wonder if it makes sense to pick up that project again, considering this new thing...".

    1. 1

      You have made some good observations.

      Each of these have different triggers other than reminders that push us to resume working on the projects.

      yes. depending on the reason of abandonment, each instance require a different trigger to get back on the project.

      Laziness is a bigger problem.

      The major problem I face is laziness as well. Having a good idea in mind, but not finding the will to work on it, is the most common reason why I abandon the projects.

      The audience I am trying to appeal is Indie hacker who with full time jobs, looking to get a side project, off the ground.

      You have multiple abandoned side projects, some of it could be really good. you get a message every Friday, with a list of projects you could work on for the weekend.

      1. 1

        Cool. So we are aligned about laziness... :D

        My point is that if laziness is a problem, then it is systemic. So if you are willing to solve for it at that level, then you are helping the person in a better way in all areas of life (much bigger selling prop). Sometimes laziness is just your brain doing a lot of processing in the background, so it's good in some ways.

        I'm basically questioning the premise of how a bot can help. Some ideas that I'm able to think of...

        1. Send inspiring stories and life hacks once in a while to trigger motivation (you can even do that as a PR since you want to address github repos...might be fun... :))
        2. Some NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) related bot to keep the person motivated
        3. An interactive bot that records why the person is abandoning the project, understand the reasons and provide relevant triggers when the time comes

        Your idea about sending message every Friday is pretty good. Has a lot of scope of automation and can be a good starting point. Success will depend a lot on how you design the communication patterns.

    1. 1

      Thank you.

      Let me know if you would like to try it

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