You've gotta really care...
One of my biggest mistakes while shipping has been my lack of motivation to do promotion for my products once I had built them.
I was greatly interested in the actual building aspect but when it comes to putting it live I often ended up dead in the water!
My worse case of this was launching a product called Ruiter. It was a website builder for recruiters complete with a job board and other tools useful for recruiters.
The biggest competitor (Volcanic) had a sales team and required calling them to get any pricing info (read: expensive).
I planned to become a low touch competitor.
The Idea was validated - my friend ran a web design agency and frequently complained about how all the WordPress plugins for recruitment agencies sucked despite paying good money for licenses.
So I built the product and it was time to create some content to promote the product.
That's when I realised:
I have absolutely ZERO INTEREST in recruitment.
And that was that. I didn't take it any further because I had been here before:
Knowing you should be doing more but constantly struggling for content ideas and being immensely demotivated when seeing people who truly did have a passion in that niche creating great content.
Thankfully Ruiter didn't take long to build but it was definitely way too long to learn a simple lesson.
Having spent some time analysing what interests me I'm finding that writing about those subjects are immensely easier and getting traction is easier then ever before.
If you've found yourself in a similar situation to me, I would recommend finding that thing that really gets you going before you jump in head first.
Finding a subject matter that you really care about is not at all easy but I would suggest seeking new experiences and digging deep in your self to find what get's you going. But that's another chunky subject, maybe for another post.
Twitter 👉 @kizahere
I'm sure you learned more than you think by building your project. You should focus on that.
I did exactly the same: I built a buffer-like app, then I understood I had no interest whatsoever for social media;the project died.
From there, I internalized the fact that I needed to work on something I was really interested in.
Very true, there's something to learn from anything
An extremely underrated, and very valuable lesson. Be glad that you've learned it :)
I've been in your place, building for the sake of building. I can tell you the Indiehacker life is 10x or 20x more pleasurable and dare-I-say-it... easier ...when you actually care.
Agreed ☺
I can relate to that because I have been (maybe still am) in those situation. It's been almost 3 weeks since I launched Designtack and the purpose it serves is to create social media content in bulk, in minutes. But so far, I am the only "active" user of it as I am using it to promote it which is one of the thing I don't like doing much.
What do you plan to do with ruiter now? Are you still going to pursue marketing it?
Designtack looks like quite a complicated one to build, congrats on launching!
At least you're using it, that's a good sign.
I don't plan on continuing with Ruiter as I have more successful projects that I can put my effort into that are closer to my heart.
For now, I am going all in with designtack. Thank you for sharing your REAL story.
All the best, good luck ☺
I'm finding the same, and difficulty in creating something that gets me going + has actual demand.
Perhaps you should have found a partner to take care of the promotion if that was required to make the product successful. If you cannot promote a good product it does not mean it should not exist, there might be a 'Steve Jobs' out there who can't build it but who can promote it effectively.
Very true, I think it definately could have worked with a marketing
I reached out to my friend that runs an agency about it as he had expressed interest in getting involved in the marketing but he's pretty busy so it didn't work out.