How do you stick with one idea when you have multiple?

I have had the same problem for at least 15 years. I took some advice from a book called Finish.

I don't let myself work on any other project until I have finished the one I've committed myself to. I can write down the ideas, but can't work on them. It's almost like a reward for finishing my current project to get to work on the new, exciting project.

It's amazing how many other ideas I get the closer I am to finishing a project, and they all seem like absolute winners. It's also quite amazing how many of those I don't have much interest in by the time I finish my original project.

Take my advice with a grain of salt because, ironically, I never finished reading the book...

My advice as a Growth Hacker: Pair up with a marketeer/Growth Hacker who can help with the marketing. If the product gains traction and starts making some money, your interest will likely increase again because you have revenue, a co-founder motivating you, a product with customers wanting new features etc. What do you think?

My first action to stay motivated is to divide and conquer. Working on and finishing small tasks is rewarding.

Second thing is to accept slow progress, set reasonable goals and track them. It's a longer journey but better slow and steady than to become exhausted and loose motivation.

I get 2 to 10 ideas a day. Most are implementation related, some are new applications. I write in a notebook for 2 hours each day (I use an iPad Pro w/pencil and Notability to track them all).

Those that keep presenting themselves in day-to-day conversations with other people, or keep coming up in each writing session are the ones that get Pinned and worked on over time.

I stopped getting BSO ideas (bright-shiny-object) when I accepted that the ideas are not viable without deep thought over many weeks, and this has allowed me to stop being dragged from idea-project to idea-project, and to only focus on the recurring themes.

Also, never continue a project that you aren’t driven to work on, or where it’s for someone else and they are losing interest or won’t commit to helping in some way. Hope this helps.

I have a suggestion, but first I wanted to mention that I have the opposite problem. I can't start anything, since I'm not a developer (well, I went to school for that over 30 years ago but moved on to management). I have plenty of ideas but no one to develop them, and I'm prepared and excited to do the company-building part of it all. I currently have 3 projects on the go in addition to my company that I've run for the last 20 years. One that I just can't seem to find expertise for is one that involves google maps routing. Anyhow, my suggestion for you would be to partner with someone who you trust that shares your vision and is willing to take it to the next step and keep you on for updates and edits. If even that level of involvement bores you, then consider selling the bare bones of the project on MicroAcquire.

I thought I’d add this to my previous comments. I’m assuming that most commenters are devs like myself. I built my own business and I’m still learning about marketing and selling services.

I don’t want to generalize. This is based on my own experience, but as devs, we have a very narrow vision when it comes to building products.

I’m fascinated by devs who successfully launch products and build a user base. But in reviewing some of the success stories, my take is:

1. Make it simple. Solve one problem.
2. Don’t work endlessly because you think the solution is not yet perfect. It will never be perfect.
3. Get feedback.
4. Market yourself. You will probably get rejected a lot. It’s part of the process. Don’t give up if you truly believe in your product and are passionate about it.

Engineers struggle with this because we over complicate things. It’s ok to admit it - I started and abandoned 4 projects in the last 6 months alone.

Here is my advice. I started following this method and it’s helped me quite a bit.

1. Step away from the code. Close VS, GitHub…etc
2. Use Notion or something similar. Write a plan.
   It should include the following:

WHAT: explain what you are building in plain English. No technical terms.

WHY: What made you start the project? Draw from personal experience, or someone that inspired you to embark on this project.

WHO: the target audience. Is the solution meant for marketers, B2B, general users…

Once you have a written plan, use Trello and create micro tasks. Work on them and at the end of each day move them to Complete.

This gives you a sense of accomplishment. Solo projects are very lonely. You need someone type of motivation to keep going.

I don’t know what you are working on but I have a hunch that you are over complicating the solution. We typically solve the initial problem that promoted us to start coding but then all of the sudden it doesn’t seem like it’s “enough”.

Frustration sets in, you either abandon your work or begrudgingly add more features because in your head, your product is not good enough.

Don’t over complicate it. Think about all the other products you use every day; at one point they solved one thing and one thing only. Then over time, they kept adding features and improving based on user feedback.

Hi Zach, I tried reading through the comments looking for someone saying what I'm about to say. I sorta saw one person use the word "launch" but they didn't really give a real reason why that works. Here's what worked for me, for me to go from many ideas to one.

I realized that I was working with incomplete information. When I fritted around different ideas, I was the repeating factor. I was at the center of each one. I chose to move on. And that's wrong. I am not the reason a business starts/thrives/grows. It's customers. It's paying users.

You need more information than just your internal boredom. When it gets easy, go hard (source: Alex Hormozi)

That boredom actually should trigger a launch mechanism.

Get the product, the solution, into the hands of users. Watch them use it. Get paid for it. If nobody pays, move on. If someone pays and then doesn't use it, move on. If someone pays and uses it (badly) fix the product.

The customer is always right, when they pay.

That's the only time the customer is right by the way. the usual shtick "customer is always right" is wrong. It's the moment they pay, they are right.

I was looking at your profile to check out your products but on your IH profile I see you have "0" products. Make a product. Update it. Launch it.

And don't be so hard on yourself. There is nearly no business decision ever made that can't be easily reversed.

You can launch, anything, over and over and over again. There are so many markets. There are so many marketing channels.

You can kill products. You can kill profitable projects. You can kill old projects. You can build projects, products, or businesses, but you usually can't build all three.

Also, consider being an Indiehacker doesn't mean you have to be alone. There are tons of people who want to develop more, faster, and create side projects, lead magnets, but don't have the time. they have a main product but they want to build more, faster so they hire people who can build something from scratch.

I work with a developer, even though I learned to code (Ruby on Rails) last year. I still hire some google script ppl on upwork if I can't figure something out for a client. And I code google script a lot now. TweetHunter founders are working with someone, and even bought a side project for their marketing.

You really don't know who you will meet here in indiehacker world or how you can work together until you just put yourself out there and launch stuff.

I don’t - if I launch 10 ideas and 3 gain some traction - 1 of those will show potential to become a viable business. How fast can you launch something and validate your audience?

Why not share all your ideas publicly on Twitter (or something similar, maybe here as well) and then see what people resonate with? You'll be more motivated to work on those ideas people are engaging with. That can be a good first-level filter.

Have you ever considered just stopping to push you into finishing? My brain literally keeps me from doing anything, that is not interesting to me . So sometimes I just forget to work further on ideas and stuff, sometimes procrastination kicks in, sometimes I just can’t make my brain to function at all when working on that project. So I just have to give myself permission to let go of the project - for now. Until it becomes interesting to me again. stopping for me doesn’t mean deleting all the project progress. I have a large folder of unfinished projects that just lie there for me to getting interesting again and continue on them with a fresh mind.

I know, advice like that is maybe not what you thought of hearing, but for me personally this is my “productivity hack”. Not stressing out and not punishing yourself for not finishing, but going with your flow, Working on what’s fun for you. And finishing consistently over time (because for me the energy always comes back, sooner or later, there’s always a project that interests me and gets done), but maybe not in the order or the timing you thing you would. ;)

mostly projects stuck in the marketing, branding, and growth stage.

to grow the business, you need to focus more on marketing!

I ain`t a developer, but as an Entrepreneur its a hype vs the commitment, some people take advantage of emerging new tech trends and tend to make use of tools to growth hack their presence, on the other hand i feel there are ppl that have been working on a particular issue for years ignring emerging trends, bitcoin could be one of the great example...

Afterall in my view, it comes to making a strategic choice.

I just try to do big chunks of work and then, if I can't resist, I just switch to another project. Always doing a big chunk.
At least I do step forward and I don't feel like I'm losing momentum.

Either wait before you start to expire ideas that are not so valuable, or fully work on one idea, making yourself too busy to have others

Just wanted to say I struggle with this too. I haven't found a solution yet, but I'm trying to find ways to have more skin in the game with whatever I'm working on (finding a co-founder, taking some funding, or making a lot of technical progress that would be hard to throw away).

I have the same issue, but I’ve spent so much time on a whole bunch of different ideas, so for my mental health I figured out some ways how I can make use of this syndrome.

• Build a blog or platform where I can share all these ideas for free you can monetize with ads, build email list of all those who are interested in those ideas. (I’m currently doing this)
• Sell my business ideas (I’m planning to do this)
• build the site, layout, buy domain etc, outline how I would run the business to success and flip that site on a site like Flippa.
• Sell templates (so if you had an idea for a marketing software, design it, build it and sell it as template to someone who wants to build something similar, there are many sites to sell templates.
• find people who are willing to invest sweat and help you run these businesses for a stake. (I’ve done this and it works when you find a smart and hardworking partner).
  There are many ways you can win, the fear too is that you’re not sure which one will take off or do the best, if that’s your biggest fear then you may need to partner with others so you can manage all of them and see which one does better. But you will eventually have a favorite of all and no matter what new projects you think of you’ll always reflect on that favorite one, my favorite one was the one I never gave up on after a week, month or year, I stick to it, I was interested, I update the design very often because I get tired of the old ones which isn’t bad. Choose one that you’ll work on the most that you think you can do when you feel happy or sad, one that you think is really in demand and one that you know for sure has potential. Set goals that you want to reach and every time you feel like giving up on that project you can reflect on your goal and what that project can do for you.

I think I too have this trait but in my case the urge to work on a new project becomes more dominant after a few months of working on a previous project.

In my case I started building Famewall in February this year & grew it slowly till July.

Then I came across the problem of emails with Mailboat & started working on it from August and just shipped the beta last week.

Since I currently don't have a full-time job, I'm trying to grow both the products with the advantage of Famewall running on autopilot while I actively have to onboard customers with Mailboat

do not stick one , do it all . you will never know which one could be success.

I do all of them simultaneously, and if one takes off, I focus on that one.

You might need to change your mindset, or maybe you can turn this into a strength. There are probably tons of folks here with a penchant for marketing who would be ecstatic to partner with you. Finding a partner is a great way to patch your own weaknesses while sticking to what you're best at.

Do the careful numeric analysis of each option, weight it against each other. It will be easier to refer back to your rational thoughts later.

The answer is one you don't want to hear and that's to stick at it whether you like it or not. You have to wake up every day and do the hard thing. People think that making something is all fun and games but if you're in it to make a business/money then there is going to be a lot of not-so-fun stuff to do too, like continually working on something past the point it's exciting. You need to ask yourself whether you'd be better off working a 9-5 and just having these apps etc. as non-profitable side projects or whether you really want to be a founder and deal with the not-so-glamourous side of it.

Nothing is going to suddenly make you stick at something you don't like. Founding a business takes a lot of time and effort and you have to love the idea even when you hate it. Sounds like you'd be better in a job where you can be creative every day at someone else's expense. At least that way you get paid to do stuff you enjoy all the time.