What keeps you from working on your ideas?
Most people have a list of ideas. What is your reason for not testing out that x months old idea?
Is it the shortage of time? Are you not sure how to start working on your idea? Are you afraid you build something no one wants?
For me personally I always had a shortage of time and skills (I cannot code Webflow on my own😅), but not anymore! Explained in this post.
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I believe many get discouraged by the enormous competition online and don't think they could differentiate themselves enough to succeed.
Most definitely time. I have a newborn, a 3 year old and a full time job to fit my side project alongside.
But I am happy with a slow pace as long as I can consistently do something 3-4 days of the week.
These days you don't need to build a MVP to validate an idea. Simply pick up the phone or email customers and talk to them about their problems. Be in love with the problem not your solution.
Yup! Something I recently discovered myself, described in this post
Mostly it's about idea validations.
No one wants to build a product for few days and see 0 traffic in it.
True! That’s the stupidest thing ever, not having users.
But idea validation can be simply right? Have a landingpage, search customers in communities talk to them and see if there is a need. If there isn’t you can remove the idea from your notes.
Idea validation is a great way to keep your notes clean of old ideas I think.
Honestly, it has to be fun to build. I have a lot of ideas that don't turn out to be very fun.
I thought I was bad at the final stages of getting an idea out there if I don't find it fun. I have so many cool machine learning projects that I totally should have whacked a frontend on, but I just don't find it fun writing that part of the code unless I have some sorta external motivation. But now I am thinking potentially I was burnt out after 4 years on a big project.
Trying to change that behavior by doing regular incremental releases and updates, and optimising for the enjoyment of building stuff.
My most recent project is automatic image enhancement for real estate photography. About to ship sky replacement, and slowly adding functionality to the site. Feels good to have a few people coming back and using it everyday, which seem to be correcting for the external motivation.
True! You have to have motivation. For me my motivation always was yeah I learned this new framework, lets build something cool with it haha.
This is just another good reason to first search for customers then start building a product. It can be so simple, like sharing a simple Carrd website in communities, that could bring in already so much customers!
Mostly time constraints.
I have a laundry list of ideas but each one takes time.
I am working on creating a way to prototype and launch within 2 weeks and see what sticks.
I just resigned from my job as I am moving overseas so I will take 3 months of my time between my old job and potential new job to try to launch 3 new products within that time frame. Also taking some time off as I am close to burning out.
Time, the biggest enemy:(
Congrats on moving oversees! I want to do that too, may I ask where you are going?
I think launching a prototype in two weeks is a great idea! This ensures you build the bare minimum.
I would also consider not building a prototype at all and just build a landing page or something else that can help you get customers, maybe even just a powerpoint xd. This way you can quickly check if there will be any demand for your prototype and this can often be done in days!
Time and money constraints (fears).
Let's a asume for a second that I have a validated product and hundreds or signups willing to pre-pay (I don't).
Should I take that money and hire developers to build it? I have a 9-5 job and I'm not in the position to quit, even if I had all that money from sing ups. That would mean I would have to find someone to build it for me, but then also I would spend a lot of time reviewing the code and working on functional / technical specs (I'm a SWE so that wouldn't be much of a technical problem).
My fear is what if I my developers can't make it? Should I return the money? Would that mean pay it from my own (shallow) pockets?
The alternative is not take any money and build it myself which would imply 2-3 hrs every day after my 9-5 job. I know for sure these things take months and months to be built so I know that might just expose me to burnout.
So, what I'm doing instead is save money, put it on long term stocks and check IH from time to time and sigh.
Investing is always good to do!
You can get money from pre-sales, but you can also try to get funding (if you have a lot of signups). Also most products aren't that technically difficult + you can most likely even find a developer here on Indiehackers who is willing to work for equity, or a reduced amount until the product is build. I think there are a lot of opportunities if you validated some idea!
Time and prioritising my mental health. Sometimes these projects take over my life and it’s hard for me to find a balance. I’m working on it
I find that so hard too! Sometimes I feel like I cannot waste any second, but after a few days you burn out and do nothing, motivation is gone then.
When I was developing it was really bad. I had days on which I was coding all day (16 hours) and while sleeping I was still thinking in fcking code, no joke. Then after a week I was completely burned out, couldn’t do anything anymore, motivation completely gone.
A limiting belief of mine is that I have to focus 100% on a side project or it's not worthwhile or will fail, so I generally don't start new projects because I don't think I have the mental energy or time required.
In a lot of cases, that's true and it's probably the right call. At the same time, it would still be valuable to put in a few hours a week to a side project and let it progress over time rather than never starting waiting for the perfect time.
Oh yeah, I don’t think there is a right or wrong in this case, sometimes you can do something next to it and sometimes not.
For example, I think it is harder to build two things next to each other (the actual coding) then to be building one thing and validating the other.
Good point! I think we can work harder than we think, just not on the same thing all the time. That's something I like about doing freelance work in addition to my day job. I can code at work and still have a lot of energy to do design, but I can't code all day for long stretches of time.