[HN Gopher] Why my projects keep failing ___________________________________________________________________ Why my projects keep failing Author : jaytaph Score : 79 points Date : 2022-02-03 14:34 UTC (2 days ago) (HTM) web link (adayinthelifeof.nl) (TXT) w3m dump (adayinthelifeof.nl) | pjmlp wrote: | My personal projects fail most of the time, unless it is a side | gig where I have to deliver to someone. | | I think this is quite common, after one learns what we wanted to | learn, e.g. how a tile engine works, then the interest is lost | and we move on to the next challenge. | | On the positive side, some of them can be used as portfolio for | HR. | oscargrouch wrote: | I can relate to a lot of things he said, but one thing i used to | pass through that was to dedicate myself to a bigger goal. | | I've started a side project that took me some years (at least 4), | a lot of perseverance, because there are a bunch of things that | are actually quite boring to implement. (You actually need to | create some thick skin to overcome those boring tasks that | sometimes can take weeks) | | Lost basically all of my friends in the process (i'm a social | person actually), with the exception of a few who kind of | understood it. | | No weekends, working from 12 to 14 hours a day, having to mix and | deal with already bigger and established codebases.. its the | loneliest job in the world and you need a lot of mental balance | and good mood to go through it. | | But some special spice that actually helped me going on was that | there is a social goal in the project and the idea is to provide | a way out of the FAANG centralized and controlled world. | | People are mostly unaware of where we are heading it as long they | have cool gadgets to play with, and governments might only act | when its to late. So while everybody is enchanted with this brave | new world, the way the things are heading is actually a pretty | dangerous one (and i really hope to be wrong on this). | | This was a very special reason that keep me going even in the | hardest parts (as for instance when i lost my dad to COVID). | | Its not really finished yet as it needs some polish, but giving | it needs just a little love, at least now i'm able to do | interviews for steady jobs (specially now with more remote ones) | and get out of this life of doing freelancing work which | sometimes is not very fun. | | Anyway, my point being, that maybe there's a need for something | else, as in my experience, just intellectual curiosity wont do | the trick.. (I`ve had some of those too) | | For instance even with burnout (which i kind of postponed to the | last moment), i'm motivated to go through it all to see this | project have at least the (little) recognition it deserves and i | don't care to have recognition myself nor i've done it to become | rich, as there were much better and easy to implement ideas to | that goal, but i just want to see it "on track", having a way to | evolve and become a viable alternative road to another kind of | future giving us back the power that is actually ours in the | first place. | arisAlexis wrote: | You need to read lean startup my friend.it will save you some | years. | happytiger wrote: | This is great. I love it when there's honest post from a builder. | | The explanation for failure is clear to me. None of these | products as they are constructed are customer-lead. They don't | start with product market fit. As crazy as it hounds the number | one reason startups fail is a lack of customers. | | You love building the technical solution. You want to have market | success. | | But your passion is probably not talking to the customer, | gathering requirements, or doing promotional talks and webinars. | | You need a product or marketing focused partner to handle that | side of things. I've always looked at the ideal team as being | three roles: ops, product and maker. The details, the customer | and requirements and the build team each are critical to getting | product market fit and that's just everything when it comes to | this stuff. I would just focus on finding a partner in crime | because your are obviously a wonderfully talented engineer. | wnolens wrote: | I'm impressed most of the projects got to the point of functional | application and the problem being lack of customers. | | That's a wild success for a side-project IMO. | | My side-projects average about a long weekend length in | commitment before I give up. There's just not a strong enough | need to overcome the effort. Given extra time, I do other things. | EXCEPT right now.. I moved to a new city and have no friends and | dislike my day job, so I've got some spare time and coding-energy | to spend. | favourable wrote: | I personally love being singularly focused on a passion project / | labor of love, and try not to spread myself thinly across | multiple projects. I have recently given up research-and- | development type scenarios where I tinker with new toy languages, | frameworks, tooling, etc | | I mean it's important to explore and toy with new ideas, but the | real quest is to stick with a project and see it out until its | death. The caveat being, the project could end up being another | ephemeral flash in the pan (depending on what timescale you cast | as ephemeral). | | I try to build & contribute to projects that will outlive me. | Think of all your code commits on Github or other projects: you | essentially write code that could last centuries, because you're | contributing to something bigger than 'you' or your own pet | project. This is why I love open source - it doesn't forget. | lumost wrote: | Almost by definition, most _new_ projects in software are | failures. The reasons are simple. | | 1. Incumbents benefit from network effects in users, and | integrations. | | 2. Due to 1, most software markets consolidate around a top | player and a list of 2-10 second-tier players. The top player | will hold 90% market share and the remainder will split the ~10%. | | 3. It costs only slightly more for a top-player to keep staying | on top as it does for a second-tier player to keep being second- | tier. | | This all means that if you want to become an incumbent you need | to be early for any market, and that market can't be a feature of | an existing incumbent. A good example of the latter was the push | for "Cloud operating systems" back in the early 10s. As it turned | out standard linux distros worked pretty well in the cloud. | | You also never know if you are early, late, or if the problem is | too big until you try. The more times you try the more likely you | are to succeed! | VBprogrammer wrote: | It depends what you are trying to achieve but there are usually | niche corners of any market which are underserved or ignored by | the incumbents. While you may never become the top player in | the market you can make a decent living in many of these if you | find the right corner of the market. | | Of course, if your aim is to become a silicon valley bro living | on ramen noodles and angel investor tears then you'll need to | find a way of disrupting the incumbent, and if your plan is to | do the same thing but cheaper you are wasting your time. | smoyer wrote: | I'd certainly be interested in working on Leita and of course | using it (if the author ever sees this). | searchableguy wrote: | Glancing through the project ideas. | | The market the author is trying to target in each of their ideas | is hard to monetize without sales engineering. | | Selling OS and programming language is impossible today and was | hard back then without significant moat into a niche field. Think | of wolfram alpha. | | I suspect timing may have been an issue for Author's e-commerce | idea. The craze for drop shipping and operating your own store is | recent. You need logistics, manufacturing, etc on demand services | to make it possible. Similar situation on payment, tax, etc side. | It became much easier and hit mainstream somewhere around 2010. | | The primary target for assessment tool is in edu or enterprise. | Both of which are hard to get in without competent sales. | | Dating and job board do not mix well. Monetizing any dating style | app is hard without being a little unethical. | | E2E email service is not big of a sell given the protocol doesn't | support it and most people will use unsupported mail service. It | is not the primary reason people use protonmail or fastmail, may | have been a positioning problem. | vijaybritto wrote: | The definition of success in his terms is insane I think. The bar | is set so high. I would consider my side project a success if I | get a ugly version running a basic thing that I designed it to | do! By projects he mean actual companies/hard problems. Maybe a | person who is good with highly talented people can get some | success in a partnership! | wrnr wrote: | The hardest lesson I struggle with is the Pieter Thiel line "the | something of somewhere is always the nothing of nowhere". It is | easy to see something that can marginally be improved or copied | to perfection but this does not give you automatically the | customer base and history that made the original work as a | business. | alea_iacta_est wrote: | > "the something of somewhere is always the nothing of nowhere" | | Never heard this one, what does it mean? | wrnr wrote: | Another way of saying this would be "it is harder to copy | something than it is to make something". For example try | building a successful search engine today, to beat Google at | their own game, you need to solve all this technical problems | plus beat a heavily intrenched incumbent. You can point to | something like duck duck go and sure they did find a | successful niche of privacy aware people that want to | "degoogle" their lives, but even this doesn't mean that you | can just be DuckDuckGo yourself. | Lamad123 wrote: | This doesn't always hold.. You might argue that google | probably aspired to be a yahoo, but I agree itt's bad to | market yourself as a konckoff of something else. | adventured wrote: | The parent slightly misquoted it and it really needs the | context. | | The Silicon Valley of Iowa, is actually the nothing of | nowhere. He is saying that when you are using the name of the | original place to claim yours is the new place, it's more | likely what you've got is a nothing of nowhere (ie the new | place really doesn't matter, thus you're attempting to borrow | reputation in naming in the form of the Silicon Valley of | country/city/location). | | The same usually goes for products/services as well. The Uber | of XYZ is most likely garbage if that's how you're | identifying your service. We're building the Airbnb of | lawnmowers. And so on. Thiel's quote is essentially about | knock-offs, copying, derivatives and how effective (or not) | that process tends to be. | | Elaborated quote from Thiel (from seven or eight years ago; | may be extracted from his book, Zero to One, in which case it | probably actually dates back to the Stanford lectures he | did): | | "There are a few different problems with it, one is that it | is not even clear why Silicon Valley works. It is a singular | thing, it is one time, one place. It's very hard to figure | out what are the factors which drive it. Is it the fact that | it has good weather? Is it the fact that you have this whole | network effect of people and some very successful companies | which have been built over years? Is it the unenforceability | of non-compete agreements so that employees can leave from | one company and go and work in another in the state of | California?" | | "And then I always think that once you have set out to copy | something you have already put yourself in somewhat of an | inferior position somehow. The something of somewhere is the | nothing of nowhere. The Oxford of Iceland is not Oxford. So | all these - Silicon Beach, Silicon Roundabout - these all | sound like inferior knockoffs." | | "You don't want to start with an inferior derivative. The | question always has to be, what is it that you can do that is | better than elsewhere? In the London context, there is a | sense that it is the most cosmopolitan city in Europe and | that is probably the strength that London should be pushing | towards. There has been a lot of interesting finance | innovation in London and so that seems natural." | | https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jan/04/the- | innovat... | runningmike wrote: | Great to see this post on HN front page. Joshua is a technical | inspirational guy. I was lucky to meet him several times when he | organised meet-ups in Apeldoorn. The problem mentioned is typical | for most self employed engineers. Creating a sustainable business | requires many years of dedication to just one idea imho. It's | never about the software that is part of the product. But it's | all about the problem your product solves for your customers. | Creating a sustainable businesses based on an innovative software | product is still not a hard scientific science. But using Problem | Solving Methods (PSMs) is key for solving complex problems like | creating a viable business. See e.g. https://www.bm- | support.org/problem-solving-methods/ for some approaches. | [deleted] | ffhhj wrote: | I engineered my life to keep working on side projects for the | rest of it, getting a low stress job with low but decent pay. | These are some points I try to keep in mind when making them: | | * Inspiration is the most valuable fuel in the universe: Spend | some, save some, replentish. | | * It's MVPs all the way up: focus on the most important tasks, | prioritize the most difficult ones. If that gets done the rest is | easier, but don't waste too much time on that. | | * Forget about it: Let the project rest in the freezer for a few | days. Revisit what the project should accomplish with a clear | mind. Use it daily, suffer from bugs and missing features. | | * Damn! It isn't what people want: The project might need to be | oriented in another very different direction. New features might | be required that will eclipse the original idea. It's depressing, | but is the idea worth it? | | * Get better at sales: and this is the part I'm still working | on... | mynameishere wrote: | _I have a severe form of autism_ | | This idiocy needs to end. If you had a "severe form of autism" | you would need institutional care. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-02-05 23:00 UTC)