[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)