Comment by shubhamjain
2 years ago
It's a fair point, but I often see all the ideas I abandoned and realize how some of them could have become profitable had I persisted and not lost motivation. Even a tiny setback (say, no response on Hacker News) was enough for me to stop working on the idea, and start working on something new. Of course, you learn a lot along the way, but to have a successful side-hustle you need to learn to sustain and channel the motivation.
As a creative person, motivation is a wild beast for me. Once I lose it for a project, reviving it feels impossible. But the mindset is a bit troubling. I don't think I would ever work on a project long-term working this way. So, while it's okay to abandon your side-project, it's important to make a mental note of why you're abandoning your project and if you can work on something better next time.
From your description it sounds like you're placing "making money" / "success" as your main motivation for these projects, which would explain why you're losing it so easily. Extrinsic motivations are very easy to lose, it sounds like you need to prioritise more intrinsic things such as having fun or learning something interesting. Check out intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation
This!
My side-projects went from "constant failures" to "always a success" when I changed my success criteria to be "I learned something new and had fun". Granted, some see it as cheating, but if it improves my happiness, I'm fine with cheating a bit as long as it doesn't hurt others.
> when I changed my success criteria to be "I learned something new and had fun".
In my view, this is the only success criteria that counts for side projects. If your goal is to make money with a side project, that's not a side project, that's a startup.
> Granted, some see it as cheating, but if it improves my happiness, I'm fine with cheating a bit as long as it doesn't hurt others
It's surprisingly controversial to recognize that the amount of happiness money gets you has diminishing returns, but empirically it's always seemed true to me. If you goal is to maximize happiness, trying to make money from some activities can make you _less_ happy. I guess I'm just not enough of a capitalist to see the value of money that doesn't make me any happier, but after having enough to be comfortable and secure enough about my ability to continue to be in the future, money stops being a motivator for me.
Is your motivation validation or learning? If it's learning, each day will be a win...even if your user metrics are trending downwards. If it's validation, your motivation will fluctuate with your traffic patterns.
Some projects are purely experimental, while some carry the hope that they can be monetized. My point is that I have a habit of abandoning hobbies, books, writing draft, and side-projects altogether thinking my motivation for them has been lost. I don't believe one should force themselves to finish things, but lost motivation is sometimes temporary or a sign of picking up not-so-good ideas. Realizing that and figuring out ways to sustain motivation is an important meta-skill.
I don't know what you mean by "validation" though. Do you just mean praise?
What if you just want to make some friends in open source? Truth is I've programming alone for over a decade. Loneliness is a crushing feeling, it feels like nothing matters and that everything is pointless. Recently people started generally interacting with my projects: creating issues, emailing me, I even received my vert first pull request. It feels really amazing, a very welcome change and also extremely motivating. Not sure if I'd call it "validation" though.
> Even a tiny setback (say, no response on Hacker News) was enough for me to stop working on the idea, and start working on something new.
It's a risk worth taking. Opening the front page only to find my project there made me very happy and motivated. I couldn't believe my luck. Someone somehow independently discovered my project, posted it on HN, people were engaging with it and somehow I managed to not miss the small window of time where all this was happening.
Hacker news traffic lasts just 2 days.
And can get completely different response when posted at just the right/wrong time. I've had posts I made that got no attention, just for someone else to post the same thing a few days/weeks later and it reached near the top, with hundreds of comments.
My go-to "trick" is to check /new beforehand. If the last post on the first page is posted under an hour ago, odds are whatever you post is gonna be burried very quickly afterwards.
If there's less things posted to /new at that particular time, it seems a bit more likely someone gets a chance to interact with it before it disappears from that first page of /new.
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My modestly successful Show HN for my last project [0] was the third time I'd submitted it - the first two got no traction at all. It does feel like luck of the draw sometimes, and it can be very demotivating.
At least HN tolerates reposts if you don't get any attention the first time round [1]; if your launch bombs on ProductHunt, you don't get a second chance (ask me how I know!)
On gsky's about HN traffic lasting two days - that was definitely my experience, though if it's interesting enough it'll likely get picked up by other sites too. Blogs, podcasts etc are always picking stuff up from Reddit and HN.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9772114
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