Hello HN,
There's a popular post up today - "The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27833064
Some commenters have point out that this very well could be just an example of survivorship bias.
Did you put in 15+ hours a week for several years on a project that never went anywhere? Please add a comment about it - we'd love to hear about your experience.
Kishore and I have worked together on about 12 different side projects over the course of 13 years, and we've tried to adopt this mindset of consistency, persistence and long timeframes for each.
A few of these projects got good traction, but most of them didn't do well (at least revenue-wise). But here's the thing: working on all these projects consistently over the years, has also helped us learn about things like how to pick a market, how to validate our hypotheses, how to choose technologies when building products, how to maintain codebases over a decade, how to stay nimble, etc.
I would say that the sum total of our collective learnings through all these projects, have helped us significantly in our Typesense journey.
So I would say, showing up everyday is not a magic bullet to making a project successful. Instead, it's a magic bullet to continuous learning and building up a wealth of experience, that might just come in handy when you're working on your next project, which then increases your odds of success.
Now I am back at my parents place far away from any city working on my own projects in the productivity space, a space I'm intimately familiar with. Theres a few tools I'm missing from my daily arsenal that I am building now.
I was too greedy in my goals and while we got funded and it was fun, ultimately it turned into nothing. I was of the "first to market / build a unicorn" mindset which as someone who doesn't come from money or connections, is pretty much impossible.
I am now trying to build a lifestyle company with a suite of tools in the productivity space, trying to hit $10k/mo MRR which doesn't scare me and I know is doable, as I've done it before (but unfortunately sold my stake to use that money on the venture I mentioned that failed). Bad move but hindsight is 20/20 I guess. I am focusing on building tools that solve my own problems.
So I'm 28 now, have under $1k in total net worth, but I am not going to stop until I am free from working a salaried job. 2 of my projects made money (sold them, dumb move, too bright-eyed and greedy), 11 of them didn't see a dime. I have never been more depressed in my life but I refuse to believe I can't hit at least a couple grand a month as I've done before, which is all I need to live my life. If only I realized this sooner. The reason I will keep doing this even if I don't succeed is because the regret of having not tried as hard as I can will haunt me every second of every day if I concede and hop on a salary. I don't want to spend the rest of my life on "what if?", and a life of sitting behind a glass wall consuming fine things does nothing for me. I don't want to be at the orchestra, or a restaurant, or a show. I want to be on stage, or be the chef, or be the conductor and for that you need time and money.
I know quite a few people with graveyard projects like this. Feel free to ask me anything, I'm an open book.
I'm not dissing that mindset at all, but it is essentially gambling. Over the decades, I've warmed to "the pioneers get all the arrows" mindset: that from a business perspective, it's better to be the second or third in a new area, because you can learn from the pioneer's mistakes. It's rare that the entity that invented a thing is the entity that makes the most profit from it.
I would go as far as getting a job in the space you want to focus on and look for problems there.
Apple always comes to mind. I can't think of any mind bending technology that they have invented but they've focused on the user's needs and have created a monster of a company by delivering products the customer wants to use.
what is to say you cant work hard on something for someone else and be equally fulfilled?
all the most lucrative and fulfilling projects i have worked on, i was drafted into by others, not the other way around.
You're right I may miss a great opportunity and probably have, but landing a job that satisfies me is a much more accessible option than being able to dedicate all of my time to an idea at the drop of a hat. As I get older and my life gears more towards family I will have less time and steam to do what I'm doing now. I'm sort of stuck for the time anyways so there couldn't be a better time to keep taking on risk and sacrificing a couple opportunities. If nothing pans out then no worries, at least I tried and will happily go back to working and still probably try something when I'm older anyways.
There is also the added benefit that what I am doing now will directly benefit my future career, so even if I fail, not all is lost.
>what is to say you cant work hard on something for someone else and be equally fulfilled?
I can and I have, I've worked for a lot of great people. I'm just not dying to go back to the career route, I'd rather keep doing my own thing while I still can and take on a contract here and there.
>all the most lucrative and fulfilling projects i have worked on, i was drafted into by others, not the other way around.
Someone had to draft you though right? ;)
https://gosu-lang.github.io/
I was paid during that time, and the language is still heavily used internally, but it never got picked up by the outside world and Kotlin arriving on the scene killed any chance it had.
Was fun though.
It is, however, next to impossible to popularize a new programming language without dedicated evangelists (e.g. hardcore fans who spend a lot of time on programmers forums and social networks, arguing for the language).
on the other hand, it was early on in the JVM language boom and so things like JRuby and Clojure were growing in popularity, and we thought we might have a shot
at least it was fun
there were some interesting technical aspects to the language, such as the open type system[1], which lives on in spirit in Manifold[2].
[1] - https://guidewiredevelopment.wordpress.com/2010/11/18/gosus-...
[2] - http://manifold.systems/
Edit: I stopped working on it after it bombed horrifically but kept burning through my savings and after a few other ideas ended up with a successful company (Shodan). I still learned a lot from failing with Labengine but I don't think working on it another few years would've made it successful.
It's a very tough space to break into it and my recent experience is that the big EMS/EMR vendors are increasingly trying to offer "modules" to do LIMS and bioinformatics analysis pipelines.
Every now and again I start thinking about unsupervised learning projects in this space but look around and see just how little spend on analytics software there is for bioinformatics tools and settle down to focus on helping folks with our cluster and general reporting needs . . .
I am hardly getting any users. The people who go to the library, do not know about my software. The people who randomly find my software, do not go the library in my German city. I tried to add other libraries in other cities, but I cannot really do that without traveling to that city to get a library card there. The librarians refuse to talk about it, because it also warns people about the due dates, and they want people to miss the due dates to raise more late fees.
It took like 15h / week for 15 years. It takes a massive amount of time, because every time the library changes their webpage, I need to make an update to read the webpage. Especially since I can only see the change, when I have borrowed a book from them. When they are in other cities, I can spend entire weeks writing mails to the library to ask what they have changed, and not getting any answer
But there are still some people using it, otherwise I could have abandoned the project ten years ago. Now I cannot get rid of it
The truth is that many don't have the stomach for "sticking with it," doing whatever is necessary to keep going in the down phases (I highly recommend the poem "If" by Rudyard Kipling and see if it resonates).
You only truly "fail" when you quit. If you can make the necessary sacrifices to struggle through the dark days, your chances of succeeding increase greatly. I'd argue "survivorship bias" is just an excuse made by people who give up (I know that will sting some of you, but really marinate on it).
People give up when they realise that continuing a grind will require then to sacrifice more meaningful opportunities they have.
It's not always good to keep going. Sometimes you're throwing your life away.
That's a conditioned response. "Throwing your life away" is subjective.
Edit: https://nav.al/kapil <-- Worth listening to.
100% this - my project is in a highly competitive space (think hundreds of SaaS alternatives). The only ones that "fail" are the ones that come in copying competitors, expecting overnight success, and get upset when the money doesn't come pouring in.
Or run out of time?
You don't have infinite time to keep trying things.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1033193-if-you-think-you-ar...
It wasn't for 5 years more like 3 and wasn't consistently 15+ hours/week but definitely got up there when the passion was burning bright.
I've failed to implement a winning conversion plan (need to iterate my pricing, just never got around to it) and do marketing.
I've since moved on to another side project, but my passion certainly calls me back to Pushback from time to time.
Deleted Comment
I have a project now that I started over 3 years ago and was completely dead until 2.5 years in about. An investor contacted me and said this is perfect timing (yeah, well, it was not 3 years ago... but it is how things go) and now he wants to jump full in: he started sending money as a token of trust.