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Do you deal with motivation as an issue at all, and if so how? I'm trying to figure out if going solo would be right for me, and I worry that I'd not successfu

Do you deal with motivation as an issue at all, and if so how? I'm trying to figure out if going solo would be right for me, and I worry that I'd not successfully overcome the activation cost without others already relying on me executing something.

mtlynch 6y ago
Thanks for reading! >Do you deal with motivation as an issue at all, and if so how? This does happen to me, but fortunately not too much. A big part of it is that because I'm choosing my projects, I'm able to pick things that I'm naturally excited about working on. The other is that I've found a virtuous cycle of: 1. I build something new or add a feature 2. I write a blog post explaining what I learned 3. People read about what I learned and check out the thing I built So, it's a way to frequently attract users, even if it's a brand new thing, and then having people test it out is motivating. There are two times I recall struggling with motivation this past year: While working on Is It Keto, it always felt like so much work and time before I could see if an idea was viable. Even just putting up a landing page for a new product and linking to it from the main site, I'd have to wait at least a week to get reasonable data on conversion rates. So, I found it hard to stay motivated when I didn't feel like I had a process that was working and didn't have confidence investing effort anywhere would yield results. The other was toward the end of the year working on TinyPilot. I promised a premium version of TinyPilot by the end of the year, and I was trying to figure out how to design license activation for it. But that's really boring because it meant several weeks of work on something that's not useful to users. I kept putting it off because I was never excited to work on it. Finally, I realized I could basically just go by the honor system and ask users to install on one device per purchase, and that cut out a lot of boring work and let me work on improving the product again. So my general experience is that when I'm feeling unmotivated, something is wrong and I have to make a change that makes me feel more naturally motivated to do the work.

mtlynch 6y ago

Thanks for reading! >Do you deal with motivation as an issue at all, and if so how? This does happen to me, but fortunately not too much. A big part of it is that because I'm choosing my projects, I'm able to pick things that I'm naturally excited about working on. The other is that I've found a virtuous cycle of: 1. I build something new or add a feature 2. I write a blog post explaining what I learned 3. People read about what I learned and check out the thing I built So, it's a way to frequently attract users, even if it's a brand new thing, and then having people test it out is motivating. There are two times I recall struggling with motivation this past year: While working on Is It Keto, it always felt like so much work and time before I could see if an idea was viable. Even just putting up a landing page for a new product and linking to it from the main site, I'd have to wait at least a week to get reasonable data on conversion rates. So, I found it hard to stay motivated when I didn't feel like I had a process that was working and didn't have confidence investing effort anywhere would yield results. The other was toward the end of the year working on TinyPilot. I promised a premium version of TinyPilot by the end of the year, and I was trying to figure out how to design license activation for it. But that's really boring because it meant several weeks of work on something that's not useful to users. I kept putting it off because I was never excited to work on it. Finally, I realized I could basically just go by the honor system and ask users to install on one device per purchase, and that cut out a lot of boring work and let me work on improving the product again. So my general experience is that when I'm feeling unmotivated, something is wrong and I have to make a change that makes me feel more naturally motivated to do the work.