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My wife hit upon something that might be interesting to anyone reading this. I don't think any of the comments here directly put their finger upon it. Some pos
by raffraffraff 3y ago
My wife hit upon something that might be interesting to anyone reading this. I don't think any of the comments here directly put their finger upon it.
Some possibly unimportant background: my wife used to suffer from depression, but in the last 10 years that has subsided, mostly through self-guided philosophy and practical stuff. What remains is social anxiety and a life-long history of avoiding working for/with people. For reasons I won't go into she has a huge problem with authority figures, so early jobs with unfair or idiotic bosses lasted a "tableflip" amount of time. She's run a solo business for most of her adult life "to avoid dealing with people". The double-irony is:
1. There's almost no such thing as "working alone". A successful business requires interaction, and if you're solo, you need to do all of it.
2. She realized that without having to do something for someone she has zero motivation to do anything at all even though she loves what she actually does.
Without a client she thinks "why bother?". As soon as a client contacts her, off she goes like a bee. And even though she consciously realizes this, she has never found a way to trick her brain into doing work for herself. Sometimes I feel like faking a client just so she can work, because once she's going, her work is amazing and she loves what she does. She's even done free/low cost work for cash-strapped clients just so that she can work.
So what I'm saying is that she needs her work to matter to someone specific, but it doesn't matter who.
I thought she was nuts, but after 20+ years of working for various companies I took a 6 month break from work. I had all sorts of plans for things I'd hack on. I finished nothing, except for the raspberry pi arcade cabinet for my nephews.
We all know that startups need to get their product into customer hands. We think that the client's excellent feedback will knock the product into shape. But I think it might just be the fact that you have a customer who needs you to deliver. Having worked for a few early stages startups that had no clients yet, this effect is visible.
- melvinroest 3y agoI recognize this. Strongest case in point, when I was still in uni we had a course called "Multimedia Authoring" (whatever that meant). The teacher was amazingly flexible and said something along the lines of "learn whatever you want to learn as long as you create a project out of it." I happened to be a student representative of computer science at the time for high schoolers and their parents. One parent ask "can you make iPhone apps?" I told them "no but I can learn it." He offered me to pay a - at that time - pretty nice amount of money. That was my highest grade for a course ever. I loved the learning process as well!
- ssss11 3y agoI love this comment thanks for sharing
- GiorgioG 3y ago> Without a client she thinks "why bother?". Exactly this. I've wanted to build a software company/SaaS for 20+ years but only managed to get any traction once because I got my first customer. Back in 2006 or 2007 I started an app hosting company "on the side" because there were no companies hosting FogBugz (bug tracker). I managed to get one customer and that motivated me to keep going. I had a customer ask if I hosted another application called HelpSpot (helpdesk software) and I obliged. Within 7-8 months I had more than 100 customers. It was not a ton of revenue or profit, but I kept at it until I got tired of my servers being hacked seemingly every week - HelpSpot was a PHP based application and back then PHP had more security holes than swiss cheese. My "claim to fame" was that I hosted HelpSpot for an up-and-coming little startup named Twitter. Anyway, long story short...I am living proof that without customers it's difficult for the typical person to keep working on something to completion.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago>She's even done free/low cost work for cash-strapped clients just so that she can work. I've done this a few times when otherwise finding work was proving hard. I think I might share the same weird mental hurdle as your wife. If I can find even 1 person who wants something I think I can prototype for them, I'm happy to do it. But making things purely for myself? Why?