5 ms·

It was the same for me for several ideas/projects that i started with. Then i realised what was the reason makes me not touching the project after a while...

It was the same for me for several ideas/projects that i started with. Then i realised what was the reason makes me not touching the project after a while... The first steps are always known and can be done by almost everyone. - Buy the domain - Construct the idea - Even, start coding the project And here comes the reasons why you slowly starting not to touch the project anymore; - You realise that you are not sure how to deploy this on production. - You realise that you will need a business model and you are just a developer/designer and have no idea about those. - Then comes the tax issues, and realisation that you need a company. - You don't know how to licence your idea/project I can list some more but these are just enough to make you feel that you need to find some people to help you which is not free but expensive unless you have friends that are expert in those areas. Yep, you give up the project...

devonkim 13y ago
As someone that wears far too many hats to the point of daily paralysis, these don't sound too intimdating... until I need to figure out what to do first. This is what iterative anything / MVP / lean startup thinking is for and also determines what I think the biggest difference between effective and ineffective people are - prioritization during execution. - Deploying? I do integrations and devops-like stuff at work, and online discussions tend to overblow this topic given this probably matters among the least. The "correct" way is the fastest that will get the job done now so you can keep your momentum going. Until you go full hog hot-deploying to keep your uptime high, expect to destroy everything eventually, who cares if it's sloppy if it went into the trash? Just git receive hooks are good enough for toy projects like O(n^3) algorithms are probably fine for starting some random webapp. -Business models are in abundant supply out given the number of times "ideas people" that "just need someone to make an app/site of it" have approached me. Unless you're undertaking significant costs or are on the edge of financial ruin, you shouldn't worry though given starting a tech company is the cheapest it's ever been and only getting cheaper (per Mark Cuban). However, you may want to do some quick market research so you don't waste too much time building something that nobody wants - your time is actually going up in cost at a rate faster than Moore's Law gives you savings! On the other hand, don't be like me and think that focus groups and all the stuff that big companies do for thousands typically for a waste of money applies for you. It seems common sense but we all do dumb things in hindsight and it can be hard to step outside your box. People with good prioritization skills do less dumb things wrt execution, that much I can assure you. - Taxes are pretty simple for tiny companies in the US (this IS still a cheap place to run a business comparatively), you can probably hire an accountant to do it for a couple hundred bucks without paying a lawyer for even more. Everyone gets moved to Delaware or something later, just get that done hastily to check it off. It's the FUNDING that will make your head spin, taxes are trivial in comparison. Beyond that it's all good problems to have from everything I've read. For me, I honestly think the hardest part is coming up with a coding project that keeps me motivated long enough without encountering some real hard blocks that just can't scale even though I know they're stupid easy for others. I get a small aneurysm having to deal with frontend design decisions & execution as a systems & backend stack guy primarily. Font choices, picking color palettes for an audience, ... am I making a business or planning my wedding again? I've only shipped maybe a couple personal projects for the public to see though, so perhaps I'm full of crap and I wasted everyone's time. But if anything, I know how my own habits lead to ineffective output even with what seems like a lot of effort, so I think by telling people the opposite of what I do, it would give better results for others than saying what I actually do.
__david__ 13y ago
> - You realise that you are not sure how to deploy this on production. My advice for this is don't worry about it. Just hand install on a cheap shared web hosting place and manually copy stuff across to get it up and running. When that gets too annoying, start automating. When your home grown automation scripts get long and unwieldy, look into Capistrano or Puppet (or Chef, or Ansible). The important thing is: make it work first, then make it beautiful. > - You realise that you will need a business model and you are just a developer/designer and have no idea about those. I feel you there! :-) Having an idea and trying to think of how to get someone to pay for it is daunting to me. I feel like a blank canvas and I have no idea where to start. > - Then comes the tax issues, and realisation that you need a company. Again, don't worry about it. If you make so much money that it matters—well, that is a good problem to have. You can always incorporate (or whatever) later. And if you're pulling in a lot of money you can afford a lawyer to just handle it all for you. - You don't know how to licence your idea/project If you're making a web site or a app store app (binary distribution) then again, it doesn't really matter. If it becomes so wildly popular that people start abusing it somehow, and in quantities that matter—again, that's a nice problem to have (compared to no one using your site or app). If you're releasing source, then pick MIT, BSD, or GPL (just choose randomly if you have no opinion). If the one you picked turns out to have side effects that you didn't foresee, then feel free to change it–it's your code after all, so you can do what you want (though if you get a whole bunch of external contributors, it gets hairier). One thing I've found that really really helps—get a partner. Having another person around (and not necessarily physically) is a great way to help keep you from getting distracted. This is why companies get stuff done—there's always someone around working and you can't just slack off without losing face to everyone around you. It's really hard to sit around and read reddit all day when the 3 people in the room with you are all working hard…
- whizzkid 13y ago
  Except the first one, thanks a lot for looking at the bright side of things and the advises! but.. How can i not worry about deployment? What happens after people trusting and starts using my 'lets say' web app and after 2 weeks i get my database hacked? Companies have TechOps department just for deploying the applications correctly. I am not trying to argue but trying to explain how i think of this :) Maybe i am being little bit too much paranoid... Should i just set Apache/Passenger with some basic configuration and wish that everything is safe enough ?
Nicholas_C 13y ago
>- You realise that you are not sure how to deploy this on production. >- You realise that you are not sure how to deploy this on production. >- You realise that you will need a business model and you are just a developer/designer and have no idea about those. >- Then comes the tax issues, and realisation that you need a company. >- You don't know how to licence your idea/project As someone who isn't a very good designer/developer this seems like the easiest part to figure out. Coding the project is the single greatest struggle for me as I just don't have the experience/expertise but it's something I enjoy doing and want to do.
mbrock 13y ago
Why not just work on it as a hobby project, for pure fun? Publish it as an open source thing, even.
- whizzkid 13y ago
  Hobby projects are always fine by me. I start, i finish it. The problem i have is always with "The great idea I have".

devonkim 13y ago

As someone that wears far too many hats to the point of daily paralysis, these don't sound too intimdating... until I need to figure out what to do first. This is what iterative anything / MVP / lean startup thinking is for and also determines what I think the biggest difference between effective and ineffective people are - prioritization during execution. - Deploying? I do integrations and devops-like stuff at work, and online discussions tend to overblow this topic given this probably matters among the least. The "correct" way is the fastest that will get the job done now so you can keep your momentum going. Until you go full hog hot-deploying to keep your uptime high, expect to destroy everything eventually, who cares if it's sloppy if it went into the trash? Just git receive hooks are good enough for toy projects like O(n^3) algorithms are probably fine for starting some random webapp. -Business models are in abundant supply out given the number of times "ideas people" that "just need someone to make an app/site of it" have approached me. Unless you're undertaking significant costs or are on the edge of financial ruin, you shouldn't worry though given starting a tech company is the cheapest it's ever been and only getting cheaper (per Mark Cuban). However, you may want to do some quick market research so you don't waste too much time building something that nobody wants - your time is actually going up in cost at a rate faster than Moore's Law gives you savings! On the other hand, don't be like me and think that focus groups and all the stuff that big companies do for thousands typically for a waste of money applies for you. It seems common sense but we all do dumb things in hindsight and it can be hard to step outside your box. People with good prioritization skills do less dumb things wrt execution, that much I can assure you. - Taxes are pretty simple for tiny companies in the US (this IS still a cheap place to run a business comparatively), you can probably hire an accountant to do it for a couple hundred bucks without paying a lawyer for even more. Everyone gets moved to Delaware or something later, just get that done hastily to check it off. It's the FUNDING that will make your head spin, taxes are trivial in comparison. Beyond that it's all good problems to have from everything I've read. For me, I honestly think the hardest part is coming up with a coding project that keeps me motivated long enough without encountering some real hard blocks that just can't scale even though I know they're stupid easy for others. I get a small aneurysm having to deal with frontend design decisions & execution as a systems & backend stack guy primarily. Font choices, picking color palettes for an audience, ... am I making a business or planning my wedding again? I've only shipped maybe a couple personal projects for the public to see though, so perhaps I'm full of crap and I wasted everyone's time. But if anything, I know how my own habits lead to ineffective output even with what seems like a lot of effort, so I think by telling people the opposite of what I do, it would give better results for others than saying what I actually do.

__david__ 13y ago

> - You realise that you are not sure how to deploy this on production. My advice for this is don't worry about it. Just hand install on a cheap shared web hosting place and manually copy stuff across to get it up and running. When that gets too annoying, start automating. When your home grown automation scripts get long and unwieldy, look into Capistrano or Puppet (or Chef, or Ansible). The important thing is: make it work first, then make it beautiful. > - You realise that you will need a business model and you are just a developer/designer and have no idea about those. I feel you there! :-) Having an idea and trying to think of how to get someone to pay for it is daunting to me. I feel like a blank canvas and I have no idea where to start. > - Then comes the tax issues, and realisation that you need a company. Again, don't worry about it. If you make so much money that it matters—well, that is a good problem to have. You can always incorporate (or whatever) later. And if you're pulling in a lot of money you can afford a lawyer to just handle it all for you. - You don't know how to licence your idea/project If you're making a web site or a app store app (binary distribution) then again, it doesn't really matter. If it becomes so wildly popular that people start abusing it somehow, and in quantities that matter—again, that's a nice problem to have (compared to no one using your site or app). If you're releasing source, then pick MIT, BSD, or GPL (just choose randomly if you have no opinion). If the one you picked turns out to have side effects that you didn't foresee, then feel free to change it–it's your code after all, so you can do what you want (though if you get a whole bunch of external contributors, it gets hairier). One thing I've found that really really helps—get a partner. Having another person around (and not necessarily physically) is a great way to help keep you from getting distracted. This is why companies get stuff done—there's always someone around working and you can't just slack off without losing face to everyone around you. It's really hard to sit around and read reddit all day when the 3 people in the room with you are all working hard…

whizzkid 13y ago
Except the first one, thanks a lot for looking at the bright side of things and the advises! but.. How can i not worry about deployment? What happens after people trusting and starts using my 'lets say' web app and after 2 weeks i get my database hacked? Companies have TechOps department just for deploying the applications correctly. I am not trying to argue but trying to explain how i think of this :) Maybe i am being little bit too much paranoid... Should i just set Apache/Passenger with some basic configuration and wish that everything is safe enough ?

Nicholas_C 13y ago

>- You realise that you are not sure how to deploy this on production. >- You realise that you are not sure how to deploy this on production. >- You realise that you will need a business model and you are just a developer/designer and have no idea about those. >- Then comes the tax issues, and realisation that you need a company. >- You don't know how to licence your idea/project As someone who isn't a very good designer/developer this seems like the easiest part to figure out. Coding the project is the single greatest struggle for me as I just don't have the experience/expertise but it's something I enjoy doing and want to do.

mbrock 13y ago

Why not just work on it as a hobby project, for pure fun? Publish it as an open source thing, even.

whizzkid 13y ago
Hobby projects are always fine by me. I start, i finish it. The problem i have is always with "The great idea I have".