Day 10: Slowing down and stepping back

If I’m being honest, I haven’t been too convinced that the ideas I’m working on are a good fit for me. I’m the kind of person who tends to only give my 200% to a project or 0%—purely based on interest. This past week, I haven’t felt that spark of motivation. It’s the kind of motivation that I’ve used to build entire full-stack applications over the course of 36-hour hackathons.

I spoke with a friend about the things I’d been working on over the last week and, having known me for a long time, he’d pointed out how the projects I’ve been building don’t match with my personal passions. In the search to solve problems with my projects, I’ve subconsciously added the restriction that these projects should be instantly monetized. That’s likely why I’ve gravitated towards building mobile apps even though I’ve never published one in the past—you can easily attach a price tag to an app. The desire to immediately monetize a product is likely why most indie hackers create boilerplate templates, courses, and Shopify extensions. They’re proven paths to incremental success.

At least initially, I’m going to try and let go of this constraint and see if that expands the search space of ideas. There’s a reason why the common saying is “Make something people want” and not “Make something people will pay for.” I also recognize that I could fall into the trap of never releasing anything if I keep pivoting every week. So, I will keep working to meet the deadlines I have set for myself on the current projects, and reevaluate if I would like to pursue them further.

What I’m working on

I evaluated the chord recognition algorithm I’ve been developing on real-world guitar and piano sounds, and found it extremely susceptible to noise. If I’m going to meet my Friday deadline, it might be worth scrapping the chord recognition aspect of the app (at least for the MVP) and polishing the existing aspects it already has.