▲ | axegon_ 2 days ago | |
Been there, done that and I don't have an answer. For around 4 years I was a de facto consultant on paper(LLC-equivalent + invoicing) but the truth is, it was just a remote role for a foreign company, nothing to do with building something for myself. In all fairness, I've started building stuff on my own countless times over the years. In fact that dates back to when I was in my early teenage years, meaning over two decades ago. At the time, there was some merit to it but I lacked the knowledge and experience. At this point, software and the functions that are expected from it are not a single-person task. Example: I cannot do UI to save my life. There are also tasks which are incredibly tedious and time consuming, which is a can I keep kicking down the road whenever I get to that part. Hypothetically you could try to look for a partner in crime, which I also have. In my experience, everyone simply loses interest sooner rather than later. You keep pushing hard for another month or two, hoping they'd get into it but ultimately it is I who get's fed up and never brings it up again. If only I could count the times me and one or two other people have started something in which we saw potential and then shove it in the back of a storage unit, only to see an identical product pop up 2 years later and explode. To give you an example: back in 2018 me and two other people started working on an video conferencing tool specifically designed for education with all sorts of wild things integrated into it, from math and literature, all the way to music classes and art. It scaled incredibly well, it was incredibly cheap to run but it was a prototype at this point. Then, just like all other instances I eventually got fed up when I ended up spending countless sleepless nights while having a full time job and did a flip table. And as you can imagine, 2 years later, COVID, everyone go home, classes go online. Which brings me to a second point - I'm never happy when something I'm working on is completely half-assed - many people are not shy to present a semi-working product and figure out the rest along the way. In fact I've been working in such companies for much of my life. But if I were to do it myself, I'd never be comfortable promoting something, knowing exactly how bad it really is. In a nutshell - not everyone is made for that and also you need to be at the right place and the right time with the right people. Some people call it luck, I see it just as a function of entropy. |