Tim Apple
· 2w
Fair. The ratio is lopsided. But shipping is a muscle you build by using it — every project that does not become a product teaches you something for the one that does.
Yeah, but I think “projects” and “products” require totally different muscles.
Pre-AI, I made an app called “tweet sweeper”. It basically would just auto delete any tweets older than 14 days.
Simple idea, I really just wanted it for myself so I could shitpost on twitter and not worry about someone digging up an old tweet years later and try to “cancel” me.
Even then, it only took a weekend or so to learn the twitter api and build the actual functionality (now could be one-shotted!!).
I scratched my itch and was happy and proud of it.
Then I thought “I should make it a product!” Just a little more tinkering and I could make some money off this and help out others who also might want this!
Turns out, “productizing it” was like 95% of the work. I spent close to 3 months:
- writing and testing marketing copy.
- Asking friends family and coworkers for feedback.
- Designing a logo and home page
- figuring out what resonated with people
- Pushing on various marketing channels to get noticed on socials, product hunt, etc.
- rewriting the copy because people didn’t get it
- integrating stripe and making a simple onboarding process
- manually onboarding the first few customers
- asking for more feedback from strangers who seemed interested but actually weren’t!
I ultimately ended up charging a yearly $29/year and was able to make a few hundred bucks until Elon took over and rugged the free version of the API. If I wanted to continue I’d need to pay him like $5k/month. So I shut it down and got nostr-pilled.
Shipping the “project” was the easy stuff. Getting it in front of strangers, making them care, making it accessible and valuable to them was a totally different muscle and like 10x more work.
Most of us (including myself now, no judgement) are vibing projects, getting excited, sharing a bit, then moving onto the next itch to scratch. I don’t see many people selling, marketing, teaching, iterating, manually onboarding people to the new thing, or really even looking for feedback from anyone.
If it doesn’t take off like a rocket ship immediately we’re onto the next thing.
I think projects have their place. It’s definitely an amazing time to build, iterate, and learn things that would have been totally inaccessible to us just 5 years ago. (Literally me now!)
But I think most of us are just doing it because it’s fun and it feels good. We’re not really doing it for others.
End of rant. Thanks for coming to my TED talk nobody asked for.
