If I manage to finish this one on time, that will reduce the time between posts from three to two months, which may be a sign of a good trend. Or a sign of nothing. Welp, sometimes I wonder if anyone reads my posts at all as I have not been able/was too lazy to hook up Google Analytics. Anyway, onward to today’s post.
We have just recently released our app on the AppStore. Be sure to download it! While you are downloading the app, I will tell you a funny story. Usually I work on the app on Saturdays and today (26.05.2018) was no different. After talking to my co-founder Anant and discussing all possible ways to attract users I was suddenly hit by an intense feeling of despair. Despair caused by looking into an abyss of future work needed to succeed with the app. I have seen all the days and nights of work to build features and infrastructure to support them, meetings with outside people, and tons of boring generic code to generate reports and dashboards to persuade future partners. And this is the worst feeling you can have while working on anything that is unfinished. This is a feeling that makes your attention wander and your resolve crack. Developer Despair.
One is not enough
As of late, I happen to face Developer Despair more often especially when thinking about building something serious (like Buddify). The more one learns about any subject the more one discovers one’s own deficiencies and shortcomings. This is 1000X true when it comes to programming for me: as I talk more with amazing people who build and sell products I understand how inadequate is the approach of building something programmatically and finishing at that. Compared to when I started at Duco, I feel the difference between building a program and building a product much more acutely and instead of empowering me, this knowledge knocks the ground from under my feet as I feel that I am not up to the task of working on all the aspects of a successful product. To be honest, I sometimes wonder how one could build, market and sell a product in today’s saturated and informationally overloaded market. And surely, just writing code is not enough, one needs to wear many hats: to be a salesperson, to be a product person, to maintain relationships with clients. Given my strong opinion that one should not work for more than 8 hours a day (this one deserves a separate post itself), I feel that idea of building a product on one’s own is unrealistic.
Focus is everything
Thankfully, this problem can be solved in the same way as many others - by taking small steps in important directions and iteratively improving. For example, right now Buddify backend is imperfect and from an engineering standpoint its infrastructure could use some love. I will not spend my time doing that though as right now our focus lies in a different area (attracting new users) and not spending time on irrelevant functionality will enable me to build something some code that really matters.
Alas, Knowing and doing are different, hopefully I will be able to fight Developer Despair in the future and continue working on things that are important. Thanks for reading this post, see you in a bit.