Set Tiny Wins: I break it into micro-goals, like “fix that bug today” or “post on X once.” Hitting those feels good, even if the big picture’s slow.
Talk to People: I hop on X, ask random remote workers what they’d want in an app like mine. Even if they don’t sign up, the feedback keeps me pumped.
Track Progress, Not Just Users: I log every little improvement—code commits, design tweaks, whatever. Seeing a list of wins reminds me I’m moving forward, even if signups are slow.
Take Breaks: When I’m stuck, I step away—go for a walk, play a game. Coming back fresh helps me see the project differently. It’s not glamorous, but it’s keeping me in the game. Last week, I got one signup after months, and it felt huge.
How do you stay motivated on your solo projects? Any tips to share?
Personally I've always done it for the fans. The people who take the time to fill out the surveys with lots of thanks or write articles about how much they loved my app. Or the people who drive to the next city to transfer money (because we didn't support card payments then) and then tell us to keep the change.
It's more than just "signups and revenues", it's more about not letting people down.
because of that I also ship my startup asap because if we spent much time on something and we not get any benefit we will burn out
You have to know how you're going to sell it before you build it. There are only a handful of things that work, which other people are using and you can copy.
1. There’s social altruism activated because you two are constantly doing things not just for yourself, but for the other person. 2. View point diversity. You get way more feedback with another talking head at the same table, helps unblock you more than you think. And this can ignite new insight and therefore new notification energy!
Is there a way to hack this as a solo founder? I think so!
I had a former co founder who I would always bounce ideas off of and even tho he wasn’t directly working on my projects, he would check in with me and kind of act like a rubber duck I could talk to. This could be your friends, partner, or strangers!
Also, time is your best friend, for good or for worse. I think back on projects I started and quit after a year, I would like to think those projects would be successful if I just put more time into it.
The only problem is I'm a solo developer so need to bootstrap my own AI co-founder first.
Here you go: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-67d9acd9106881919145eacc538ec9a2-vir...
https://i.imgur.com/UqA7eHy_d.webp?maxwidth=760&fidelity=gra...
"My AI co-founder has just stitched me up on the cap table. Does anyone know a good AI lawyer that can sue them?"
I also agree about time. I think new products follow a model similar to compounding interest. It's very small at the start - sometimes negligible but over time things add up.
Lastly, I think we get desensitized to success. Getting the first user, the first ten, etc. These are not small milestones. They're meaningful.
Lastly lastly, if it's something you want to make money from then focus primarily on user acquisition and secondly on product. Commonly difficult for builders to do but not doing so cements delayed failure.
To answer OP's question, about a year ago, I told my parents what I was building. My mum is a teacher, so she's my first test user. Every time I talk to them, they ask how things are going, so I need to keep working on it so I've got something to tell them.
To join in on everyone else's roasting OP's business idea: OP, what are you offering your users that they can't get from typing 'coworking space' or 'cafe' into their search engine of choice? It's not enough to make something useful, it also has to be something that your customers don't already have.
Some problems are problems but for a startup to succeed it needs to be a very important problem.
Having a unique insight is also not enough. It needs to be a highly leverageable insight or advantage. One that you can use in this startup; as you grow your leverage it will help you get users and revenue.
Neither seem true here. When that happens, the journey is a grind, you try to push hard but people don't seem interested.
how do I get motivated? well I have to believe there is a 'leverageable' insight or angle that will grow when I make progress ;) belief that it's a big problem people care about and that I am growing unfair advantage over time solving it.
Being honest with yourself is the best way to be kind to yourself. Moving on is not giving up.
* Remote individual workers are the least attractive customer for the typical coworking space (that isn't a cafe). Small and unpredictable revenue, plus higher support per head, since the account is only one head.
* Remote workers also aren't a great fit for you. Very few like to hop around. Their reasons are typically avoiding loneliness, finding a reliable place to focus etc. And so would only use your platform until they find a space they like.
* SMBs are the sweet spot. Coworking is cheaper AND less overhead for them. In many countries they don't get access to grade A space even if they're willing to pay. For the coworking space, it's only slightly more work than a solo account and significantly more recurring and reliable revenue. You may be better off targeting small teams.
* One particular pain point is expiring inventory - remote workers actually fit this well since they're willing to go for a floating desk. Most spaces would be willing to offer discounts on this. Kind of like last minute flight or hotel deals.
* Another related product is meeting and conference room bookings. Also expires and has a market in WFH teams.
* The last two also have a better business model fit since they are intermittent and people may be more inclined to shop around, allowing you to take a cut of every transaction. For any kind of recurring contract, you're probably limited to taking a one time lead gen or brokerage fee since you have no grounds to maintain a relationship with the customer after the initial match.
Isn't all of WeWork this business? Granted, I know they've had their share of problems with profitability and bankruptcy, however, I think that stems from issues other than the business not necessarily being viable.
No, it's not even close. WeWork owns real estate.
OP is trying to sell subscriptions to an app that helps users find coworking locations.
Critiquing the OP’s project doesn’t interest me intellectually.
From what you wrote, I'm not sure, but it seems that the "talking to people" and the "problem definition" steps could be improved to better identify the SPECIFIC problem you are solving, the causes behind the problem, the users motivation to solve it... By asking questions like: Is it a problem people are trying to solve? How many? At which frequency?
Because solving an important and specific problem will make it easier to target potential users and for them to be naturally interested.
Wish you the best!
My motivation is purely on how it makes me feel, I feel like an engineer solving problems while at work I am just working on Jira tickets that I don't feel personally impact me or anyone except a corporate bottomline.
It will take time to get traction. I have a bigger picture in mind and shipping small updates and features constantly helps a lot. I’m building a tool for myself and I use it on a daily basis and keep improving it with the things I like, that keeps me motivated.
I have had MVPs turn into something years later when I didn't expect it anymore, some projects, the majority to be fair, never made it tho.
I've been building a time tracking app for freelancers myself, and after getting some test users, I realized that people don't really want it because of various reasons.
I've been trying to continue getting more users because it's possible that I'm barking up the wrong tree, but it's also possible that my app sucks, and that I need to work on something else.
Some food for thought...
Are you not able to simply address those shortcomings?
I’m going thru something similar (eerily similar actually) but for my B2C product, most people that hear about it quickly understand that it’s a “good idea” and want to try it and tell other people about it. Our problem is, and always has been, dev velocity. It simply takes too long to implement what we know people want and our runway gets shorter and shorter.
I agree about dev velocity being an issue. As a single developer, it's going to take ages before I can compete head to head with these other established apps, who also have good financial backing.
If I want to get customers for my product, I'll have to look for users who are currently not using anything else so that they can invest on mine. I'll probably have to invest quite a bit on paid ads in order to attract these kind of people because they're hard to come across.
Or I can try the 1000 true fans route and try to get ramen profitability. We'll see how it goes.
By having many of them going on at once. Diversify the portfolio.
If I only have exactly one project to work on and it starts to go poorly, my mood suffers severely.
If I have several projects to work on and one goes poorly, I can toggle to a different one and not worry about it. Inevitably, I'll swap back to what I was working on after a period of time. This also keeps me out of other subpar areas, like mindless doomscrolling or gaming for hours on end.
The sweet spot is when those tasks are complex and it really takes some motivation to get started/keep going.
I'd recommend fostering your curiosity as a mechanism for building momentum and getting stuff done, even if it's not a top priority task.
Your insight is helpful almost as much as knowing that other people like me are out there too.
I think (!?) I've finally let go of a project that I've been working on for a couple of years.
A key tenet of the project (which I frequently forgot) was that it was a way for me to learn|refine technical skills and to keep me entertained|occupied.
The project certainly achieved those objectives for me and I'm a better person for doing it.
Good luck to you and I hope you continue to succeed!
2. Have frequent debriefs with friends and, if none is available, an IA (which will be less afraid to offend you actually).
3. A lot of sport
Even the supposed quality improvements found in an automated way may just turn out very expensive compared to just spending the time doing the QA yourself at specific milestones. Unless your career is devops be very skeptical and track your time and return on that time.
I learned this the hard way although I am a build/devops person professional I came to realise I had a tendency to build really complicated processes that would be ok in a hundred person team, while I actually was working solo. The upside is that there is lots of reusability for future projects and I also became very skeptical of custom CI jobs and CD tools, and try to reduce everything to env variables 1 line bash scripts. I also am very skeptical of automated integration tests as they are incredibly expensive to build and maintain.
This is almost impossible in a marketplace business, which is one of the infinite number of reasons that building a marketplace inevitably fails.
Some of them can also feed delusion or false signals - most people you talk to aren't going to outright tell you that your app sucks, for example.
Non-monetary signals can also be encouraging but misleading long-term. My last attempt at a solo SaaS was a financial data application that had a lot of built-in virality. People really liked it, traffic was growing, and I thought I was succeeding at "product-led growth."
But the monetizable parts of my app appealed to a completely different type of person than the viral parts. What's worse, the sales process for people willing to pay was also very different. I'd built a low-touch marketing funnel with "prosumer" pricing but needed a high-touch sales channel with few clients and a fat price tag!
It was a "pivot or die" moment and a tough pill to swallow as it was the first time I'd built a software project with lots of happy users. Those users just wouldn't pay me, and rather than burn another 6-12 months re-tooling the entire business, I killed it instead.
If you are not getting ANY traction whatsoever it may be time to move on. Please don't take this the wrong way, but I'm your target audience and I would not give you money for this. I might not even use your app, as a search engine could get me viable coworking locations and curated reviews faster and more accurately.
Maybe there is a path to success where coworking spaces themselves pay you for a listing and the remote workers themselves aren't your customers? But as they say, your paid solution has to be 10x better than any free competitor and in this case your free competitors are Google and Facebook.
