I don't need to make a full salary anymore and rather than work a traditional job I'd enjoy maintaining a few projects that were profitable but no longer worth the time of someone who had bigger hopes for them.
I like running the day to day of something that people use, and I'm not looking for any kind of unicorn potential.
Feel free to contact me at the email in my bio to discuss.
Something switches in my brain when I've figured out how to solve a problem, it starts to seek a new problem because it considers that one "done", even though most of the work remains. Perhaps it's because that work is more "painting by numbers" after the problem is figured out. Does anyone else experience this?
For some income I'd be fine with maintaining something long term, I'm just not the person to bootstrap a project into that.
Just getting the feedback, implementing it, deploying the next day and sending "hey, I loved you feedback, so I implemented your suggestion, lemme know what you think".
I personally enjoy this.
I have not found a solution to this apart from just getting done with the boring things as quickly as possible.
In other words, a job offers you money for adding value to society. Most of us need this yo live. Adding value is usually "work" because it involves many things, most parts of which are not fun. (If they were fun, there'd be little value, people would just do it themselves.)
A hobby however is the "fun" part without the "work" part. The value added is usually marginal. For example I've been doing ceramics as a hobby. It's lots of fun and the rubbish monstrosities I create are not really valuable.
If I applied myself, I could churn out bowls that are sellable. But frankly, where's the fun in that? Making 4 identical vases for sale would rob all the joy from it.
Understanding the difference is key to your long term satisfaction. My work gets me paid, so I need to do all the boring bits, and the better I do that the more I get paid. I get satisfaction from doing the job well, and having happy customers, but there's a lot of grind involved. Maybe 80% grind to 20% fun.
My hobby is the reverse. 80% fun, 20% grind. I get satisfaction from pushing my skills to the next level, even if the results are far from perfect, and frankly not sellable. (I'll give away pieces to someone if they like it, but I won't sell it.)
So, to answer your question, yes everyone experiences this. It is quite literally the definition of "work".
The project is basically a script that scrapes events from various Eventbrite organizers and Meetup groups I am interested in, filters them down by a variety of parameters, and writes them out to ICS files that Proton Calendar can read from. Its been an interesting project because it really reveals how much detritis these sites throw at you in spite of your preferences, and it has helped me basically have something to do with my evenings no matter the day of the week.
What I'm tired of is trying to make it flexible so I can open source it. Screw that! As soon as I gave up on flexibility, the number of lines of code dropped significantly. I occasionally update the code when I discover something new that I want to filter by, but otherwise it can now just exist and I can just run it manually every so often.
It's chatbot creation platform based on Node-RED (a low coding tool), basically allows to create a multi channel chatbot visually. It also has a backend for the bots (the place where at some point you might want to manage the bot's users, configurations, etc) and a good plugin system (the idea was to try to make it the equivalent of WordPress for chatbots).
It got some traction at some point, at least a couple of time it was cloned, rembranded and tried to resell as their own. But it allowed me to get my current job (the company got in touch with me for this open source project).
Why I'm tired:
- the only money were coming from consulting, most of the users were hobbyst, not really keen on paying for services - eventually ChatGPT was released and this changed everything, so I stopped developing to see what would happen (and now there are some opportunities actually)
guido.bellomo@gmail.com
I have redone the app icon 3 times, changed the App Store metadata and keywords several times and fixed bugs. I have tried sharing it on reddit, here on hacker news etc but it's gotten no traction :(
Not sure if I want to get rid of it though.
And how much do you spend on those ads? I haven’t looked at ads because I thought it would be too expensive for an app which is already not making money.
Until this point, I was happily working away at the technical side: Designing, manufacturing prototypes, talking with suppliers and other people who contributed to the product, learning how to write firmware. All fun stuff.
Now that I actually have to reach people who can benefit from the product, I am feeling entirely sick and tired of it.
Writing software is easy. It can be figured out, no matter how hard it seems.
havent spent much time optimizing keywords/app store listing since I am more interested in my current projects
what kind of projects are you looking for specifically?
Most of what I found on Flippa and other markets:
1. AI drivels.
2. Suspicious customers. (ie: probably fraud).
3. Hype driven.
4. Real customers but more like consulting than SaaS.
5. Insane premiums for the value.
I've shot you an email.