Ask HN: Why is nearing completion so demotivating?
Part of me thinks it might be an aversion to sales. Part of me thinks this could have been built up so much in my head that anything short of overnight millions would be a disappointment (though I would be happy with 1500 bucks a month ), part of me thinks I might be scared of success ( or scared of surpassing my parents )(media attention), part of me fears the attacks that might come with success ( having something to lose ), part of it is the un-fun-ness of mature projects where the focus is on polish and bugs rather than broad new features, and part of me is scared of commitment: if I succeed I have to stick with this (freedom value), part of me wonders what will happen when more people become involved, if I will be able to maintain my creative direction, since I'm scratching my own itch. Part of me wonders if diet and exercise isn't a factor.
A combination, likely...
170 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadIt sounds to me like you need to find co-founders or partners. Part of surviving in the long run is really just emotional support from people who believe in your product and share similar interests. It is unnatural in my opinion for a human to spend years working on something with no immediate reward (doesn't mean you shouldn't do it).
I'll make a video when I get some energy so you can get a better idea. I have several examples. The 3d examples are pretty cool, and some of the stuff possible with svg filters is really cool, and then the fact that it responds to user's scrolling makes it kinda fun to play with, and see the effects go in and out.
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Programming feels like productive work, and indeed it is, up until just about the point you are at. Now it is not productive work any more, in fact, once the product is finished, programming is counter productive work. Other things need to be done and you don't know how to do them and if you do, are not in the habit of doing them. IOt is easy to get up in the morning and write code, harder to do unfamiliar things.
--> self sabotage (deeply seated need to actually not succeed)
--> fear of the unknown
--> avoidance of a change in work habit - from programming to...... ? what does one do post launch
--> fear of the likely outcome which is zero feedback, zero users
Curious - how close are you to launch, what remains to be done, and what does the software actually do?
Can I suggest perhaps be really ruthless about the remaining tasks - likely many of those launch tasks just are not important, even though the completionist in you thinks they are. For example - terms and conditions document? Ditch it until users are interested. Privacy document? Same. Purchase? Drop it.
See what I mean? If people like what you have built and use it, then the world will not come to an end because you did not have those things... and user interest will motivate you to implement them.
It's incredibly hard to work on something with no user interest. Just dump what you have built out there and see what happens.
I am empathizing with the OP about how hard this point of a project is.
Perhaps I'm being too dry.
A better motivator, in my opinion, is that disclosing up front what data you're going to capture, and what you're going to do with it, and obtaining consent for that from users - is "the right thing to do". Unless your business model is "fucking over the users", those are not scary things to do, and will likely lead you to make better decisions about what you collect and how you store it, and reduce your and your users exposure in the worst case.
I'm still protected by GDPR.
(Personally, I reckon that's quite an overreach by EU lawmakers, but that's what they've chosen to do, in response to equivalent or worse "overreach" by internet companies trading in personal information...)
That actually makes sense (not something that's expected to be true of laws...)
So by my reading of the advice linked there:
If an individual is in the EU, they're covered by GDPR - whether they're a citizen or not.
If a company is based in or does business in the EU, all it's users are covered by the GDPR - whether they're in the EU or not, and whether they're an EU citizen or not.
That's much less over-reachy than I'd thought. The EU arguably does have the right to make laws about how you treat people within it's borders - whether they're citizens or not. (A death threat against a Chinese person in Paris should be prosecutable under French law by French police/authorities). The EU definitely does have the right to make laws about how businesses in the EU or who have offices/presence in the EU treat people everywhere. (A London company discriminating against a homosexual Saudi citizen should be prosecutable under British law by British authorities, even if it's not illegal to so discriminate in Saudi Arabia).
I don't even take it as an aggressive negative, unless it is explicitly expressed as such. You can just be honest and say "I can't accept your custom at this time because X, and we have other priorities that would make addressing X to everyone's satisfaction a problem for the foreseeable future".
So many testers said they would try it out, never did and there was an insane amount of actual testers who wanted something slighty different. (Which i couldn't do, as I had spoken to the company, and doing certain automated style actions would have gotten me banned).
divide it to many small challenges according to the process, and reward yourself after each one completed, then you don't need to reach 100%, you are already succeeded ( by your own definition ).
The truth is people aren't going to bust down your door and give you millions. What comes after release is far harder and demotivating then before, and, if you are lucky, you can find success after a few more years of a hard, slow grind. If you aren't so lucky, you end up back at a normal job :)
Good luck!
If you are a creative at heart this finishing stage can feel soul destroying: you've already got your next big idea, probably several of them, just waiting for you to complete this one so you've got time to properly get started...
For sure and probably more than any of hose hidden psychological you've invented.
My advice is to find someone to work with on your product.
So while it's common to think of a release as a birth of something new, realise that you also have a significant loss. You will mourn that loss. Give yourself some emotional space to deal with the mourning.
I took a break from side projects for several years but recently got back to it and couple weeks back finished building. It is the same story all over again. Same feeling. I'm dreading what comes next.
This is also why funding (and employees) helps a lot of startups. Not so much the money itself, but an ever growing consortium of people who literally have a vested interest in the thing continuing. It's harder to give up when people are counting on you.
If your side project isn't the kind where you want to make money in the end then you're going to need to have higher intrinsic motivation I suspect as none of these pressures will likely come to bear and help you stay motivated.
So, I picked my best memories, and they were animation related. I knew that when it came to the 'switch horses' temptation, I would be able to say, "every project gets to this stage, so why would I switch to my 2nd favorite thing, because surely that would be even harder at this phase. Sure this phase is hard, but doing my favorite thing means this is the easiest version of this phase".
It's kept me going.
Best comment I've read all week.
Not sure if this is what OP is experiencing or just some 90/10 etc rule about the last parts being the hardest parts. Starting a greenfield project you can make massive progress quickly. Polishing it is slow.
Thankfully, I have neither suffered from the loss of a child nor a failed major project.
However I would expect someone making a statement like this to have suffered from both, in which case you have my sincerest condolences.
There's a scary cliff there, but I feel like launching is when a project first becomes real. It's the actual start. It's when you're judged. It's usually when you learn that your assumptions were completely wrong. It means you have to start dealing with actual problems, not imagined problems.
That's usually less fun, but I think it is more exciting (in large part because it's the dive into the unknown).
Thanks a lot !
I hope you'll find the strengh to do so :)
It sucks to fail, but hey; most people do not have the inherent desire to even play. That means something in and of itself. Good luck.
Post-completion depression is a recognised syndrome in the arts. One psychological explanation is that constant pressure to complete maintains a core state of focus and emotional arousal.
When the pressure disappears so does the arousal, and sometimes a sense of purpose and direction disappears with it. You knew what you were doing and why you needed to get up in the morning, and then you don’t any more. It’s a bit like losing a job.
It’s also temporary. A good prosaic but effective antidote is a vacation and/or a change of scene. If that’s not practical just after shipping - it often isn’t - at least clear a couple of weeks later, book a break, and take at least a weekend off to do something fun in the short term.
I could not say this better myself. "The Dream Is Dead, Long Live The Reality". So very true upon many things.
Thank you.
Beware of those expectations, after the initial press fades out (a week or two in), you're going to have close to 0 users and 0 revenue. Launching is just the first step, you'll be successful when you can grow your user base.
You're likely not going to feel successful at that point, probably the opposite: "I spent 2 years working on this and no one is using it".
Its like when you're in love, at first you can survive on romance, but to survive a marriage, there is a necessary shift into the long term mentality.
You've romanced your way to a product, but haven't considered the long term of it yet. In the future, it would help to have some long term thinking earlier on, so you can plan for various things and not have a step-function-like inflection point in your expectations.
Have you launched a product before? Do you have any pre-launch users/customers? Have you done customer development on this product, or just built a thing?
For me the solution has been to know that whatever I create is out of the need that it has to be created or it will bother me to no end. So even if it is criticised the other option would have been to not create it which would be much worse.
Also if you are not on point when it comes to your diet and exercise there is a lot of room left for you to feel better than you are at the moment just by doing that. The difference can be night and day.
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/12/how_to_create_motiva...
> More concretely, they are a form of self doubt not about the success of executing the act which is in your control-- the writing of the book, the asking the girl out-- but of being able to manage the consequences which are not-- the publishing of the novel, sustaining a relationship/finding a burn unit.
Brilliant article. Hits home. Thanks.
Like someone here said already - the second 90% are no fun. The first 90% are fun, launching is fun, people using and loving your software is fun and eventually getting filthy rich is probably fun (I really wouldn't know), but the second 90% are usually just a giant pain in the arse. Accepting that does make it easier.
Plus, when you're making something you care about and you really want it to be good, it's particularly hard to say no to features, even more so when you expect to get paid for the whole thing. And a case can certainly be made that one should probably be careful not to launch an MVP with too strong an emphasis on the M, no second chance for a first impression and all that.
That being said, as Joel Spolsky once wrote, shipping is a feature. It's your most essential feature. If you cut a few things here and there and add them post-launch, it probably won't kill you. It may even turn out that you don't need them or that you could do them better.
If you keep pushing a deadline trying to get everything in there, getting it just so for the launch, losing more and more motivation along the way, maybe deciding that you really need to rewrite this or that but it'll take you another month or something - that could kill you.
So I think this is the time to brutally cut everything you can cut and just get the damn thing out the door. Half a product is better than both a half-arsed product and no product.
Once you're done butchering your todo list, you apply the age old universal recipe for all things that you don't feel like doing but need to do, trite though it may seem - you take it one step at a time. You don't sit down at the computer thinking "I've got to launch this". You sit down thinking "I've got to implement this thing", "I've got to fix that bug", etc.
You've worked on something continuously for two years. This already puts you ahead of the overwhelming majority of people who want to make things. In the words of Captain Reynolds:
https://youtu.be/xbbj2o0yUI0?t=17s
I should probably go and see about following my own advice now.
Very true. It's a feature, but I think I've been looking at it as a liability.
If that’s true, it’s better to be realistic about what work remains. That way you won’t lose motivation when you’re spending so much time completing the project, because you’ve consciously recognized there is still a lot of work to do.
And TBH I’ve been in the same boat, and in fact am in that 80/20 area on my current project. We’ve all been there I think. It’s part of software. Best thing you can do is recognize it for what it is and deal with it like you would any challenge.
I totally get what you are saying and have been there myself - the development stage is fun, and you avoid / defer marketing tasks because, let's face it most of us HATE that stuff. But if you want to make money, you need to do it, and having a plan helps because you have the 'big tasks' broken up into little chunks.
Once you have broken down the steps you can plan your time - start by spending an hour a day on one of the marketing tasks, just to get into the mindset and work from there. You might find some marketing tasks are fun, just as doing a blog / video demo of the product, or putting together a collection of cool screenshots showing what it can do.
Your very first marketing task is to post here with a screenshot or something showing what your product looks like, or even the name - marketing is part getting the name out and I haven't seen that in this post anywhere yet.
So, yes it is hard but take it in small steps - one at a time and be persistent.
I do have an example page in the works, with 4 examples so far, of each of the different page-integrations (in page pop-out, scroll, auto-play, etc), and each showcasing a few of the different svg filters.
It's marketed toward professionals, so I'm not in the game of taking non-creative people and "giving them a creative outlet". It should help with real world animated web tasks, and I had some experience with that in my freelancing. I'll probably have some pricing tiers, but probably something like $29/month, 59, 149, with higher tiers being more support.
For marketing, besides doing tutorials and buying ads on youtube, I can reach out to people w/ existing "how-to design" blogs, and share revenue with them (recurring), to keep their watchers using the software. Then reaching out to companies, even cold-calling if it proves cost effective.
I just have a bunch of polish to iron out. If I release it with bugs, and those bugs end up causing people to lose work (ie work for an hour without saving, and then a breaking bug causes you to lose work), I might lose those customers forever, so I'm stuck ironing those out for now.
It's getting really close though, and it seems like the closer it gets, even though I have figured out some possible ways forward for marketing, the less motivated I am.
I think I have to admit that in some ways I was, and really liked, chasing a fantasy, and I don't know how to chase now that it's more real. The hunger is what I'm lacking, in a way I feel full.
"perfectionism is very dangerous because, of course, if your fidelity to perfection is too high you never do anything, because doing anything results in... it's actually kind of tragic because it means you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is, and umm, there were a couple years where I really struggled with that."
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5R8gduPZw4
Here's my animation platform that gets no traffic as an example: https://www.superanimo.com
Maybe yours will be different but at one time I also thought "if I release it, the people will come." Luckily I wasn't invested too much in a certain outcome after launching. Otherwise I would have never kept improving it. I still don't know if more than a few people will ever try it, but I like working on it so much it won't ever feel like a waste. If nothing else, at least I can make silly animations with it.
Reading the post again I think he's saying he'll have money again because once launched he'll stop working on it and go back to freelance. In that case it makes sense. I thought he was assuming he'll bring in profits once launched - even though he hasn't gotten user feedback yet. IMO that type of thinking is premature, even if you have the best idea/execution in the world.