Tell HN: I underestimated how lonely building solo can be

I can relate, not sure what to do about it besides move to a hacker house in Thailand or such.

NPR's show 1A had a program on loneliness. There were a couple of interesting things: these days university cafeterias are quiet because everybody eats alone while looking at their phone. A Gen-Zer complained they 2 jobs and no time to socialize. On top of that, our third places are being ruined with hostile architecture (parks), or uncomfortable seating (Starbucks) because they want you to just do a mobile order and get out. Seems like the Internet should at least be a good third space, its called cyberspace after all, but at least idk how to get invited to the right discords or tiny social spaces where there's community.

nice job, man!

I feel this. I think loneliness has been the principle feeling in my life forever, whether I'm with people very different to myself or like-minded. Lack of connection == lack of purpose, and that makes every action more difficult.

Piers Steel researches motivation and has a book called "The Procrastination Equation". In the book, motivation is modelled as Motivation = (Expectedness * Value) / (Impulse * Delay). In his academic papers, it's rendered as:

Utilityᵢ = (Eᵢ Vᵢ) / (Γᵢ D)

That is, the perceived utility of any action increases with the expectancy that one will be able to finish it, and the perceived value of the end result, and is reduced by a person's inclination to be impulsive or distracted and the end goal's distance from the present.

How can any action have utility if someone has no place in the world? As a social species, our purpose is largely defined socially. When you're going solo, it's hard to get a sense of value of a given action.

Curious why you are building?

Hire an intern at minimum wage, theres a ton of ones from good schools that want to work at startups. hire two.

The main thing I'm missing at the moment is learning by osmosis from people with more experience. Learning stuff that I didn't know I didn't know. Mentorship.

Something I've been doing for general feedback is keeping my friends updated on what I'm up to and asking for their perspectives. There's a bit of a balance though cause you don't want them to associate you too strongly with your work and bring it up whenever you see them.

If you mean technical feedback then yeah not being surrounded by other engineers you can bounce ideas off kind of sucks...

Not sure how sporty you are but I have a pretty fixed weekly routine where I do sports with my friends some nights after "work" and I've found that great for forgetting about my project and pulling me away from the computer at a reasonable hour. For loneliness during the day I've found working somewhere busy helps, like a library. Maybe a nice way of framing it is that you can't get distracted by coworkers if you don't have any :)

Yes, this road is very lonely. Always has been. Entrepreneurship is going against the grain, with no help or support. Until one day you make it and then everyone tells you how easy you have it. Is it no different than when European settlers came to America or all of the space program. Exploration is in our blood, few undertake such ventures, and it is always a lonely endeavour.

In my friends group we regularly go coworking together. Sometimes we close our laptops and go get dinner or drinks after work. We are vaguely aware of what everyone is working on because we rant about it and ask each other for help. I use them for informal UX testing.

I also have a small audience on social media that lets me work in public. They are very supportive.

Not really. I have been writing my own software for personal use for several years. Yes, it’s quiet but it does everything I want as fast as I could want it to happen.

The worst thing about this is complete loss of compatibility to the world of corporate software employment. Other software developers do not think like this. In the land of employment you work on what you are told, no more and no less. If the stuff you work on is slow you just get to bitch about it. If there are frustrations or missing features then you simply wait for a patch that may never come.

This is the main reason I quit freelancing. Working 3-4 hours was great. Money was decent. There's groups for freelancers and solopreneurs and such. But they're not on your side, they're just peers.

Eventually I think life stagnates. Working for a unicorn had its downs, but there's just something about working with people smarter than me. One thing I just hate about social media is having to explain everything. HN seems to get me, but not quite. In a top tier tech company, there would probably be 6 or so people who have done the same thing you're doing. And you can just sit around for hours debating the best way to design a table to store currencies and be paid a good sum for it. We can talk about insane things like testing in production, getting rid of feature flags, getting rid of documentation. Or just dumb things like Wordle solving algorithms. Someone will not only get it, they'd indulge you on it. But you'd need to hire some of the smartest people in a region and force them all to join the same Slack.

Absolutely. This is my biggest obstacle on doing personal projects.

Like many people who go into programming, I am a bit of an introvert. I can program for days without interacting with other developers and feel very comfortable.

But I am not a total hermit. I want to get with others occasionally to bounce ideas off or to show what I have built. A solo project can get lonely after awhile.

Two things work for me 1) Bonding with other solofounders over how miserable LLMs are to work with 2) Users. Talking to users. Great to bounce ideas of, and so rewarding.

I suppose I'm rather used to it so it doesn't bother me too much. I'd worked from home for several years before going solo and by then was only doing a few videocalls a week, so it wasn't much of a difference day to day.

However, I do miss having someone working on the same project to bounce ideas off of. I have to rubber duck the old fashioned way.

You think it’s lonely?

When a free soloist climbs a mountain by themselves, they are entirely alone. Do you think they have time to think about loneliness while climbing? No.

That’s the mentality you need when building solo. If you’re thinking about how lonely you are, it just means you’re losing focus. Get your head in the game.

When you get to the top, you have all the time in the world to think about how lonely you are up there. And if you don’t get to the top, well, don’t worry about it…

I relate, but you need to become healthy. Get up early in the morning, run with your friends or join a group of runners. That’s the answer. Regulate your sleep, get your blood checked, and if you’re low on vitamin D3, supplement it. Follow Bryan Johnson’s blueprint as a reference.

Then go build. Be 50X.

I do relate with what you’re saying, BUT there’s a solution. It’s not a pill, it’s not a diet, it’s not giving up and recruiting people just because you’re lonely.

The best counter to this is to have groups of people you can show your work off to.

Family? Cool, I guess. It can start there.

Slack? Discord? Yeah, those work I guess. There are some pretty cool niche groups who love to talk code, projects, whatever.

Games? That's where it's at. Social clubs revolve around those and you'd be surprised how many smart & techy people play games. You just gotta get past the barrier of "I don't want to talk about work/personal life/projects etc". You might even find like-minded people wanting to turn what you've got into a business. Or hire you.

I was the only developer in a 4 person startup. we'd go to board rooms and talk about how great the software we were building was, and all faces would turn to me and be like 'oh yeah, and how is that software we're all here to sell coming along now?' Not only was it 'lonely' but all the actual pressure to produce the product was on me. I would never want to go back to that state ever again. Now I still work remotely but there is a decidedly social component to this job because I'm not the only developer. I'm one of 34.

It's a very common feeling and I'm no stranger to it as a solo game developer. But remember that the "grass is always greener on the other side". Chances are that, once you go back to the "nice job" at the end of the day, you'll miss the peace and ownership of your solo building days.

I always enjoyed chatting with my coworkers and learning from them. I do miss that. But I don't miss anything else from that environment, to be honest.

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I work remotely for a fortune 250 company and am on a project with 50+ devs. They are all offshore and I generally work on solo assignments. I go days, sometimes weeks without talking to anyone else including my onshore director. We have a weekly 1:1 scheduled and they are cancelled every week. I generally only end up speaking to him less than 10 times over the year.

Its gotten to the point where If I have get a meeting on my calendar all I feel is irritation.

I lost all my real life friends 10+ years ago once I had kids and I have worked remotely for the same period of time. I can literally go weeks without talking to anyone besides my kids and wife. I don't leave the house unless its to go to the gym or to take the kids to sports. In the gym I'm just head phones on and head down. Just got back from a mini vacation with my wife to a beach resort and all everyone spoke to me about was my physique. I had nothing to respond to them with. I honestly feel like an alien sometimes.

Very strange days.

I get a bit miffed if I go a full day working remotely without any meetings, I can't imagine signing up for this all day every day with no end in sight.

The solution is to get a partner, either in the form of one or two other devs, or at least in the form of an audience who is engaged and willing to give you regular and detailed feedback

I relate very, very hard.

Ironically, I solo-built an AI bookkeeper for solopreneurs all of last year on my own dime. Predictably, I ran out of money and had to go back to contracting.

It was incredibly hard for me and I started to lose my mental health. It was a struggle to get any positive or negative validation, to get anyone to pay any kind of attention whatsoever. It was a great luxury for me when an investor actually said "no," most blew smoke up my butt and strung me along. Even my paying users seemed to not really care one way or another.

After I ran out of money and all but abandoned the project, I had an incredible stroke of good luck when an established player in my niche out of nowhere decided to incubate a new version of my app built on their platform. For a minute, I was finally getting real traction as this company's founder started promoting me across their socials: people signing up, giving feedback, folks adding me on LinkedIn, messaging me to set up partnerships.

The deal eventually fell apart and everything went cold again, but for a second I saw how much easier this all is when you have social proof. It was frustrating. Nothing had changed in me or my product other than a famous person backing me. I was the exact same entrepreneur with the exact same offering, but somehow now I was worthy because someone else said so. Well, I guess that's how the world works.

I want to say "hang in there," but honestly for me the whole episode was the straw that broke the camel's back. After 12+ years of working for myself, I'm seriously reconsidering my life choices and whether I still want this. I'm currently focused on contracting and paying down my debt.

I think that I'm coming back, slowly, to the entrepreneurial path, shorn of many of the BS narratives the tech industry tells about startups. The loneliness is very real and I feel every inch of your pain. You are not alone.

If you ever want to share or reach out, feel free to shoot me an email: me@ersinakinci.com. I'm also trying to write more about my journey at www.ersinakinci.com, although I haven't written yet about the startup failure--too raw still, and frankly, I'm afraid of telling the whole truth.

Get a Discord going with your users. Advertise it in your app. If you are building something valuable, they will join and encourage you. That's what I've done and it's a lot less lonely now with hundreds of people tuning in and discussing things (my work) daily.

If they don't show up, then you probably are not shipping early enough and valuably enough to keep this going. Or you need to learn more modern marketing strategies for unfunded solo builders. Or you are building something valuable that your users have no passion for, which will be hard for yourself to grow sustainable passion.