One time I had a project that was dragging on forever, I was trying to develop a product for an existing business but I kept missing my self-imposed deadlines. 1/3rd of the way in I'd realize I want to approach it a different way and throw away everything tangible I had and re-start. I did that twice. It was dragging on forever.

Then I hand-coded a crappy html sales page and started taking preorders at half price. Got like 60 of them. So, my most loyal customers have given me money just on my word. I promised it would get to them within whatever timeframe.

Now there was no going back, no perfectionism, just had to work my ass off to get it out. And I did! Towards the end I was so burnt out and delirious from all the work and energy drinks and lack of sleep that I actually paid two freelancers from Elance to clean up some of the rough edges on my work, since I knew what was wrong, but I was too broken to fix it myself. But it got out! (Actually, it was two weeks late - I apologized profusely, gave out some free stuffs, and made the second deadline I promised)

After that I had a product that generated some sales for a couple years, so that was awesome. Get some cash. It motivates on many levels. It's like the military commander burning his ships behind him - now there's no retreat, you've got to go forth and conquer, because it's the only way out. Except, unlike burning ships, cash is cool and useful and you can spend it on things, even using the cash you got to help pay to deliver your new product or service. Magnificent thing, cash. Get some. Huge motivator.

Very interesting. What other ideas do you have for sweetening the deal for a customer willing to signup for what is essentially vaporware?

Well, as I understand the term vaporwear, it means stuff that's never built that's never going to get built. It's a result of either a company grandstanding (Microsoft) or a company with perfectionism issues (Duke Nukem Forever). Taking preorders demonstrates that you're not grandstanding and forces you not to be a perfectionist. So I wouldn't call it vaporwear.

Beyond that, running a successful company people trust and delivering value to them helps immensely. Give them things for free - write a newsletter, write a free tool (even a simple one! simple tools are awesome), give some useful case studies, a blog, whatever. If Patrick McKenzie (patio11) announced that he was releasing an ebook in 30 days and charging $80, but it was $20 if you pre-ordered now, I'd jump on that in a heartbeat. Because I respect him, trust him, and would be happy to give him my money, and I know he'll deliver.

Beyond that - solid concept that's demonstrably possible in the real world. If you announce something that seems difficult to impossible and you haven't figured out how to get there from here, people will be skeptical. But if you're doing a version 2.0, or you're selling media (a book, an album, whatever) where people have seen dozens/hundreds examples of it created in the past, or if you're just known as a guy that always delivers - then you should be able to get some preorders.

Really though, I didn't take preorders for the cash, I didn't need the cash. I did it to make a promise to other people. Most people take promises to other people much more seriously than promises to themselves.

Agree with you on taking the cash being a form of promise, to help motivate me to punch through the last 10%.. errr 90%.

I'm not clear on what you mean by "losing faith in the product". Do you mean that you stopped believing that it had any value whatsoever; or that any/enough customers would ever like it; or that you lost faith in your own ability to accomplish it? Or do you just mean that... you ran out of motivation?

The key idea is not that "it takes time", but for it not to take time. In other words, to get something done ASAP. I'm talking like 2 hours, not 2 weeks or 2 months.

esr said to launch a product you need something that (a) runs; and (b) has a promise that it can be turned into something really cool in the near future. It's code + words. Note: this means that the thing that runs is not really cool. [many others also state this idea, but I really like esr's formulation]

For motivation in general (not just for launch), the same thing is true: you want to get something that works ASAP. Fred Brooks says of this style of incremental development: I was stunned by the electrifying effect on team morale of that first picture on the screen, that first running system.

I wrote the first version of my product in 2 hours (though I'd been thinking about it for a couple of weeks; and it took a 9 hour day to write the website). This isn't because I'm some great coder, but because the product was that simple. It wasn't "finished". It took a year before the first sale, and eventually I made enough to retire (for small values of retire).

tl;dr release before it's ready.

The technical community seems to have these virulent quality assumption: Everything test driven, inside out, full stack, behaviour drive. This is great and a must if you have a clear product requirement and/or a clear vision.

But I think this is conflicting with the "release a MVP, crappy, early" philosophy. Maybe I'm to "slow" when doing tdd things. Maybe I just aim too high?

Maybe I've a low frustration tolerance that does not allow me to survive the gap between "end of initial euphoria" and "the first paying customer". How to to improve?

   The technical community seems to have these virulent
   quality assumption: Everything test driven, inside out,
   full stack, behaviour drive. This is great and a must if
   you have a clear product requirement and/or a clear
   vision.

After being burned by having to support/maintain/develop upon someone else's huge, less-than-optimally-thought-out code base you grow afraid of quick hacks, even tho those are sometimes exactly you need.

Is it because you are not convinced that aiming lower is the right thing to do; or do you believe it but you have trouble actually doing it?

Perfectionism is common in programmers (perhaps because imperfect syntax doesn't work). It means that you compare your product with "perfection", instead of comparing it with "nothing" (ie. it not existing at all.) If you tend to be critical, and quickly notice faults and omissions, then you may be a perfectionist. It seems to me that perfectionism is the number one reason why many programmers aren't successful in business. It's very difficult to overcome, but one way to begin is simply try to find what does exist in your product (and elsewhere), and just acknowledge that it does. You might not yet be convinced that it matters, but just being aware of it is a start.

For me, a crucially motivating thing was people actually being interested: feedback. When I launched that 2-hour product, I wouldn't have continued if there was no feedback. But there was (a single email!). Feedback can help survive the gap you mention, to paying customer. Before then, just getting something that does something can be very motivating (see my GP comment).

BTW: don't do tdd for a MVP! It takes too long. The advantages of tdd don't really make sense for prototype.

EDIT Ask yourself how you could cut corners, and yet still deliver some of the essence of the thing. Work out what your one essential idea is, and try asking of a particular line of code: is is absolutely necessary for that essence? Some other questions:

   - error checking? *cut*
   - corner cases? *cut*
   - "option to save your work"? *cut*
        (unless it's a DB etc, whose essence is storage)
   - cover the most common cases? *cut*
        (just cover *one* case)
   - documentation? *cut*
        (except: the essence + how to run)
   - debug? *cut*
        (provided it mostly runs)
   - integration test? *cut*
   - define formats/interfaces? *cut*

   - present slides of your product (Steve Blank)
   - pretend to have a product, but you just:
      post on HN
      one webpage (optional: a survey on it + Skype chat)
        (feels wrong to me, but can be done ethically)
   - adwords campaign + landing page

Here's some essays that might help: "Mediocrity is underrated (or better is the enemy of good enough)" http://nayna.org/blog/?p=11 "Getting Real" [6 very short excerpts, I suggest read all esp the footnote/quotes, in this order:] http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Whats_Your_Problem.php http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch09_Epicenter_Design.php http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch06_Race_to_Running_Softwa... http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch06_Shrink_Your_Time.php http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch06_Done.php http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch10_Less_Software.php and pg's 2008 essay (on HN 2 days ago): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1525068

disclaimer I find it hard to cut corners on my present project. My excuses (which I'd like to overcome) are due to it being based on a new mathematical model:

    - if the maths isn't realized correctly, it won't work perfectly
    - showing off all its benefits (eg error checking) requires more work
    - getting the foundation right will be easier to build on
    - patenting (can't be done after release)

When I ask my developer colleagues about feedback for my "crappy alpha", I'm just getting totaly bullshit responses like "you need javascript input validation before the user sends his form" despite the real problem I try to resolve.

So I asked serveral of my ~100 developer contacts on different projects, unfortunately feedback was kind of the same.

But only few of them managed to release something in their spare time. So they probably have the same problem as I have.

It's hard to get in contact with people that made it, some of them just tell you "I was lucky" which is cool, but not really helpful - It's easy to say that when you've made it :)

Oh no, you don't ask for feedback from your colleagues - you get it from people with the problem you're solving. From users. Your fellow developers can't even know if you solved the user problem; the best they can do is point out things like grammatical errors which, as you say, is useless.

EDIT I guess your PHP friend wouldn't have been able to bring over users for his very his first app, and I bet he remembers it vividly. You could email him, or talk on the phone. He's not the only person in the world to have shipped, but you know him, so he's an excellent person to start with. You could visit him. Consider: 500 km vs. 4 weeks. Sounds ridiculous, but if you take this journey, you won't forget his point of view.

Well there's your problem. Assuming you are working part time, two to four weeks is not even remotely enough time to build even the simplest of businesses. Note I'm not talking about building an application, which you could complete in 3-4 weeks, I'm talking about building a business.

I would guess a more reasonable timeline for starting something in your spare time would be about 6 months until you get your first revenue, (or more likely your first 'pivot' because you finally have enough data to realize your idea sucks). I wouldn't be surprised if it took longer. So, whatever you choose to do, try to ask yourself if you are willing to spend most of your spare time for the next year working on it before you even see any money. As soon as you start passing ideas through this filter, I think you'll find more success.

Any more optimistic timeline is a time fantasy.

Side note: this is in my opinion the problem with starting something on the side. It's far too slow. Sometimes it looks like I'm going to be 30 before I make a dime! I think I could cut down this cycle to 2-3 months to my first 'pivot' if I was full time. In other words I think working full time would move things along 4X as fast. Add a competent cofounder and you could probably almost double that.

Absurd, huh? Not really. It's the same thing.

People walk because their parents absolutely, positively would not give up teaching them to walk. It's that simple. We need more of that thinking when it comes to "raising our businesses".

When I hear about people starting businesses and failing, I wonder if it's because (a) the business never had a chance or (b) they gave up too soon. I suspect it's a lot more (b) they most people would admit.

I think the secret to not giving up is finding a cause that's just about as important as teaching your child how to walk. This depends upon how your hard work will benefit others, not on how cool it is, how much fun it would be, or how much money it will make. You will have to succeed because of those who are depending on you just like your child depends upon you to teach them to walk.

If you have some side project you are distracted every day by things that maybe have more potentials, people that may compete or even personal things.

So you start think: Why should I still do that...? And then your project is toast.

Yes, If you rally know all "stages" you can recall them in future ventures:

"okay, I feel miserable now, but that's the same with the last thing and in the end I made a good product. I'll just repeat. EOD"

Citation, please? All three of my kids have taken the initiative themselves to learn to walk, and I've never seen a non-walking older child without a physical disability.

If you want to be motivated to walk, look at big people walking. Adjust your time online to make that your focus. Meet up with people who ship.

3 reasons they will likely say yes:

1) A chance to show off the results of their hard work.

2) Since you're smart enough to be asking about them, they may by default think you're a heads-up person and worth taking a close look at (for a potential hire).

3) If you're asking about them, you may know something about their industry or their product that they don't, so they might be interested in finding out if you can provide feedback.

Bonus) Free lunch!

This causes the lack of motivation / reduces the chances of reaching success for a few reasons.

- The first is that you do not need it to succeed.

Don't get me wrong, you would love it to succeed and make money, however you are most likely doing it after your day job and the reality is, you've not risked enough to 'HAVE' to succeed. Therefore it is very easy to fail / decide to try again when things get tough or haven't yet been as successful as you had hoped.

- Another key reason is that, while bootstrapping time is tight. You find you spend hours / days / weeks / months of your spare time on something (while working full time at a job) and the reality is, you just burn out / want free time again. This is not unreasonable, especially if you have a family to look after, or your health is being affected.

- Ultimately every idea goes through a dip, 'a hard' section. The fun idea / initial build has started (if you're a software developer like me, this is the best part), but now you must focus on the other elements such as sales / marketing / support, etc. We can easily diagnose and fix a problem in our code if our product is running inefficiently, but it's often far harder for us hackers to say exactly why the traffic is not pouring in, why the traffic is not converting to user sign ups or why the sales aren't increasing. At this point we think how much fun it would be to work on another exciting idea, doing the fun part again.

- Finally (I already realise this is quite an essay), the idea may not have been so great to start with. It is a common thing to have 'great' ideas, which at first seem brilliant, but after a week seem weak. I always try to give any idea I have at least 3 days of thought before jumping in. Similarly I always ask other people for their thoughts and whether they would use this service?

Ultimately, there is nothing more demotivating than working on a project realising that no one actually wants it.

2-4 weeks? I've been working on my current project for five years... And I still don't know whether it's really going anywhere :(

But maybe I'll find out soon. My project's latest iteration is slated for release this week, after nearly two years of development.

May I ask what the project is?

Maybe an admin can help? Thank you!

Read:

Ecclesiastes - http://bit.ly/bFJruK

Proverbs - http://bit.ly/aJpmva

Henry Ford's autobiography My Life And Work - http://bit.ly/9fZkFG

How to enjoy grinding? Get absorbed in the daily small tasks and focus on them completely. Our brains are built up in a way, that it's impossible for us not to enjoy ourselves, if we really focus on a single task. Multitasking really kills the flow experience, so it's good to to avoid multitasking whenever possible.

Have a grand strategy and know where you want to be in life. Review your strategy every one or two weeks. Look at the week ahead, and the week just passing. Is there an activities you should focus on? Look for small improvements.

Track your resources (time and money). How much time and money do you spend on certain activities (you think you know, but you have no idea without actually tracking it). There are time tracking apps (eg. Eternity for iPhone), that could help. Look at your spendings (again time and money) each day and find things, that you could do better / things that you shouldn't do / things that you should do instead.

There are a million things that might work for you, but the bottom line is to find a way to enjoy the grinding process.

I would suggest building a very simple feature set that you an launch quickly (MVP in startup terms) or even a quick mockup and ask your end customer (or who you think your customer is) what they think of it.

If you have a prototype a customer wants then you will be excited. Set some deadlines, targets, goals, and really execute on it.

That's my 2 cents.

Yeah. Find ways to generate excitement on your side and actively seek it on a regular basis.

For me, in this phase I'm in, it's talking to entrepeneurs which really does help. I guess it's also about a supportive environment. Family and friends, people who believe in you and lift you up.

It's not all bad news though. You need to revisit your motivation for doing your own project. Money alone is rarely enough to offset the emotional drain of doing so. And as I said above, neither is doing it just because society values individuals who pull it off / go the effort of at least trying. Ambition for the sake of ambition won't cut it.

Find something you're passionate about. Change the world, change people's lives, or change a very tiny part of the lives of many people. Find a competitor who has stopped innovating because they have a monopoly on a market and fight tooth and nail to break their monopoly by providing a superior service. Pick a fight and don't back down. People don't give up after 2 to 4 weeks if they're passionate about something.

Go out to the library, or borders, barnes and nobles (or digitally) and buy this book - http://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/04.... It's called the War of Art, and a really short read, 150'ish pages (but actually more along the lines of 75 pages). A friend of mine loaned me his copy and it's definitely pulled me up from the doldrums I've been in recently to get some perspective. I suffer from pretty much the same thing and succumb to that resistance, or what other people sometimes call the "lizard brain", in getting something DONE. It's HARD.

Honestly - just read the book. It'll help. I promise.

Firstly, it maybe my personality- Resource Investigator then secondary Plant. Both type of of personalities are creative but get bored of things pretty quickly. Working along side a Sharper generally solves this problem. For more about belbin have a read: http://www.teambuilding.co.uk/belbin-team-role.html

If I'm by myself. I generally make the time scale large. Like right now, I'm trying to read a 373 page book. I could read it in a day. But instead, I am going to do it over 4 days. So generally, I expand my expected time for success. I talk about it in this post: http://chegra.posterous.com/consistently-underperforming

Also, when I'm finished a small task, I announce it on my twitter and facebook. The likes and the comments generally boost motivations. So, maybe like every two days I have some kind of news to report on what I'm doing. Like, I finish my low fidelity mockup design. I try as much as possible not to mention the future, it decreases your motivation for getting stuff done. Apparently, the brain rewards you for just saying you are going to do it and your friends too, hence no incentives to complete the task. So, do it afterwards and obtain the rewards from there.

I thought that both partners are going to motivate themselves, don't allow one to procrastinatel off the roads.

In the end it did not work out. He raised more "no go" concerns than even I have when I start failing a project, e.g.:

A 2 hour discussion about: "when we focus on the US, who does support at night? I'LL NEVER STAY UP READING EMAIL TO 2AM EVERY SECOND DAY. I CAN'T DO THAT."

That was after approx. three weeks. Nothing worked yet. No customers of course.

TL;DR

I try to find cofounders but usually they have less motivation than I have. I probably don't do me a favour.

I was thinking about writing a short post on this. I suspect this whole agile culture with releasing crappy version 1 and iterating may be misleading for some people. For example, I've never heard of authors iterating their fiction book - they write it and sell it. If they don't sell right away, they may sell it later, so it's not an immediate failure. I think maybe this, at least partially, may be applied to the software world. Games and iPhone apps pretty much fall into this model. But maybe webapps could somehow do the same. The point is, I see nothing really wrong with this attitude of working hard for some time, but not wanting to continue to invest your time and energy into the product after its release. It maybe be good for some products, but bad for other. The real problem is the current trend towards iterations and continuous development, which may fool some people and make them unhappy.

Faith in product or self?

I think you are right to question the ratio of HN articles readers obsess over at the expense of psychology. You want to build something, but first you have to overcome many hurdles. Somewhere along on the way the balance of motivation and flexibility that keeps hackers working on projects gets out of whack, code stops getting written and your project dies.

Overcoming obstacles is what it's all about. If you avoid signs of failure [0] you have a better chance of completing the project. This of course doesn't mean the project is worthy of being called a product. Users just might not like what you have to offer. Not completing the project/product is the quickest way to failure. There are no easy answers here. Keep moving forward.

[0] Reading this motivates me to finish an article I've been planning on failure. Here's some patterns of failure I've noticed ~ http://seldomlogical.com/2009/08/12/10-signs-of-failure

So keep on building fires, one day you'll hit one right out of the park as long as you learn from previous fires and why they died out.

In a roundabout way the feelings we are unwilling to experience end up running our life. So maybe it would be a good thing for you to take the quiet time to discover what is beneath the behaviour you abhor.

One way to do this is to ask yourself what is it that you would lose, or tightly held belief that would be invalidated, if you were incredibly successful. And then rather than try to answer this question with reason or your intellect, just write a page or two without thinking, and see what comes up.

Good luck!

The subconscious starts to think of all reasons why this will fail for sure.

Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: You work less, waste time and focus, procrastinate.

Then it's over.

I found the biggest motivator is user feedback. Especially positive ones.. It makes me stay up late to get another thing implemented or fixed etc.

If I would run out of encouragement from users or people around me for a while, I think that is when I lose interest.

You loose not faith but interest as soon as you realize that you could actually do this and here comes the important part *if you wanted to!

So if you want to do something about it, you need to make sure that once you have established the groundwork someone else will take over the nitty gritty of finishing.

Unfortunately people are only willing to take over if:

a) it makes them easy money, or is near to be profitable b) you pay them for doing your work (you trust your idea, so you it will pay others, too? sure..) c) you can make a big marketing around selling your pre-alpha-incomplete company (unrealistic)