I had a tool I worked on a little bit every day for over a decade and for a while it was pretty popular with a large following. Persistence is what got me from nowhere to somewhere, but after a while persistence offers a diminishing return.
Persistence is necessary to build something from nothing to establishment. That is more than just working. It means you have pushed through into something that works well enough that other people will use it and strongly recommend it.
That is the point where a trickle becomes a flood, but the flood analogy is a bad analogy. Actual flooding, with water, is an explosive phenomenon where a large area achieves maximum saturation in unison and so the trickle becomes a serious concern almost instantly. When all water over a large area has nowhere to go suddenly at the same time there is an immediate change like the flip of a switch.
Growth and adoption don't work like that. It takes time to build adoption. By the time a product reaches critical mass many early users may have already moved on. The very thing that made your product special or unique may be gone and you probably don't know it. This means the thing that cause adoption could be code while you are still building traffic because of a lag between network effects and incentives. That means adoption could be dying while you are building traffic and you won't know and until the future once traffic catches up and begins to decline at which point you are having to catch up.
If you are passionate enough, beyond mere persistence, you will figure the traffic/adoption cycle out to keep forward momentum, but only if you are properly incentivized. It takes tremendous effort to reach a large critical mass, especially for a small team (in my case a single developer). To want to pivot past your personal motivates to keep your product alive takes something more, something different. Persistence won't buy you that.
Persistence is necessary to build something from nothing to establishment. That is more than just working. It means you have pushed through into something that works well enough that other people will use it and strongly recommend it.
That is the point where a trickle becomes a flood, but the flood analogy is a bad analogy. Actual flooding, with water, is an explosive phenomenon where a large area achieves maximum saturation in unison and so the trickle becomes a serious concern almost instantly. When all water over a large area has nowhere to go suddenly at the same time there is an immediate change like the flip of a switch.
Growth and adoption don't work like that. It takes time to build adoption. By the time a product reaches critical mass many early users may have already moved on. The very thing that made your product special or unique may be gone and you probably don't know it. This means the thing that cause adoption could be code while you are still building traffic because of a lag between network effects and incentives. That means adoption could be dying while you are building traffic and you won't know and until the future once traffic catches up and begins to decline at which point you are having to catch up.
If you are passionate enough, beyond mere persistence, you will figure the traffic/adoption cycle out to keep forward momentum, but only if you are properly incentivized. It takes tremendous effort to reach a large critical mass, especially for a small team (in my case a single developer). To want to pivot past your personal motivates to keep your product alive takes something more, something different. Persistence won't buy you that.