IMO, your post is spot on. Grinding out the last 10% of the boring details while fear starts creeping in and new ideas surface to distract you is exactly what I’ve felt.
You’ve codified this in a way that I feel like I can begin to manage it better. Really great post. I’ll incorporate this one into my life going forward.
In video games which I personally know, “make games that are fun to make not to play.”
The polish and marketing of a thing is always done better by bigger budgets which you don’t have. The math the article is missing is that shipping something polished and boring is only possible because you valued your time at zero. So even if you find success, an honest accounting could wind up making your ROI negative.
Indeed I’ve gotten out of so many worse situations by quitting early and getting my life back compared to the colleagues I left behind. It was never worth the chance to ship something that would have never found an audience anyway. This is especially true of people doing startups, they are doing psychological warfare against themselves and shrouding the reality that they have already failed and will have learned little by spending 4 years on something compared to 1.
One thing we should do while we’re configuring oauth consent screens, verifying domains, and other 10% drudgery is tell ourselves we’re building reusable infrastructure or at least obtaining the knowhow to do so.
You’ve codified this in a way that I feel like I can begin to manage it better. Really great post. I’ll incorporate this one into my life going forward.