Why I’m starting a new (ad)venture
It’s different this time
All I wanted to do this time was build something and actually finish it.
I get restless if I’m not working on a side project. After taking a break due to burnout, it was time to start doing something again.
this time I promised myself I’d make sure to take it slow, and not pressure myself into delivering something. Just make something cool, and when I finished, I’d see where to go from there.
No more empire-building for me.
And that remains true. I am going only as fast as my body allows me to. And that is very slow.
The thing is, I have a chronic health problem, that I’ll talk about in more detail in other posts. But the gist of it is that I have a hormonal imbalance in my brain that makes it extrude a few hormones, such as adrenaline, almost constantly.
In practice, this means that even when I don’t have emotional stress, I have physical stress. And of course, the longer I have this, the greater a toll it takes on my body.
This means I have to be very careful about pushing myself to my limits; a hard thing to do as a workaholic.
And so, the idea this time was not to worry about creating a company but to focus on creating a product and have fun with it. I wanted to make something I would use and that would push my skills a bit, but not too far all at once.
This led me to start working on a CRM for freelancers.
I never understood CRM’s, even though I knew their usefulness. Most CRM’s focus on big corporations and I guess as a solopreneur the way they deal with the issues doesn’t make sense.
Everything seemed too complicated and time-consuming. I wanted something as simple as possible that would do as much as it could with AI.
So I sat down and started working on what I was calling CRM.
Yes, that’s right, I hadn’t named it yet. This in itself is a great departure from my normal process, where the business side came first and the development side came second. I was fully committed to focusing on the build rather than the business.
I was making decent progress. By which I mean it was slow, but at least I wasn’t hurting myself in the process. And things were great.
And by this, I mean things were fine. I had no real drive to make this thing, I wanted to do something.
So after a few months of dealing with setting up the basic structure that I had no idea how to do, I was finally getting somewhere. And after 5 years without a vacation, I finally had one coming up, that I could use to focus a little more on the project, without pushing myself too much.
I should note that I work a 9–5 job, and am busy most weekends with either my house life or social life. This is also something I’ve learned that I can’t forgo, otherwise it accelerates my inevitable burnouts.
The stars were aligning. Everything was on track and I was poised for great success.
So of course, I got Covid.
My fiance works at a hospital, and caught it at work the week we started our vacation. Something we found out the second day in. Suddenly, I had to cancel all the plans I had made for my two weeks off. And that included Christmas and New Years’ celebrations.
While I was asymptomatic, my fiance was not. And even though I had none of the symptoms, I did have a few very annoying side effects.
For the next couple of months, I was exhausted all the time and had trouble thinking. I’d be easily confused or just straight-up forget what I was doing or thinking about.
And even when that didn’t happen, my thoughts were sluggish and muddled. All in all a terrible time to be had.
I should probably specify as well that my fiance is a veterinarian. And it’s been a while that she’d be asking me to make a system she could use to keep track of her work and patients.
So while my mind was muddled I was having a hard time working on the project and it started to stagnate. To get out of that, I decided to pivot.
I determined the minimum requirements for an MVP with my fiance, and that was great.
I’ve found that I’m a lot more motivated to work on the system knowing that there are already people that are waiting to use the product I’m creating. Furthermore, it’s easier to know what to prioritize when you can talk to other people about their needs, something I didn’t have before.
This is something I’ve never really done in a personal project, and I’m loving it.
There is a danger though. Since other people are waiting for the product, I do feel a little more pressure to deliver and have a harder time not pushing myself to my limits.
This is something I am working on, and it’s been a challenge. But it’s great to be learning all kinds of new things, and know that it will be useful for someone once it’s ready.
If you are interested in following this new journey and learning about how I deal with all of the issues that will arise in making a new digital product, follow Growing Pains. I will be documenting everything there and hopefully, you can avoid some of the pitfalls.
