I accepted the problem that I keep abandoning projects. There is nothing terrible in it, and I am a human-being with upsides and downsides. If you have an interest in why I have killed yet another project, keep reading.
I crafted a short answer that consists of two parts. The first one is that I have a psychological problem, the Sysphus scenario. And the second is that I tried to implement the idea that does not fit me well as a founder and eventually burned out.
Meet InboxQuery:
Before I deployed InboxQuery, I have around two months of productive work but wasted on other projects. I tried to build a monitoring system but did not finish it. Then I tried to make a disposable email provider, but I did not finish it.
I was angry at myself and the world. I felt demotivated, depressed, frustrated, and anxious. Every project I take, I can’t complete.
You know the myth about Sysphus, right? The first man to take advantage of self-interest and deception among the Hellenes. And after the death, he was punished. He will never complete his simple job - to lift a stone to the top of a mountain. Every time he riches the last step to do the job, the stone falls. What are the feelings of Sysphus?
Whenever I get close to finishing a project and deploying it to production, somehow, I find the reason to throw it away and start doing something else 😞. Why? I leave it for another post.
I opened my idea log and picked up a simple idea that I could finish in a week. It was an advanced email validator API. Sounds simple, yes? Yes. It took me two days to develop the project and share it with friends.
But what then? Three months of raw silence. I did not touch it and did not invest any time in it. And today, I close it - delete the server and sell the domain.
It was an outstanding achievement for me ✅. I felt fulfilled when I finished the project 🎆. I did not thoroughly overcome the Sysphus scenario, but it was one of these first moments when I thought I could do it 💪.
So, to fight and overcome the Syphus scenario, I need to accomplish projects regularly. At some point in a lifetime, I will see more streaks of accomplished projects than abandoned. I do not say that throwing and completing plans is evil. But I need to get to some point and to get something from the project. If I keep quitting projects without analyzing why I do it and feel depressed, I need to change it.
Indeed there is a founder-market fit. I made a simple API that is what I trained to do the best. I am good at crafting backends and APIs. But I did not know anything about the market, and for whom I will sell the solution I developed. I do not live in the market of email validations. So, no, there is no founder-market fit.
I am still not convinced that I must have an idea that fits me well, but it is an excellent heuristic to achieve some success in accomplishing projects. It is a chicken and egg problem, and you do not know the market until you start exploring it and building something. So you are always limited and might miss arising demand that you can exploit 💰 to make a valuable thing.
There are markets where you can begin to gain the necessary skills to build products and achieve at least some success.
An excellent analogy came into my mind from the software engineering world. You should never start a new project with more than one (zero is preferred) new technology because you will invest a lot of time learning instead of doing it. You want to learn something or to do something?
The same idea stays for the founder-market fit. If you want to learn the market and explore what options it has for you, the best way to do it is to serve in this market or create a product. But if your goal is to build a small niche product to cover your basic expenses, it is better to leverage the market you already know.
So, I will take some time to figure out what I want to do next and how to do it - should I follow the founder-market fit idea or explore new emerging markets.