How I stay motivated as a solo creator
herman.bearblog.dev
herman.bearblog.dev
But, the real issue in working on something, for myself, that is engaging, and pushing back the "WTH are you wasting time on this for?". It's all very fleeting.
It's not like I have some other burning passion to work on instead, some "if you do this you'll make lots of money instead of those toys you make thing". I don't.
But, especially being older, it can be a trick at times to persevere, not say "F it" and fire up "distraction du jour" (HN, YT, video game, etc.).
My recent project, that I actually released, documentation, cross platform installers, and everything, took a year of calendar time (but not a year of effort, it was idle for some months). It felt good to get it out, put it in the hand of other (I think only one person has actually used it). But, that actually doesn't deter me (sure, I'd like folks to use things, that's why I finished the project to make it, ideally, easy to pick up).
But, still, there are those times when that hopelessness of "why bother" creeps in and takes the wind out of my sails.
What drives people?
Then slowly, nearly all of them stopped. Some got jobs at big companies. Others quietly stopped posting after numbers flatlined or declined. This includes a lot of people whose projects were “Ramen profitable” and then showing huge month over month growth, which was supposed to be the start of something bigger.
A disappointing number of them have pivoted into personal brand building and selling courses. It’s a lot of “follow me/subscribe to my newsletter for more advice” which turns into “sign up now for an exclusive spot in my new course” after a half a year. It’s like a switch flips after a certain number of followers where they realize it’s going to be easier to sell courses/content than to build their project into a successful company.
Spammed my email with subpar / spam writing
What’s the next stage for these content creators?
I've worked on [side/pet/hobby] projects consistently for the last 6 years. What drives me is my friends. One of the latest projects I've started to work on is a free alternative to a mobile app called UDisc. They hit us with the ol' switcheroo by offering the service for free for several years and now force you to pay if you want to maintain your previous disc golf rounds (beyond 10 rounds).
I've tried to build things only I want and I usually lose steam or interest. For me, building things for, and with, other people keeps me motivated.
So, feedback from others motivates me.
Seeing people visit my website, even if only a few dozen or hundred, is motivating.
Of course it's possible to learn techniques and behavior patterns which can help you be a successful pure-solo creator, but it takes time and persistence (and motivation :) ) to learn and stick with those behaviors.
So my conclusion, as someone with a few dozen parked ideas (some of which got 80% near to MVP complete), is to find a partner or at least goal-buddy to help you stay motivated... and occasionally to help you remember why you're doing the thing.
I personally lean on people to help stay motivated. For your example, I would find a game dev meet up or some discord community, talk shop & share what I'm working on on a regular basis. Validate or give feedback on the work of others, and get some of my own.
It's a process of constantly pushing back the thoughts and community makes it easier
I've been building a business solo over the past year, reached 80% in late spring, ready to a closed invite launch and... lost all motivation. Between the fear of seeing savings go down without anything to show for it, the utterly demoralising job market during which it took 6+ months to get one solid freelance opportunity, and the constant nag that I am wasting my time and should just find a job like a normal person... meant that I completely lost steam, just staying afloat with a good freelance client, shelving the business idea for months.
Only a couple weeks ago, after seeing that my financial situation isn't getting better, and I still am allergic to a regular job, I managed to overcome the massive inertia and got back riding the wave of launching a business. I adore the freedom of working for myself, the challenge, but until I start seeing good money coming in, I'll always believe I am wasting my time and following fanciful ideas instead of just going back to trying to win the interview lottery and working for someone else on something I don't care about. It's hard.
On a motivated day I can work as much a full day of work (7h), most of the time I'm spending a couple of hours on it. Everyday (mostly). I find it easier to be consistent by having a day job that firces me to wake up in the morning than when I have a full empty schedule.
Free afternoons feel like every day is a holiday that can be filled with whatever I fancy, though sometimes morning work motivates me so much I might do more work in the afternoon. I might need to pace myself, like that Hemingway quote in TFA.
It is incredible how productive one can be with just 20h of consistent work a week, with no bosses or bullshit meetings. I'm still working on the consistency part :)
Similar for me. I'm generating and validating ideas at the moment, but it takes almost no time for me to convince myself an idea is rubbish, not worth exploring, or already done.
The difference between a successful business and a failed startup is how much effort you put into it, considering that a solo or a startup is exponentially more nimble than an established player at identifying and focusing on a novel approach to an old problem.
The classic Silicon Valley/Paul Graham advice of "validate an idea and don't write a line of code until you have signed 10 clients" is a good approach only iff your job is creating ideas and putting the least possible effort in each one. This is the Twitter indiehacker approach. But if you only have one good idea that you believe in, that scratches your own itch, just build it. Don't spend ages to build it, try to market it ASAP, but how much effort you put into it is more important than how game changing your idea is.
This is my plan at least, and no successful business just yet to say if this approach is valid, but it agrees with my reading of the business, indie hacker and startup world.
Just don't create another productivity app. That's the most saturated field in the entire space, and for some reason 90% of indie hackers have built yet another calendar/todo hybrid, wondering why no one cares.
It just as well may indicate there’s room in the market for yet another twist on a similar thing.
You probably actually enjoyed it too, just not the whole time. That's fine, that's the treadmill.
Problem is, no money. I don’t mind, really.
But I treat every one of my free, open-source (or proprietary) projects as if I am delivering for a Fortune 50 corporation.
Lots of boring bits, but the results speak for themselves.
There was a Show HN, some time ago, where someone made a Web site that cataloged existing markets, with insufficient software.
It was a good idea, but not for me. I like to be heavily invested in the use cases for my work.
It looked for products with a lot of ratings and mediocre levels, which indicated a market that wasn't being satisfied.
The middle of the bell curve would be an app that had 10,000 3-star ratings.
This excluded products being "hate-bombed," and ones being "gamed."
It suggested using the list as a starting point for finding poorly-served markets.
It was fairly clever.
Loss of structure can be devastating to productive habits.
I suppose I should do a Show HN at some point and find out.
It's a "simple" GUI wrapper around a fractal planet generator (that I did not create).
I'm not very good at GUIs. I don't have the visual eye, I'm lousy at detail. 99% of the time I'm happy with something that spits out the answer I want awash in a sea of debug logs and printlns. I have a great tolerance to ignoring all of that.
I bogged down on the installers because I loathe configuring build tools, hunting down plugins, tweaking configurations.
It ended up as 4000 lines of code just for the GUI part, which seemed surprising. But that's the nature of it. GUIs are just heaps and gobs of detail, and events, and wiring it all up.
But I did it, it's "done", even if imperfect, even if the box has rounded corners as I shoved it into the outbox. And its got all sorts of things I wouldn't do again, which is useful.
Getting it out was like an interview with Columbo, always "one more thing". One of my "last minute" changes took me a month.
I was considering doing a YT video (or series) just going through this thing. Seems small enough, but addresses "real problems", rather than just examples, maybe there's value seeing it all together. Some examples of, perhaps, what "not to do".
Share and enjoy!
Just sharing your knowledge can be a hand up to someone in a bind, even a complete stranger on the internet who doesn't even give out an upvote.
Everyone's gifts are different, and none of them are universal.
Some possibly unimportant background: my wife used to suffer from depression, but in the last 10 years that has subsided, mostly through self-guided philosophy and practical stuff. What remains is social anxiety and a life-long history of avoiding working for/with people. For reasons I won't go into she has a huge problem with authority figures, so early jobs with unfair or idiotic bosses lasted a "tableflip" amount of time. She's run a solo business for most of her adult life "to avoid dealing with people". The double-irony is:
1. There's almost no such thing as "working alone". A successful business requires interaction, and if you're solo, you need to do all of it.
2. She realized that without having to do something for someone she has zero motivation to do anything at all even though she loves what she actually does.
Without a client she thinks "why bother?". As soon as a client contacts her, off she goes like a bee. And even though she consciously realizes this, she has never found a way to trick her brain into doing work for herself. Sometimes I feel like faking a client just so she can work, because once she's going, her work is amazing and she loves what she does. She's even done free/low cost work for cash-strapped clients just so that she can work.
So what I'm saying is that she needs her work to matter to someone specific, but it doesn't matter who.
I thought she was nuts, but after 20+ years of working for various companies I took a 6 month break from work. I had all sorts of plans for things I'd hack on. I finished nothing, except for the raspberry pi arcade cabinet for my nephews.
We all know that startups need to get their product into customer hands. We think that the client's excellent feedback will knock the product into shape. But I think it might just be the fact that you have a customer who needs you to deliver. Having worked for a few early stages startups that had no clients yet, this effect is visible.
Exactly this. I've wanted to build a software company/SaaS for 20+ years but only managed to get any traction once because I got my first customer. Back in 2006 or 2007 I started an app hosting company "on the side" because there were no companies hosting FogBugz (bug tracker). I managed to get one customer and that motivated me to keep going. I had a customer ask if I hosted another application called HelpSpot (helpdesk software) and I obliged. Within 7-8 months I had more than 100 customers. It was not a ton of revenue or profit, but I kept at it until I got tired of my servers being hacked seemingly every week - HelpSpot was a PHP based application and back then PHP had more security holes than swiss cheese.
My "claim to fame" was that I hosted HelpSpot for an up-and-coming little startup named Twitter. Anyway, long story short...I am living proof that without customers it's difficult for the typical person to keep working on something to completion.
I happened to be a student representative of computer science at the time for high schoolers and their parents. One parent ask "can you make iPhone apps?" I told them "no but I can learn it." He offered me to pay a - at that time - pretty nice amount of money.
That was my highest grade for a course ever. I loved the learning process as well!
I've done this a few times when otherwise finding work was proving hard. I think I might share the same weird mental hurdle as your wife. If I can find even 1 person who wants something I think I can prototype for them, I'm happy to do it. But making things purely for myself? Why?
Ultimately it's easy to work on things when they are fun and exciting; but motivation will only last for so long... once that happens it's the discipline that needs to take over for you to keep progressing forward.
Both external and internal rewards. And external punishments, Ie on review, pay cut, fired etc.
You get motivation to do something, run on that motivation as long as you can and hope it lasted long enough to make it a habit.
It's investing in your future self while the going is good. Like, build that habit while you're motivated because it will go away and you'll be left with it as a habit.
On another note, one motivational trick I am applying nowadays with everything is to learn meta-skills like these in many different contexts (otherwise it won’t transfer).
Maybe it’s not another note. Maybe that’s the way how I stay motivated to focus at will for any given task.
It’s still early days. Also, I am doing this in conjunction with tackling my compulsion to go to YouTube.
Or do the public progress showmanship thing (recurring blog or vlog posts about your project and the current status). I admire the people that go this route, but it frankly scares me since we're talking here on a forum of talented people, some of whom could just hear the project idea and probably get it built faster. So sharing seems to create a lot of risk.
My issue is that I don't give a shit about other people outside of those I care about. imo the whole coach thing is a cottage industry of bullshit artists.
If Linus Torvalds wanted to give me advice/coach me I'd damn well listen, even if I disagreed with it (and I'd question if I'm right because Linus is that good).
But the random joe blow whose entire career is coaching? I just have no respect for it.
For example, an accountability partner could be a potential client/user that you're building a tool targeting. You keep them in the loop with regular updates, and that activity alone can help keep you moving forward even when you might have moments of doubt. If you know you _have_ to report status to someone weekly, you're less likely to blow a week off entirely. At minimum, you might wait until an hour before the meeting and hustle to do at least something.
Since going back to being primarily a maker after organizing my days around being a manager[1], and being an avid runner, I've redefined my relationship with "motivation" in a way that can be summed up succinctly by author Brad Stulberg: "You don't need to feel good to get going. You need to get going to feel good." I know that I am long-term very motivated, but day to day or hour to hour, "motivation" is a tricky word, because my energy and creativity waxes/wanes.
Agree with the author that structure is the most important thing for me to work around this. Even though makers dream of an open schedule, on the days where I'm off my usual routine, it's really tough to prioritize all the many things always on my plate. It's even tougher trying to decide to peel myself away from work to go for a run that I know will help me focus better after. Making the decision can be emotionally and mentally taxing, whereas if I rely on the default that I just go out for a run as soon as I wake up, the rest of the day just flows from that without the decision fatigue. Time-blocking or even just very simple structure like the OP has has been really effective for me. This includes a hard stop time each day even if it feels like I'm on a roll— my younger self would often borrow against my future energy, and that seemed to rarely work out in the medium-to-long term.
> This is combined with a lack of co-workers. Comrades in the trenches, if you will. And finally there's the ability to not do anything, which can be quite nebulous and dangerous if not managed.
For anyone who is a solo-creator struggling with this, "body-doubling" is a term from the ADHD/neurodivergent community that simply means "doing a task in the presence of another person". Surprisingly, they don't have to be working on the same task to help you feel like you have "comrades in the trenches". If you're interested, check out Flow Club in my bio.
This is what I found combatting my social anxiety by approaching people on the street. Even after a decade of doing it, I am still as socially anxious as ever but simply giving some genuine compliments to a few fellow pedestrians loosens me up after half an hour (in Europe).
Honestly, if I need strangers around, I'd rather work in a coffee shop, but ideally I just want something no more intrusive than an IRC chat to shoot the shit while the code is compiling.
Still crossing my fingers for body doubling that less intrusive.
The problem with working from a coffee shop is that your strength and motivation to go there must come from you. You must get up, leave your apartment, go to the coffee shop, and decide to work there. For chronic procrastinators, it's rather tricky. A person like that needs enough motivation to do it but not enough to work alone.
Shameless plug - you can try us (https://workmode.net/). However silly it sounds, we provide body doubling as a service. Try the demo session - no registration is required, and it lasts from 15 minutes to several hours.
Some features that might convince you to finally give body doubling a shot:
- you connect with our employee (aka productivity partner), not a random stranger,
- you always connect with the same productivity partner,
- all sessions are 1-on-1. It's just you and your productivity partner,
- you don't have to enable your camera. We don't rely on you being our body double. We're happy as long as text chat/audio/screen sharing/webcam feed makes you productive,
- you can share your screen at a greatly reduced resolution. It's enough for us to distinguish between you watching Youtube/reading Hacker News and spending time in IDE/Excel/other work-related apps. We're unable to read any text on your screen, even at 32px font size,
- every day, we make sure that you connect with us. We make sure you tell us when you want to start the next day, and in case you don't show up, we'll call you and keep calling you.(I'm kind of reminded of video games where there are some "canned lines" that you can click on in the middle of the action and your character will "say" them to the opponent.)
Still going! Still going? 10 mins more and let's break! I think I'm done Thanks for playing Ok Hmmm Never!
etc. :)
How relatable!
" - Coffee and a walk with my partner - Gym for about an hour - Journal and write - Work block 1 (about 3 hours) - Lunch and chill - Work block 2 (also about 3 hours) "
That looks fantastic!
What it highly correlates to is your health - mental and physical. I have a friend / colleague who is a successful creator. YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. He does well. But the stress is endless.
Being solo, pardon the cliche, but he's like a rat in the social media platforms' wheel. There's no room for error (i.e., getting sick). Even his "vacations" are driven by what content he can create. The wheel never stops.
From time to time we chat about his "business model". To me it's not sustainable, or it is until it isn't, and then the bottom comes up fast. I've suggested he start to think of himself less as a recording artist and more as the record label. That is., to somehow try to figure out how to be less dependent on being the only rat running (for dear life) in the wheel. He agrees. But in no time at all, he's gotta get back on the wheel. There's no exit other than to shut down, which is no exit at all.
The focus is admirable. But it can also be blinding, and perhaps eventually unhealthy. For as successful as he is, I wouldn't trade places with him.
When, for example, the YT'er you follow steps away, the platform has to have some idea that traffic (read: revenue) to the platform will also dip. Sure, some followers will consume other content. But if the content creator was your initial "gateway" to engagement and that isn't there then you might not engage the platform at all. The platforms know this and make it far too difficult for the CCs to say "No, I need a break."
Sadly, the rest of us fellow proles are the key enablers of this paradigm.
I enjoy the cyclical development pattern where I spend a LOT of time - not quite gamedev crunch time, but occasionally close - building the first main production iteration. Then I get to relax a little and balance adding features and reducing debt. And finally I reach a maintenance and support phase which typically requires very little time and effort. That last phase is when you'll find me traveling, "living the good life".
But even during the early intensive phases, having the freedom and authority to decide what tools to use, where to physically work from, and even what time of day to work is of such value that the heavy workload is less painful than big company in-office alternative scenarios.
As for routine, exercise is indeed a big benefit and contributor toward success. Some office work situations have good workout opportunities, but many do not. And if the daily commute takes a lot of time, then exercise is one of the things that tends to get cut or squeezed down to a level where it doesn't provide much benefit.
Having a schedule helps, but sometimes I just sit down with the best of intentions, get brain fog and say fuck it and lose a day.
One of my best "tricks" is if I feel like I am facing a wall on something, to work on a different task, even perhaps a non coding one that I know I have to get done at some point.
https://theaggie.org/2020/10/23/for-the-love-of-god-stop-cal...
https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/14sqoig/t...
https://braindoggies.medium.com/i-hate-being-a-content-creat...
My motivation is two-fold:
1. I am a perfectionist and can't leave things undone.
2. My creation work is my sanity preservation against my actual obligations.
Needless to say, my motivations won't apply to 99% of people.
Everyone is going to be different. Find your motivations, but don't assume they'll be the same as some viral blogger.
When it is done (and I've gotten to the point where it's only months away), the roadblock will be my inability to make a sale.
I have cut down my initial feature set drastically. My build system won't even have incremental builds. It must be able to build itself, though.
This is not always the case. For example, I work in a midsized consulting firm at a fairly senior level. While I have a line manager, he’s only there to give me corporate news and policy. He not only doesn’t tell me what to do, he often doesn’t know what I’m doing.
What happens is there are a pool of account executives who I have grown to know over the years. We talk regularly, and if there is something I could work on (pre-sales or a project), we talk and figure if I’m a good fit and have bandwidth. Unless I have almost no work I can be choosy about what to work on. Yes, clients and the account guys can mold my deliverables, but I have a lot of sway in that as well.
This also lets me figure out my own hours, within constraints if engagements of course. Since I have kids in school, this gives me great flexibility to schedule work around family, instead of vice-versus.
So while what the author describes as regular jobs may be common, it is not the only model.
You can put this to the test by just ceasing all work on your current projects, without telling anyone, and seeing what happens.
And the aspect of choice matters a great deal. The ability to say “no” to an engagement is very empowering.
Was a developer for many years, but I transitioned to more strategic roles after I took a bit of a personal detour in 2026. I got involved in a major environmental movement and ended up in a grassroots leadership role. That lead me to doing meetings and presentations with a number of local, State and National politicians and their staffs, along with senior folks at certain state agencies, like NJ DEP. That helped me to think more strategically, to be flexible and be able to think on my feet, and how to talk to some very senior people on complex topics.
That experience translated into the ability to speak to large crowds on technical matters, to converse candidly with C suite folks (technical and not) about their products, and still be able to chat with front line developers, QA folks, support and the like, and how to craft visuals and presentations to convey complex technology decisions to different kinds of stakeholders. I am a mix of developer, solution architect, Enterprise Architect, product strategist, and marketing/sales rolled into one.
The problem is that many of us didn't have the fortune or wisdom to park in one company long enough to reach that high level. Or we did and got bored, and left for new challenges.
How does one find these supposed Slack groups and meetups? I live in a major metropolitan area, but the meetups I've been able to find have been underwhelming.
For example, I’m in a city, and there are at least 2 or 3 very active WhatsApp groups - a mix of tech devs, creative entrepreneurs (one of those groups has 800+ members). Every day - there are 2-3 events posted, talks, seminars, workshops, code jams, pitch workshops, digital marketing how-tos.
Idea: Co--working spaces often have a formal or informal group chat (often WhatsApp). You could take a tour and ask around.
Business incubators - Business incubators, often have a Slack channel (with channels like #dev, #design, #3d-printing). They often have a networking site where you can book free office hours with vetted experts / founders / engineers / executives / angel investors). The one I participate in has a Slack group containing 2,800 creative entrepreneurs, founders, investors, etc. At the co-working space, they host events, social mixers, etc. You’ll aways find some interesting people there. Find the group chat, get on it. Eventually you’ll get “dragged” into an interesting social group of startup / entrepreneurship / growth minded people. I jokingly say dragged, but what I mean is - if you go to an interesting talk on CNC routers, you’ll likely meet someone interesting there, they’ll tell you about a cool upcoming event, you book it - over time, you’re just spending more time per week with interesting people.
I know you just asked about WhatsApp groups, but I wanted to just share some of what I’ve learned, within 1 year of moving to a new city.
I believe the above statement is the single, most common denominator among all indie hackers (or, solopreneurs) and I have to admit that it is too challenging to master and get around it.
> I'm not on traditional social media so don't have that eating away at my attention, but Hacker News is pretty good at derailing my day. So is YouTube to a lesser extent.
Same here..
OP mentioned a Slack channel for creators in his country. I've been looking for a similar channel.
I'm in Arizona in the US. Anyone know of any similar channels that I could join?
You can be the customer, which helps. But other customers, ideally paying customers, is motivating assuming you have a goal of making some money.
and so on.
There is not such a clear relationship between putting in work and making money in the same way showing up at a job has. The effect of slacking off may not manifest until a year later when you didn't land a new client or didn't get an investment.
If the person is already independently wealthy than that person has those needs covered already.
A solo creator can be a musician or art painter, or web developer. Quite often they are not independently wealthy (yet) and most never are.
- rifd 1/23 after 13 yrs - 25 yrs exp
Lowering overhead helps too: Learning to love what you have and another thing i learned on HN: for everything you buy, you buy it twice.
I didn't understand what you meant by that? Care to elaborate?
As in, I can whistle a song I created on the guitar because I pull it out of thin air - can he do the same with his “creation” as it were?
Stay in your lane.
Do you really believe the songs you write on the guitar are non derivative?
Where do you think the line is?
It seems obvious to me that an artist is a creator.
If a person is stitching together Wordpress sites for someone else’s content are they a creator? A configurator?
If a person is creating excel spreadsheets are they a creator?
What about if they are just tallying numbers on a calculator?
What about if they are just counting inventory?
BTW, I hate it.
Everything is built with contraints, where it be physics, processor speed, time, money or something else.