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Comment by tnolet | Hacker News Reader

Sounds very familiar. Was a solo dev for at least 2 years before being able to form a team around my product. One nit, one confirm:

- I don't agree with the guiltiness on zero days. There is just no way to stay sane if you don't truly enjoy zero days. You will burn your candle.

- I 1000% agree that any form of customer validation makes your day. Could be a Stripe ping, a mention on Twitter or here. Set up services like https://f5bot.com/. Google alerts is useless.

My totally failed / crickets initial launch here on HN is findable via submissions in my bio, anno 2018. Three upvotes.

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Customer validation is also super easy to get.

The easiest way I've found is to include a simple Google Form in the product. It's super rewarding to get feedback from users. Ask simple questions like: "What's your favorite thing about X", "What's your least favorite thing about X", "How did you learn about X" and "Anything else you wanted to let me know?". And make all the questions optional so there's a minimal amount of friction.

Another great service for mentions is https://syften.com/, also supports Twitter but is paid.

This is the one I use, should have mentioned in the article

Yeah. We use that too now but still have my F5 account going

For my SaaS I use https://kwatch.io which is equivalent to F5bot. The free plan is less generous than F5Bot, but on the paid plans you can monitor Twitter, Reddit, Quora... These days getting organic traffic from Google seems to be harder and harder, so such platforms are good customer acquisition alternative solutions in my opinion.

Yeah there’s some nuance to the zero days thing. If it’s a day I’ve already set aside that’s fine, but I’ve found myself unable to decide in the moment “not feeling it today, this will be a zero day”, and be okay with that emotionally. Unless I’ve shipped a massive feature recently or something, then it’s okay. Motivation is a mess, is what I’m getting at :)

Haha I share in your frustration with the crickets launch, anything I post here that I actually care about people seeing, gets shuttled off to the shadow realm, then stuff like this that’s just musing tends to hit the front page.

For what it’s worth, I feel the exact same way about zero days. Intellectually I know I deserve them, but something inside me just refuses to stop thinking “I need to work now” until I’ve had some kind of “minimum viable productivity” to show. But interestingly as soon as I do, I can absolutely disconnect.

Yeah, I know that feeling well. The day after completing a massive thing, I'm super happy to have a zero day, and just enjoy the feeling of having accomplished something big. Other days, not so much.

I have found there is only one way to get a zero ‘time’. Extreme exercise or activity. Something that requires my whole being to attend too.

Heavy weights, high intensity workouts or something that has the mental requirement like climbing.

Then the chemicals give a reset and I’d return to the subject.

I’d think of them as activity naps.

If you care about Linkedin monitoring as well & having posts scored by relevance to reduce some of the noise I am working on octolens.com :)

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