waprin

Since you’re interested in more opinions I’ll toss mine in as someone full time focused on building a one person software business.

First, I think entrepreneurship is a bit like music genres. There’s a lot of different styles. If you’re trying to start a pop punk band, the guy in the successful jazz quartet probably has a lot of good advice , but also a lot of advice that’s less relevant to your goals. It’s good if you can filter between the two.

I hang out in dvassalos discord which is filled with people trying to do 1 person business, about half SWEs and half creators / influencers. The creators seem to be crushing the SWEs. It’s just way easier to build an info product people will pay for than an app people will pay for. The info products also have the advantage that , content creation is both the product and the marketing work. But in pure SaaS, product development and marketing are completely different.

I’m working on a few different “bets” but the project I’m most optimistic about making money is www.livepokertheory.com . I still want to do SaaS since I’m a SWE at heart and think there’s more long term upside. But this project is a hybrid info product/ SaaS since I’m creating content on how to understand game theory solvers and creating a SaaS to make it easier to study and retain the content.

Poker is a niche I enjoy plus it’s quasi-b2b since there’s an ROI on the content.

If you’re looking for credibility I have very little as I’ve only made a bit. I had an iOS app that made a little more but it was too controversial (very unfairly so, but it was too much controversy to build a business around, it’s in my post history here).

But I’ve made a little plus I’m making money myself with my own content.

I’ve been a little MIA on my blog and twitter but hoping to build in public a bit more once I get ducks in a row.

Anyway, I think there are certain formulas and playbooks that get trotted out because they often work well. But they don’t guarantee success nor do alternative playbooks guarantee failure. I think what’s more important is to look at high level strategic reasons why certain playbooks exist and let the high level strategy guide you rather then rigid adherence to specific tactics (which, incidentally, is also good advice for understanding the articles on my poker blog).

This is a passion of mine as well , and is called “life logging” or “the quantified life”.

I have a long term passion project called Navigoals (Navigoals.com) built around the concept. It’s like a habit tracker but I organize all my habits/actions into a massive DAG so if I track something at a low level it also bubbles up to a high level goal. I can track instances of things or durations of things (time tracking).

I also have an unpublished iOS version with Apple Watch support, using the Watch is quicker to track stuff.

I realize to many this sounds insane but PLEASE email me waprin@gmail.com if you’re down to watch a demo over video chat.

As far as the people who think I’m crazy, here’s why I’m passionate about this project. I really had trouble focusing my whole life so as an adult I bit the bullet and got ADHD meds. Those helped a LOT at the immediate problem of focusing but literally made me crazy, very crazy, almost ruined my life. During recovery I decided I would meditate 5 minutes every day and journal one paragraph every day, which I used a habit tracker for. This was a key part of my recovery. That got me thinking - if a little tracking saved my life, what can a lot of tracking do? I also needed to better manage my time and goals without the usage of any medication.

People will say the data is pointless if you just admire it, not the case. I noticed in weight loss subs , people strongly advocate starting with food tracking. Just the act of forcing honesty with yourself about what you’re eating will change your relationship with food. In a completely different domain, the most important step to playing pro or semi-pro poker is diligently tracking all results. Same reason - forces honesty. And also in both cases, surfaces trends (e.g. I eat or play poorly certain times of day).

I track over 200 of my actions every day and I strive for my apps to make it quick to do. However it’s important to understand this does not turn me into a robot. My brain is so naturally all over the place , I wander and do random things so much, that just forcing myself to use apps to have _some_ structure and discipline puts me in the balance of a rigid life and an improvised one.

I am realizing I’m in the minority, most people I demo my apps to say, “that seems cool…for a certain type of person.” So, open to connecting with certain types of people.

Yes I just migrated from Jekyll to NextJS.

I agree it’s a terrible idea if you just want a blog. My motivation was to improve my web dev skills and have a low stakes playground to try stuff, since I’m using Next on most of my projects.

However, it is nice that if I ever want some quirky feature on my personal site, the world is my oyster. That may have been true for Jekyll but I don’t know Ruby well.

I mostly blog because I like writing, I like owning my own identity on my own site, and because other people have written about the benefits it's brought them.

I haven't blogged a ton (I plan to more) but I wouldn't say it's brought a ton of benefits so far.

The blog posts that have done well have had people email me nice things, produced some mean and uncharitable comment sections, some offers for low-paying freelance writing opportunities, and some signups for some projects I'm working on.

The number one piece of advice I'd give is to have some sort of goal in mind. If you're writing for fun, then make sure you have fun. If you're writing to build an audience, publish consistently and have a clear audience you're targeting in mind, and stick to writing stuff relevant to that audience. If you build an audience around a specific niche, you can convert that to something like signups for a product for people in that niche (e.g. a paid course on whatever programming topic you write about). However, you probably need to be somewhat intentional about that. And you'll probably get "stuck" in your niche to some extent, so pick one you care about. I think blogging increases your "luck surface area", but it's better to have a specific goal than hope for serendipity.

I mentioned this video on another thread and a couple people went to the effort to email me to specifically thank me for sharing it so I thought it was worth it's own thread.

It's 4 short videos, the last two videos I've seen widely re-edited and shared, but I think part 1 on storytelling tips and part 2 on killing things that don't work are actually more interesting (and relevant to startups as well).

It's been discussed on Hacker News before but not for fifteen years! Time flies!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=198935

The other day I was aimlessly browsing through Youtube, and I found a video by a man named Ira Glass. I had never heard of him but apparently he's a famous NPR journalist. He told a story about how in English class he learned to start with a theses and then explain facts. But, in broadcasting, he learned that doesn't work.

Instead, you start with an anecdote - the purest form of a story. Ira pointed out that humans are naturally drawn to listen to stories, so by framing facts as a sequence of events, it gives them momentum that can make even the most boring of facts more interesting and engaging.

As I listened, he elucidated by talking about a man waking up and walking around his house. While nothing in his story happened, the way he told it was very suspenseful, which did make me much more curious as to what Ira was going to say next.

I think Ira makes a great point, and even if you are just trying to educate people on a topic matter, framing the facts you're trying to convey as a sequence of events makes it much more likely you will succeed at conveying the information you intend to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6ezU57J8YI

Firstly, it's tough to avoid subscriptions on platforms like web and iOS because it's awkward to distribute a v1, then 2 years later a v2 as a new purchase, the way desktop software used to work. On web, you'd have to run multiple versions server-side which is tricky, on mobile you'd have to release a separate app which is not what the App Store UX is designed for at all.

As a consumer, of course I have "subscription fatigue" and some apps when I get a $20 monthly charge I question whether I really need it.

As an entrepreneur, it's all just customer lifetime value , there's a lot of factors to whether subscription or lifetime makes more sense. Recurring revenue is easier to build a business upon but given people have subscription fatigue, there's a lot of merit to looking for ways to sell one-off, despite the aforementioned challenges.

With all this said, my biggest theory is that we _think_ people have subscription fatigue, but it's an illusion. What's really happening is that web software was VC subsidized for a long time, both directly (with sites like Facebook having no ads their first decade of existence), and indirectly (with many startups forgoing monetization favoring growth following companies like Facebook's lead). So people got anchored to web software being free/cheap for a long time.

When most people say "I hate subscriptions, I don't want to pay $20/month, just sell me the one-off software!" So as a business owner you say, ok, then give me $200 for lifetime, and they say "$200 for an app, that's crazy! I want to pay $20 lifetime". This debate looks like it's about subscription when really it's a debate about price. And consumers have been psychologically anchored to apps being very cheap for a long time - nobody would bat an eye at a $14.99 book on Amazon but that's considered a hefty price tag for an app that might have taken a fair bit of design and development (in-demand skills).

Last but certainly not least, most software is internet enabled these days. Not all of it, but a lot of it. It's risky as a business owner to offer a lifetime purchase for something that will have ongoing server costs. This is doubly true if there's an AI component that might involve expensive GPUs.

As far as it being "counter-intuitive" to hike prices, the cheap money is gone, and businesses are realizing it's better to make a small number of paying customers happy then a large number of non-paying customers happy.

If you're looking at this purely from a consumer perspective, you're sick of managing subscriptions, you're sick of getting billed for something you didn't use much, etc of course I relate. But if you put yourself in the shoes of software businesses, if people are going to complain and moan about paying $10 a month for an app because they think the most they should pay you is $20 their whole lives, you just can't build a sustainable business around those types of customers, when you have expensive design, development, marketing, and server costs.

Thanks for writing Micheal, I’m also 30-something ex-Google SWE and currently all-in on solo dev bootstrapping, so your blog is one of my (many) big inspirations.

As you note, I do think if your primary objective was to catch up to SWE compensation, your project idea filter was probably not optimal. But it’s still great that you have the spark of something with TinyPilot. One thing I see repeatedly in the indie hacker community is hockey stick success where people struggle to get the engine going but often once they find the spark it takes off. The ten year overnight success.

Also worth noting many indie hackers add part time stable income such as contracting as their finances require.

If people are looking for a straightforward path where they leave their SWE job and quickly get similar stable income as a bootstrapper, they’re in for an unpleasant surprise. But if you can “make it” you control your own destiny , face unique challenges demanding true creativity, and have uncapped upside in a way you’ll never get at BigTech .

I do think content businesses are an easier launch point . Adam Wethan of Tailwind and Nathan Barry of Convertkit are both examples of bootstrappers who self-funded by starting with info products. I think one mental trap for solo devs is to over identify as SWE and not as online entrepreneurs with SWE skills as a particularly helpful asset.

Wish you and TinyPilot the best of luck and look forward to future updates.

Entrepreneur is a very broad term. A power lifter may wonder why the boxer is doing footwork drills when he just needs to lift heavy weights until he realizes they’re both athletes but in different events.

It’s silly to label “open startups” as a movement when it’s more a technique which may or may not be useful to you.

By being open ,people can follow your story, which can translate to marketing/sales/feedback.

There’s also an aspect of idea exchange and psychological motivation by being part of an entrepreneurial community.

I think it’s silly to consider it a movement rather than a tactic. Whether it’s applicable depends a lot on whether it will help you reach potential customers. If you’re trying to sell fintech to big banks, probably not, if you’re selling no-code landing page builders, it probably will.

It’s also a bit of a pendulum where the business default is secrecy, new school thought says build in public, now people are realizing it’s just trade offs .

This has been a key part of many successful products such as Stack Overflow (Jeff Atwood’s blog), Basecamp (Signal V Noise blog). Convertkit is another one and has a really good interview on Indie Hackers about it.

I'd argue the exact opposite.

Key costs like hosting are way cheaper, back then you probably had to rack server in a data center, now you can deploy a free/cheap PaaS with a free/cheap database while you find PMF.

Marketing is way cheaper, social media is a grind but it's a game you can play to acquire users/customers for _free_.

There's more stuff going on online, more people, more businesses, more everything. Think about the entire "creator economy", other bootstrappers, Shopify sites, etc.

Yeah some stuff has gotten harder, more platforms, higher UX standards. But on the whole I'd rather bootstrap in 2023 then 2010.

Check in with me in a year though.

If you compare the pg essays from 2000-2010 to 2010-now, there's a very noticeable shift in tone on this exact topic, even moreso if you zoom out of pg and consider YC messaging then and now.

Tons of old pg essays sound straight from something like Indie Hackers or Microconf with their "avoid raising VC money" angle. He even literally predicts the death of VC in web SaaS, saying "investors aren't worth the trouble": http://www.paulgraham.com/divergence.html .

His YC cofounder Jessica Livingston wrote a book "Founders at Work" and about half the founders in the book are bootstrappers (DHH, Joel Spolosky, Craigslist). The other half are mostly founders recounting horror stories of interacting with VCs.

Compare that to modern YC where there are videos where they say _everyone_ should consider applying to YC with the _only_ exception being people that want to bootstrap. Modern Startup School says: "Without startup funding the vast majority of startups will die." (https://www.ycombinator.com/library/4A-a-guide-to-seed-fundr...).

There's something very important to note which is that YC did not change the deal from 125k for 7% to 500k for 7%. It's still 125k for 7% plus 375k worth of equity on your next raise. Which only makes sense if there is a next raise. So obviously they discourage bootstrapping since their whole model has been built around you raising at least one more round after YC.

Seems a pretty simple case of "follow the incentives." YC basically became more of a traditional VC over time. And I think pg was still closer to a founder in the early 2000s, from a founder perspective, it's more of a set of tradeoffs whether you should bootstrap or seek VC. But from a VC's perspective, obviously they want you to seek VC since they can't get involved if you bootstrap and bootstrapped startups won't get the outsized returns they need.

My opinion is, pg is a smart guy, there's still a ton of wisdom to learn from in his essays, but as with every other person on the planet, consider their motivation and incentives for telling you what they're telling you.

Yeah it’s interesting reading the old pg essays where he says, VCs suck but they are a necessary evil. After all, racking reliable servers will cost at least 20k, paying a PR firm so that there’s a chance anyone will hear about your site will cost at least 20k etc etc

Now basically every PaaS has a free or cheap (<$50/mo) tier, tons of helpful tools with free or cheap tiers, you can get users / customers for free on social media and probably more effectively than traditional ads / PR coverage.

It’s not strictly true because some projects use GPUs for ML , sometimes there’s some technical rot if you don’t upgrade your stack a bit, market change could make you irrelevant etc

But in general there’s a lot of products that can simmer and slowly iterate for a long time as long as founder keeps chipping away as evidenced here.

Congrats and thanks for sharing, as an aspiring SaaS bootstrapper and father there’s plenty of headwinds so nice to see people sharing their stories piloting through them.

Well said, good analogy.

There’s the immediate issues of the policy. But there’s the bigger issue of the thought process that led to the policy. One of Elons central criticism of old Twitter management was unfair content moderation policy. And almost immediately he enacts a far worse content policy than anything old management did, in a brazen display of hypocrisy.

Even if he reverses course on this one issue, he’s demonstrated that any previous advocacy for free speech was completely disingenuous. He wants to run Twitter like he’s the dictator of a banana republic. And any time you spend on the platform strengthens his ability to do so.

It was disturbing and confusing watching people like pg and Lex Fridman seemingly throw their apparent principles to the wind tolerating this type of behavior. I do sympathize there was some ambiguity about Elons plans for Twitter before this last week but with the banning of journalists and the banning of links to Mastodon, that ambiguity has been removed.

I’m relieved pg took a stand here but like you I wish it was a much stronger one.

I'm similar, though not necessarily chores - usually other projects.

In my goal tracker, I set high levels goals to be productive, but then about 30 different possible tasks count as productive. I track them at a low level so I can keep a good track of my time, but they all count towards the high level daily/weekly goal of being productive. That way I make sure I'm just doing _something_ productive, if not the thing I planned to do, rather than screw around surfing Reddit or something.

Of course, this strategy works much better if you're a bootstrapped founder with 40 important tasks in front of you. It works less well if you have a daily standup with a project manager stressing the importance of only doing the JIRA ticket at the top of the backlog. So YMMV.

Programmers:

> "Why does BigTech keep tracking me!"

> "If you're not the customer, you're the product!"

> "Why is the internet getting monopolized by a few media empires owned by a few billionaires!"

Small indie developer: "hey guys I put a massive amount of work into this project, how about you just act like a customer and pay me a small amount of money".

> "Ahhh this is highway robbery! $30 is outrageously overpriced!"

People are insanely cheap with software, even professional software developers. It's an attitude that's shifting but very slowly. The VC backed ad-economy has anchored everyone's expectation that anything above $0 is somehow a ripoff.

The end result is we all get tracked, our data monetized, and the best job opportunities are mostly obeying the rules of a tiny number of elite overlords who can finance "free" products.

Also, people won't bat an eye at paying $40k, $50k, or $60k for 1 year at a university even though you'd probably learn more programming from doing Fireship's classes then a lot of undergrad CS semesters.

It has more to do with psychological anchoring than any sort of economic rationality.

Great article. I played Stratego a lot as a kid and it always felt simpler than chess, go , or poker so it’s surprising it’s a much bigger game tree unless you stop and think.

I’m curious about the comparisons to poker. I know the hot algorithm in poker solvers is counter factual regret minimization. The article indicates that the feedback cycle is too long for those algorithms to work but I’d be curious to learn more about the relationship from CFR to what’s tried here, if any.

I've been in Bay Area high tech software for a long time now, and more recently I've been participating more in the indie hacker scene. It is fascinating to me that I do know many extremely talented engineers who either dream of setting out on their own and never do, or they try and repeatedly fail. Then random novices in circumstances far removed from tech teach themselves a little coding online and start making 5 figure MRR quickly.

There are somewhat obvious explanations. Coding is only one subset of the skills to launch a successful software business, and not even the most important one. There's also a huge element of randomness and luck, especially for a single given project and especially for any type of free b2c social app. Also, people outside Silicon Valley bubble have access to unique social circles that can serve as community "bootstrapping", which would be especially important for a social app

Even knowing all that, there's an element of surprise when you see it happen.

I do suspect another big factor is that experienced people overthink things a bit, much like a child seems to learn a language faster than an adult but may only be more willing to make silly mistakes. Many of the best startups and indie projects would never be started by many experienced engineers because they're perceived as too simple, the market is too saturated, or simply they feel they'd look foolish for trying and failing to do something simple instead of trying and failing something complex.

Email is most reliable since I try to moderate social media but Ill ping you on Twitter

5 years ago I would have downvoted you.

Based on some unfortunate personal experiences I have to emphatically agree. I would also throw cut down on social media / porn / addictive games as very important if you’re identifiying as ADHD.

Amphetamines like Adderall have issues with long term tolerance and can have adverse effects on your cardiac health and mood, both of which I unfortunately experienced.

They mostly work by spiking dopamine which there are non pharmaceutical ways to accomplish such as cold water therapy and being more cautious with your baseline dopamine levels (hence the importance of avoiding cheap , easy spikes of those levels).

It’s obviously a complex issue still being figured out by scientists but there is a zeitgeist pushing people towards pills as the simple solution when increasingly the science demonstrates that lifestyle change is both more effective long term and lacks adverse side effects.

I do think psychiatric meds can be appropriate in extreme circumstances and in cases where they temporarily help people “course-correct” . But people viewing them as a panacea because someone’s having a stimulant honeymoon should dig deeper.

Finally, I get ADHD meds advertisement on Facebook constantly. There is simply a financial incentive to push people towards pills over lifestyle change and it’s irresponsible to pretend that doesn’t impact any narratives.

I just shipped my first SwiftUI app and have more queued up. Don't know of any Discords but happy to join one or start one with you.

Yeah even in the webdev world, the zeitgeist has shifted from

"write as many tests as possible, 100% code coverage, in fact 100% branching code coverage. Use an absurd amount of mocks to achieve this"

to

"write tests, not too many. mostly integration". (Guillermo Rauch tweet)

And thank god because 100% code coverage always felt like an exercise in obedience to dumb process over good judgement.

Despite being in the industry a long time, I think most of what I worked on had little to no impact.

In terms of impacting other people, probably the biggest thing was blog posts and sample code. It’s funny how sample code has less “cred” than “real” code, but if you’ve ever been trying to start a new project in a new language or framework you know how invaluable sample code can be.

In terms of impact in general, what I’m working on now has been the most impactful , because it’s improved my health. Im trying to innovate on the concept of a habit tracker. Since I started working on it, I’ve lost 10 pounds, quit drinking, went from about a gram of marijuana use a day to about a gram a month, quit addictive video games, went surfing much more consistently, and been able to put in many more hours of focused work than I ever have before despite working alone and only being accountable to myself.

Generally when Ive gotten feedback about the project, I’ve gotten told it’s too complex, people want simplicity, I should focus on B2B, and I shouldn’t write any code at all unless I’ve validated a problem. I try to communicate to people that I don’t want to sacrifice my own health progress to simplify things. But I am hoping long term I can figure out how to build a bridge between what’s effective for myself and what’s appealing and understandable to everyone else. Lots of work to be done! But I think improving my own life a lot more impact than most of the stuff my employers had me doing :)

I'm not in any way associated with Notion but I find Notion way better than what you've listed _for me_.

I love Notion because it makes it easy to organize lots of notes and has a good search feature. The databases are super useful, I have a bunch of them and I use the template buttons to auto-create new entries. I also use the template buttons to create new entries for my daily and weekly planning & review to make sure I check off all the things I need to do.

For example, I write blog posts on programming, startups, and mental health. I have a database with ideas for each of those three things. Then I have a centralized database where I link to those other databases so I can see which ideas I'm most inspired to write about in a centralized queue.

If you're interested in things like meal prep, using the gallery to show recipe idea pictures, then you can link a database of shopping needs to a database of meal ideas to automatically create shopping lists and meal prep ideas.

I acknowledge that some people have the opinion that you can spend too much time futzing with your tool and not doing the work enough. I respect that for some people something as powerful as Notion is a distraction. For me, my mind races and I take tons of notes and do tons of planning and I find Notion very helpful for organizing everything in a way Apple Notes could never be. I think people need to be respectful of differences on this topic.

I'm someone who's always hated Jira at work because I felt like we spent more time planning than doing work. But with Notion, I use it very quickly for the most part, there was a learning curve but it mostly just helps me out and stays out of my way. The keyboard shortcuts are amazing too, I like automatically adding different colors to my documents using them.

I do like Bear for Apple Watch and I still think Trello has a better mobile UX for boards/cards, so I take notes in those two apps then organize them into Notion. I also think it's funny Notion advertises habit tracking on their SF billboards since I think habit tracking is one of the only use cases Notion is terrible for (disclosure: I'm building what I consider to be the Notion of habit trackers).

But overall I think people are being incredibly uncharitable to Notion in this thread. Maybe it's a little overhyped, maybe performance could be better, maybe some people prefer more minimalist tools (my wife still likes pen/paper and whiteboards over all these things). But to me, Notion is still an incredibly well-designed tool that's incredibly powerful.

I had the same reaction.

The phrase "chemical imbalance" can't die soon enough. I've met some very smart people who were misled into thinking there's much more scientific evidence than exists that there's some innate brain chemistry that's linked to mental illness. In general, people overestimate how much of psychiatry is first-principles instead of black box statistical conjecture. The first huge hint that there's no simplistic chemical imbalance explanation is they don't measure any brain chemicals when they do psychiatric diagnosis.

Furthermore, when people discuss "chemical imbalance" they're almost always talking about something innate and unchanging e.g. I'm depressed because of a chemical imbalance, not my lifestyle. When there's actually a ton of evidence that to the extent there's chemistry in your brain, your lifestyle and things like your food diet and information diet play a massive role.

I will recommend this guy in way too many comments here but if you haven't heard of Andrew Huberman, please listen to his podcast, it's been life-changing. He gives tons of lifestyle tips and backs up all his arguments with his decades of experience in neuroscience.

A noble goal. One of my bad habits I've been tracking and trying to reduce is rude behavior to people, online or in-person.

Ahh I’m working on exact same project. I applied to YC with the idea and was told that “nobody wants this” during the interview.

There’s a ton of problems in the space around privacy and UX. But I’m incredibly excited about projects in this space because in modern society we’re basically surrounded by a million unhealthy things designed to tempt us. Logging forces you to “stay honest”. I’ve been shocked already by how many unhealthy habits I underestimated and how many healthy habits I overestimated.

My #1 priority is just to improve my own physical and mental health. Whether there’s a market for this stuff, who knows.

Good luck!

I noticed this too and I have a simple explanation.

Ruby and Python overtook Java and C++ in the early 2010s in _spite_ of their lack of a good typing system, not because of it. On the whole, they are much more productive languages.

Now we're seeing languages that have Ruby / Python productivity but also have much better ways of static typing such as Typescript and Swift. And the Ruby / Python community is more open to static types as well.

The problems of ~2010 Java and C++ were mistakenly pinned on static types and the framing of "static vs dynamic languages" was always a red herring. Java and C++ were just crappy languages (at least in 2010, not sure about modern incarnations).

It really is a shame that Swift is so confined to the iOS world because it's such a great example of how you can have a language that feels like a scripting language but with much more advanced type safety.

The blog post literally says Stripe has higher transaction volume than ever.

Anecdotally my indie friends all report modest revenue growth this year while my big tech friends report more work for less money (due to equity grants decline).

From the data I see, the “reality” is not the failed indie dev but the failed inefficient big tech company.

This is an area I'm pretty passionate about.

So first of all, it's pretty clear that you _do_ have some interests. You mention Feynman and Kazantzakis. That sounds like you're interested in the history of science and literature. That sounds pretty cool.

Many people will recommend going to a professional which I won't try to dissuade you from but that's not mutually exclusive with examining your lifestyle.

I'm obsessed with this podcast by Andrew Huberman (Stanford Neuroscientist) because he's talking about a scientific basis for stuff that has "felt" true to me for a while. Your food diet affects how you feel but your information diet does massively as well. There is a neurochemical basis for this with your baseline dopamine levels, that sets your motivation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmOF0crdyRU&t=779s

I also recommend reading the book Dopamine Nation.

Too much social media will fry your brain. If you're checking Hacker News more than a handful times of day, work on doing less of that. If you're addicted to Reddit, Twitter, or pornography, work on doing less of that. Exercise. Spend time in the outdoors. Focus hard on sleep hygiene. Eat less sugar and processed foods.

You can not change all this stuff overnight but if you can take baby steps it will help massively. You will not feel better tomorrow or next week but if you take tiny steps you will feel a tiny bit better in a few months.

I would also highly recommend learning about mindfulness, meditation, and yoga. A lot of dissatisfaction is aversion to a feeling of emptiness that we have to learn to accept.

Again, I'm not trying to dissuade you from getting any sort of help, especially if you're socially isolated (though you mention having friends). I just don't want you to underestimate how much you can help yourself.

Lastly but not least, if you're eating great, exercising, getting natural sunlight, spending meaningful time with good social relationships, sleeping consistently, and moderating your internet usage, and you still feel no energy or interest in anything, you can just calmly accept it. Life "passes" us all by whether we're joyful or interested or not. Sometimes people with passionate interests actually get more problems from those interests than someone who can just calmly accept the moment for what it is. Ask yourself if the interests would make you happier, or if the actual problem is that you are making an imaginary problem out of not being interested in things. Just food for thought!