2024-09-02

I am really good at coding and love doing it. I also really enjoy thinking about the product I'm building and how it solves a problem or is useful.

Working for companies has always been a delicate balance mentally. There are times when I'm in pure building mode and happy about the work, but also lots of moments where product direction is non-existent and I feel powerless to do anything about it. Also working really hard to make someone else rich if I succeed doesn't sit well with me. I understand I'm trading stability for upside when I'm an employee but that's not philosophically what I want, I'm ok with the risk of no stable income but higher upside if I succeed.

So the past two years I've been "trying" to build my own company. I type "trying" like that because I only built, didn't actually try to sell anything. I built two different stats website, an analytics tool, an AI-powered coder, an automatic AI-translations app, an AI prompt monitor, an LMS platform, a template to build stuff faster, a blogging platform, a productivity tracking app, a D&D combat simulator, a D&D character sheet, a gym workout tracker, a small strategy game, a subtitle generator for videos and probably a few other small things I forgot about.

The only one of those things that made any money is one of the stats websites, that gets ~250k impressions/mo and makes $80/mo from unoptimized ads.

I feel so stupid. I keep building stuff without any distribution or even a plan. I just build stuff that I find useful or want to use, but what use is there to build so much stuff if nobody ever sees it?

It's just hard for me to come to terms that the biggest skill I have, which is being able to build complex products really fast, is not that useful. The real useful skill is being able to get people to try and use the things you build, and I don't have that skill. I learned about SEO, marketing, copy-writing, cold-contacting, etc, but I just suck at those things. I can get better with practice, yes, but I'll never be world class at it. I was amazing at coding from the first program I wrote, my brain intuitively just gets it. I have the source code for some silly games I wrote when I learned to program in university and the code quality is better than most senior devs today. Unfortunately, that skill is useless without distribution.

So I have three options as I see it: get a co-founder that can distribute what I build, get a job or spend most of my time improving at selling to be an average salesman at best. I'll make that decision eventually, but I hate all three options. I'm a stubborn guy and I'm still having a hard time accepting reality.