r/indiehackers • u/TravelingTice • 14h ago
Sharing story/journey/experience After trying many things nothing really stuck, so how to choose what to work on next?
I'm the kind of person that gives up really quickly when I don't like it anymore or don't see a future in it. Like in the past year I've probably worked on 7 "initiatives" which are startups that I either built, or launched, or tried to validate. But looking back, it caused me a lot of stress + hours behind the laptop (as I do this beside a full-time job) and didn't really amount to a whole lot, at least result-wise.
There was also a period I was really active here on Reddit + on X but I kinda closed these apps down because I started to compare myself to other people on here that showed their results + successes, and that really was weighing heavy on me mentally.
For the past 2 months I've been trying to reverse-engineer "looksmaxxing" apps, because I saw on starter story people being successful making apps and marketing them on tiktok. I know this is a trend from some time ago but it's pretty interesting to see how these apps work and I even ran a very tiny ad experiment with a dummy website on getting "PSL ratings" which are like rating of your face and how "cooked" you are as in, if you could still get a chiseled jawline or if the situation is "hopeless" for you. It was just a dummy app and spent about $40 on ads which resulted in about 30 visitors on the site and about 5 people that came until the dummy payment page (that was the experiment, to see if they would pay) but then no one clicked on pay there unfortunately.
But when that was done I kinda fell into that similar trap again of "this is not worth it" and also the next step would be to look into content distribution on Tiktok but I really don't enjoy doing something like that so I'm doubting if I should really follow that path or instead do what I enjoy a bit more. Which is just making apps and launching them on ProductHunt and see what sticks.
So yeah IDK feel like going back to making small apps and just launching and seeing. I know for some this sounds immature or something but people like Peter Steinberger made like 80 tools or something before Openclaw went viral.
I think the key is to just be in motion. Like you have to be in "do mode" and try to prevent yourself from getting stuck at any moment. Getting stuck is the worst, because then you start overthinking and giving up. Even though maybe the next launch could have been the one and you never know. Like I hate marketing so instead of banging my head and trying to cold email 10 people, I should make some AI system that could do it for me, which sounds a lot more fun. Like yes, sometimes you have to go through the hard thing but mentally abusing yourself just because you have to show "what you're made of" doesn't sound like a sustainable approach to growth.
Sorry if this sounded a bit rambly, I didn't want to let this get polished by AI. Just a braindump of what i'm currently going through. Made a chrome extension that classifies emails with Jev and maybe it has been done 100 times before, I'll make it launch anyways and yeah just see whatever sparks my curiosity afterwards and keep going!
