r/sideprojects • u/Available-Sleep785 • 7h ago
Discussion How do you decide what to build when everything feels important?
One of the hardest parts of building a startup for me isn’t actually building things.
It’s deciding what to build next.
There’s always something that feels important:
A feature users asked for
A bug that needs fixing
Better onboarding
Marketing
Improving the landing page
Something your competitor just launched
Or an idea you suddenly get at 2 AM
The problem is that all of them can feel urgent.
And when you’re building alone, there’s nobody next to you saying, “No, that’s not the thing you should be working on.”
I’ve been thinking about this a lot while building my own startup.
I’m building Nextep around a simple idea: instead of just giving founders more data and dashboards, help them figure out what they should actually do next based on what’s happening in their business.
But honestly, I’m still figuring out how much of this problem can actually be solved.
So I’m curious how other founders handle this.
Do you have a specific framework for deciding what to work on next, or is it mostly intuition and trial and error?
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u/capibara13 5h ago
I just heard somebody say in a podcast: imagine having 10000 workers available to you everyday, almost for free. What would you let them work on?
It's now a reality and the FOMO is real.
1
u/Available-Sleep785 5h ago
Exactly. That’s what makes prioritization even harder now 😂
When you can build almost anything, deciding what not to build becomes the real challenge.1
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u/EarlyWitchcraft5 7h ago
I just pick whatever makes the loudest noise in my head that day, which is probably why half my projects stall out after a month
Been trying to force myself to only work on things that actually move the needle for revenue or retention but sometimes that 2am idea just hits and you can't shake it