Fun is no longer fun
Maybe "having fun" is overrated. The best kind of fun is making money with your startup.
Fun had always been a huge thing for my indie hacking. If a product isn’t fun to build, then why do it?
You got to enjoy the process as much as you want the goal, right? The journey not just the destination. The means not just the ends. My thinking was… through fun, I get to profitability.
Now it feels kinda cringe to say all that out loud. To me at least.
It’s important yes. Necessary, even. Great for motivation and sustaining the journey, yes.
But not sufficient.
And definitely not as important a factor as I make it out to be.
Maybe I might not have fun initially, but once people start using it, it can start to get more fun. It might not be an interesting product at the onset, but once it gets profitable I’m likely to start getting more interested in it. The more engagement the more fun it gets.
Fun’s not the arbiter of what makes a successful product. And product-market fit doesn’t care if you’re having fun or not. The market, your customers, don’t care. They just want a thing that helps them do a job. That’s it.
When you optimize for fun and nothing succeeds, what’s the fun in that?! Fun is no longer fun.
So fk fun.
I’m optimizing for success and profitability first. When that happens, that would be the real fun.
I have a suspicion I know where you are coming from and that the capitalist machine has a role to play here. I shared emotions I am dealing with at the moment in an article along the same theme here https://schalkneethling.substack.com/p/the-hidden-costs-of-creativity-in
I do agree that we need to ensure we are not frivolous with how we spend our time but I also believe that we need to find a balance. We spend so much of our time and mental energy at work and thinking about work, we must find ways for it also to be fulfilling and not just in a monetary sense.
I am by no means in a financial position to just go YOLO and make stuff, but heck, I do not want to end up hating this craft because of pressures imposed by the system we did not choose.