Joy is the ultimate creator

The joys of coding a side project on weekends

I’ve been having a pretty sucky past few weeks to be honest.

But somehow being able to code and deploy something new for my product Lifelog on weekends lifted me up again. Now I’m enjoying the new audible feedback feature that I made myself. Every keystroke punctured by the sound of a mechanical keyboard. Relishing the fruits of my creative labour.

This energizing experience really shined light on how being able to ship fast is such a key part of the motivation equation for indie hackers.

You get the dopamine rush of building something quickly and launching it out into the wild.
You get the satisfaction and fulfilment of using it yourself, or seeing your customers use it almost immediately.
You discover gaps and erros, and areas of improvements quickly, leading to an iterative build-launch-tweak virtuous loop.
You feel productive that tangible outputs were delivered.
You get more motivated and inspired by the fast feedback loops.
You had fun. That’s the most important part.

Previously I didn’t ship anything much for Lifelog for 2 years, and with that, the motivation also stagnated. Now, I look forward to every weekend when I get to ship something new, something fun. And there’s an ensuing boost of fresh creative energy that spills over to everything else.

They say there’s different kinds of indie hackers. There’s the builder sort who just loves to code and make things. There’s the marketing sort who enjoys storytelling and engaging and persuading others. And there’s the CEO, entrepreneur sort who loves building and running businesses.

I’m totally the first kind - the builder. Just being able to build and code is such joy. It’s not about the marketing or the cool stories I can tell. It’s not whether I can make a business or boatloads of money out of this. Just the pure unadulterated joy of making a widget that does something when I push the button. I don’t know why that gives me joy but it just does. It always feels like magic when I do. Especially with coding.

And on days or weeks when it feels sucky, getting in touch with that side of me had always helped uplift my spirits somewhat.

Joy is the ultimate creator.
But creating is also the ultimate joy.

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