Code Soloist #8: Draw your line

You need to draw a line in the sand and stand behind it. There’s a sort of cap on the amount of inspiration, planning, and daydreaming you can do before you inevitably must take a stand on what you intend to create. After you reach this enthusiasm ceiling, you can only do one of two things. I have met a lot of people who are simply addicted to the potential of building a business and so they spend all of their time going to technology conferences and mixers and pitching their “amazing technology”. But you’ll see the same folks next year giving the same pitch, because this is where they live, in the possibilities. Possibilities are exciting; transitioning your great ideas into your second job is not. But this step is the most important. This step Hugh MacLeod would call “Do I make this damn thing exist, or not?”

Notice how it’s not “I should make this thing because I’ll get rich”, or “I probably better do this because I’ve already told everyone I’m doing it”, but “I will make this damn thing exist”. That’s taking a stand. It’s closing the browser tab on this blog and doing some real work, even if you don’t get paid for it, expecting that you never get paid for it, but not caring because you have to live in the world where the thing you’re imagining right now is real. Not a lot of ideas can survive that kind of commitment, and the kind of ideas that do, have a better chance at making it than the greedy pitches you hear at those networking events.

I’d argue that you have more opportunities and advantages today than at any other time and most other careers. You can literally build a business with your bare hands and reach customers worldwide for peanuts. And nobody else but you can do this. Sure, a marketing guy can buy outsourcing to put a sales page together but that’s going to break down real fast when things get complex.

I also don’t see things changing any time soon. Demand for technology goes up, user comfort with web-based applications and eCommerce go up, software complexity goes up, and every time someone thinks they can commoditize what you do, to make some magic piece of software that does all of the work for them, so they just have to slide a bunch of boxes around and they’re suddenly software engineers, it fails. Miserably.  Because you can’t fix complexity with simplicity, you can have complex or you can have simple but not both.

You can go simple and draw a line in the sand, or you can get complex and try really hard to live in the possibilities, to have the possibilities be enough, and ultimately create nothing.

Code Soloist is for single-person software development companies that are trying to start something big with their bare hands. In it, I try to impart whatever I’ve learned, for better or worse, doing the same thing badly.


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  1. danielcrenna posted this

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