I’ve been thinking about this in the back of mind for a few days, but I find myself looking at my projects in two ways. Pet Projects or Products.
I hear a lot about how to make creative works successful, you know mantras like “fail early, fail often”, etc. On one hand I have a ton of unfinished short stories, ideas and notes filling up my notebook and unfinished scraps of software on my laptop’s harddisk. Yet I still preserve with my Lost Heroes RPG, a project perhaps I should have quit on an age ago when it has become apparent it’s not going to be some sort of whirlwind success or if a minor success (for the record, I’m not going to quit on it and I’m currently working on a rules system for it).
Makes me think, there are two types of projects, defined more by your attitude towards them than anything else. A product is something you’re trying to “sell” (in some abstract sense) and if it doesn’t sell or find an audience, it’s a failure. But a pet project is something you do because you want to do it. It’d be great if you find an audience, but if you don’t, so what?
For me products are the stuff I do in work. I get paid to do them and they are done at a professional level. You have to be ruthless about it, avoid adding new features, doing everything as right as you can straight up.
Pet projects are stuff I do for fun, in my spare time. I make mistakes, I learn. I explore options and tangents and cut away stuff at my own impulse. Lost Heroes RPG is my on-going pet project. I’ve learned about writing, mythology, game design, etc. and it’s brought me in contact with other gamers and writers. Even if, no-one else reads it, I’m still enjoying working on it.
It’s a little bit about sanity too, if I’m working on something because I’m enjoying the work, then “failure” is only what I chose it to be. If it’s a product, I can prepare myself for failure by simply distancing myself. I’m not talking about what failure is, only how I treat and react to my spare time projects.
TDO-Mini-Forms was also a pet project, one that perhaps should have been a product in hindsight. I was working on it because I was enjoying it. I was learning about PHP, coding for the web, working with WordPress and so on. But people were and are using it, expecting a supported product. That’s a bit of a disconnect, working on something as a pet project but random people consuming it as a product. I would have been happy with a small number of users and supporting them, while extending it and learning how to do things right.
But the number of users is quite high. Still not getting used to google occasionally telling me about some random dude on Twitter who stating that it’s utter crap because of X, Y or Z. It stomps all over why I was enjoying working on it. Turning a pet project, not into a product, but into a chore was/is a death knell working for the appreciation of faceless strangers. Will I start up work on TDO Mini Forms? Maybe, but I’ll need an attitude adjustment towards it first. I’d be tempted to start over, doing something from scratch, taking what I learned from TDO-Mini-Forms. I’d also need a machine that gives me reams of extra spare time to work on it as well.
I think if I were to start trying to write a novel (I have a few ideas) for example, I would be treating it as a Product, taking on board everything I’ve learned from writing Lost Heroes RPG and the various little flash fictions or short stories I’ve hacked together and being a bit more ruthless about it. The same would go for any software project I might start that’s bigger than a very simple tool.
Interesting post… one minor point!
‘A product is something you’re trying to “sell” (in some abstract sense) and if it doesn’t sell or find an audience, it’s a failure.’
True, and incorrect at the same time. If you look at it that a product is something that someone is trying to buy (not something you’re trying to sell), then it seems like a far less ‘evil’ enterprise. You’re creating something that someone likes so much that they’re willing to pay for it! Cool! Also, trying to create something and then find an audience is almost always guaranteed to be a failure. Start with the audience, find what they like (and what you’d enjoy providing) and your chance of success greatly increases.
Thanks for stopping by Dave.
I do admit I don’t have much experience in creating viable products in my spare time. I tinker for the sake of it. It sounds like there is a lot of luck in trying to find an alignment with your own tastes and creative desires with an open audience.
That’s sorta what happened with TDO-Mini-Forms. People were looking for a plugin that did X, I had something that did nearly X so I made it do X. Sadly I was doing it purely for the fun of it so it kinda ran away from me and was no longer fun for me. I wasn’t trying to sell something.
Pet projects that are shared online can be painful too. Over the many years I’ve had Icar online, I’ve had mostly positive feedback but once in a while there is someone who wants to complain. It seems odd that they complain about something that’s free but they feel cheated out of time. They’ve downloaded it and then when reading it through realised it’s got a mechanic they don’t like. All that reading effort has come to nothing! Emails come in two forms: small one liners and bitter tirades. The one liners are easy to redirect. You just tell them that they are amateurs at rubbishing Icar. The longer ones often have good feedback squirreled away inside them and they can be very hurtful. It might be a pet project, it might be free but people still want stuff and if you’re going to share it, you should really listen.
Your “product” TDO Mini forms is very definitely a valuable product and tool for a lot of us out there. You are immensely appreciated for creating it. I bet it sucks majorly when you hear people bashing it and possibly even you personally for it, but the Internet is full of people who don’t realize that on the other ends of these screens are other people.
Anyway, just wanted to say thank you! Please keep working on it! Make it a paid product, we’re happy to pay for it! Or pay for support!!!