Why people quit their projects (¼)

Emotional setup is underrated by indie hackers

Lots of ingredients are often ignored when you start cooking your project for a profitable business. This is OK, you learn as you go and adapt to changes, it is part of being an Indie-Hacker.

But some of those ingredients are just necessary conditions for success and you don’t want to underestimate them.

In particular, the need for a correct emotional setup is very hard to notice and easy to overlook, although absolutely essential to get your project to a good end.

Turns out one might exhaust the emotional runway much earlier than the financial runway. All the money in the world will not help if you are mentally and emotionally exhausted. It might end up being one of the main reasons for people to quit their projects.

This was probably one of the biggest mistakes I committed. I will share my personal experience, so you can avoid the pitfalls of starting off with an incorrect emotional setup.

The best lessons always come from mistakes, so I hope you learn a lot from this post series (there will be four of them).

Defining emotional setup

First off, let's define what emotional setup means. The idea is related to the psychological rollercoaster entrepreneurship imposes on the entrepreneur.

You will inevitably go through (eventual) highs and (frequent, deep) lows, you will face them mostly alone (only other indie hackers will know what you are going through) and you will feel the burden on your shoulders of literally playing with your sustenance.

The emotional setup is the scenario you prepare for yourself to live in until you get your business to sustain you.

Whether this scenario is correct or not will heavily affect key aspects of your performance, creativity, productivity, mood, endurance… It can be the difference between learning/enjoying/succeeding or wasting/suffering/failing with your project.

In other words, you want to get it right, otherwise, chances are you are setting yourself up for failure from the get-go.

A final note on my definition is that it is relative to your approach to entrepreneurship, e.g.: an indie hacker should probably have a different emotional setup compared to someone who decides to go the fund-raising way.

The indie hacking one is what I know about and that is what I am going to share.

My story, a counter-example

The beginning: life is soooo good…

I am a full-stack software engineer by trade and at the beginning of 2018, I decided I had everything ready to try and build a profitable business by myself.

Starting my own company was an experience I just wanted to live. As such, I practically prepared it as one of those trips you definitely want to make at least once in a lifetime.

Although I didn’t have a totally defined view of what exactly I was going to build, I had a clear view of what spaces I would be touching: e-commerce + social apps. I had been observing the trends and I was convinced the convergence of those areas would bring opportunities in the short-mid term.
My financial runway was around two years and my couple supported my plans, philosophically speaking. Although financially speaking I was in a comfortable situation, my intention was to keep a part-time job until my project could sustain both of us.

At least initially, I wanted to enjoy the pleasure of investing all of my time in an “entrepreneurial trip” until I had a well-defined idea of what my project would be about.

Overlooked aspects/mistakes I committed at this stage

• I adopted a romantic/idealistic angle: don’t do this! Of course, entrepreneurship has some adventure to it because of all the unexpected situations and challenges you will find along the way. But apart from that, you should keep a cold, clear, and simple vision of your project: does it realistically sustain my life already or not?
  You are taking the way of building something that pays the rent and puts food on your plate. Period. That is pretty f**king serious and you should take it as such!

• Be brutally honest with yourself and with anyone who might be affected directly or indirectly by your project (like your couple). With the best of intentions, sometimes people say yes to things they do not really understand. For instance, hearing my couple one would say she was ready for a nomad life, supported the perspective of me earning less money for a while, and even encouraged me to go ahead and try to build a business.
  Only after a few weeks, it became clear that was actually not the case. She started being pretty nasty about me “wasting time” on the project. Clearly, she didn’t know what she signed up for and that was my mistake, not hers.
  It is your responsibility to make damn sure everyone is aware of what is coming their way and be ready for them to support your project or not.
  Do not start your project until there is true solid consensus with anyone you will be affecting it with.

• Don’t go all in until you have some reasonable traction. If you do, you are probably taking a break from your routine, just masked as the first steps of building a business.

A couple of months in + moving to China

After a couple of months, I had a clear view of what I would be working on. As a developer, I dedicated some time to building some quick PoCs of certain components, getting familiar with the APIs I would use, and deciding on the best tech stack to build things fast.

Unexpectedly, after 3-4 weeks, my couple received an offer to work in China as a high school teacher and we decided to move there, as it was advantageous for her, I had the freedom to work from anywhere, and the timing seemed perfect!

On my end, I had everything ready to start working on an MVP, plus I noticed how emotionally unhealthy it was not to have a reason to go out of my place regularly. The same high school offered me a part-time job as a science teacher, so I took it, thinking it would be the perfect complement for my main activity: my company.

Although I didn’t know it then, that moment was a huuuge inflection point: my emotional setup had just radically changed and that would affect my project and my life.

Overlooked aspects/mistakes I committed at this stage

• There is a toll on your couple when moving to another country, emotionally speaking. Friction appears (independently of the previous conditions that existed) and consumes a lot of mental and emotional resources.
  Unless yours is one of those cases where your couple works on the project too (e.g.: Sarah & Andrew from Canny.io), my impression is that going abroad is probably a major impact you should avoid on top of building a business from scratch.
  Of course, if you are single and you have no responsibilities it is a totally different story! :)

• Protect your project by protecting your emotional setup. I accepted a part-time job as a high school teacher… In China, where the norm is the 996 working hour system, basically a euphemism for work exploitation. If you do the math, you will see my part-time job was basically a west world full-time job, which essentially left no time for my project.

• Snowball effect: although my financial runway would have allowed me not to work while in China, I accepted it just for the sake of reassuring my couple.
  Remember when I said the emotional runway exhausts way quicker than the financial one? This point is where it began happening for me and it only got worse from here!

In the next post I will deep dive into endurance and (very) hard decisions one has to take while working on an indie-hacker project…