I love this and I aspire to eventually, if I come out of the grinder with any ambition, drive, or passion left, do something similar.
I abhor big corpratism, and love the way software can be independent and disconnected from it, if not usually in practice.
I deeply admire Basecamp's style of "you don't need VC money, keep it small, keep building something useful that gets you paid." I want that someday but someday is not this day.
I'm not much of an idea guy. I can build stuff. I can get really passionate about how things "should be" and implement process and infrastructure to get there. But whatever "it" is, just hasn't come to me yet.
I long to be an indiehacker but for all the supposedly wrong reasons.
I want to putter but don't know where to get the right seeds to be puttering for.
I have too many ideas. Every problem or small improvement is a potential business opportunity or startup idea and I see them everywhere. My experience as a software consultant likely contributes to this. It's my job to go talk to customers, understand their problem and propose a solution.
If you want to just build stuff for yourself, go work for a software consulting firm for a while. It should be a smaller one that's interested in tackling smaller jobs. This way, you'll interact with more potential customers. You'll learn a ton about their businesses, because after all; they hired your company to solve their problems. Save as much money as you can.
When you have enough money saved up, you can afford to quit your job and focus on something you that interests you because it's fun or an amazing opportunity. I've done this a couple of times so far. Right now I am splitting my time between a startup and a part time job.
I am really glad I have the part time job. Not so much for the money, but for the socialization aspects.
What if the idea doesn't really matter? You need to start the journey and be ready to adapt along the way. I've been at it for 12 years now as a cofounder and you'll need to change your product every couple of years. Remember - even Microsoft is shipping Linux these days.
If you're trying to sell and earn money, you don't need an idea, you need customers. From customers to idea is much easier than from idea to customers.
I'm not saying that getting/finding customers is easy neither...
That's the minimum viable product thing - you need to figure out what's actually helpful to people.
For instance, I hope some day someone takes up the mantle and goes out making a decent free identity system. I think most of the North European countries have one of those, and they are all proprietary and suck with no interoperability. If think there's government or even EU money to be had for something that works.
So basically, every citizen needs a way of authenticating, e.g. to submit tax information, log in to banks etc.
Is Basecamp really the example to aspire to? Being the developer of Rails and ActiveRecord and fostering and milking that would be the software equivalent of Peter Frampton, and I mean that in the most positive way.
I think we know that we’re not all going platinum. This article was about just “working on the song(s)” for the enjoyment of it, whatever that may involve, or that’s the way I took it.
I think the sentiment is that Basecamp is no Led Zeppelin. In that they perhaps haven't achieved the record breaking, Unicorn level growth that many startups strive for. But perhaps that's OK for them?
They've got some great tunes, a loyal following, and can still put on a fantastic show. They're superstars by any definition.
Peter Frampton had a standout, influential "live" album and an innovative style of playing that will forever be remembered.
Led Zeppelin had a series of standout albums and hit songs spanning close to a decade, spawning Unicorn level sales, crowds and generational fandom that held influence on rock and roll for 40+ years.
But the band members of Zeppelin eventually succumbed to the excesses of their success. They split up after some really dark days. The scope and size of their success wasn't long term manageable on a personal level. But their legacy remains.
Whereas Frampton is still playing small live venues today!!!!
> Being the developer of Rails and ActiveRecord and fostering and milking that
It's not entirely fair thing to say as DHH's rise to fame was really on both fronts in parallel, actually I remember that one of the selling points for ruby/RoR thing early on was that "the basecamp was built on it". Most of people (me included) never even heard of Ruby before they've made it popular, and they could do that partially thanks to having an already very popular product built on it and big following of fans to their approach to business and software. It was before "the lean" ideas got popular, so it was all very new and revolutionary.
Now I really know I'm getting old, when I've gone past nostalgia for the 1980s 8-bit era and even Web 2.0 feels like a distant, but warm and fuzzy memory...
I second all of this, and this line from the fine article resonated deeply:
> That’s what I want from my products. I want to putter about, feel connected to the process, and have fun doing so.
I too have the same "writer's block" issue for ideas. I've got some, but I dunno, it just seems so hopeless to gamble and go that route.
For now, I've managed to scrimp and invest enough from the day job, I may just quit and putter on projects until I hit on something. If I don't make enough to cover costs, I can try freelancing/consulting. Worst case, I can go back to the corporate grind.
> I'm not much of an idea guy. I can build stuff. I can get really passionate about how things "should be" and implement process and infrastructure to get there. But whatever "it" is, just hasn't come to me yet.
> I deeply admire Basecamp's style of "you don't need VC money, keep it small, keep building something useful that gets you paid.
Honestly, DHH looks to me and comes across to me as extremely burnt out to an unhealthy point. I wouldn't want to aspire what he has become. He doesn't strike me as someone like the author of Bear Blog who just enjoys puttering along. He comes across as someone who constantly stresses himself to become BIG without VC money so he can prove someone that you can achieve VC level success without VC money. As a result he seems to be constantly arguing and lecturing people on social media to a point where it feels difficult to watch. Also Hey feels like a real flop to me, an attempt to fix something that really nobody wanted to be fixed. It's like creating yet another social media app when people are already sickened by the sheer amount of apps which demand their constant attention.
I admire what bear blog stands for and to me that is far away from Basecamp, otherwise I agree with your points :)
DHH certainly doesn't putter (by the common definition), but as someone who has followed his output here and there over the course of ~15 years I disagree that he is burnt out or that he is out to impress.
Over the years his approach has in my opinion been an example of how to be practical, think for yourself, be productive and not burn out. His form of puttering looks to be blocking out time to program in Ruby and extracting patterns from Basecamp (and now Hey) to release as open source. This looks like a form of cultivation/gardening to me.
I think most people, myself included, would burn out if they attempted to emulate him—he has clearly found a way to remain balanced, in his own way.
For the rest of us I think Bear Blog is a good example to follow if you can make a living doing so. If you want to see the parallels between this and Basecamp then you would need to wind the clock way back to the early days of that product/company. That said, winding the clock forward on Bear Blog will likely not get you something that looks like Basecamp today.
I abhor big corpratism, and love the way software can be independent and disconnected from it, if not usually in practice.
I deeply admire Basecamp's style of "you don't need VC money, keep it small, keep building something useful that gets you paid." I want that someday but someday is not this day.
I'm not much of an idea guy. I can build stuff. I can get really passionate about how things "should be" and implement process and infrastructure to get there. But whatever "it" is, just hasn't come to me yet.
I long to be an indiehacker but for all the supposedly wrong reasons.
I want to putter but don't know where to get the right seeds to be puttering for.