Hello, my name is Jason and it's been 125 days since I've published my last retrospective.

As punishment, I've published this retrospective.

I find that from time to time completing easy tasks start becoming more difficult and slow. I take it as a signal that something is wrong and that my actions don't line up with my thoughts. This time the action is working on yet another feature for my car website ( CarPriceValue ).

I subscribe to Courtland Allen's advice :

your whole goal is not to quit

And for the most part, it's a simple way to ignore the doubts and distractions and just work on the thing. And it feels fucking amazing having that clarity and drive to do good work in a decided direction.

But sooner or later the right-side of my brain kicks in and injects pure existential dread into my veins and then I have write this retro.

The issue is that I'm doubting the (income generating) potential of my car website.

Stats:

• Free users: 654
• Paid users: 2
• MRR: ~R450 / ~$25

My gripe is that it's a B2C website that's only targeting South Africa, which heavily limits its growth potential.

I'm not looking to make money online at all costs. I want to make it in a very specific way. I want to build software where my incentives are aligned with the incentives of the people/businesses paying for the software.

Maybe it's just FOMO 🤷‍♂️? I see my indie hacking / solo founder colleagues earning good money and working on cool shit which I don't feel I can participate in because I'm still fighting to "survive".

Sometimes the anarchist in me wants to say "fuck it!", open-source the car website, and move on.

It has occurred to me that perhaps the tight grip I have on the car website is because it's the first software I've built that's making any kind of money and I don't want it to not work out (i.e., scarcity mindset).

So if I don't have what I want yet, then there's nothing to lose, right?

I don't think the car website has reached its full potential yet. I still have ideas, but it has been more than a year.

Fuck, but Courtland won't shut up about not giving up 😭.

The allure of the infinite potential of a new project is very enticing, but very painful to achieve traction on.

Conclusion

Perhaps the responsible, balanced answer is to allow myself some time to explore new projects.

If you have a better idea, let me know ❤️.