It is interesting how much this blog post is not relevant to my status.
I always wanted to create my own startup, and nearly always had pet projects for this purpose on the side. It is no news to me that starting a startup is a cool thing.
I dont' watch TV, and I don't need a Palsma TV. But I have a family to care about, I live in a quite poor country and I need a day job.
I think I am a good developer, but I don't think my knowledge is a goldmine. They pay approximately $2000 per month for even very very good developers in my country. This is not a goldmine.
I made 3 projects to the sellable product phase in my life, and all failed.
The first was too ambitious and I could not keep up with competitors like google. (natural language translation from english to my mother language)
The second was an Indie game: The critics said it was done professionally, but it was not especially playable, it was not fun enough.
The third was not ambitious enough: This was a small software for the consumer market (language learning), It got lost amongst the thousands of small shareware tools on download.com and also there were free products which were partially competitors.
I start to lose my energy. (Having a boring day job for years is not fun.) Of course I build something again on the side. I think it is a better idea than the previous ones. I cannot stop. But I will never ever will have the optimism like the OP.
i don't understand why #3 was not ambitious enough, could you explain?
There are a host of language learning tools, but a lot of them are simplistic, or very poor, or very expensive and only support a few languages (e.g. as you're hungarian, I've yet to find a good one supporting your language).
Language learning is not a solved problem, afaict :)
My product/approach was too simplistic. It was just a word learner tool, basically a 'flash card' program, which tracked and modeled the user's knowledge, and 'annoyed' the user time to time with questions. My main mistake was that I did not research the market enough before building the tool: the problem exists, but there are too much competitors, and there a free ones amongst them.
Otherwise this was my smallest 'fail', because this did not involve that much work from me. My other 2 'fails' especially the first was a more severe one. (Google translate did not exist when I started my first project. I already had some paying customers when google translate had been made available in my language. Then I realized that I have no chance to keep up with them.)
I live in Hungary. (Eastern Europe.) It is not an especially poor country, but poor compared to Western Europe and the USA. Multinational companies mostly bring here only the boring jobs. (I can understand them: they don't want to offshore their main competencies.)
I can imagine. I live in Poland, that's why I asked. I guess you agree that our nations have things in common: kind of stubbornness but also wild imagination. There are even some old historical sayings about it.. We seem to have completely non-transparent politicians and similar economic struggles as well. Still your country seems to have good opinion in the wild and also Budapest seems more civilized than our capital, which is important for multinational companies.
I guess the best we can do is to risk build something ourselves when the right moment comes -- read: when we have some savings for at least couple of months. If we fail we will be still considered as early adopters of tech things (because what we decide to use is usually better and more modern than so-called "industry standards") which is good for finding another job.
Since 2 years I'm switching between consulting and doing own stuff every several months - it didn't generated big income but I build few non-profit things which is also very good and gave me lots of experience. By non-profit I don't mean open source - I mean organizations or users who behave like real customers but aren't businesses. I didn't get rich but it was fun and gave me some insights for the future.
"I guess the best we can do is to risk build something ourselves when the right moment comes"
I agree. I hope I've learnt from my previous failures. My newest project is something quite close to pg's #22 on this list:
It is something like a very intuitive web based user interface for databases. Something like hybrid of Excel, Access and Wiki, but still different from all of them.
Thanks for the encouraging words, and also good luck to you!
I start to lose my energy. (Having a boring day job for years is not fun.) Of course I build something again on the side. I think it is a better idea than the previous ones. I cannot stop. But I will never ever will have the optimism like the OP.