When it comes to personal projects you are your own harshest critic. While you’re debating over colour palettes and backend language choice some teen in his dorm room with the same idea as you is focused on getting his product out as fast as possible, skimping on design and just wanting to get something out to the world.
I am in the same boat. I’ve got more personal projects than hands, one project of which has been sitting idle for about 6 years now called WolfPHP. I’ve probably missed the boat on that idea, but I’ll eventually go back and try to finish it.
The closest I’ve come to launching an idea I’ve had from design to development to release is a music blog called Kill Hipsters. But having said that, all I did was design a simple theme for WordPress, cut it up and move it to my theme folder and activate it.
Of all my personal projects I’ve released a grand total of zero projects. It’s not that I lack the technical skill (design skill yes, definitely) but technically I feel as though I am able to take an idea and make it work in code. It’s not laziness, it’s failure to meet my own unrealistic expectations.
Expectation
Personal projects are dangerous because the client is yourself. You are never truly satisfied and I’ve come to realise over the years, you never will be. I have this vision of how my personal project ideas in my head look and function, but I feel as though I have an expectation of how something looks in my head, a level of design that doesn’t exist anywhere. Nothing is perfect, even Google have shown with their basically unlimited resources and large teams of PhD holders that nothing is ever perfect.
While you might expect your first version to be perfect, it will hold you back. Release and tweak.
Letting Go
The key to getting your ideas out there is to let go. Don’t lose focus on what you want, but don’t let it hold you back. The first version of your product isn’t going to be successful overnight, you have time to make changes after you’ve launched and having a user-base to give feedback is more valuable than blindly creating something you think is great, but might not be great when others use it.
The earlier you let go of your idea and let others see/use, the less time you’ve wasted potentially making something people hate or find hard to use.
So…
Stop debating over typography, image sizes, colours and advanced functionality: just fucking release it and then worry about the direction of the project later. I am going to start living this mantra right from this moment onwards.
