My Failure

It’s ironic that creating a post about continuing in the face of failure was ultimately what contributed to making me face that I have failed. Maybe on some level I was subconsciously aware of it and was merely resisting the inevitable.

I started the site a month ago. Actually, it started much further back than that. Video game achievements are a way to continue playing a game in fun and different ways. I always thought it’d be interesting if there was to create real life achievements, but it was never more than an idea.

I’ve talked about struggling with finding a sense of purpose before and while on that journey, I came up with this idea to sit down and just write every thing that I wanted to do. Any and every possible thing that I wanted to do, I would write that down for a minimum of thirty minutes. I would continue doing this every few months to reaffirm what was important to me. Eventually, the spreadsheet that I was using became too clunky so I switched it to a web app. Once I was almost finished with that, I figured I should open it up for other people to use as well but I soon realized that the design I created for myself was unintuitive for anyone else, so I started all over from scratch.

This became Do It! Prove It! I released last month and things were going okay. I wasn’t getting very much traffic. It was at least 30 people per day but I was still very hopeful. Actually, I was so passionate about the project that I genuinely wondered what could ever make me wanna quit. But now, in spite of a pretty consistent effort on my part to market the site, I’m down to about half of the traffic I once received. In addition to that, I’m realizing how much competition I have in this space. I thought it was only one competitor that was focused more on a video game niche, but there are a lot more.

I’ll still be continuing work at the same pace until mid-September but after that I’ll be limiting the amount of time I allocate (unless it somehow takes off).

Check back tomorrow for what a post on what I’ve learned from my failure.