The story of the code, love and success
I’m in the dark garage. Surrounded by the beautiful, calm darkness. Only me and my code in front of me. It’s 4AM, I’m perfectly awake. I’m perfectly focused. I touch my touchpad. The masterpiece slowly materializes in front of me.
“The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with” ~ K. Kelley
I push one button, second, third, write a patch, fix a feature; my thoughts go away to a new idea that just appeared in my mind. New idea, new idea, new idea — it shouts. I’m getting excited, my heart starts to beat faster. It’s starting to hurt, too. I immediately note this idea in one of tens of Evernote notes. I’m in the flow. I write, test, fix, patch. I don’t see the end of the road. The tragedy doesn’t want to stop: I want my piece to be perfect.
Weeks pass, one after the other. I’m getting less and less sleep. My energy levels go down dramatically. I’m becoming the thrifty robot: caring about the result only. Something that initially was a fun thing to do, transforms into an obsession, an addiction — some could name.
There comes the rescue. Unexpectedly I’m getting in love! Not with the code this time, not with a robot, too. It’s a woman. She offers her hand. She offers to do the project with me. I don’t know that yet, but she will become the source of the big success, a success we will both achieve.
It’s January the 1st, 2016. We release Proud, our first app. Thanks to Angelique who took care of finding and managing a huge community of our future users and my endless hours in the proverbial “garage” we’re ready to launch our baby.
We didn’t know if working on Proud for such long time will be of any success at all. Once, I was creating an app with my friend Wojtek for 9 months and after releasing the project we told each other that we will never make an app for 9 months again. It was a total disaster. One could said it was because we were doing it for so long. I would say it was because of many things that I decided never to repeat again:
- we didn’t focus totally on the core feature. It was an alarm clock but it didn’t wake up people…
- we released it after a long time, not having any energy for marketing it
- we never updated the app
- we never checked if people would actually want such app before releasing it
I had many low moments with Proud. I wanted to quit from the project at least 6 times during those 2 years. Two quotes from Thomas Edison here: “Nearly every man who develops an idea works it up to the point where it looks impossible, and then he gets discouraged. That’s not the place to become discouraged.” and “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”. Knowing that and having the support of my girlfriend, I continued the work, I tried one more time over and over again.
I always knew that even if I quit from the project, I would get incomparable experience that I could use in my day-to-day work. I did B2B projects during the 8-hour day periods and sat down to Proud in the evenings, and nights, you know?
There were so many things to be done with Proud. If you are one person doing code, design, animations, mockups, websites (yes, there were 3 websites during those 2 years), bug fixing, screenshots, blogposts, sounds and many more, it will drain lots of your energy.
I needed to motivate myself. I know that you can’t achieve big things by sitting still. I was constantly coming back to my productivity gurus: Eben Pagen, Ari Meisel, David Allen in search of encouragement and persistence. When I saw that one of them saw our project and up voted the product on Product Hunt in the day of the release, I thought that my dreams has came true…
Right now, I’m in coffee shop with Angelique. We’re drinking coffee and replying to hundreds of emails after the release. We succeeded, much higher than we thought. The number of “high-fives” we did during the last two days would meet around 20–30.
If you asked me would I create such project for 2 years again, I would probably say: yes and no.
Yes, because the things I learned about myself during creating it was much more than what I could learn about coding. I perfectly got in control with my motivation, energy, productivity and persistence. Our work was also appreciated by huge community of our users and this is something that boosts your energy like anything else.
No, because it was literally killing me from inside. It was VERY difficult and if you don’t want to sacrifice your energy and health for such long time, don’t even try to do this. Get a lot of money from investors, build a team and do it that way. You won’t have 100% ownership over the revenue, but you will be much happier person in the end. My happiness levels need to recharge now. And seriously I need a few good months to become the same energetic, open and sociable person I was before I started Proud.
This post was not to discourage you from doing big things. I tried to explain you in detail that it can get very serious and difficult sometimes. It will be worth it though if you don’t quit: trust me!
If you want to ask me about anything, shot me a tweet @piotrszwach. I will be happy to share my thoughts with you about this project. If you are curious on how @angeliquetoque got her huge community, you can read her blogpost about it here: LINK.
