The world is full of opportunities to build tools to help creative people be “more creative more of the time”.

Let’s look at some of the academic literature on creativity and creativity tools and get a birds’ eye view of the field.

Creativity

What is creativity and where does it come from?

A starting place is with personal characteristics. According to Doris Shallcross, creative people exhibit —

• Openness to experience, self-confidence, willingness to take risks, sense of humor, enjoyment of experimentation, lack of feeling threatened, personal courage, unconventionality, flexibility, preference for complexity, goal oriented, originality, self direction.

So part of creativity has to do with personality traits but Sternberg & Lubart think personality traits alone aren’t enough to give rise to creativity. What about abilities? Environment? Their theory involves a ‘confluence’ of elements that need to be present for creativity to occur. …

It can be really hard to stay motivated when you work for yourself… this is particularly true if you’re working on a product that hasn’t yet found product-market fit.

When I started out building my own products I would often find staying motivated difficult.

Sometimes I would set aside time to work on a project but when the time came to finally sit down and begin I would think: “I can’t work on my project right now because I don’t feel like it… I’ll do something else for a bit and then get to work.”

I really didn’t get much done. Working on projects can be stressful and I rarely felt like working. …

I recently came across a post on a forum by a developer who was just starting out.

He was feeling overwhelmed.

He wasn’t learning much because he kept jumping form one online course to another. He felt that his problem was that there were just too many helpful online courses (and topics) out there to study.

In his words:

There are so many helpful resources out there that it’s super easy to lose focus.

I start learning one thing and then find something else that seems better.

In the end I feel overwhelmed and I don’t know what’s important any more. …

I believe one of the best ways for an entrepreneur to increase the odds of success is to start projects by picking a market. In this article, I want to examine why picking a market is important and examine a research technique that you can use.

Over the years I have built a lot of personal projects. A few have found customers… many have not.

I know I’m not alone in this experience. Medium, Indie Hackers, and Reddit are filled with stories about engineers spending years working on product ideas that never end up finding viable markets.

I have come to believe that common problem entrepreneurs face is that they don’t know how to find viable markets. …

Market research can reduce the risks that entrepreneurs face when they want to build a new product. In this article I talk about some market research techniques I have found that answer some important market questions.

On doing market research

Seasoned entrepreneurs often recommend doing ‘market research’ as a starting point for building a new product.

The goal of market research is to determine how easy it would be to launch a new business in a particular market.

When you do market research you want to find a ‘good‘ market.

A good market is a market that is growing rapidly where there is a manageable amount of competition and where there is no clear market leader. …

Developers often start new projects by immediately writing code. I have found a more effective approach is to start new projects by writing marketing materials.

If you build products, I hope you find these ideas helpful.

A while ago I released an Android app.

The development process had started with some research.

I had identified an app that I thought I could improve upon. It had a high download rate, but the app itself was simple and poor quality.

I reasoned that if I could build a higher quality app, I’d get a lot of downloads. …

The times when I have made the greatest leaps in my development skills have been when I struggled to learn something new and didn’t give up. This has not always been easy for me. I have come across a few ideas that have helped me push through my personal blocks.

Perhaps you can relate.

It’s all too easy to feel frustrated when you are faced with software engineering problems that are hard. I sometimes experience a feeling of wanting to give up. …

I got into Silicon Valley’s tech scene through the back door — by building my career with simple, quick freelance gigs. I highly recommend this approach. Not only is it a great way to learn a lot of different coding skills really quickly, it’s also a lot of fun!

The paradox: you need a job to get experience but you need experience to get a job…

The other day, a friend who was getting ready to graduate from college asked me for advice on how to get a developer job. He had spent hours poring over job boards, sending out cover letters, and had heard back from exactly zero companies. 😢

I completely understood his pain. Having been one of the founding engineers at a tech recruiting company where I worked on data-science, I’ve had the opportunity to see actual numbers and the picture can be pretty glum. …