Okay. I admit it. I don’t know what to build anymore.
It had always been exciting. I still remember my very first experience foraying into the field of programming. It was fun. It was all about excitement. Blood gushed through my veins like never before while I typed lines after lines of code that spurred out on my computer screen. It was something that I’ve never experienced before. I guess that was the inflexion point where I just wanted to build things – to never stop building things.
It took days and nights to build something out of my text editor. I was naïve. I didn’t know anything about creating a well-polished site, publishing it to the masses and making it popular (It was the time before the iPhone and the ‘app’ got popular, everything was about building a website). Due to my ignorance and wanting to reach the “overnight success” as portrayed by the media like Kevin Rose (Digg was the popular site back then, even more popular than Facebook), I stuck my head into the computer all day long, trying to build a site hoping that it would eventually lead me to my success. But, you know how it goes. I was inexperienced and foolish.
After countless of the same experience, reality struck me deep. I started reading and exploring. I found out that there’s no such thing as an “overnight success”. I found out that there was much more than coding to make the thing that you’ve built successful. I smirked at how stupid I was.
How stupid was I?
As I read and read, I lost my interest in hitting the runway and achieving an “overnight success”. I realized that for you to build a successful and wildly popular app or website, there are many other factors involved, e.g. the startup environment, investments, marketing, early-adopters, customer support and people who you work with. It wasn’t as easy as deploying a website and waiting for site visitors to slowly come. They won’t and they never will unless there’s something in it for them.
Then, the iPhone got popular and everybody started working on apps. Want to check your pulse? There’s an app for that. Want to pretend that you’re drinking beer? There’s an app for that. Feel like licking your phone? There’s an app for that. Whatever you want to build, however bizarre and outrageous, there’s always already an app for that.
Ideas? What ideas? Everybody, no matter who you are or what field you’re working in, you’re constantly thinking of ideas to build, an app to publish; hoping to hit the “overnight success” (as portrayed by the media, in fact, it’s not) and get yourself into the millionaire club. What else is left for the uncreative and exhausted me?
It then came to the present. I am out of ideas, waiting desperately to get into a university to study computer science to meet awesome and talented people. Maybe we could build something together, I don’t know. Currently, I’m working as a waiter and whenever I have time I will always keep on pondering on this simple yet unanswerable question: what can I build?