Recognizing that I believe in the FDF.
I have built many things.
All of them I have spent too much time on, and always just focused on the building.
This has led to a graveyard of lovely but lonely projects out there on the web, my hard drive, gnawing at a hidden part of my frontal lobe.
I love to build things, but for too long the other portion of building has been missing, the part of it actually reaching the people it would be useful to.
Without realizing it, I have fallen victim to the FDF.
When choosing a new project or finding the motivation to actually build it, never did I ask myself, “How am I going to get this into the hands of the people it is being built for?” Worse yet, after it was built, I still didn’t ask that question, or deign to answer it.
No need to answer these questions I thought, the people who need this will find it. The internet is funny that way. Things just happen. Put it out on the web, and soon enough thousands of people will find it.
You see the problem here don’t you?
Of course you do. It is easy to say that from the outside looking in.
Maybe you read that and are reminded of yourself.
The real issue is, this doesn’t happen consciously. It happens in the hidden part of your mind that refuses to ask, much less answer, the hard questions.
The building is easy.
The hard part is overcoming the fear of people hating what you built.
To me, that is the real driver of the FDF.
Fear.
Because if you actually go out and try to drive people to what you have built, you know you will get an answer to, “Was it worthwhile?”
The FDF allows you to say, “No one has found it yet, but once they do, wooooaaahh man is it gonna be huge!”
It is too dangerous of a belief to hold.
And I have definitely got to get rid of it.
Maybe you do too.
How my (mistaken) belief has hurt me.
The first thing I ever built was an inventory management system for a nationwide chain of trailer dealerships. It is a slowly evolving industry, and those dealerships were by no stretch of the imagination technologically advanced.
Lots of pen and paper, faxes, scanning and emailing, and a lot of errors.
What I built solved a lot of issues for them. Keeping track of special orders, intaking large deliveries, organizing the stock in a sane way to make it easier for the salesman.
The beauty of the software was it went directly into their hands. I built it alongside the input from the company, and every new feature created held a ton of value to the business.
Now you might be asking yourself, where does the mistaken belief in the FDF come in?
Well, if it helped this company so much, don’t you think it might help others in the industry? Especially since there is little to no variation in the operations between dealerships. Same product. Same flow of inventory. Same outdated technology.
To this day, that first chain of dealerships uses the software.
But guess how many other dealerships I reached out to?
Guess how many other dealerships are currently using it?
No, no one else magically walked out of the cornfield…
What I plan on doing about it.
You are seeing a portion of the plan in action right now. Live and in person. How can an operation of one get in front of people, get their ideas out there, without a marketing team, or a large budget?
This right here. Telling stories, creating value, maybe inspiring, maybe connecting, with people like you reading this right now.
The plan is to continue doing the stuff I love, building things out of lines of code, that have the power to help people.
But most importantly, telling you all about them.
Overcoming the fear of someone hating it, and all that time spent being a complete waste.
Realizing that the FDF I hold, and act on, and believe in, is the wrong belief.
Time to have the courage to let the things I build be hated, or loved.
Not sure which is more terrifying, but it is time.
Because I’ll tell you, building it and letting them come does not work.
— Jay
Let me know if this is something you recognize in yourself.
Let me know how it has hurt you in the past.
Let me know what you plan to do about it in the future.
