Being an invisible content producer

3 minutes to read

Well, anything needs to start somewhere.

I remember as it was yesterday, seven years ago I had a "perfect app idea". We were having a major hydraulic shortage in Brazil and I thought it was a good idea to study native Android development while creating something to help people save some water.

After some months of developing and studying, I decided to open the APK to the public. On the release day, I barely slept, I was too excited, mainly with the idea of so many people trying and using my long-fermented project idea.

Creating expectations of the possible success of my beloved project idea is horrible. It took me weeks to stop checking the statistics and accept that no one cared and nobody was using the app. And this is not about the marketing I did for, it was about my long-studied and planned "perfect idea", which took me so much courage to release in the wild, not being "perfect enough" to be successful.

Even after some iterations like adding features, removing ads, and opening the source code to try to get some people helping to add more features to it, none of those actions changed the situation. In my mind, at the time it was a total failure, but at the same time, it was a hell of an experience.

I learned the importance of finishing up something, but more importantly, how to deal with failure and why that's great.

Well, that last statement was depressing and not true, but when we idealize a project, we idealize that we will impact so many people in a very short time, but unlike that, when you aren't a famous content producer the time to your ideas/project/content to reach their public can vary a lot.

Like my first project, it took me three years to receive my first honest feedback about my app and even a feature request, in the same email, the person said it was a teacher using the app in its classes with students to raise the awareness about water consumption. Great success right? But in my head, seven years ago that wasn't the idea of success I had back in the day.

The episode that I described above happened so many times with me, but the intensity of the excitement involved, especially of feeling that the project was "good enough" to release to the public and accepting the fact nobody will ever care for your project changed.

So little by little, my relationship with my ideas and projects changed over time, I lowered my expectations and that helped me release more and faster things in the wild. All this is because of what I learned with the experience of many attempts. This is very relieving, since I always feared releasing something flawed and receiving a huge wave of critics and a bad reputation because of a ridiculous idea. and be found out I'm an impostor

Then you may ask me: If your project impacts just a few people in such a large amount of time, why bother to keep doing things and releasing them in the wild?

I started paying attention to the sources of the solutions or projects that I used to solve a problem in my day to day and most of them are from nonfamous projects in Github or from small blogs or shady questions on Stackoverflow.

The key to me is the diversity of content, numerous ways and approaches to the same problem is a beauty of the modern internet, I do love alternative projects that aim to solve something that has been already worked many times before, so many times they showed me a way that I could finally figure out what I was searching for.

You can always create a unique solution to solve a very specific and niche problem that could get you way less public of your content, but be sure that they will be grateful.

The invisibility grants you a safe space to explore ideas and prepare your mind for releasing stuff in the wild, you will always learn something back. Lower your expectations about your content, but be sure it will reach your public, even if it's few people or it takes much longer than you originally planned.