Building open-source projects without expectations

Throughout my career in tech, I've built some open-source projects and honestly some of them never gotten too far. I think the biggest success I've had so far is Route (https://github.com/s1lvax/route) which had 17 users.

The Wrong Mindset

I've learnt that by focusing on the success of the app (even though it's open-source and not monetizable) brought me only misery and dissatisfaction. I kept wondering if my ideas were bad or if I was just a bad programmer. I think nowadays we see so many success stories, specially in tech, that we've convinced ourselves that it's easy and that every project needs to boom immediately.

The mentality is always the same, spend time coding, buy a domain, launch the app, advertise it the best you can using free methods but end up seeing your database end up with 5 users, 3 of which haven't even finished the onboarding process. It's painful and makes us and our work feel devalued.

At some point, you stop caring about the app because it's not something you were even interested to begin with and the project just dies.

Since I shifted my mindset, everything changed for the better.

The Correct Mindset

I believe that the first and most important step is to actually care and use the application you built, solve a problem you actually have. 

This way, even if users don't use it, you still solved one of your problems so it was never wasted time.

Using this mentality, you may even be closer to achieving success because if you have a problem, chances are many more humans have the same problem. 

We're all connected after all.

This is a short post but I believe it's important that more people create more, specially in open-source.

Take for example this application, I built it and advertised it to about 50K people and got 7 users. Is it a failure? Maybe, but I love it and I use it, it helps me and that's all that matters.

Many people make fun of other people or call them losers because they try something and fail, but never let them convince you. If you tried and failed, you're the cool one and not the person making fun of you. All they're doing is projecting their own insecurities onto you, they want to try but are afraid of failing. 

If you have an idea, build it.