I wrote this on Friday's post:

Building and marketing products isn’t for me. I prefer to be neck deep in code rather than marketing tools.

I've been thinking about it a lot over the weekend.

The pursuit to build something that people will want to use and buy is what many people want. To take an idea, build it, and turn it into a successful product. Everytime I see an app (usually based on a simple idea) rocket to the top of the App Store charts I wonder, "Why didn't I think of that?".

The thing is though, this usually isn't the first idea for that person. It might be their tenth or even twentieth attempt at making a successful product. Yes, it might be their first attempt, but I don't think there's ever been a single attempt at a product that's went on to sell millions. There's always been a few failed attempts before that one successful product happens.

Rather than continually change the idea of Journalong into something that works I simply let it trudge along based on it's same initial idea. If I was really serious about making Journalong into something better I might have changed how it recorded entries, or changed it's target market to a more focused group, or even open sourced it after the first three months of inactivity. It's taken me a couple of years to finally admit defeat.

A continually pivoting product isn't something I have a whole lot of time for. lame excuse you might say. I would disagree. The ongoing testing and validating of a product until it starts to gain the traction of paying clients isn't what I want to do. I want to write software, but I also want to be paid for writing that software. I'm exploring a few options such as open sourcing a few ideas to see what happens, but for the moment I'll be keeping the focus on writing code rather than building products.