Lanyrd and the frustrations of private projects.

Some years ago two individuals used to work for Torchbox, Simon Willison - all round clever back end developer, and Natalie Downe - all round clever frond end developer. They got married and in the void where some couples might put a baby, instead they released their first digital baby, Lanyrd; a social tool for bringing together everyone in the conference scene. Just today they announced they’ve received 150k funding from Y Combinator and I’m genuinely happy for them!

And yet at the same time bitter.

I’ve been looking for a decent project to sink my teeth into for a while, but have yet to find anything and therein lies the bitterness. I don’t care if my project isn’t funding by Y combinator, I just want a project! I’m broody for a project, thats pretty much the long and the short of it. The trouble is that the people around me are so damned successful that every idea I come up with pales by comparison and you become so self-critical even good ideas could slip by unnoticed in a blur of dismissiveness.

They say the best ideas tend to solve an every day problem simply. Lanyrd is indeed a perfect example of this. I too had a problem around planning my upcoming wedding. I saw an apparent need for a clever way of receiving RSVPs, that would give me an opportunity to express myself in a language I never get to use at work and express the results in a funky fresh way. So I duly set-to on both learning Django and creating a system of registering your wedding, listing the people you were inviting and seeing the results of your RSVPs (captured through some kind of unique 5-digit code in each invite) in a cutesy infographical way.

No sooner had I spent several days planning it and starting on the model layer, than I somehow scuttled my own plane (so I mix metaphors, sue me) with the almost accidental realisation that no one wants to input 150 names into fields into a website. Yes you could import them from a CSV, but why bother with my site if the couple already has a spreadsheet? No one who’d put 150 names, plus-ones, food-choices etc into a spreadsheet could surely fail to realise the potential of using the very same spreadsheet to record who had replied! And while the wreckage of my idea lay smouldering on the ground, my other half added petrol to the embers by pointed out that many of the people we were inviting wouldn’t even understand what was going on, how to use the site, or even necessary have web access.

Needless to say, I haven’t written a single line since. Another private project successfully aborted, Wunderbar.

The trouble is I still can’t honestly work out whether my idea was good or not. For every wedding where 70% of the guests are over 60, there must be another 5 where all the guests are under 40. The demographic issue would seem to be surmountable, but is the effort issue worth…well, the effort?

It would probably be simpler to start a new project but that requires coming up with an idea. If the ideas come from every day problems, I clearly need to encounter more problems or perhaps become less fault-tolerant of existing systems, because I can’t really fault most of what I encounter on a daily basis. And once i’ve found the problem, I need to somehow summon the energy to work on it after a day of overwork at the office. It seems the best I can do is brood, at least for now.