I, too, experience that. I am anxious and I overthink and I am avoidant. Vyvanse helped a ton, but it was producing health complications, so I am taking something else that's not as good.
It's not a substitue for counseling, but consider talking to your favorite LLM chatbot. It will provide generic advice, but it will probably work 80% of the time. Sometimes being told what to do is good enough of a kickstart.
Or I can give you the crappy advice that works. "Just start."
I super recommend Innovation. If you enjoy nuanced gameplay like in TCGs, this is for you. Everyone starts in the Stone Age and the goal is to race to 4-6 achievements, advancing through technological ages. Cards represent technologies and they have powers, like drawing cards, forcing other people to give you cards, score points, etc. It's a great game of resource management, politics, and sabotage.
Innovation is worth playing but it’s a Chudyk game. Perhaps with a lot of plays there is more strategy and nuance, but even with experienced gamers, I find Innovation much too swingy. With the right mindset to embrace the chaos, and players with the same level of experience/skill in the game, it can be fun though.
I used to play Pokémon cards competitively. It was fun going to local tournaments and flying with friends for Regional tournaments. I stopped to focus on night school, and I want to pick it back up with the card legality change happening Friday.
Pokémon Champions just came out, so I might give up cards for the video game. We'll see.
You make a really salient point about having a clear vision and using clear language. Patrick Zgambo says that working with AI is spellcasting; you just need to know the magic words. The more I work with AI tools, the more I agree.
Now, figuring out those words? That's the hard part.
I'm in sales. This is going to sound shallow and tautological, but you find the people to interview for Product Market Fit by looking for the people you THINK are the ideal customers.
If you can't find your target market, you might want to consider a different demographic that you understand better. Most successful startup founders started a business specifically to solve the problems they dealt with at their last job. They understand their product market fit because they ARE their target market.
Tell me who you think your customers might be? Or ask ChatGPT what's a good watering hole for them, it will definitely come up with some reasonable guesses.
Was largely asking for all the people looking for specifics, since people were asking, and vague advice isn't very helpful when first starting out with this stuff. Like broadly, I've had luck with Linkedin messages for b2b and SEO for consumer, but mostly after the product is in an ok place. The initial users can be tough to find.
But sure, I'm working on things for parents/students, home buyers, and DIY heat pump installers.
Off the top of my head (don't expect any revelations here, but mostly for people wondering how to approach this type of thing for the first time):
* Parents/students hang out at schools and are probably a good referral/recommendation crowd
* Home buyers are looking for mortgage comparisons on Google (but that's probably a terrible strategy, since this is a highly lucrative segment to market to, so you should expect high customer acquisition costs)
* DIY heat pump installers will probably look at ads on /r/DIYHeatPumps
Your experience of being better at editing than writing makes me think of advice from Alan Moore (of Watchmen fame) on writing. He says to also read bad books, because if you read only good books, you'll never realize if you unintentionally plagiarized. But if you also read bad books, you'll think, "Jesus Christ, I could write this shit," and feel liberated to analyze their writing and examine why their writing offended you.
I analyze the writing of my LLMs and I get really annoyed and frustrated and I think it's marginally improving my communication.
> First write with lots of formatting.
> Then figure out how to remove it.
> Then put it back, if you want.
In the fifth grade, we were required to write an outline for our research project essay. Imagine my delight when writing the paper was as easy as copying the outline and adding a couple extra words.
That value of formatting into bulleted lists reminds me of the McPhee method of writing, which was shared last year on HN. He manipulates physical note cards to write, and I was manipulating digital ones.
I love how vibecoding has opened the door for hyper-custom apps and scripts that benefit an exact audience of One.
Last week, I built a dynamic map to track local Play! Pokémon tournaments. It uses leafletjs and an api for an ICS file of events. I don't know what most of those words mean, but I have something perfect for me and my local competitive Pokémon community!
I get that. I am a non-programmer who vibe codes personal web apps for Magic: The Gathering and Pokémon TCG. I turn them into github pages for easy access for myself.
I don't share them with my hobby communities because I don't want to hear feedback because I don't want these finished projects to become eternal projects.
* Cardsphere (Magic card trading website) wishlist to inventory comparer
* Scryfall (Magic card database) search result CSV Downloader
* Cube Tagger, an app to easily tag cards with function tags for easy categorizing in cubes (boardgamified collection of Magic cards)
The vibe coding part is wonderful because I can "make" the software I want. However, it always takes hours of runs to get to where I need it to be because I'm unpracticed at project planning. I constantly hit critical edge cases and UX problems.
It's not a substitue for counseling, but consider talking to your favorite LLM chatbot. It will provide generic advice, but it will probably work 80% of the time. Sometimes being told what to do is good enough of a kickstart.
Or I can give you the crappy advice that works. "Just start."