Building for the abstract

2023-12-31

This isn't an advice post. I'm noting a personal failure of mine: I cannot build things for an abstract use case. Every time I try, I fail.

BUILD is currently waiting for whether or not an invoice-tracking project will proceed. I took the time to write a prototype of such an invoice-tracking system in Rails. I quickly proved the broad strokes of the system, but it looks and feels too horrible for a real user to use. This is not too remarkable on its own, but I also don't feel compelled to make it good enough to put in front of a real user, and I know I won't feel compelled to do so unless the project goes ahead, because only once the project goes ahead does the use case become concrete. Until it does, the use case remains abstract, at least in my head.

This has happened before, and it's a problem. I have ambitions to create a product. How can I do that if I can only work on something if someone contracts me?