it is better to seem than to be

How many times do you need to step on a rake to change your behavior pattern? How many times do you need to look at zero metrics to make sure the product is more dead than alive? How many times does it take to move a project folder to “Completed Projects” to start doing things differently?

Startup

No other word in my entire life has elicited as many vomits as the word “startup.” We will not talk about the word “chill”, but it, at times, leads to white heat.

So, I tried many times to do a “startup” instead of doing a business. A startup is when you, with a presentation and a semi-idea, or maybe an MVP of average readiness, run to investors and look for those who will assemble a team for you, find managers, and you, depending on your competencies, will either code or shine your face on breakfast parties, conferences and pour into the ears of the audience from any channel.

If your competencies are in marketing and sales – raise waves of hype and bring customers, if your competencies are in letters highlighted in WebStorm, then … this will not be enough. You can stubbornly punch yourself in the chest, but what the hell will happen if you don’t have a person on your team who can scratch his tongue and communicate with people.

In my distorted view, which has long since turned into a smoothie after constant reading vc.ru and successful startups, the idea was buried that “startup” is about “bang, bang, production and investors.”

Here and there they saw products, conduct surveys, draw CJM and calculate ROI, are interested in the size of your CPC and often ask about CPL or CPS.

But all this does not make any sense if for 3-4-5-6 months you are trying to resuscitate a miscarriage, which, being available at the IP address, refuses to show signs of life.

It turns out that reading smart books and listening to smart people is not enough … it will be enough to close the IDE, open XMind, Miro, FreeForm and any other tool where you finally think about the target audience and ask yourself a few questions – what am I going to sell to them how am I going to sell it to them and why the hell do they need it. To be precise, the questions should be in reverse order…then there’s a better chance that the new project won’t even need to be created in the IDE.

Rake

Who better than IT people to step on a rake most often? Seriously, have you seen at least one salesman who steps on a rake?

If a good salesperson can sell any product, then not every IT specialist can make a good product. The only thing that connects us with this world is the keyboard on which our fingers tap out letters, words, sentences and correspondence in Telegram is much closer to us than constant calls, attempts not to hurt the feelings of believers and manifestations of our near-zero soft-skill of empathy.

A rake – they are alone, they are in our faith … in the belief that we will be appreciated when we do something, but it will be later. Delayed gratitude. We will receive the delayed prize later, later… when we do it. In the meantime, we are digging in our prod and dev environments, collecting webpacks, lintim and minifaim, a person who is about sales – collects a land on a tilde, farts with several articles on forums or telegram channels and already receives the first feedback, collects the alpha- beta testers and generally begins to build a picture of what is happening – whether he will get involved in this or not.

As never before, IT people’s faith in their product and themselves treats them cruelly and brings disappointment, lowered hands and thousands of lines of code, which, if they were written on A4 sheets and by hand, could be thrown into a burning fireplace with anger and exhaled.

Illusion

IT people need to become illusionists.

A hacker is the same IT specialist who decided to use his knowledge and skills to take money from people (if we are talking about a black hacker) and earn his living on this … the same code, but less disappointment – no expectations of gratitude and approval for you surrounding. Why the hell are you approving when you stole 150 bitcoins from a bitcoin wallet and already praised yourself well for your work?

IT people need to become illusionists, but only those who want to immerse themselves in this whole smoothie topic and not lose their desire to program somewhere along the way … I perfectly understand those who, gritting their teeth, close the IDE and start writing articles knowing full well that there will be no article – there will not be in the metrics of the only visitor who sees the product. There will be no visitor – there will be no praise, gratitude, money.

And so, yesterday’s IT specialist writes articles, periodically being distracted by programming, begins to receive questions, some kind of feedback that is at odds with his idea of ​​​​a saint – about his product.

If at this moment the IT specialist was or became an illusionist, then everything would be different … but what is an illusion?

An illusion is a distortion of reality that a person perceives as real.

Now we, as illusionist programmers, Illuminati coders, need to use our thinking abilities to deceive the user and mislead him that the product is, it works, it exists and it is tangible.

We must see this product in our head in as much detail as we see the screen with the code in our IDE, and closing our eyes, we must lead the user through this maze, distorting his picture of the world and causing him to FAITH that our product is real.

IT people need to become preachers-illusionists who, with their own faith in the product, are able to ignite others and carry this fire to the first payments and the implementation of the MVP.

Faith is blind and faith, sometimes, is so strong that money can bring much earlier than the implementation of even an MVP. The life of an IT specialist is short, unpredictable and full of incredible events from the digital world, and for the time allotted to us, which we do not take our eyes off the screens of our MacBook Pro 15/17 inches, our task is to bring to this world as many of our products, ideas and innovative decisions for which, of course, we will be paid money by believers… believers in us, our product, our vision. Greetings from Elizabeth Holmes.

IT people should become new preachers of their own, yet unborn, product and the faith with which they will carry the good news to the masses will be poured out every time and in greater numbers, because it will not be locked for a long time in WebStorm modal windows, Git and consoles that raise CentOS Stream on Selectel or TimeWeb servers.

Instead of completing

IT people have Faith… and this Faith is much stronger than the Faith of any other person in the digital crowd that it is their product that will shoot, it is their product that will change the world, it is their product that users will like and bring them fame, money, peace and freedom.

Sometimes (although, who am I kidding? often!) Hundreds of hours of life of the bright minds of IT people lie buried in the cemeteries of time, who would survive the storm and would have the strength to cope with failures if they were illusionists.

Take care of yourself, take care of your time and take care of your Faith.