Maybe I Can't Build "Real" Apps

Confession time.

After I made it through baseball draft season earlier this year, I took my nights-and-weekends development time and started pouring it into a couple of "real" website businesses. I am ending the year stuck on both of them, with essentially nothing launched to show for my work.

Here was my thinking: Fantasy sports, like a lot of things that are fun, are hard to make into businesses. Too many people are offering stuff for free, and there are just lots of things competing for people's entertainment dollars.

Knowing that fantasy isn't a great place to build, I've been trying to build products in a couple of other industries. Normal industries, with normal businesses, and money to spend. After my development on the first one slowed down, I started in on the second one, this time with a co-founder. I thought maybe a partner was what I needed to shore up my weaknesses. Yet somehow I've managed to get stuck on that one, too.

Neither of those projects is dead, but I've hit a low spot with each of them. And I've started dreaming, once again, about building for fantasy sports.

My current feeling is that maybe I just don't have the ability to build on something that isn't fun. I've tried to push myself to work on "boring" projects and I haven't managed to complete anything. And, when I look at my completed projects, it's mostly just fantasy stuff that I've been able to stick with and complete.

I haven't gone through the trouble of being formally diagnosed, but I've mostly come to terms with the fact that I have ADHD. My life is littered with side projects that have been started and never finished. My fantasy record also includes lots of teams abandoned midseason or whenever I lost interest in the sport completely.

One of the few places where I can avoid this struggle: Fantasy drafts. I can focus on them obsessively for a month or two and then be done with it. Then, after a year away, I'm ready to dive back in obsessively.

DraftKick is proof that I can complete things. But maybe it's time to accept that a project like DraftKick lies in the sweet spot of my abilities: Something a little entertaining, that comes and goes in waves.