Taking Shots: Why You Should Try to Build Your Idea

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Nord podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We're continuing our season and we're talking about mistakes, missteps, and other things that either led to successes or have proven some lesson that was learned that did help further down the road. This episode we're going to talk about what was essentially a quote many years ago by the great hockey player Wayne Gretzky who said, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. And that's really the lesson that we're going to talk about today with this story. Now this goes back a few years ago, quite a while back now, when I was starting out and working on doing my day job, but also had some side hustle stuff, which honestly I've always had some sort of side hustle going on. At the time, one of the things I did was a referee for soccer. So I go out on many nights a week and a lot of the weekends and would referee soccer games. And that included instructing referees and included at some point doing a signing as far as assigning referees to a game. So I had every facet of that occupation, I guess we'll call it, covered as far as something that I did and something that I worked on and was very familiar with. And this is something I had been doing at the time that I started into this part where the story sort of begins. I've been doing this for years. And one of the things I was looking for was an application I wanted to build. And we've talked about this in other episodes that one of the best ways to learn a language or a platform is to build an application that is useful with that tool. In this situation, I wanted to build something that was a full force, full featured Java application. It was Java JSP. So this is back a little while, but also utilized thing called Torque, which I've mentioned before, which is a object relational mapping tool. Actually, it's more like a more like a framework along the lines of struts and some of those kinds of things that are out there, most of which are even today used very rarely. But at the time it was a pretty big deal and it was a way to build a, we'll call it, I guess, an enterprise or commercial grade application without having to have a huge development team. So that was my probably my primary goal. But secondary to that is I want to build an application that helped me and potentially helped other people that I worked with, other referees to keep track of games, to contact an assigner, to schedule things, to schedule games, to keep track of results of games, sort of do the whole administrative side of refereeing. And so I built something that was it's sort of a CRM, I guess. It was essentially an application where presumably a referee would register or their information get entered in and they would have a log in. They could log in, they could see what games they were, they were assigned. They could see they could essentially subscribe to fields or complexes or assigners and then see what games were coming up that were, you know, what games were scheduled for those fields or complexes or that that assigner had available and who filled them, you know, who had filled the slots. So instead of an assigner going in and calling people, which is back before email was really super popular, they would, the assigner would basically sit down, they'd have a list of phone numbers, they would call people, they'd say, hey, here's what I've got. And using paper, usually they would fill in, okay, Bob's going to use, you know, do these three games and Jack's going to do these others and Mary's going to use these other games and Jane's going to do these games. And that was what it was. And it would take hours, a couple of nights a week because you can only call certain hours because a lot of the referees are high school, school age kids and adults that work during the day. So you basically have to call roughly, you know, between like six and eight, which is sort of like dinner time is you can't call too late because then people are going to bed and a lot of other things that you just didn't want to bug people about. So it was tedious and time consuming. The way the application worked is it gave us a way to, it was an easy way for people to log in to select the games they wanted to assign or even for me when I was using it as an assigner, I could enter in information real quickly and then print out schedules and things like that so that I didn't just have one copy of what the schedule was. And this became a moderately useful application. I used it for a couple of years myself, had a few referees here and there that would, you know, that had logins and they could jump in and they could take a look at games. They could send me messages and stuff like that. It wasn't high use, but it was functional. Now this is where we get to the shots you don't take, I guess. This is a, an application that I got it to a point where it was a good, at the very least proof of concept and could have been, it was essentially a software as a service before that really was a thing. It wasn't really how stuff was designed. And so it was, and I guess it may not, it may be a little different from that because when quite a software as a service, maybe more like a, like a social networking type application of sorts or a, and we see these now, a lot of these like scheduling, particularly if you're in any kinds of sports, there are a whole bunch of sites out there where basically you can register your team. You can do sort of like a roll call and talk, you know, produce a schedule. You can schedule practices. You can, you can do a lot of stuff. This was before all those things existed and it was admittedly very niche, but it was functional and it was something that I looked at the idea for a few months. What would I want? What would it take for me to turn this into, you know, try to attempt to make this a product? And it wasn't a whole lot. You know, there's a couple of things that I would want to do as far as like nailing down security and have to figure out some, you know, some sort of marketing and advertising and essentially didn't. It was essentially one of those things I looked at it and then never really followed through with it. You can point to a lot of different reasons why, but it was just really something that I was just didn't feel comfortable at that point trying to figure out advertising and part of it was even like in marketing and part of it was just investing additional time and money into this thing that I didn't really have the time and probably not even the money at that point. It's had a lot of other things going on and now granted, many of those were things like games and some of the other side hustles and things that I had. So I could have shifted my focus to this. So I don't want to excuse it as something as like, oh yeah, there were just too many other quote important things to do. This just was something that however you want to look at it, I guess either either intimidated me or worried me that it would be too much of a risk or I just didn't want to take the risk and fail. I mean, there's a lot of different ways you can look at it and I'm not sure if any or all of those are either correct or incorrect. But the bottom line is I didn't take the shot flash forward a couple of years after I'd sort of gotten out of the refereeing stuff as probably five, six years later, it turns out that the next group that came in had an application that they used heavily for the very same thing. And it was when I first looked at it, it was actually not, there's nowhere near what I had built years before. Now they've advanced. It's now gotten very good and very complicated and there's a lot of good features to it from what I've seen. But it was something that I don't know what their business model is. I forget how they make money. I can't remember if there's, and I think there is anything it's like you sign up for 20 bucks a year or something like that, which was more or less what I was looking at at the time. So it's sort of frustrating to see that. Yeah, that was a, that was a shot I could have taken and probably, you know, had a good chance of it working now, granted, just because somebody else did something similar and they were successful does not mean that I would have been as successful. Maybe I would have been more so maybe I would have failed completely. It's everything's a little bit different, but it is a good example of a situation where I will never know for sure because I didn't actually take the shot and you could go with, you know, you could go to your Hamilton songs and lyrics if you want to think about that as well. But really the point here is more about having something that, that you can step forward with that can, you can call your own, that can potentially be your place where you plant your flag, your flagship product. And if you don't pursue it, if you don't put effort into it, then it's not going to succeed. You have to try and if you don't try, you won't fail. But also, if you don't try, you won't succeed. And that's, I think, an important lesson for a lot of us to learn. It's another thing that has been mentioned over the years. If you ever go to a like an MBA program or something like that and talk to them, because one of the deliverables of most MBA programs is a business plan, some sort of business plan that you put together to show that you've thought through something like that. And a lot of the business plans that come out of MBA schools are viable. Some of them are fascinating and really have a lot of value to them. But a lot of them, and I can't remember the last time I saw the numbers, it was I want to say it was like 70, 80, 90 percent of those things never see the light of day once they get through school. They don't take that shot. They don't advance from the work that they did to set all of that in place, to actually put things in motion and see if it give it a shot, test it out. And in the modern world where it is very easy to find either cheap resources or a little bit of time where you can programs and computers and things like that are so available and software service is so easy to get a hold of at a lower entry point than ever before. So it makes it really hard to find excuses to not attempt whatever it is that your your itch is, whatever that idea is, that product ideas that you have or that that side hustle or that improvement on whatever it is that you're improving. There really is no excuse to not at least give it a shot. Give it a try. Spend a little time, even if it's sometimes it's not more than a few weeks, a couple of months. Look into it, dive into it, put some effort into it and see what happens. That could be it all falls apart quickly, but it could be that it starts moving forward and suddenly you realize that you're riding on something far bigger than you ever thought that could be. And that I think for everybody that's ever done it would say that's pretty darn cool when you've been in a situation where you were just scratching an itch basically, and it turned into a livelihood. I don't think I've talked to anybody or heard of anybody that did that where they said, no, that was horrible. I wish that hadn't happened. And so it could be you. I mean, it's there's so many stories that you can't even imagine. I mean, it's there's so many stories of success out there. People that just they gave it a shot. Sometimes it didn't didn't make sense for them to do so. Maybe there were probably a lot of people telling them they couldn't do it or not to do it. And yet they did. And next thing you know, they sometimes changed the world. Stories of failures and detractors. Stories of failures that have gone into feeding or motivating successful and even highly successful people are countless. So if you've got a good idea, if you've got that side hustle, if you've got something that you are thinking, should I or shouldn't I? The answer probably is, should I? Yes, I should. If you don't, you'll never know. If you do, at least you'll know that, yep, it wasn't a great idea. It wasn't a great idea or it was a great idea. But these things are why it was not going to be viable as a product. And even in those cases, it may be that you go forward and even though it's not viable as a product, maybe you create something that at least is useful to you. And you still get something out of it. It's like, hey, that work was not a waste because at least you enjoy it. There's one customer yourself and you were happy with it. So give it a shot. Don't let fear and doubt and uncertainty and all those other things pile up and turn you away from taking a shot because you never know. You may score a goal. That being said, I think it's time for us to take a shot at whatever we're shooting at today. Put some work in, put some effort in and go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success. Develop-a-Nor podcast and site are a labor of love. We enjoy whatever we do trying to help developers become better. But if you've gotten some value out of this and you'd like to help us, it'd be great if you go out to developernor.com slash donate and donate whatever feels good for you. If you get a lot of value, a lot. If you don't get a lot of value, even a little would be awesome. In any case, we will thank you and maybe I'll make you feel just a little bit warmer as well. Now you can go back and have yourself a great day.