you really don’t know until you try

Recently, I started advertising some unused products and properties on Facebook marketplace. I have been held back a bit by the voices and underlying assumptions inside my head: “there’s no way people will see these listings in the sea of products out there”, “oh there’s no way people would want this used and half broken product”, “oh there’s no way people want this flat when we are already 1 month into the second semester”. But after posting them online, I had people expressing interests to all of them almost immediately.

This got me thinking, maybe sometimes we need to recognise and stop listening to the excuses we make to ourselves in our head. Just go out there and do stuff, you won’t know the outcome unless you take action. Be optimistic and stop assuming the worst, this applies to many situations in life. Personally, I get a lot of random startup ideas pop up in my mind, with many casted aside due to them falling into the category of “Someone has already done this”. If everyone had this same mindset then there wouldn’t be any variety. There would be no Jollibee (the GOAT) because we already have KFC (or whatever came first). There’s already ChatGPT, but hey guess what, that doesn’t stop thousands of others to publish the same old ChatGPT wrapper to app stores (seriously though we don’t need any more wrappers pleeease).

Everyone is different, different tastes, backgrounds, problems and needs. There’s a plethora of similar products out there serving people with various needs. If you know a product already works, even better, nitpick problems from them and build an entirely new product line to address all the pain points. Or even just something to complement existing products and improve the quality of life experience. An example of this is easyfolders.io which is a chrome extension that introduces a folder system into ChatGPT, allowing one to better organise and find their chats.

Your ideas might fail, but it’s okay and not all in vain. Every failed project should be seen as a valuable skill acquisition and learning experience. You’ll know what works and what doesn’t. There’s no such thing as wasted effort. Embrace failure and move on with more knowledge.

Now go. Build. Ship. Refine. Repeat.