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- What causes the joy of building?
I spent thirteen of the last twenty-four hours building a no-code product.
Usually, I spend an hour before I sleep on no-code, but there are only a few days left to meet my October goals. So I had to work a little aggressively.
While building the product - maybe because it’s a part of my routine now or because I spent significantly more time than usual - I began to appreciate The Joy of Building.
I noticed how my routines, conversations, and interests changed over time, and the positive impact it had on my otherwise not-so-exciting life.
This essay attempts to articulate what the joy of building means to me.
But first, what is building?
I define building as creation, independent of scale.
You don’t need an agenda or a clear-cut goal. Solving problems is sexy, but it doesn’t always have to be that way. My version of building also includes creating for fun—with no ROI-driven thinking.
It could be the content - the newsletters I write.
It could be content again - how I help my clients grow.
Or it could be the no-code products - which sometimes have no meaning and sometimes are useful/valuable.
I started building no-code products a month ago. It brought two noticeable changes in my life.
One, a new kind of balance I didn’t know was possible.
There is a work-life balance where you include hobbies in your routine to drift your mind away from work. But building introduced me to a work-work balance.
Unsure about others, but content and no-code fundamentally require different kinds of focus. If I can compare them to physical activities, content creation feels like painting on canvas. Whereas no-code feels like assembling a complicated LEGO set, with a little more freedom for your imagination.
Writing is a solitary activity. No-code is both solitary and social activity.
The different focuses keep my work hours fresh and active. The dissimilarity causes me to switch my attention and approach, making me look forward to the next content/no-code phase of my day.
Ex: I spent the last twenty-four hours with no-code. Now I am pumped to publish newsletters and finish my clients’ projects.
Two, I began appreciating my time and focus on content.
Only after I noticed how different the two entities are, I was able to look from a thrid-person POV and appreciate myself for the volume and quality of my work in content (wow, I didn’t feel awkward praising myself. Self-obsession era starts?)
Little more time with my thoughts made me wonder about the cause of joy. I could be doing anything for joy - what’s special about this?
What causes the joy of building?
A phase of obsession.
When your mind hits you with a potentially good idea, you get excited and get into a high-energy state where you obsessively search for similar products, the problems in them, the people you make them for, what they mean to you, and if you are as impulsive as me, you will even think of a name and buy a domain.
You will immediately write notes, or draw databases or flowcharts about how things could function.
This little phase between the idea and the first few hours of building projects, where you truly, with all your heart, believe you can produce meaningful output (until proven wrong), is worth experiencing time and again.
Being useful
This is the primary reason I build.
Be it with Cognition, where I share my case studies, hoping it would help someone do things better than I did. Or to the most recent Telugu playlist with 850+ songs, which I am sure someone somewhere is listening to today.
The happiness that comes from knowing what you’ve built is useful to people feels like magic. Especially when they are kind enough to leave a note:
❤️ for Cognition
❤️ for telugusongs.online
❤️ for Vikra’s Café
The learning curve
We wildly underestimate how little we need to know to get started.
Yes, you fuck up many times because you only know a little or didn’t know better ways existed. But it’s all a learning curve and is 100x better than waiting for a perfect time to begin.
I start somewhere. I know the direction. The best I can do is collect enough information to take the next step. That’s enough. I need not know the entire path, and it kind of makes the journey exciting (I need to frame this for the times I don’t follow this lol.)
Coming back to the learning curve, I experience a level-up in my confidence every time I learn a new tool/method I had no idea about. I might or might not use it in my life ever, but it won’t go wasted.
My people, ofc.
I have worked solo all my life and now I am exploring working with friends—not just friends, but these are people who are smart, wise, and I admire them from heart.
I am currently building:
Caffeineletter with Aravind, a newsletter for coffee lovers
r/newsletterhub with Mitesh and Chelsi, a subReddit for operators, service providers, and developers in newsletter space
Even if we are not working together, I bother most of my friends by sharing ideas and asking for feedback. I constantly message, “What do you think of this website that does…” or “I just made this… What do you thinkkkkk?”
Working remotely, this is the closest I get to friendships, colleagues, and similar bonds and it feels good to talk about what I am building and all the other rants included.
So yeah, that’s the Joy of Building for me. One of many. One too beautiful.
See you.
Love,
Vikra.