[jowday]

I commented on your other thread - but you should really clean up your information diet. From the vocabulary you use and the tone of your game and pitch deck, I can tell you’re someone that hangs on the words of tech industry ‘thought leaders’. You need to realize that most of the people in tech who have time to podcast, write substacks, or otherwise build a ‘personal brand’, aren’t actually making shit. They’re trying to inflate their profile so they can trade reputation for career advancement in any number of ways. It’s also not worth listening to most VCs. Most of them don’t have the time or technical ability to understand the areas they’re investing in and just chase trends. If they had the time and technical abilities, they’d be building companies instead of getting other people to do it for them. You’d be surprised to hear how many investors or personalities that are supposedly high profile are openly derided among actual founders.

The way to make something that’s fun is to try to make something that’s fun over and over again until you’ve got it down. It’s not by obsessively reading what investors or people who are essentially glorified influencers say.

[yawnxyz]

I totally agree, though whatever Jesse Schell writes is great (he was my advisor!)

I'd say pick ONE SINGLE MECHANIC and MAKE IT FUN. That's it.

You can even just duplicate a mechanic that already exists: Tetris, Breakout, Balatro, Pachinko, whatever. Make it the best version you can make of that version, until it gets so perfect you're bored of it. At that point you bet you'd just "wish it had this one tweak".

Your goal is to get to that point — where you've perfected making the boring thing — that you're both excited and confident in adding that one extra tweak.

It's a really simple, technically easy process. But it's to so boring and it takes a lot of time, that's why it's hard and most people stop.

[stevekwon211]

I should probably experience the best stuff out there, take it apart, and make it my own. I’m not going to stop, I’ll keep going.

[jjani]

I can personally vouch that this trap is extremely prevalent in Korea, mores than elsewhere, and is imo one of the top reasons the country has 0 internationally successful SaaS startups. Or actually, it has 1, but ironically it belongs to the 0.1% of companies here with a foreign founder, which says it all really.

Community leaders set the tone, and here the communities in the ecosystem are very rarely led by people who spend >50% of their time building stuff. Instead they're led by, just as you said, people who have 1. never built a successful product 2. spend >50% of their time building their brand.

I can see on OP's twitter that he's actively engaging from people in that scene as well, so really if he wants to build a successful product, step one is getting out of that scene and into one of actual makers.

[stevekwon211]

While building this social network called Disquiet mentioned in the post, I got to connect with over 100,000 people in the Korean startup scene. And yeah, I’ve noticed that most of us including me end up listening more to thought leaders. The people who are actually building real things don’t seem to share as much online. It really makes sense that I need to be intentional about our “information diet”

[globalnode]

> clean up your information diet

I'm going to try and keep this in mind now whenever I'm reading anything.

[macrocosmos]

I'm going to look for a book about how to do just that, then watch a YouTube series on it, and then see if anyone has interesting blog posts so I get more unique perspectives on the matter. At that point, I'll know enough to finally clean up my information diet.

[stevekwon211]

This is the best comment. I’m far from San Francisco and Silicon Valley, so I end up mostly consuming what the thought leaders there say since it’s easier to access. There’s definitely a tendency for me to lean on that. It’s great to hear more from people who actually build stuff through Hacker News and other ways, but like you said, the real answer is probably for me to stop relying on that and just dive in myself—try things, mess up, and learn. Thanks again.

[533474]

Best advice here