After I shut down Snip in October 2015 I decided to take a break from any kind of product endeavor for a while. Part of my reasoning was that maybe if I stopped trying so hard to make a product business happen, then maybe it would finally actually happen. Not too surprisingly, nothing happened.

Because “don’t try” doesn’t seem like a very good plan, I’ve decided to start trying again, as far as trying to identify a viable idea goes. Unfortunately I have no idea how. I’m familiar with the standard advice on how to do this, which is to just go out and talk to people and try to detect problems that can be solved with software, but so far that hasn’t worked out for me. It’s like looking at one of those Magic Eye things and not being able to see it. You know there’s a picture there, and you know other people have seen it, but you don’t see the picture and you don’t know how to see it.

I’ve been working at this for eight years and I haven’t figured it out. Clearly I’m lacking in character in some way, I just don’t know exactly how, or how to fix it.