(Italian here) AFAIK Italy implemented the logic to be valid for 9 months, which wasn't ideal and it shows its limit in situations like this since we don't have a short expiry date.
Dunno if in the end they also put in place some kind of blacklisting for leaked certificates
One of the most difficult thing about burnout is that it can be quite different for each person in the way it is expressed and it's hard to discern.
I was (and probably am to some extent) burnt out.
The hardest thing was caused by the fact that I asked for help.
Help to reduce my workload, help to have some kind of support, whatever.
What happened is that many if not all the people I knew always reacted with "Yeah, you'll be fine".
And this is because of two major things
1. I always solve problems. People expect me to do the same so when I ask for help, they don't consider this a threat.
2. People don't want to face pain: I was the only one in a team noticing that one of our teammates was on the edge of burnout. We don't want to face the pain because it's hard, because we don't know how to fix pain easily and sometimes we also can't fix pain.
In the end I decided to do something like Maya. Tell my story.
I documented myself for the burnout part, asked a friend that's expert on psycology and wrote a piece to help people understand how complex this topic is. (here it is in italian, for those who care: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vogliamo-parlare-di-burnout-o...)
Result? Many people reached out and shared how much critical was this problem.
We need to fix it and learn both how to see this in ourselves and in others, and how we can help them (and to me the fist key element is being able to face other people's pain and suffer with no fear)
I feel the same way and being a 'Generalist' mostly because of my ability to adapt any environment is both amazing and terrible.
The terrible part is mostly because I got too many roles and zero help to grow (I'm often the icebreaker of a tech or role), which lead me to myself doing the actual criticism to ensure I'm doing my best.
On the other hand this kind of continuous self-doubt is stressing, so reading a comment like yours is a relief :)
And thanks for writing your comment about his comment.
I think I sail the same kind of ship as you, at work I'm like a jack of all trades and pretty isolated. Took me long to realize it wasn't my fault if management put too much on my shoulder and I have no peer to share with. It's a management issue if our bus factor is 1 on many project.
While I often get praise from my CEO the impostor syndrome is part of my daily routine.
Out of work, I'm currently in the process of finally releasing to GitHub a half-baked side-project I invested 100+ hours of personal time but was really too ashamed of to publish. It's not perfect, it'll never be and it's ok. Maybe it will even help me migrate to a better workplace.
Lot's of comment int his thread ring a bell for me!
I agree, history is not important, but using phone/mail/chat always implies some kind of "requiement of attention" and given the many groups I need to update I wanted to give them more time instead of reducing it.
Right now scheduling calls diminishes time on the people you involve, so if it's a simple update why not give them the choice?
It might be a result of our former structure that leads to this issue I am experiencing (or it might be an issue I only have :) )
Ok, so, as both a developer and owner of a company that built a physical product (in the Cosmetic field, so no tech stack :D ) I'd say that, at least for me it all starts with scratching my own itch.
Create it for you, solve your problems, chances are you are among a group of people that share the same issues and the work will be "where do this people group together?"
Creating a company in a cosmetic field was challenging, but I do believe it's something feasable for everyone as long as you accept the fact that you must delegate part of the work.
I still think that this might be true for the dev field, so yeah, as many other pointed out: Build a decent MVP that solve a problem, share it with the people who care.
Obviously, for me, turning into a product means "making some money", otherwise you're simply testing.
So, the process to get from "I have an idea" to "I have a product" might vary a lot.
I started saying "Scratch your own itch" because if you are not solving something you care about and you are infatuated by an idea, doing the market research, finding what the ideal customer really wants is hard.
Instead, if you are the first customer of your product and use it daily it's much easier to find pitfalls, problems, defects and so on.
From there, a good advice I always found is trying to sell it to the circle of people you know even before selling online.
If none of them buy the product (note the word "Buy". don't give it away for free) there's a good chance something is off.
Yes, they might not be your target user, but I would bet that you should at least have a friend that shares part of your interests.
As for how to choose ideas: We have limited time, so I invest in the one with the higher probability of success and leave the others in a list. What happens is that, from time to time (rarely but not so much), I'll see someone else came up and made money with a similar idea.
I'll bite my finger, smile, and move on :D
Afterall what counts is not the idea alone, it's the execution. That will -always- make the difference.
I agree but I'll tell you (as an apple fan in the ecosystem) that sometimes this kind of "let's abandon the old things" has some drawbacks.
For example, the changes in the https behaviour and support for the websites, made an old mac useless because safari didn't support the new TLS versions and there weren't any decent alternative for an old system like that (we're talking about a 2004 mac if I recall correctly, intel 32bit, so yeah, I know it's old in many ways).
The only solutions was to install linux and it worked.
So, even though I'm fully committed to the ecosystem and I love each and every apple product I still do think that having to trash a machine after 10 years isn't so good considering that those machines are usually still capable to work daily.
Not tech related: The power of vulnerability by Brenè Brown (audiobook/course). Worth every single penny.
You can get a glimpse of what's it about on the netflix documentary about her.
There are many things that might influence the result and therefore your decision.
I once worked for a product in the SaaS business and what helped us is understanding "where are our customers".
So, where are _your_ customers? How do they come to your product, how do they discover your product? After having this answer we focused on improving that conversion rate (for us it was all about being first on google and having a high-converting landing page, but in your case forums might be a better place to look at. It all depends on the target customer)
Also, one issue I've often encountered is that knowing the customer and selling to the customer might be very different things.
Did you only sell online? One great piece of advice is try to sell the product IRL and record the audio.
After many failed and successfull attempts you'll have recordings of _what works_ and what doesn't work for the kind of customer.
That information will be useful to convey the benefits into your landing page / homepage.
Back to your question: How much growth should you expect? It is a generic question. How many people are impacted by your product? How many have that specific itch to be scratched? How fast can you get to them? How good is your product at scratching the itch?
The (partial) sum of these questions might lead to the answer.
If you have many people impacted by your product, if the product scratch a big itch and you can reach all the people at the same time, chances are you're going to grow fast.
If you grow slow, is it bad? It might be bad if you're asking 5$/month for an extra. If it is 100$/month maybe a slow growth might make sense.
In the end, if I were in your shoes, I'll wait a year to decide if it's time to give up, but at the same time I'll set some monthly checks to see how growth is going, what are the feedbacks and how the community is reacting and test each month a different way to market the product. A good book on this is "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg
PS I also run a side business creating cosmetic products (not saas) and my growth has been relatively slow. The product (in my case) fixes a big itche and had no competitors. Reason for that is that achieving a stable efficient result is quite hard, but we somehow made it (bootrapped obviously). In our case slow growth was a good thing because it allowed us to fix the issues in the product before being too much known in the public.
Dunno if in the end they also put in place some kind of blacklisting for leaked certificates