Loving Your Idea Too Much
A trap as an indie hacker is working too much on the initial idea.
Two human tendencies make this worse:
- Confirmation bias – You start out with an idea you think will work. You get a few small wins (or even just nice comments) and suddenly you love the idea, the branding, the tech stack. You unconsciously filter out signals that it’s not resonating with users. Every positive datapoint feels huge; every negative datapoint feels like an outlier.
- Sunk cost fallacy – After spending months building, it’s painful to imagine pivoting or killing the project. The more time you’ve invested, the harder it is to admit “I might be solving the wrong problem.” So you keep polishing, adding features, and doubling down on something that may never have a real market.
It’s a dangerous combination: you fall in love with the thing you’ve already built, not the actual problem your audience has.
The best way is to keep the initial investment small, test aggressively, and set clear “kill or pivot” checkpoints in advance—otherwise it’s too easy to burn a year polishing something no one needs.
Below are other contributing cognitive fallacies that are all too common among people:
Optimism bias – Overestimating the likelihood of success and underestimating challenges (“Sure, it’s niche now, but in six months it’ll take off”).
Status quo bias – Preferring to stick with the current project simply because it’s what you’re already doing, even if switching might lead to better results.
Endowment effect – Overvaluing your own product just because you built it.
IKEA effect – Similar to the above, but specifically overvaluing something because it required effort to create.
Escalation of commitment – Doubling down on a failing plan to “make it work,” especially after investing time, money, or reputation.
Planning fallacy – Consistently underestimating how long new features, pivots, or marketing efforts will take, which can keep you “just one release away” from success.
False consensus effect – Believing that many people share your tastes, pain points, or use cases just because your friends or peers do.
Commitment bias – Wanting to appear consistent with your past decisions, so you keep telling yourself (and others) it’s still the right path. See Inconsistency-avoidance tendency in The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, by Charlie Munger
Liking/Loving Tendency – "it acts as a conditioning device that makes the liker or lover tend (1) to ignore faults of, and comply with wishes of, the object of his affection, (2) to favor people, products, and actions merely associated with the object of his affection (as we shall see when we get to “Influence-from-Mere-Association Tendency,” and (3) to distort other facts to facilitate love."
- as quoted from The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, by Charlie Munger
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**Commitment bias** – Wanting to appear consistent with your past decisions, so you keep telling yourself (and others) it’s still the right path. See Inconsistency-avoidance tendency in [[The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, by Charlie Munger]]
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**Liking/Loving Tendency** – "it acts as a conditioning device that makes the liker or lover tend (1) to ignore faults of, and comply with wishes of, the object of his affection, (2) to favor people, products, and actions merely associated with the object of his affection (as we shall see when we get to “Influence-from-Mere-Association Tendency,” and (3) to distort other facts to facilitate love."
- as quoted from [[The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, by Charlie Munger]]
