I think I'm thinking too much

Updated on March 7, 2025 · 3 min read

First off, let me apologize in advance for the tone of this post—it’s written entirely out of frustration. Actually, scratch that—I’m not sorry. If you don’t like it, just stop reading.

So, overthinking. We’ve all heard it’s one of the biggest things holding us back in life. As humans, we’re stuck making thousands of decisions every single day. Sometimes I envy zebras: sleep, eat, “Oh no, lion!” run, stop, eat again. Simple life.

That’s part of the reason my colleague Giorgio and I built Easy Decision Maker—to help make simple decisions, well, simpler. That, and because the keyword had decent search volume and low competition on Google. Gotta love SEO.

Now, if you’re one of those people who tends to overthink, let me tell you: us engineers? We’ve got you beat.

Why? Because if you’ve been working as a software engineer for a decade or more, especially for big companies with endless budgets, overthinking isn’t just a habit—it’s your job description. Missing a single detail could be catastrophic. I still have PTSD from a bank project where a bad regex in the code prevented corporate clients from paying their employees. Can you imagine? “Sorry, no paycheck this month because we didn’t test a line of code properly.”.

But here’s the problem: this obsessive overthinking becomes second nature. So when you switch to working on your own projects, like building a decision wheel (yes, a wheel that helps people make decisions), you catch yourself applying the same level of scrutiny. Spoiler alert: you absolutely do not need to overthink a decision wheel.

Transitioning from the big corporate world to indie hacking is… well, tricky. You’ve got to unlearn years of ingrained patterns. Why? Because in this world, timing and feedback are everything. If you spend a month building a fancy, perfectly stable feature, there’s a 99% chance you’ve just wasted that month. Odds are, nobody even wanted that feature—not your users, not even you.

This is where market research comes in handy. But more importantly, you’ve got to stop obsessing over technical details. Your users don’t care if you used Tech Stack A or Tech Stack B. Heck, they might not even mind a few bugs, as long as the app actually solves their problem. You can always fix stability issues later… if anyone even complains.

To be honest, this post is mostly for me—a reminder for when I spend half a day overthinking how to do something but end up doing absolutely nothing. Like today. The only outcome? A raging headache after lunch and the rest of the day wasted because my brain’s fried.

So, to wrap up these mental notes:

Iván, stop overthinking!