A thief belongs with the shadows
A missive about burnout, product death, and "The Thief."
I find myself in a lowercase-c crisis. This isn’t existential, but it is a crisis of interest. The last quarter and a particularly busy December has burnt the candle a little low. There’s still wick to catch the light, but there’s not much left, and this kind of low-wick deep-in-the-jar burnout has allowed some shadows to grow long.
I’m embarrassed to whine but suffice to say I’ve invested a lot of money intoThe Thief • An Audidorama, and now that it’s time for taxes, I have to admit the numbers make it hard to justify.
Critically, The Thief does okay. The reviews are kind. It regularly charts. But just as it’s no secret to writers that a “best seller” nod doesn’t actually require that many book sales, let me spoil that podcast charting in fiction and science fiction doesn’t require that many listens.
And after two years of chin-up optimism that the audience for The Thief exists and just needs time to accrete, I am no longer so certain there’s an audience.
The Thief isn’t a hobby so much as a product, and in product engineering you submit to and you must suffer the iterate-test-fail-iterate-test loop until there’s a market fit. The agreement is, or at least what I pitch inStoic Designer, is that when there are no market-fit indicators, you must put a bullet in it.
So, if emotionally I am not ready to put The Thief to rest, the only way forward is to disentangle the hobby out of the product. Hobbies don’t need metrics. Hobbies don’t need success. Hobbies don’t need fit.
But, sunk-cost being what it is — empty pockets, empty spirit — I’m not sure there’s any hobby left.
Unless I can walk these stories back, dust the work off of them as if productizing The Thief just left it with grass stains, it may be time to send those stories to the farm upstate.
Shadows that grow long with burnout would have their rogue back with them.