Can I make a living making what I want to make?

For a long time I ran a community called rlidea.com.

RLidea is a name made by overlapping Ridea (Reality idea) and Lidea (Liberty idea). Put the two together and you get realistic idealism: chasing ideals and goals while taking real conditions and limits into account, and looking for practical ways to actually do it.

This time I want to apply that thinking to how I make a living.

Make what I want to make, get it to the people who need it, and earn an income from it. How much could that actually help support my life? I built rlidea.app because I wanted to find out for myself.

I don't want to decide in advance what I'll make. It could be a small tool that fixes an annoyance right now, or a service that grows over time. I want to look for the places where what I'd like to do meets what people need.

I plan to record that process here. Where each idea started, what I made, and whether people actually use it. I also want to look at how the income compares to the time spent building and the cost of running it, and whether it's worth continuing.

How much do the things I want to make, the things that are useful to others, and the things that help me make a living overlap? I want to learn those conditions little by little by actually building and running things. I'll leave here not only what worked, but also the attempts nobody responded to and the reasons I decided to stop.

I don't know yet how far this can go. For now I'll start with what I can do, look at the results, and decide the next attempt from there.

rlidea.app is the place where those experiments build up.

This is an English translation of a post first written in Korean.