So while it's common to think of a release as a birth of something new, realise that you also have a significant loss. You will mourn that loss. Give yourself some emotional space to deal with the mourning.

Post-completion depression is a recognised syndrome in the arts. One psychological explanation is that constant pressure to complete maintains a core state of focus and emotional arousal.

When the pressure disappears so does the arousal, and sometimes a sense of purpose and direction disappears with it. You knew what you were doing and why you needed to get up in the morning, and then you don’t any more. It’s a bit like losing a job.

It’s also temporary. A good prosaic but effective antidote is a vacation and/or a change of scene. If that’s not practical just after shipping - it often isn’t - at least clear a couple of weeks later, book a break, and take at least a weekend off to do something fun in the short term.

I took a break from side projects for several years but recently got back to it and couple weeks back finished building. It is the same story all over again. Same feeling. I'm dreading what comes next.

This is also why funding (and employees) helps a lot of startups. Not so much the money itself, but an ever growing consortium of people who literally have a vested interest in the thing continuing. It's harder to give up when people are counting on you.

If your side project isn't the kind where you want to make money in the end then you're going to need to have higher intrinsic motivation I suspect as none of these pressures will likely come to bear and help you stay motivated.

So, I picked my best memories, and they were animation related. I knew that when it came to the 'switch horses' temptation, I would be able to say, "every project gets to this stage, so why would I switch to my 2nd favorite thing, because surely that would be even harder at this phase. Sure this phase is hard, but doing my favorite thing means this is the easiest version of this phase".

It's kept me going.

There's a scary cliff there, but I feel like launching is when a project first becomes real. It's the actual start. It's when you're judged. It's usually when you learn that your assumptions were completely wrong. It means you have to start dealing with actual problems, not imagined problems.

That's usually less fun, but I think it is more exciting (in large part because it's the dive into the unknown).

Best comment I've read all week.

Not sure if this is what OP is experiencing or just some 90/10 etc rule about the last parts being the hardest parts. Starting a greenfield project you can make massive progress quickly. Polishing it is slow.

Thankfully, I have neither suffered from the loss of a child nor a failed major project.

However I would expect someone making a statement like this to have suffered from both, in which case you have my sincerest condolences.

Thanks a lot !

I hope you'll find the strengh to do so :)

It sucks to fail, but hey; most people do not have the inherent desire to even play. That means something in and of itself. Good luck.

I could not say this better myself. "The Dream Is Dead, Long Live The Reality". So very true upon many things.

Thank you.

Programming feels like productive work, and indeed it is, up until just about the point you are at. Now it is not productive work any more, in fact, once the product is finished, programming is counter productive work. Other things need to be done and you don't know how to do them and if you do, are not in the habit of doing them. IOt is easy to get up in the morning and write code, harder to do unfamiliar things.

--> self sabotage (deeply seated need to actually not succeed)

--> fear of the unknown

--> avoidance of a change in work habit - from programming to...... ? what does one do post launch

--> fear of the likely outcome which is zero feedback, zero users

Curious - how close are you to launch, what remains to be done, and what does the software actually do?

Can I suggest perhaps be really ruthless about the remaining tasks - likely many of those launch tasks just are not important, even though the completionist in you thinks they are. For example - terms and conditions document? Ditch it until users are interested. Privacy document? Same. Purchase? Drop it.

See what I mean? If people like what you have built and use it, then the world will not come to an end because you did not have those things... and user interest will motivate you to implement them.

It's incredibly hard to work on something with no user interest. Just dump what you have built out there and see what happens.

So many testers said they would try it out, never did and there was an insane amount of actual testers who wanted something slighty different. (Which i couldn't do, as I had spoken to the company, and doing certain automated style actions would have gotten me banned).

I don't even take it as an aggressive negative, unless it is explicitly expressed as such. You can just be honest and say "I can't accept your custom at this time because X, and we have other priorities that would make addressing X to everyone's satisfaction a problem for the foreseeable future".

That actually makes sense (not something that's expected to be true of laws...)

So by my reading of the advice linked there:

If an individual is in the EU, they're covered by GDPR - whether they're a citizen or not.

If a company is based in or does business in the EU, all it's users are covered by the GDPR - whether they're in the EU or not, and whether they're an EU citizen or not.

That's much less over-reachy than I'd thought. The EU arguably does have the right to make laws about how you treat people within it's borders - whether they're citizens or not. (A death threat against a Chinese person in Paris should be prosecutable under French law by French police/authorities). The EU definitely does have the right to make laws about how businesses in the EU or who have offices/presence in the EU treat people everywhere. (A London company discriminating against a homosexual Saudi citizen should be prosecutable under British law by British authorities, even if it's not illegal to so discriminate in Saudi Arabia).

A better motivator, in my opinion, is that disclosing up front what data you're going to capture, and what you're going to do with it, and obtaining consent for that from users - is "the right thing to do". Unless your business model is "fucking over the users", those are not scary things to do, and will likely lead you to make better decisions about what you collect and how you store it, and reduce your and your users exposure in the worst case.

I am empathizing with the OP about how hard this point of a project is.

Perhaps I'm being too dry.

The truth is people aren't going to bust down your door and give you millions. What comes after release is far harder and demotivating then before, and, if you are lucky, you can find success after a few more years of a hard, slow grind. If you aren't so lucky, you end up back at a normal job :)

Good luck!

I get asked a lot why I left architecture and tech to be in product, and now, bootstrapping a relatively non-technical collaboration platform. My answer is that it's solving similar problems just at a higher level of abstraction. It's moving from a perfect information game of development to an imperfect information game of alignment and persuasion. It's like a context switch from chess to poker.* Going back into learning mode with books on sales and business is really refreshing.

Shockingly, once I cobbled my demo together it didn't just start raining term sheets. My impression is that people who know what it's like to be here don't let it out as not to discourage others.

However, what I still believe is, we don't regret things we take all the way. What we live to regret is the the pulled punch, the hedged bet, the b-plan, the retreat, the fold, the concession, the job, the approval of people we don't admire, the unsaid, the declined invitation, the judgment, the things we held on to or didn't let go, and the lack of belief in ourselves - these are the things that will shake you awake at night in middle age, and I assume, forever thereafter.

When you finish something, you need to "pop," up a level of problem solving. It's analogous skills, just with new tools and variables. Oddly, it's also a way to rest. There is an old saying that translates to "a change is as good as a break," and getting my code to the point where I could not touch it for a week while I worked my pipeline and have a demo meeting where it just worked was a huge confidence and energy boost.

Take time to invest in reading some books on business in your field. It has massive returns and feels like a break.

For me, it’s so regular that I can see it creep up on me — all the major features completed, only the polishing and websites to complete, and it starts to hit me, trying to drag me down.

Steven Pressfield wrote a short book called The War of Art that talks about this. It’s common to any creative endeavour, whether you’re writing a novel or building a product. I’ve written a novel as well, and it hit me at the same time and in the same way — near the finish.

You need to power on through and come out the other end. All the problems and issues others have talked about will be there waiting, bit that’s a different can of worms.

I guarantee that you're thinking about your problem wrong. There are things that people want to do that you don't know yet. There are things that are obvious to you about how to do things with your software that nobody will be able to figure out. You won't be able to learn anything about that until you have real people using it.

Go out. Find a potential customer. Preferably paying. Non-paying is better than nothing. Sit down with them, offer them a demo, train them, get feedback, and try to make them happy. If you can't do that, and can't take the feedback, then you not only won't succeed, you never had a chance in the first place.

This is WHY the idea of having an MVP and iterating has won so thoroughly.

But it remains: art and expression is valuable.

Yes I can probably make more money optimizing advertising attribution. But, honestly, I think there's some art in all of us. It's ok to explore it.

When the idea is just taking form I think getting too many people involved is a mistake. All you need is 2/3 people really invested in the idea. For example: unix

When the idea is near completion I think it's really good to get all the feedback you can.

Humans are notoriously bad predictors. For example; That fancy menu system you spent a week making might be completely useless to most users, simple user feedback could have prevented the colossal waste of time...

In some cases, if someone has a very highly developed sense of aesthetics and design, or can extrapolate from previous user feedback scenarios, then they might be able to come up with designs that users will love even if users wouldn't have thought of it that way ahead of time, or if more generic feedback would never have collated down into actionable decisions that empowered that particular designer.

As I've gone on in my career, I tend to see the value of this more and more, and lose faith that feedback collection mechanisms won't be politically subverted.

One example: I'd say a lot of the feedback about the principal lines of work for TensorFlow from the recent dev summit is wrong-headed, and they should just let Francois Chollet's design aesthetic motivate what gets worked on and how it gets designed, for a while.

Introspection and all the thinking you're doing is important and good and will help you overall find happiness so keep that up -- but it's not going to help you ship this. Just make a list of bugs and cross them off. Ship a V1.

If it's usable now just release it. Call it a beta, call it early access, whatever. You'll have a few weeks to just react and absorb feedback and that will help you decide what you want to do with it, learn what the market looks like, learn what the users want.

Especially with something like a creative or animation tool, you're not going to get people knocking down your door and throwing money at it overnight. But if a few people find it expressive and useful, find those users, support them and their work will bring others.

There are a few things that I've found that help me in these situations:

- Get a good project management software, personally i use https://monday.com/ for small project task management, you can list all the things you need to do - and seeing the tasks slowly disappearing can help get that feeling of momentum back

- Get a cofounder/help finding someone else to be passionate about your project or help with the work often will help spark more of that early stage excitement again. I'm currently working with some contractors on my own project and their excitement helps motivate me to push though these 'work stitches'.

- Take a small break, not too long, any longer than a week or two and you can distance yourself too much.

What you need to remember is that you're attempting to pull something off that very few people actually do, building and launching a company from scratch. It _is_ a-lot of effort, but as a founder and as it gets traction you can start to hire into roles which you don't like/don't care for.

Good luck with your software!

"perfectionism is very dangerous because, of course, if your fidelity to perfection is too high you never do anything, because doing anything results in... it's actually kind of tragic because it means you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is, and umm, there were a couple years where I really struggled with that."

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5R8gduPZw4

If you are a creative at heart this finishing stage can feel soul destroying: you've already got your next big idea, probably several of them, just waiting for you to complete this one so you've got time to properly get started...

You just reached a major milestone, whether it feels like it or not. You are getting near completion on a major project, you are starting to think longer term, you are considering the impact of your work on the world.

Take a week off. Or even a few months. Take a step back and let what you've done really sink in. Give yourself a treat, like playing a video game or binge watching tv or walking in nature. Whatever floats your boat.

Come back to the project in a month or two and you'll have a clearer head about where you're really at and what's left for you to do. Be kind to yourself. This kind of project is a heavy emotional and mental burden. Do not underestimate how much emotional weight it has. Give yourself permission to get back to a balanced, healthy mindset before taking the next steps.

Be well friend. Good luck! And be kind to yourself.

For me the solution has been to know that whatever I create is out of the need that it has to be created or it will bother me to no end. So even if it is criticised the other option would have been to not create it which would be much worse.

Also if you are not on point when it comes to your diet and exercise there is a lot of room left for you to feel better than you are at the moment just by doing that. The difference can be night and day.

When you're only spending ~2 months developing a bare-bones MVP, it becomes easier to just launch the thing and be less attached to the ultimate outcome.

This is just my personal experience, I've worked on both types of projects and I vastly prefer the ones that take only 1-2 months to validate.

There is a business book that explains the disconnect between many people who say they want to start a business but only focus on the task that they're good at. One of the premise inside the book was that a baker started a bakery and ended up only baking and leaving all of the managing and appointment making to her employees. All of the employees quit and she ended up taking on all of the work herself, quickly burning out. Despite the fact that building a business was the task that she should have been trying to figure instead of just the act of baking which. She was good at baking, thought she should open a bakery, didn't realize that a baking business is only 1 part baking and 8 parts baking system building. I wish I could remember the name of the book.

The lesson that the book tries to teach is that the business is actually the product customers will give you money for, not single piece of software that you're programming right now. If you organize your thoughts around it that way then you might be able to become more motivated. You've only really built a single part of your business system. The rest of it still needs to be built and you still need inputs, cogs and outputs for it.

I'm not sure if this is helpful.

If you don't mind me asking, did you get validation for your idea and product before spending two years building it out?

You get to the end; you've done all the big-vision important stuff. The application works, you just need to tidy it up a little. You're at the annoying snagging, which provides little personal satisfaction, but has to be done.

If that’s true, it’s better to be realistic about what work remains. That way you won’t lose motivation when you’re spending so much time completing the project, because you’ve consciously recognized there is still a lot of work to do.

And TBH I’ve been in the same boat, and in fact am in that 80/20 area on my current project. We’ve all been there I think. It’s part of software. Best thing you can do is recognize it for what it is and deal with it like you would any challenge.

Its like when you're in love, at first you can survive on romance, but to survive a marriage, there is a necessary shift into the long term mentality.

You've romanced your way to a product, but haven't considered the long term of it yet. In the future, it would help to have some long term thinking earlier on, so you can plan for various things and not have a step-function-like inflection point in your expectations.

Then just before the finish line when I feel that I have a good understanding of the project my energy and willpower falters and my focus is drawn to new projects.

It seems I'm always learning new skills in preparation for something greater. Maybe its just a lie I tell myself in order to prevent disappointment...

Here's my animation platform that gets no traffic as an example: https://www.superanimo.com

Maybe yours will be different but at one time I also thought "if I release it, the people will come." Luckily I wasn't invested too much in a certain outcome after launching. Otherwise I would have never kept improving it. I still don't know if more than a few people will ever try it, but I like working on it so much it won't ever feel like a waste. If nothing else, at least I can make silly animations with it.

Reading the post again I think he's saying he'll have money again because once launched he'll stop working on it and go back to freelance. In that case it makes sense. I thought he was assuming he'll bring in profits once launched - even though he hasn't gotten user feedback yet. IMO that type of thinking is premature, even if you have the best idea/execution in the world.

Like someone here said already - the second 90% are no fun. The first 90% are fun, launching is fun, people using and loving your software is fun and eventually getting filthy rich is probably fun (I really wouldn't know), but the second 90% are usually just a giant pain in the arse. Accepting that does make it easier.

Plus, when you're making something you care about and you really want it to be good, it's particularly hard to say no to features, even more so when you expect to get paid for the whole thing. And a case can certainly be made that one should probably be careful not to launch an MVP with too strong an emphasis on the M, no second chance for a first impression and all that.

That being said, as Joel Spolsky once wrote, shipping is a feature. It's your most essential feature. If you cut a few things here and there and add them post-launch, it probably won't kill you. It may even turn out that you don't need them or that you could do them better.

If you keep pushing a deadline trying to get everything in there, getting it just so for the launch, losing more and more motivation along the way, maybe deciding that you really need to rewrite this or that but it'll take you another month or something - that could kill you.

So I think this is the time to brutally cut everything you can cut and just get the damn thing out the door. Half a product is better than both a half-arsed product and no product.

Once you're done butchering your todo list, you apply the age old universal recipe for all things that you don't feel like doing but need to do, trite though it may seem - you take it one step at a time. You don't sit down at the computer thinking "I've got to launch this". You sit down thinking "I've got to implement this thing", "I've got to fix that bug", etc.

You've worked on something continuously for two years. This already puts you ahead of the overwhelming majority of people who want to make things. In the words of Captain Reynolds:

https://youtu.be/xbbj2o0yUI0?t=17s

I should probably go and see about following my own advice now.

Very true. It's a feature, but I think I've been looking at it as a liability.

That's why I try to release stuff as early as possible to feel which way to go in with the development to minimize that chance. Two years is a long time but I can see how for some software that is a reasonable amount of time to spend in development mode before the first release.

Beware of those expectations, after the initial press fades out (a week or two in), you're going to have close to 0 users and 0 revenue. Launching is just the first step, you'll be successful when you can grow your user base.

You're likely not going to feel successful at that point, probably the opposite: "I spent 2 years working on this and no one is using it".

I totally get what you are saying and have been there myself - the development stage is fun, and you avoid / defer marketing tasks because, let's face it most of us HATE that stuff. But if you want to make money, you need to do it, and having a plan helps because you have the 'big tasks' broken up into little chunks.

Once you have broken down the steps you can plan your time - start by spending an hour a day on one of the marketing tasks, just to get into the mindset and work from there. You might find some marketing tasks are fun, just as doing a blog / video demo of the product, or putting together a collection of cool screenshots showing what it can do.

Your very first marketing task is to post here with a screenshot or something showing what your product looks like, or even the name - marketing is part getting the name out and I haven't seen that in this post anywhere yet.

So, yes it is hard but take it in small steps - one at a time and be persistent.

I do have an example page in the works, with 4 examples so far, of each of the different page-integrations (in page pop-out, scroll, auto-play, etc), and each showcasing a few of the different svg filters.

It's marketed toward professionals, so I'm not in the game of taking non-creative people and "giving them a creative outlet". It should help with real world animated web tasks, and I had some experience with that in my freelancing. I'll probably have some pricing tiers, but probably something like $29/month, 59, 149, with higher tiers being more support.

For marketing, besides doing tutorials and buying ads on youtube, I can reach out to people w/ existing "how-to design" blogs, and share revenue with them (recurring), to keep their watchers using the software. Then reaching out to companies, even cold-calling if it proves cost effective.

I just have a bunch of polish to iron out. If I release it with bugs, and those bugs end up causing people to lose work (ie work for an hour without saving, and then a breaking bug causes you to lose work), I might lose those customers forever, so I'm stuck ironing those out for now.

It's getting really close though, and it seems like the closer it gets, even though I have figured out some possible ways forward for marketing, the less motivated I am.

I think I have to admit that in some ways I was, and really liked, chasing a fantasy, and I don't know how to chase now that it's more real. The hunger is what I'm lacking, in a way I feel full.

1. The enjoyment of building - I quite enjoyed building this project, and once it's "done" that joy ends.

2. The fear of failure - what if it's a flop after I publish?

3. The hatred of sales - I'm a programmer, I don't want to deal with selling the product!

I can't force myself to work on the project I say to myself, "You don't have to work on the project, but you can't do anything else. You can either sit here and do nothing, or work on the project"

For some reason this works for me. My inner self is so fed up with being told what to do, it doesn't work, it rebels, but if I limit it, and let it drive forward, it tends to work a bit better.

There also might be a factor with eliminating all distractions, setting the rule of "you can't do anything else".

As for #3, I have the same, and I did a project I truly believed in; I truly believe if more people did more animation, they'd be happier. So, it's not really selling, it's just telling people how I actually feel about animation.

#2 I accept the possibility. If it flops, well, I will have to do some actions to change that. Maybe I change the product, maybe I start calling people on the phone. A flop is a place, not a destination, I can move away from a flop, without failing, taking the product with me.

I checked your http://schuwing.com website and want to tell you it is really great what you have built.

Now Advice: Forgot about all the expectation you have about money, payment model, people will like it or not.

Think about positive side of it. Check your website again and see what the great thing you have built. How much you have learned during process. Can you mention it on your resume? Can you talk with passion about this? After two years when you see this Is it not making you great or felt yes I have achieved something?

If yes than do not fear and push the release button. Forgot all about you negative thoughts. Loose your expectation if someone will buy or not. Continuously improve it.

I find this fairly accurate for people with depression, and I try not to let actions cascade into my identity, but I try to make my identity drive my actions. If one of my actions doesn't symbolize my identity, I don't change my identity, I just try harder to make my actions truer to my values. I think if a person does this, they are still subjects to bouts of sadness and normal grief of life, but not so much as to invalidate themselves as a person and then fall into depression. `yourActions.onfail = function(e) { e.stopPropagation(); }`

Because the bulk of the interesting work has been done, and now all that's remaining is the finicky, nitpicking tasks that you've been putting off doing for the whole project.

> though I would be happy with 1500 bucks a month

I wish you the best of success, but please be prepared that you will not likely reach this goal for some time, if ever (although I hope I'm wrong).

Everything else you are worried about (surpassing parents, more people becoming involved, losing creative direction etc) is putting the cart before the horse. It's far more likely that the project will fail to meet your expectations. Especially if you've been working on it for 2 years and haven't had any customers validating your work in that time.

I don't mean to be a downer, but that's the reality of most projects.

Getting a software out in public is very stressful the first times you do it, essentially this is fear of _social rejection_ I guess and it can be harder for introverts. But customers and people are much, much nicer than one can expect! Especially if you love your product chances are people will love it too. You'll get used to be "vulnerable" in this way, meaning anyone with an internet connection can criticize your "baby" unfairly (but most of the time fairly!).

Sales, bugs and getting criticism are actually really fun once you get to enjoy them!

My advice is to give you some time to be energetic before launch, so as not to begin it tired.

That is, when you make a small personal work, you can leverage all your technical skills towards the goal. And you can redesign the problem to fit your skills. You get to try anything just for the sake of learning.

But if you intend to build a whole business, the leverage - and hence the techniques - come from a different, more abstract place. The SV startup model that is often on display in HN is based on leveraging lots of capital and the existing Bay Area tech ecosystem to build very large, capable organizations in a short span of time. That takes a very broad skillset and it isn't 100% based on the founding team's own skills, but rather on the strength of the connections and recruits they can get as they try to build "business machinery". An organization is ultimately a designed thing, just like a product.

When a codebase gets past the prototype/greenfield phase and becomes a grind of churning out features, bugfixes and optimizations, sales, product marketing and customer support, it is likely to escape the grasp of your existing techniques, because - unless you're extremely selective about what you're aiming for - that kind of breadth is going to be better suited towards an organization with defined roles and specialists than a lone developer who is wearing every hat every day. There's both a technical burden and an emotional burden involved and most people, most of the time, do better by sharing it, hence the common advice to have co-founders.

That said, plodding along for long periods with slow progress is hardly unusual regardless of how you scoped the project or who you got involved. Sometimes you have a technique handy that makes it go smoothly, but oftentimes it is just a grind and you have to commit to the grind to get the learning done and even know what you're doing wrong. It's no different from training your body or mind in other contexts: some things come easily, others don't. Try to go from strength to strength, but don't despair when you have to do something you find painful and stressful.

The solution was to partner with people that enjoy sales, so I can remain focused on the product ("building the dream").

I would love to find the same. Now that product is nearly done, it should be possible.

Maybe you should just now release a quick alpha version and share it for free on a niche forum with your target audience. I am sure you will get a valuable feedback. There may be people who may want to donate to help you with beta and then GA version. If you succeed then you will worry, you can always employ somebody, sell everything, open-source or just fork with your new direction.

My last side project was a data-driven sport (Cricket) analytics blog (https://hackpravj.com/blog/inside-cricket). Worked on it for 8 months (every Sunday), now when it's done I don't like the way I wrapped it up.

People appreciated it, I learned multiple new things but it didn't go as per the dream (the initial motivation that helped me start it).

This can be support for the completed one, another project, vacations, or anything really, as long as it is clearly visualizable and tacit. If there are multiple good options and I cannot pick one of them, I try to clamp them to a maximum of 3. All of them have to be clear and concise.

It is a somewhat simple system, but I have found this to work time and time again, mostly because I came to realize that the core of these downers could be attributed to post completion void. Before this approach, I would find myself delaying completion in order to not face the unknowns of what would happen after getting though the goal line. This led to unneeded anticipation worries and needless time wasting.

On the other hand, having these delimited post project goals took the situation on its head. Instead of delaying completion, I worked even harder to get there fast and jump to the next exciting stage as fast as possible.

Thank you for the post and for sharing your experience with us!

It sounds to me like you need to find co-founders or partners. Part of surviving in the long run is really just emotional support from people who believe in your product and share similar interests. It is unnatural in my opinion for a human to spend years working on something with no immediate reward (doesn't mean you shouldn't do it).

I'll make a video when I get some energy so you can get a better idea. I have several examples. The 3d examples are pretty cool, and some of the stuff possible with svg filters is really cool, and then the fact that it responds to user's scrolling makes it kinda fun to play with, and see the effects go in and out.

1

- Before a release, I have to hold off major features (like you path system) and it goes slow and boring. But immediately after release, I can suddenly begin the exciting new stuff again. It's a freedom to look forward to.

- When swimming, I would get tired near the end of the lane, but by visualizing the end being even further away, I got more energy.

- My todo list grows faster than I clear it. So aggressively remove pre-release items as much as possible. You're never going to do them all anyway.

- You really need people to be using it or you'll be designing things wrong, perhaps even the major organizing principles will be hard for users to understand. You don't want to end up with a Gmsh or a Blender!

- User requests are a powerful motivator. You're doing work for a confirmed real purpose and know they're going to appreciate it.

https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/12/how_to_create_motiva...

> More concretely, they are a form of self doubt not about the success of executing the act which is in your control-- the writing of the book, the asking the girl out-- but of being able to manage the consequences which are not-- the publishing of the novel, sustaining a relationship/finding a burn unit.

Brilliant article. Hits home. Thanks.

Stick with it, and ship. Shipping is a drug. You will level up to really be in the driver's seat.

divide it to many small challenges according to the process, and reward yourself after each one completed, then you don't need to reach 100%, you are already succeeded ( by your own definition ).

You are motivated to get a lot of bang for the buck. While the derivative of your function is high, you’re feeling you are making “great progress”.

Then the thing decelerates and now you have a lot of niggling details to iron out. Each one takes a while.

You look around and see that other problems have higher BANG to BUCK ratio. You naturally want to do those.

Remember to land the plane man (or woman) !

Have you launched a product before? Do you have any pre-launch users/customers? Have you done customer development on this product, or just built a thing?

The story is acted out by elementary school students in this video -- showing things don't always have to be perfect or polished to be of interest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krptm4-mTDM

I've found this entire discussion enlightening. I especially liked the comment about the story of a baker who starts a bakery and soon finds out that being the owner/manager of a successful bakery actually has little in common with baking skills (even as baking is obviously important to a bakery).

For me, as with some other posters here, a big issue for programming projects I start is that while you are working on a project -- as a programmer who likes to program (working person-to-machine) -- the programming is usually fun. And also you can also imagine anything about the potential value of the results while things are under development. But when a project is "done", then getting others to try a project and dealing with support questions or major design feedback and such involves a whole different set of skills (working person-to-person). And those tasks -- especially promotion and support -- are probably are not fun things for a typical programmer. And also you might have guessed wrong about the need if you did not have users lined up before you started or got incremental feedback. If you couple all that with a perceived need to make money from the project when it is released, putting software out there can be a big source of looming stress -- especially if you begin to realize you are someone who loves to bake software and not someone who loves to run a software bakery.

My latest FOSS project took about a month of spare time -- porting to the web a CYOA-style interactive fiction Delphi app I co-wrote twenty years ago. And while I enjoyed working on it, I did drag the end out a bit and also consider even just not releasing the result just because I did not want to have a support burden from unpaid users. Luckily on that score it sank like a stone. :-) Thankfully I didn't need to make money from it. http://storyharp.com/

And at least that result is a big improvement from some previous independent projects which took much longer (sometimes years) and where hopes for making money from them were disappointed.

No, unfortunately I have no solution available...

For sure and probably more than any of hose hidden psychological you've invented.

My advice is to find someone to work with on your product.