How to deal with fear, self sabotage, imposter syndrome, and other impediments to launching?

For quite a few months I’ve been working on a product…A native iOS app as well as a complimentary SPA built in Vuejs…both supported by a Node/Express backend.

I’m not a developer by trade. Stylistically, I write shitty, ugly code. But to me it’s fine. It works. I don’t write tests. I just want to get stuff done. There’s part of me that doesn’t care about stylistic concerns, code smells, or writing tests, but there is another part that feels very insecure about it. I don’t feel like I’m really a developer. I suffer from imposter syndrome. For the most part it hasn’t held me back, except that I’d be very shy about letting anyone look at my code.

I’m self taught. My background is as varied as being a stockbroker, a sales guy most of the time, an MBA, a tech startup CEO (just a tiny one). But dammit, I started teaching myself to code a few years ago and I’m not half bad…and I learn shit quickly.

So back to my project. For months, I was obsessively working on this product every spare minute of every day. My girlfriend starting getting pretty upset at how much time I spent hidden away in my little office. I tackled quite a few challenges, jumped between writing front end VueJS code (which is friggin awesome by the way) to writing Swift for iOS. I stayed home Friday and Saturday nights just working as fast as I could to get this thing launched….

Then something happened…

For the past 1.5 months, I’ve been really close to finishing up. Basically just needing to finalize the IAP behaviour for the iOS app. And now suddenly I’m nothing but excuses. Finding any tiny little thing that needs fixing before I launch….

I think I’m scared to launch my product. Right now it’s just pure potential. Blue skies, big money, and all that nonsense. But as soon as I launch it…..the hard reality will set in. Plus I don’t really have a good plan to get users.

So between all that and feeling slightly afraid I’ll be discovered for the imposter I am plus insecurity about the product itself…my project stalled. I will finish. I know that. I’ll see it through. And I will develop a marketing / UA plan. But I’m slightly fascinated by my own psychology through this process and I’d love to know if others have had similar experiences.

If you haven’t already picked up on it….writing this post was yet another stall tactic. I should have been testing out the IAP flow in my app and getting the app store assets ready :(