How to break the failure loop?

We pivoted around 15 times (and built 10 MVPs) before settling on a product that a small number of users love.

The biggest lesson we learned is: find a painful and frequent problem you yourself have, and go solve it for yourself. Once you'd use it yourself, you can find a few people like you. It seems your biggest issue is you are trying to build a solution and not solve a problem. Copying big companies will never work because you don't understand why their users are loving their product.

I had two projects which completely burned me out for similar reasons.

I went into a long period of recovery and reflection and I'm doing things as 'best practice as I can'. My advice would be as follows.

1. Similar to the other comments solve a real problem which you have. Then there is at least one customer to validate with! I struggled with this one because I tend think of something 'really cool' and creative and then want to go build it thinking everyone else will love it but that is not always the case.

2. Find a 'product owner' if you can. This person is there to keep you accountable. I'm very lucky because my wife is a PM and agile delivery manager and despite her wanting to help in my previous projects my pride stopped me giving up control to somebody else. But with her help I actually have more control as its a joint process. It only takes maybe an hour of their time to see your progress, accept your completed tasks for the week and prioritize next weeks features which leads me on to my next point....

3. Document what features it needs and priorities and as you or your product owner review it, new ones will be added. Eventually to try and recover my projects which didn't work I did start doing it after running it informally for years. It helped a bit but as the list of fixes, tweaks, cool features grew it increasingly became a source of stress feeling like I'd never get it all done. Unless you're app is fairly complex you should be able to get a decent prototype (not an MVP) to start validating with your audience. Even if the UX sucks if it solves your initial problem thats a big win!

4. Mockup UX and user flow and validate before you start coding. I've wasted a lot of time just throwing something together only to rework it five times because it didn't look right. Its painful and boring especially when you want to just get started on the code but it will save you time and stress in the long run.

5. Find somebody else to do the growth side. Maybe there are some exceptional individuals which can both make a full product AND do all the marketing to get users but building a product is enough work without having to also do something which is probably not you're primary skill. They can even help you with product validation because they are closer to the audience.

6. Enjoy the journey. I would say that most people here enjoy coding, and its cool, the ability to build something out of nothing. However with the added pressure of making a business and a high degree of impatience it can quickly remove all the fun out of it. I fell out of coding for a year or so after my second project burned me out and its because I felt I HAD to code rather than WANTED to code. Its hard with all the talk of hustle lifestyle but try and not put too much pressure on yourself.

If you made it to the end of this giant post thanks for reading and I hope it helps.

I'm currently working on a new project and although old fears do arise I'm confident in my new approach.

That's relatable, I'm also in the same loop, looking for a way out!

Have you tried building what people want and interacting with them through out the process? It'll keep you motivated and might even give you your first customers when the product is built.

If you'd like to see that happening, checkout needgap my problem validation platform where people post their problems for startups to solve and startups interact with those whose problem their product solves directly.

Besides the why, as described by @shanefromfargo, I would put more trust in the process. And I'm not referring to the process of building, -because honestly that can sometimes suck, but the one after going live.

Once launched there will be a whole other dynamic and energy (Especially for solo entrepreneurs!). Don't strive for perfection and find a workflow that you enjoy for optimizing it.

What you were doing before was wrong for many reasons, which you are now seeing. This is good! You are already past the 1st step of breaking the cycle.

My first big piece of advice is to reserve some quiet time for yourself, and really ponder why you want to do this. In your post you say "I don't even aim for monetizing it", and "prove myself I can". This comes across as a red flag, and shows a lack of direction.

Why do you want to start a business\project? And who do want to be?
-Do you want to have a tech company so successful that you get billions of dollars and fame. (Elon Musk)
-Do you want to create a project that you don't make any money on, but you get a career/personal brand bump in return.(jQuery founders, Vue founder)
-Or maybe you want to create a medium size SaaS that you can use to achieve financial freedom(Rob Walling, and everyone at Startups for The Rest Of Us)
-Do you want to quit your job, and replace your salary with passive income(4 hour work week)

These are just a few of the 100s of paths you can take. Once you figure this out, find the community of others going down the same path. Do a deep dive! Good luck, and don't forget to embrace the struggle.