If you've got an idea you keep meaning to build — what's actually stopping you from starting?
Not looking for "I'm too busy" — I mean the real reason. Don't know which tool? Scared it won't work? Keep researching instead of building? Waiting to feel ready?
I'm trying to map what actually keeps people stuck between "I have an idea" and "I started building it" — especially non-technical folks now that AI tools exist. Reading every reply, and happy to share back the patterns I find. 🙏
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For me, it's that I start with something simple - a problem I want to solve. I come up with a simple idea, something I can build, a MVP essentially. Then I start thinking about future-proofing - what do I need to do so that XYZ will be easy in future? Then incorporating that means that originally simple MVP becomes a massive project that just feels impossible. So I get bored, and think of another simple idea. Repeat.
That scope-creep spiral is real. Curious — has there been a project you managed to keep small enough to actually ship? What was different about that one vs the ones that ballooned?
Strangely enough, only one - and it's only recently that I've been satisfied enough with it to consider it public-ready. I'm the kind of person that will come up with ideas, start a lot of them but either never finish or just not feel happy enough to share it (my GitHub account is full of private projects that I've created solely to scratch my own itches but I'd never consider them 'ready' enough to share).
However, a big part of that is imposter syndrome. I've been an able programmer for the best part of 15 years but I never formally studied anything tech-related, am completely self taught and there was always a nagging thought in the back of my mind that because I don't have the qualifications or real world experience, everything I make will feel amateur. It's only been the past couple of years where I've gotten to the point where I'm like "yes, I'm good at this and there are things I've made that I'm very proud of".
Either way, the project that I've recently 'finished' (it's published on here as LoveInvoice if anyone's interested) I dedicated almost a year to building alongside a non-tech day job. I'm pretty sure the reason I didn't burn out or lose interest was that I cared enough personally about the cause behind it (TLDR: if you're a freelancer starting out, tools to help get you paid should be affordable), I was happy with the initial scope for launch (I have a lot more features planned for it but right now it's enough to do the job relatively well) and I also genuinely just had fun trying new tools and libraries I'd never used before so there was the novelty factor of that too.
This is one of the clearest breakdowns I've heard — caring about the cause, keeping the launch scope honest, and the novelty of new tools is a combo I keep seeing in the ones that actually ship. The imposter-syndrome bit is interesting too: did shipping LoveInvoice actually quiet that "it'll feel amateur" voice, or is it still there even now that it's public? (congrats on shipping it, by the way 👏)
The gap is that the first real step feels too small. Researching feels productive, the messy attempt feels like failure. So people stay in research mode forever.
This is exactly the pattern I keep running into — "researching feels productive, the messy attempt feels like failure." Did you catch yourself doing this on a specific idea of your own? Curious what (if anything) ever got you out of research mode and into actually starting. Trying to map what breaks that loop.