Wanted to comment on this "The first project I did on my own was jeansbargains ... I built it and then realized that I did not want to spend the time looking for deals to put on it"
This seems to run as a common theme in many engineer friends (including myself, several times.) When approached with a sales-like problem, such as a opening a store or a SaaS product, or even starting a social network, we dig into the code first and build, but then get stymied by the "business stuff" necessary to get things off the ground. This might mean not e-mailing potential customers, sales leads, blogging, etc. In the meantime, we'd spend time polishing back-end code that no one will end up using.
I have several unfinished projects due to this syndrome (does it have a name?) And while I am not better at this yet, reading HN has definitely inspired me to do more than just code in that regard.