I feel this deep in my bones. I worked on <some project> a long while back because I wanted to scratch an itch, and I thought that some of the problems I was seeing, hey, maybe someone else was having them too. So I start kinda-sorta-half-heartedly exploring the idea, writing some pilot code, then I discovered hacker news. And oh boy did people have things to say about the general problem, it's impossible to solve, no one should waste their time, we can just <do the drop box thing and wire up ninety five things and make it shamble along>, definitely no need to waste time trying to implement something new from scratch.

Then I dropped it, because, hey, the glitterati of hacker news and all of the others must be right, huh? I let it wither, while working on other things, working for other people, making them wealthier, while all in the back of my mind I keep thinking: "maybe I should keep working on it."

Services doing the same exact thing started popping up. They get traction. Users are mostly happy with what they were doing, but they didn't have half of the features that I had already implemented in the code that hadn't seen any use outside of my testing environment. Some take off so well they have a now-publicly traded company doing the same thing. Ten years after I started my little project.

Fuck.

Lesson learned. The naivete of youth is a harsh teacher. Work on it. Put more effort into it. Ship it. Go with your gut--you probably have a better sense than you think you do of what will work and what won't. Ignore the hivemind. Don't leave room for the regret you will inevitably feel when you're scooped.