From a personal point of view, I completely disagree here. The one-person thing is just not doable, no matter how hard you believe/try. I've attempted this countless times and my motivation and dedication never cut it, no matter how hard I push. It's an inhumane amount of work for a single person to handle. And there is one specific moment that I've been able to pin-point every single time. I end up making a ton of progress: bootstrapping a development environment, databases, frameworks, containers, yada, yada, yada, I end up building a tons of things and just as I feel extremely happy and motivated, I take a step back and suddenly I see how many small details I need to fix up, as well as how much stuff there is still to be done and how much more would pop up to fix, polish and clear up and even a small project ends up feeling like infinity and depression and frustration kicks in. In my experience having at least one other person is at least a good frustration and prevention mechanism. That said, finding someone who's on board is equally hard.
> I end up making a ton of progress: bootstrapping a development environment, databases, frameworks, containers, yada, yada, yada
The „modern“ way of development is overcomplicated and not suitable if you are an solo founder, too much time is lost on infrastructure, setup etc. The modern complicated js stack where you need to maybe configure everything for 1-2 days and need to constantly fight webpack is not how you should built an web application as a solo founder.
You should be able to be „live“ in a few minutes. For every language there is a stack enabling this, they are not the most fany ones but get their work done. Take for example laravel with spark (https://spark.laravel.com/), for 99$ you get a login-system with teams and subscription management all-in-one within minutes. And don‘t build a ci pipeline, complex kubernetes cluster or learning a dozen of aws servers. A simple VPS or root server and Laravel Forge (https://forge.laravel.com/) or Ploi (https://ploi.io/) and you are live.
As a solo founder you need to find a way to cut down on non-programming and non-marketing tasks. This means maybe not working with the hottest tech stack of the day but simply using a workhorse solution which lets you get shit done quickly.
The biggest problem is you are missing an ecosystem. If someone wants to use it they need to do everything your way. But when using a boilerplate like from laravel, django, ror etc. there is a huuuge ecosystem which can be used too. So many functionality which does not need to be reimplemented.
So in my opinion all these one-off boilerplates not build on a well-known framework are too much hustle.
Never worry about the big picture. It's too easy to get overwhelmed. Sure, have an idea where you want to go, but don't worry about all the steps it will take to get there. Worry about the next thing. And then the next thing. And little by little you will have suddenly made a lot of progress.
Easier said than done it seems. I reckon I've abandoned at least 7-8 projects I took pretty far in the last decade, everything ended the same way-collecting dust in a repo or on an old drive. At this point even if something interesting comes to my mind, I shrug it off and ignore it or just share it online somewhere or tell someone. Maybe someone else has a stronger will than I do, idk. Still secretly hoping that eventually I'll meet someone as motivated as I can get so we can push each other but seems incredibly unlikely.
10 years / 7 or 8 projects is about 1.3 years on average. It takes a long time to build a company and a product as one person. Sounds like you have been giving up a bit prematurely. Or if you would like results in that time, make an MVP instead of trying to build a feature complete product.
I disagree. That's a skill, one you have to learn by yourself. Getting something production ready rarely is fun but doable. Motivation is complicated but for me it's for example bills I have to pay and the experience that we'll done projects do pay out sometimes.
