ugh. this is 100% me. spent 6 years working on a hard problem. Why? Because ironically people wouldn't pay large sums of money for it and I figured that if I made it 1000% more innovative than the market I'd surely justify the price.
I sometimes look back and see how fucking naive I was. I'm a totally different mentality now. It's figuring out how to get paid and making sure you are able to CHARGE people for it. You just need to get to the absolute MVP. If it's something nobody has seen before then you don't even need to build it. Just try to sell the god damn thing before you even build it. However, if there are already established markets and competitors you can't do it without risking looking like a snake oil salesman but what this is the problem of many engineers, we view making money as evil and negative because we devalue our work, we just don't see the business value and so highly possible we end up working for free at some point our careers.
For example:
Marketer: Our software that will boost your sales by 50%.
Developer: It just scrapes data from other companies and resells you public data. You can find it on github.com
VP of Sales: Shut the fuck up.
Anyhow, I can't stress enough. Startup is 80% people and 20% coding. I've learned my fucking lesson the hard way.
