I afraid how people will react and this makes anxious. What to do?
I don't mean to be rude, but either 1) share this tool with the world, regardless of the reception, or 2) don't release it and stop wringing your hands in public.
Show off your work. Advocate for yourself. If you worked hard on something, you damn well should be proud of it.
Maybe I need to be open about loosing and facing criticism.
Ordinary advice, but it's an ever-recurring, ordinary-enough situation historically.
You need to get over the fear and not tie the reception of your product to your personal perspective of self worth. The reception of your product is not a reflection of you.
More important than the initial release is how you receive feedback and criticism, and then adjust your product.
I have been working for years on a new kind of data management system. I was convinced that once I proved that it could organize files better than file systems and find things based off tags thousands of times faster; that people would adopt it. I was also convinced that if I could make it do relational table queries twice as fast as the competition, that it would likewise spur mass adoption.
In spite of making it do those things, it remains an uphill battle to get people to try it out.
So, let's say this tool that you created tanks? If that happens, I'm sure there's more than one lesson to learn from that. And if it catches on but doesn't take the world by storm (maybe it only solves a million dollar issue), then you can take consolation in the fact that what you created helps some people.
The decision to show it to the world is yours. Make a choice, then don't agonize over whether that choice was the right one.
Success is the result of powering through this early hate and reaching the necessary point of critical adoption rate.
I just built a data layer to solve this.
Major issue to who? You? How do you know it's a major issue for others? How do you know that others will value this fix as much as you do?
> has a fix but is very hard
> I just built a data layer to solve this.
These seem like conflicting statements, maybe I am reading too much into it but your choice to use the word "just" makes it seem nonchalant, like you whipped up the data layer in week, and if you did then the fix wasn't "very hard", and the code owners of the tool could do the same easily.
I have to agree, your question is way too cryptic and vague for you to get any real useful feedback. You need to discuss with someone you trust, or with some advisors that are willing to sign an NDA. Or just put it out there, who really cares how others react? If people like it cool, if not, oh well, at least you tried.
