Ask HN: How do you decide on what to build/avoid decision paralysis?

The last time I was paralylized for 3 weeks and decided on one of the ideas I had. I think to this date that this has been the best decision according to the knowledge that I had at the time. Nevertheless, after 1 year of working on it, I had to take a pause due to life circumstances, literally a 1 year pause (which is still in progress). During that time, I could not help but think about other ideas. I'm not 100% sure what I will end up doing, but it kinda looks like I'm taking the first product, rebuilding it into a completely different (and much simpler) product that will put me on the path to launch the product (much more complex) I decided to skip on earlier.

I don't know, it's like. You have to keep building, keep the momentum up and do some periodic direction checks, but don't let it get out of hand with your time. I would be building my first product to this day if I was not forced to take a pause. But since I took that pause, my knowledge got updated and all things considered I think I will be building the idea I decided to skip earlier.

All product ideas that I have are complex, and even the simplest one requires some 5,000h total to launch. I learned that if even something that I considered simple takes time, maybe I overshat the complexity of the more complex product and if it's so much time and life sacrifice, I will pick the idea I'm more interested on and don't mind it taking more time. If it fails, at least I know that I did not kept anything back. If the simpler idea failed, I would be full of regret that, it failed anyway, I should have pushed for the thing I was more interested about.

I hope that once I invest in a product enough time, there will be no going back and no reason to question direction anymore. I spent 1,500h on this one, and it's still such a long way to go that scratching it can be justified, especially since I'm re-using some of that code. But once I settle on that more complex idea, push some 3,000h, I will know that there's no going back and I need to go all the way to 10,000h or whatever it will take to build it.

That said, I think it's valuable to question too much. So much in this game depends on what you build. No matter how shiny the product is, if it's useless.