Ask HN: Am I just a wantrepreneur?

Don't take this as criticism of you. On the contrary, this may be the opportunity you need to leverage your true strengths instead of attempting repeatedly to embark on a gambit that seems to be a poor fit for your personality.

I agree that if you can devote more time then definitely do though. Maybe that is going part time, or getting rid of some debt first so you can take longer breaks and focus then.

The other difference I think showing here is that a side hustle doesn't look anything like a startup. A small business doesn't even look like a startup. If you have a startup you probably have VC and employees, then of course you should quit your job.

A side project you are trying to turn into a small business can be done alone and slowly scale up. At some point in that long process you will probably need to quit your job, but that will hopefully be easy to see when you get there.

Reading between the lines a little, you seem to beat yourself up or go within yourself in response to failure. This is a common trait with perfectionists, who often want to feel like they are without flaws before they open themselves to the world.

I'm basing this on this post and the post you linked to about imposter syndrome, although that post appears to be from another user.

If my description seems accurate, I would recommend dealing with anxiety/perfectionism/self-esteem first by learning about it. If you want, throw up an anonymous website that tracks your journey. Self-help is certainly a profitable market. Developer self-help might be an interesting niche.

Without being centered enough to weather failure with grace, you're going to have a hard time being a successful entrepreneur. Once you have it worked out, you'll be a different person with a better sense of who you are and what your strengths are. And then you'll be in a stronger position to build a product that really connects to people.

One is so profitable in fact that the side project is about to become his full time business. He built a tool to do link tracking using social media pixels. I mean that's a suuuuuper crowded market, but he fine tuned it enough to serve a particular customer base of small to medium businesses and with a primary focus on managing retargeting pixels in one place.

The second business I know of was built in the market of checking cron job success/uptime and doing alerting on failures. Again, there are other products that do exactly this thing. But humans being humans don't connect purely with the feature sheet. From pricing to overall experience his product and customer service was different enough that people are paying for it. And while it was a slog to get his first 10 paying customers, his next 10 took only 1/3rd of the time that it did for the first 10.

This is just a supporting statement for the above comment. Have courage in yourself. Go forth! :)