Ask HN: Why is nearing completion so demotivating?

I'm currently in a somewhat similar situation, although with a smaller open source project, and that's exactly what I've been struggling with the last few weeks. There are some great points in the comments here, here are my 2 cents and what I'm currently doing.

Like someone here said already - the second 90% are no fun. The first 90% are fun, launching is fun, people using and loving your software is fun and eventually getting filthy rich is probably fun (I really wouldn't know), but the second 90% are usually just a giant pain in the arse. Accepting that does make it easier.

Plus, when you're making something you care about and you really want it to be good, it's particularly hard to say no to features, even more so when you expect to get paid for the whole thing. And a case can certainly be made that one should probably be careful not to launch an MVP with too strong an emphasis on the M, no second chance for a first impression and all that.

That being said, as Joel Spolsky once wrote, shipping is a feature. It's your most essential feature. If you cut a few things here and there and add them post-launch, it probably won't kill you. It may even turn out that you don't need them or that you could do them better.

If you keep pushing a deadline trying to get everything in there, getting it just so for the launch, losing more and more motivation along the way, maybe deciding that you really need to rewrite this or that but it'll take you another month or something - that could kill you.

So I think this is the time to brutally cut everything you can cut and just get the damn thing out the door. Half a product is better than both a half-arsed product and no product.

Once you're done butchering your todo list, you apply the age old universal recipe for all things that you don't feel like doing but need to do, trite though it may seem - you take it one step at a time. You don't sit down at the computer thinking "I've got to launch this". You sit down thinking "I've got to implement this thing", "I've got to fix that bug", etc.

You've worked on something continuously for two years. This already puts you ahead of the overwhelming majority of people who want to make things. In the words of Captain Reynolds:

https://youtu.be/xbbj2o0yUI0?t=17s

I should probably go and see about following my own advice now.

It’s the 80/20 Pareto principle. The last 20% of the work feels like 80% of it. And honestly, maybe it is. Have you considered that maybe you aren’t as close to the end as you think? Often that last 20% doesn’t contain any major challenges, but rather a mountain of small and tedious tasks that you’ve “left til later” throughout the project. So although it feels like you’re almost finished, because you’ve eliminated all major challenges, you actually have a lot left to do because the sum of those smaller tasks is greater than you estimated.

If that’s true, it’s better to be realistic about what work remains. That way you won’t lose motivation when you’re spending so much time completing the project, because you’ve consciously recognized there is still a lot of work to do.

And TBH I’ve been in the same boat, and in fact am in that 80/20 area on my current project. We’ve all been there I think. It’s part of software. Best thing you can do is recognize it for what it is and deal with it like you would any challenge.

Do you have a written plan on how you will make money with this - like a business plan? If not, take a day off and work out a complete outline on what you want to achieve and how you will get there.

I totally get what you are saying and have been there myself - the development stage is fun, and you avoid / defer marketing tasks because, let's face it most of us HATE that stuff. But if you want to make money, you need to do it, and having a plan helps because you have the 'big tasks' broken up into little chunks.

Once you have broken down the steps you can plan your time - start by spending an hour a day on one of the marketing tasks, just to get into the mindset and work from there. You might find some marketing tasks are fun, just as doing a blog / video demo of the product, or putting together a collection of cool screenshots showing what it can do.

Your very first marketing task is to post here with a screenshot or something showing what your product looks like, or even the name - marketing is part getting the name out and I haven't seen that in this post anywhere yet.

So, yes it is hard but take it in small steps - one at a time and be persistent.

Have money again? Getting people to use it for free will probably be a challenge... getting people to pay may be nearly impossible.

Here's my animation platform that gets no traffic as an example: https://www.superanimo.com

Maybe yours will be different but at one time I also thought "if I release it, the people will come." Luckily I wasn't invested too much in a certain outcome after launching. Otherwise I would have never kept improving it. I still don't know if more than a few people will ever try it, but I like working on it so much it won't ever feel like a waste. If nothing else, at least I can make silly animations with it.

Sure, but what should I do about it?