How to never complete anything

In the quiet times, I ask myself these questions and get sheepish, embarrassed answers. When you can give reasoned, confident answers on hard, painful questions about your future business rather than current tech demo, then your project has a shot at life.

I have an amazeballs tech demo for my side project. It is scoped way too huge. Heroics and not knowing what I was signing up for got it to where it is today.

Honestly, if I were to do it again, my first features would have been user management and payment processing. I wish I could take users and have them pay me as soon as they saw value in my growing hobby project. But I can't because I didn't prioritize getting users and using their subscriptions to fund my work. I have a ton of neat features and no users, argh!!

I still talk with the guy and fill out estimates for his potential clients whenever he wants. We'll eventually hack out a working professional relationship and start a company together.

The fact of the matter is that personal life matters more to me than professional life. I think a lot of people wind up using professional accolades to make up for things they can't get in their personal life. Maybe that's not you, but for me, working on my relationships and my emotional health is 100x more important than a big pile of money and influence ever will.

Maybe your answer to this is to "just work harder." To that I just have to say, 'absolutely not'.

Good jobs are hard to come by and can be unreliable also.

The key difference is that my project was a video game (this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwXl8lDrxn8) and that takes a lot of temptation to do what the OP is writing about, rewriting stuff in Haskell for example. The interesting bit when it comes to side projects (and now my full time projects) for me isn't actually the tools or the methodology or anything like that, but the end result. I spent my teenage years building games that I never finished, and it made me quite miserable, because I so just wanted to finish something. Anything.

I remember the first game I ever finished was a clone of Snake. There was nothing remotely interesting in the implementation or in the design, but I was so flipping pleased with myself, I had finished something! And that let me slowly build my projects up to more interesting endeavours, and eventually to one that could be sold. Starting small was the key for me, as I learned two things: 1 - what was 'too much' for me to try and tackle at the time and 2 - self-discipline, not chucking the project the moment I got bored, or had a 'better idea'.