Ask HN: How many project have you started but haven't shipped?

You are not. To be fair, I also have a few products that I've shipped but that didn't go anywhere -- of course, I didn't really expect them to as I didn't really do anything in the way of marketing or anything, but they're out there (or shuttered).

In my case, for the most part, I'll either come up with an idea or a challenge. In some cases, I'll work towards an idea and usually, I'll get further along with those because I start with the boring stuff like logins, user profile pages, etc.

With the challenges ("How would you build a web site that did ?"), those are pretty much guaranteed to be DOA. I do the hard part, sometimes realizing my initial approach was stupid, starting over, and then doing it more elegantly, and then uhhhh, well, that's it. The chance of me writing all the boring crud for something like that to make it multi-user is infinitesimal.

I lost count a long time ago.

Definitely 20+, could be closer to 30+. Some of them I lost interest in, some I lost interest in the technology. Some I want to work on so bad but have no time.

Tons. This work is like art, imagine, create, not finish, and toss to the side.

Here's a few that come to mind:

'07 - A Search Engine that used MS/GOOGLE/YAHOO as my seed and resorted the order based on some composite ranking from comparing the three results.

'08 - An Email Myself Blogging service that took some words, links, and posted it on the date in the email.

'09 - A Local Coupon site to work against Valpak. You could throttle the amount discounted so you didn't have the Group On effect. I came back to this idea 20x, but in order for it to work you have to hit the pavement and talk to store/rest/bar owners.

'10 - Social networking site for fitness with a workout tracking tool.

'11 - Quit a company that got bought by Google (just had to get it off my chest)

'12 - Notes sharing tool that's transformed into something else. I stopped for a month on it, bugged me so much that finally late March I got back on that damn horse. In 4 weekends I have POC (like a lawn motor on wheels) that finally worked...but I'm excited about it now.

In the end that # of projects doesn't count for a damn thing. Everyone of those ideas listed above could work, have worked for someone else. Someone that saw one thing to the end. You aren't alone though, so don't beat yourself up one bit.

1, that's the number I am going to focus on this year. Finishing one idea out.

Quite a few unshipped. I think there ought to be a difference between unfinished and unshipped. My projects are unshipped by which i mean I finished them but couldn't commit the time to market/sell them.

Eventually you learn: If you build it they will come; If you are lucky.