I really enjoy the building phase. Development and solving problems are my passion... but my projects tend to never take hold and sit stagnant with <10 visits a day for months after the initial 'i made this' plea to folks/sites/forums.<p>At what point do you call it quits on projects and hang them up, let the domains expire, etc?
How educated is the market on the problem you are trying to solve? How tied down is the market to their current solution? Does your product have sufficient value to justify switching costs?<p>Assuming your product actually is better than what's already out there, it is up to you to figure out how to reduce friction for your potential customers. Have you reduced your signup flow to the least amount of pages and fields required? Are you able to showcase the value of the product even before they sign up? Are current customers able to easily share the product with others in a way that's also valuable to them?<p>A lot of this stuff sounds simple but many products don't get it right since some successful products get by without addressing it.
I created <a href="http://dogehold.com/" rel="nofollow">http://dogehold.com/</a> out of interest in crypto and the lack of a good escrow system for Dogecoin. However, after the first few transactions I realized I wasn't actually interested in maintaining it as a business.<p>One seller had an issue due to a bug in DogeAPI, and given that my reaction was "Ugh, I don't have time to deal with this nonsense", I realized I didn't have the passion for it that I thought I would.<p>It was a really fun project, I had a blast building it and playing with Redis, but I knew within the first week of its release that it wasn't something I wanted to sustain.
I struggle with the same issue. I've shifted my thinking quite a bit and now think of it as just solving a different problem.<p>Say my goal is to write code 6 hours a day with headphones on. In order to do that, I need people to pay me to use what I'm building.<p>So the problem to solve has become "how to get people to pay for my service/product."<p>Projects die all of the time because of bad market fit. Less likely do they die because they were built poorly.
How saturated are the markets you are trying to enter? You're not going to invent a better search engine as a side project (without a ton of luck and an amazing idea/staff/developer/perfect execution).<p>Do you receive feedback for these projects?<p>Do you listen to your feedback and pivot when necessary?<p>If the idea is good and the site is made, then it should be just marketing and appealing to customers needs.
So long as you're alive-- there's still hope. If you read the bios of great inventors, tinkerers, and founders-- all of them faced failures, road-blocks, and years of struggle. Areas to explore: Can you persist? Have you ever achieved anything in your life that required years of disciplined effort to complete?