Okay so real talk, I spent 6 months spinning my wheels on side projects and literally shipped nothing, the pattern was always the same - get excited about an idea, waste 3 weeks configuring auth providers and payment gateways, burn out before building anything that actually mattered
The breakthrough happened when my cousin who runs a Spanish fitness channel kept venting about how impossible it is to generate natural content in languages other than English, everything comes out super robotic and awkward, I realized there's this massive gap for creators making content in Spanish, Portuguese, all these underserved languages
Instead of starting from zero again I found ShipAhe.ad which came with auth, payments, database, email verification all wired up already, no decisions to make about Stripe vs Polar or Supabase vs Postgres, just clone and start building the actual features, went from concept to charging customers in 4 days because I wasn't stuck in infrastructure hell
Honestly the biggest lesson was that all those early technical decisions don't matter nearly as much as just getting something in front of real users, my cousin's audience is already using it and giving feedback while most of my previous ideas never made it past the deployment config phase