Dean Spade's Love in a F*cked-up World is also helpful; starting with loving oneself and forgiving missteps/mistakes/failures might help you break through the barriers.

Right now (sorry if this is presumptuous) you’re thinking that the next step is releasing a product. Instead you need to believe that the next step is discovering…

…what features you have people love/don’t

…what works/doesn’t

…what they want you don’t yet have

…how to prioritize what you think needs done

Stop for a moment and think of the apps you use most often. I promise they have bugs, and - like all products (software or otherwise) - are held together with a little crazy glue and duct tape. ;-)

Think of product development like farming: we engineer a product (seed), plant it in the field, and then customer attention (water) nourishes it while our customer support (care) nurtures it over time. Eventually, we harvest the results. In this model, it makes sense that we obsess over the quality of our seeds since that largely determines yield when given sufficient water and care.

When you work at a company, you build something, hit a quality bar, and there's a big launch day. But for indie founders, that model doesn't work well. Let me explain why with an expanded version of this farming analogy:

Think of your product as a seed and your marketing as an irrigation system.

Established companies already have deep irrigation channels dug. Water (customer attention) flows naturally to their fields. Thousands of eyeballs naturally see their products every day through existing marketing channels, social media presence, and brand recognition.

The reason your experience at work makes you believe launching is so crucial is because your company has already built these irrigation channels. They've constructed a system that brings fresh eyeballs to look at proposed solutions each and every day. As an engineer there, you're just putting seeds into already-prepared soil. You get everything ready, then turn a valve to divert customer-attention water from another established field to your new ground. Then you watch your product work (or not) for all these customers and grow.

But as a solo founder, you have no irrigation channels yet. There's no natural flow of attention to what you're building. You don't have a marketing channel established. It feels like you have a tiny cup of attention (your personal network), and that's understandably terrifying. If you spend your one cup of attention on your seed and it doesn't grow, you're screwed. You've used up your limited resource with nothing to show for it.

Your fear likely comes from feeling like you have a small, non-renewable supply of attention. Once used up, that's it.

Here's a thought experiment: Imagine I promised to bring two real potential customers to your house every day (let's say I'd pay you $10,000 for each day I failed, so you know I'm serious). Two real human beings, just like the people you validated the idea with. Brand new. Never seen them before, never see them again.

How would you feel about your product then?

If you knew you'd get fresh eyeballs on your product daily - a guaranteed stream of attention from the right people - the pressure of a "perfect launch" would vanish. You'd just explain your solution, get feedback, fix issues, and try again tomorrow with new people.

I personally believe it's impossible for any engineer to fail if they get 100 days of direct feedback from people. Tell me specifically how getting feedback from a different person each day for 100 days won't work.

Concretely, find where your potential customers already hang out online.

Here's what most people here would advise: Finding people ALREADY looking for a solution:

1) Instead of cold DMs, I searched for posts like "anyone know a tool that..." or "frustrated with [competitor]" and offered genuine help.

2) Leading with help, not sales. My first message is usually answering their question thoroughly.

3) Only AFTER providing value did I mention "I actually built a tool that might help..."

My email is in my profile if you want to talk about it further.

Know this. Every day apps get released to fix yesterday’s bugs.

Keep going. I wish you well.

But I was determined to ship, so once the code was deployable (the bear minimum, nginx with ssl setup) I pushed to my VPS and posted a link on HN. It was late Sunday night, was very tired, but just wanted to get real user feedback. But I also knew the chances of anyone seeing the link and actually giving feedback were slim, so I tried not to worry too much about it. The important bit was taking the first step and shipping something. Everything else follows from that.

So, my advice is to put it out there and invite people that could give you helpful feedback. Avoid toxic communities as that will only add to the stress.

Best of luck!

Not to frame it more ominously or anything, but when you pull the trigger, that's the day you make a stepwise life change into being a business operator if you have never been one before. Just a little life change, no big deal, that's what you have been working on the whole time, how long has it been? A flying leap from the uphill trail you have been on, that you're going to jump further upward from sooner or later as the intended goal.

Single-handedly it's not like lots of other ways too, even when technology is not involved.

If it flies off the shelf as-is, you may never have enough time to complete it "properly". Or worse, if there is not realistic interest, you'll need to spend more time promoting it than you were probably spending coding. Either way can mean no more coding at all for the foreseeable future, which you have to be prepared for even if you have incredible advantages there and that's where all your progress has come from up until that point.

I've done it and my technology has never been perfect, not even as good as it could be.

I guess I distilled it down to a business concept I wanted to live by, the day I decided to change my life, abstracted from the tech.

Not the same concept as other people, but I have to be able to live with it.

I just want to give clients their money's worth.

If the bugs and rough edges are not show-stoppers on those terms, the greatest obstacle has already been lifted for me.

I can then launch based more on strategy than undue hesitation.

Launching is in the eye of the beholder. If you launch to 10k people that is 10k 1 person launches. That's all. A single 1 person launch is the same in many ways.

Except any buzz etc. But don't worry about that.

Seriously, I've emailed ~10 potential customers, and have been in direct contact with people I personally know, offering them the software completely free in exchange for review/feedback. They created accounts, but never bothered with actually using it. So getting initial feedback has been difficult.

So, just keep that in mind: most people don't care. But if you manage to find some users, do your best to take care of them, listen to their feedback. Implement features for them, etc.