I dabbled in writing scripts for TradingView a while ago. It is a little rough but also fun to be able to add your own stuff to the platform. I actually pay for Scott Carney's harmonic trading software for trading view. As much as you are posting words of warning, it kinda makes me want to take another stab at it. :)
One startup I made, that actually gained some traction, turned into a struggle for me as well. I made a site to share and find tutorials for the new Swift programming language. I released the first version the day after Swift came out and it was actually getting used all over the world even. I expanded the platform a bit and I had a number of tutorial creators regularly cross posting their stuff on my site but ultimately, I myself did not jump into learning Swift and I just didn't have the continued drive to keep working on it.
It is funny because this Swift project was probably the startup I was the least passionate about building but it really was the only one that has ever garnered any real traction. Some of my take aways from it are how important timing is and that I get very enamored with the initial building phase but as you talked about in your writeup, the amount of work _after_ launch dwarfs that initial rush.
One startup I made, that actually gained some traction, turned into a struggle for me as well. I made a site to share and find tutorials for the new Swift programming language. I released the first version the day after Swift came out and it was actually getting used all over the world even. I expanded the platform a bit and I had a number of tutorial creators regularly cross posting their stuff on my site but ultimately, I myself did not jump into learning Swift and I just didn't have the continued drive to keep working on it.
It is funny because this Swift project was probably the startup I was the least passionate about building but it really was the only one that has ever garnered any real traction. Some of my take aways from it are how important timing is and that I get very enamored with the initial building phase but as you talked about in your writeup, the amount of work _after_ launch dwarfs that initial rush.