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Building, not tinkering

Disclaimer: in this post I describe the biggest challenge I stumbled upon, but not the solution. I doubt you would learn anything new from it.

How do you actually build things and finish them?

I finally got a startup idea worth considering, although I feel overwhelmed by realization of amount of work and time it would require to build an MVP. I know some very experienced business and sales people who would help me with making it public, bringing first users and monetizing it, but first I need something viable to show them. And that is the hardest part.

Thinking of complex filters that possibly would require me to use something as sophisticated as Neo4j (although thinking more deeply says that PostgreSQL would be enough) is killing me. Even SQLite would be good enough for months or even years ahead, then why bother with managing a database server? But, still, I don't even know Neo4j, so I can't be sure it'd fit there. But I don't know enough of PostgreSQL either, so I cannot be sure it would solve problems that are (probably) waiting for me.

Thinking of complex features in general is killing me. I know I should start small and then grow around it, taking one step at a time, otherwise I'm not getting anywhere.

But the reason I'm stuttering there is that I am afraid to make a step that would make following steps harder. Like excluding the possibility of scaling or extending just by the design decision I made in the beginning.

I have started a ton of various projects and libraries and applications, but very, very few of them got to the point they are usable and implement the general idea. It’s not a completely bad thing though. Some of these projects, despite never being finished, taught me a thing or two. But that’s off the topic.

So the question towards senior software engineers, that have experience with building things that grow with time: how to take a single, small step and not be afraid of steep climbs that are ahead of me?

At this point, I am trying to take a small step, but I'm already thinking of things that (probably) will be ahead of me, take them into account and make this small step way too sophisticated to actually happen.

Ironically, somewhere in the README.md of my project, I wrote:

An hour of actual coding yields more results than a week of planning!