Ideas are addicting; the longer you have them the more you idolize them and become over time immune to the idea's criticism.
The general principle in startups is that you know remarkably little about what actually is valued in the market until you do some very specific validation research, which involves putting some kind of real, meaningful solution to a person's pain in front of them to see how they react.
The first rule of social network is that it's useless without many people on it, and there has to be some hook to get them in. But you won't figure that out just by thinking about it and imagining how people will behave. In practice it's a billion subtle factors which you can't reason about without a tangible product that people are interacting with.
100%. I've been going through this exact concept in building https://sqwok.im. I got a ton of positive feedback but also "it's not fully baked yet", "not quite there", "missing X feature". It's a challenge but you have to believe in it and keep pushing, try new things, and constantly collect feedback.
Then you're not providing a "gain" for the user, if people are saying it's "incomplete".
You need to figure out what problem your users are having and solve that. Random feature bloat in search of a magical fit is Hope as a Strategy (TM), and it's not typically effective.
I do agree with you. I've had more positive feedback than negative and there's been a cohort of supporters who seem to enjoy it.
Def have to be careful about building features, throwing darts, etc. For this project the genesis was that I wanted to use the product myself and didn't see it in the market; I wanted to scratch my own itch, so I did indeed just build it.
But when I initially did a Show HN[1], the client wasn't far along other than supporting the basic chat feature. By the 2nd Show HN[2], the client had matured a bit and it both withstood the hn blitzkrieg and led to people from all over the world having realtime public conversations - the core idea in action. But people were asking for expected features including tags, search, message permalinks, and other stuff that wasn't there yet.
So that's what I've been building since...
All that said I could be blind to my own biases and it's taken awhile to bring it to maturity. I've also had slowdowns due to outside normal job stuff etc.
Oh yeah I'm in the same boat right now; it's easier to throw features at the wall to see what sticks, but the success rate and is lower and "worthless" effort is higher. Hard to resist though, as someone technical!
100%, it's something I do struggle with because I enjoy building, and not marketing lol. But the latter is absolutely critical to even be able to continue building.
Ideas are addicting; the longer you have them the more you idolize them and become over time immune to the idea's criticism.
The general principle in startups is that you know remarkably little about what actually is valued in the market until you do some very specific validation research, which involves putting some kind of real, meaningful solution to a person's pain in front of them to see how they react.