[kokanee]

I very nearly did a startup with a friend. We had a bit of seed money and were accepted into an accelerator, and had a decent beta. But we had major concerns about the market, which seemed to be a bit of a fad, so we pulled out at the last minute. I don't regret that decision at all - within a couple years the primary competitors failed and Amazon ate their lunch.

What I do regret is never finishing my side projects. I recently stumbled across a little website that my boss had paid me $50 to make for his cousin years ago. It was a slick but very simple site that basically just played a few useful audio files. The site now accepts donations and has been wrapped into paid iOS and Android apps that have thousands of downloads. It kills me that someone has made thousands of dollars off of that dead-simple weekend project. Over the last 10 years there has virtually never been a time when I wasn't working on a side project, and yet I haven't actually launched and monetized a single one.

[jjoonathan]

I have a similar story. I let myself steer pretty far in the startup direction before I ultimately dropped those plans.

7 years later, I'm on a M&A team evaluating startups in the exact space I would have been in. There are many of them and few of us (companies looking to acquire). Most of them have failed or will fail and get nothing (beyond investment). The winner will get a mediocre payout that, for the founder, will merely compare to the salary I've earned in the meantime, if my back-of-the-envelope is correct. The stress, of course, will not compare. That's the reward for the winner.

I don't envy the people across the table.

[wpietri]

> What I do regret is never finishing my side projects.

Just want to say I finally got out of that prison, and it's pretty nice. The trick for me was releasing way, way before I felt like I was ready. E.g., my little Twitter bot brings me a fair bit of pleasure: https://twitter.com/sfships

I actually had much bigger ambitions; the Twitter bot was my grudging compromise. I still hope to get to those bigger plans, but it's really satisfying to see actual people getting actual value. It's given me the energy to go back and productionize the infrastructure. Once that's done, I should be well placed to do a bit more.