[journey_16162]

My situation is a little different but somewhat related. I'm working on a smaller product and I realized just how much time the whole thing may take (maybe 10 years from concept to acquisition). I spent 2 years so far, didn't launch it yet. I'm actually considering scratching what I'm doing now and starting a new, more ambitious product - something that would be more worthy of the sacrifice, life is short after all, why wait.

I do like working on what I'm working though and at best, maybe I could be done with it in 7 years from now - with a small acquisition that could make it easier to build the next product (or wrap it up as a failure in 4 years and still get tons of experience from that). In contrast, the more ambitious product would take 7 years just to launch it, however it's not that much of a difference on a bigger scale.

In the end, I think I'm sticking with the current product, for better or for worse. I already spent a lot of time on it, I have very limited resources and it's faster to ship, to get some success or fail earlier and use the experience (+ resources if any) to start working on a new product in 4 - 8 years, whatever it could be.

But it does get me, that things take time either way, things are hard either way, so maybe it's better to work on something with bigger potential. I have some more thinking to do.

[mkmk3]

I'm a little clueless, in what environment is this sort of time frame reasonable? I'm guessing this is not a software project, or exists in a slow moving niche?

[journey_16162]

Yeah, it's not reasonable at all and it's a software project, niche is kinda slow moving, yes - but I do worry about possibly launching too late. I'm almost certain that if I launched it in 2019, it would be a success, but launching it in 2025 - 2026 may be a much different landscape.

Currently I'm estimating the effort to be 5,500h. I really started in 2021 and will probably launch somewhere in 2026. So it is 5 years hustle to put almost 3 years of full time work while also making a living working for other people.

My self funding strategy was small time freelancing, which was ok for a short time, but when I found out it's going to take more time I'm spending now a lot of time to prepare to get a full time job instead and lower the personal life sacrifice. I guess if I had a well-paid job from the start and I was willing to sacrifice more personal life, I would get there faster - but either way it would take some time.