[throwaway0asd]

It comes down to persistence and originality. If the given idea is original and the value is worthy I will follow it at great expense.

For example I maintain a peer to peer application that used to use HTTP for all its traffic. I found an alternate transmission scheme that dramatically increased both performance and simplicity but it took me about a year to implement from scratch across all aspects of the application. This was a great effort and at first appeared incredibly fragile and broken, but once I really nailed down the concept it became far more durable that other more common transmission techniques.

I have been working on this application for just over three years and have almost no users. I keep going because now the application can do amazing things that everyone else cannot.