I turn 30 in 5 months and can completely identify with how you've felt. I too have the dozens of domain names for long-abandoned web applications for some idea that I thought was a radical spike of insight at the time.
It's a vicious cycle. I get the idea. I register the domain name, already imagining a brilliant fully-featured yet astonishingly-easy-to-use product. I start cranking out code. But it takes some time. I realized some problems I thought were easy are harder. That takes more time. I realize a certain problem is exceptionally hard and will take me longer than I thought, so I hack together something that works for now. I realize yet another problem will take me longer than I thought, and a few weeks pass and I begin to feel my web application is just a series of hacks. If we're using the art analogy, rather than the beautiful and crisp design I envisioned, my canvas is filled with ugly smears and smudges that doesn't look anything like what's in my mind.
And it's always a lot easier to just throw out the canvas and start something new, than to tediously work out improving those smears and smudges.
So, perhaps one hopeful anecdote I can share: earlier this year I did start a project that I've finally been able to focus on. The only difference with this one vs. the others
is that I saw a tangible return relatively early on. Two months after I worked on it, I made $72. That's basically a laughable number, except it's the first tangible return on the dozens of web applications I've started and abandoned for the past 5 years. From then on, there's been a mostly-positive correlation between "hours put into project" and "dollars earned," which has completely shifted my mentality.
I've begun to take pride in those smears and smudges, knowing I'm already succeeding to some degree and it could be especially rewarding if I continue. I have no idea if this would work for you, or anyone else, but like others have said, this is a process. Everyone designs and creates at their own pace, and age seemed pretty meaningless to me. In fact it's now that I'm older, instead of 5 years ago, that I can begin to appreciate my limitations and have the patience to work with them, instead of ignoring the fact that they exist.
And above all, be proud that in a world where many are content to maintain and manage (literally and figuratively), you have the desire and the ability to create and produce. Best of luck.
Keep doing things. Be lazy. Try to do less. Figure out how you can reduce and write less code. Ask yourself again and again "Do I REALLY need this part?"
Your process sounds a lot like mine, honestly. Keep going, it works.
I think what's missing (for many of the people with trails of broken dreams, including me) is the ability to rally support for what you're doing. The best test of a good idea is whether others rally behind it. It's a crucial skill for makers.
It's worth remembering that web applications come a long way from conception to what the general public will see. Facebook is barely a hallmark of what Zuck was programming by himself.
If you have a great idea the early adopters will recognize that. The general public won't. However those early adopters might give you enough money to keep developing so that 5 years from now the general public might be paying too.
Like you, and and I'm sure many of us, I also have plenty of projects I've conceived up, purchased domain names, and cranked out a bit of code for, only to let it languish in non-use never to be heard from again.
This is healthy, it helps to weed out the bad ideas, or at least the ideas that might be promising but for which you don't actually have the passion for bringing to fruition, let alone maintaining for years should it actually gain a little bit of traction.
The projects of mine that have stuck around despite my rather fickle nature are the ones that really hit close to home -- projects for which I clearly have a need and even more, a passion to keep alive. My current project, BracketPal[1], is such a project. I'm a pretty hardcore beach volleyball player, and after playing in many volleyball leagues, both bar/casual and competitive leagues, I've found the average quality of league websites to be offensively dismal. So it started as a nugget of "I need to make this, because I just can't handle getting my schedule emailed to me in a spreadsheet anymore", to my first paying customers' leagues starting up their indoor volleyball and kickball leagues this coming January.
Before that, in 2005 I was obsessed with running my World of Warcraft guild to an unhealthy degree, and so I started up and launched my guild hosting system in 2006 and it's still around.
In both cases, I would not have managed to create a quality product if I didn't have a passion, nay, obsession about these particular fields.
So I strongly believe that it's a good thing to cook up a bunch of half-baked ideas. If you lose interest in them before launching, great, you've found a project you shouldn't be doing anyway, it's time to move onto another project - one you might have a bit more serious passion for.
In your case, it's absolutely great getting that first payment, that first evidence that what you've created is being used and appreciated by people, even if it iss only $72. It all starts with those first few dollars. And once you've made something that you're receiving praise and money from your customers, it becomes a highly addictive drug, except that getting your "fix" requires you improving your software and keeping your customers happy.
[1] BracketPal is my sports league management system and I'm crazy excited about it! You can find it shamelessly linked right here: http://www.bracketpal.com
BracketPal is awesome! I'm so glad you made that! That's inspiring to see people scratch their own itch this way. There's a lot of itch scratching that's geared more towards businesses and other stuff that is definitely a niche but yours is in an area where I haven't seen anyone go. It's cool to know that your tiny little project which you may think is insignificant and probably won't get covered by TechCrunch or anyone is still useful enough to people that they'd pay. That gives me hope. Good for you, man.
I've been there too and I like that you mention that you feel like you web app is just a series of hacks. I feel that way too and I'm sure others do as well so why do you think that is? In my case it's probably because we see so many other successful people launching and we start thinking of all the things that could go wrong and that just makes us want to start over.
I'll give you an example. I've had this VPS over at Webbynode for months now just sitting there. It was originally going to be one app but now I just set it up as another last night. (writeapp.me in case you're curious). So I set up my LAMP stack, uploaded whatever part of the app I had to far (which isn't much) and proceeded to install a mail server. Well it went well except I screwed something up and I can't access the web interface for it. That one little thing, not having my mail server work perfectly made me think about starting over with a fresh Ubuntu install. Crazy! I think your idea of what it will become when it's finished has a lot to do with this stuff.
It's a vicious cycle. I get the idea. I register the domain name, already imagining a brilliant fully-featured yet astonishingly-easy-to-use product. I start cranking out code. But it takes some time. I realized some problems I thought were easy are harder. That takes more time. I realize a certain problem is exceptionally hard and will take me longer than I thought, so I hack together something that works for now. I realize yet another problem will take me longer than I thought, and a few weeks pass and I begin to feel my web application is just a series of hacks. If we're using the art analogy, rather than the beautiful and crisp design I envisioned, my canvas is filled with ugly smears and smudges that doesn't look anything like what's in my mind.
And it's always a lot easier to just throw out the canvas and start something new, than to tediously work out improving those smears and smudges.
So, perhaps one hopeful anecdote I can share: earlier this year I did start a project that I've finally been able to focus on. The only difference with this one vs. the others is that I saw a tangible return relatively early on. Two months after I worked on it, I made $72. That's basically a laughable number, except it's the first tangible return on the dozens of web applications I've started and abandoned for the past 5 years. From then on, there's been a mostly-positive correlation between "hours put into project" and "dollars earned," which has completely shifted my mentality.
I've begun to take pride in those smears and smudges, knowing I'm already succeeding to some degree and it could be especially rewarding if I continue. I have no idea if this would work for you, or anyone else, but like others have said, this is a process. Everyone designs and creates at their own pace, and age seemed pretty meaningless to me. In fact it's now that I'm older, instead of 5 years ago, that I can begin to appreciate my limitations and have the patience to work with them, instead of ignoring the fact that they exist.
And above all, be proud that in a world where many are content to maintain and manage (literally and figuratively), you have the desire and the ability to create and produce. Best of luck.