> As a writer, I'd like you to maybe consider that the effort you put forward at least was self-improvement exercise in communication - as in, through practice

> As a writer, I'd like you to maybe consider that the effort you put forward at least was self-improvement exercise in communication - as in, through practice and time, you had some realizations about how you want to present yourself, your product, etc. I genuinely think time spent in your objective isn't a waste, per se, because you've got material that you created which can be used as a reference, template, or reminder in the future. I agree with this broadly, but I feel like I am too biased by how fortunate I have been to really appraise how useful the exercise was in the terms you describe. By "fortunate", I mean the application has been a success in my own modest terms, relative to the time I spent working on it. I think that success is attributable mainly to luck. Although the people who use the application like it based on its inherent qualities, I don't think those inherent qualities alone were enough to guarantee that my application would find users back in the critical early stage. I think it found users because when I submitted it to Reddit a couple of years ago, shortly after creating the first version, I was lucky that enough people happened to see it in the list of new submissions and happened to like it and happened to like it enough to upvote it. There are 5-10 people out there who I will never meet who are responsible for that submission getting on to the front page of that subreddit, which resulted in a flood of traffic, which resulted in a chain of events that eventually led to success (again, on my own terms). If you flip a couple of bits of background entropy, I build exactly the same thing and try to spread the word about it in exactly the same way and it never gets any traction and no one ever really finds out about it. So while the current version of me may agree that I value the self-knowledge "I'm not the kind of person who feels comfortable mass-emailing strangers in an attempt to promote myself", the version of me in that other, equally plausible reality where my application never got any users might not feel the same way, or might still be mass-emailing strangers, or what have you. I don't know, because I've been so fortunate with how things have turned out.