One reason I believe for this could be because often in these cases your project is a 'side' bootstrapped thing. This causes the lack of motivation / reduces t

One reason I believe for this could be because often in these cases your project is a 'side' bootstrapped thing. This causes the lack of motivation / reduces the chances of reaching success for a few reasons. - The first is that you do not need it to succeed. Don't get me wrong, you would love it to succeed and make money, however you are most likely doing it after your day job and the reality is, you've not risked enough to 'HAVE' to succeed. Therefore it is very easy to fail / decide to try again when things get tough or haven't yet been as successful as you had hoped. - Another key reason is that, while bootstrapping time is tight. You find you spend hours / days / weeks / months of your spare time on something (while working full time at a job) and the reality is, you just burn out / want free time again. This is not unreasonable, especially if you have a family to look after, or your health is being affected. - Ultimately every idea goes through a dip, 'a hard' section. The fun idea / initial build has started (if you're a software developer like me, this is the best part), but now you must focus on the other elements such as sales / marketing / support, etc. We can easily diagnose and fix a problem in our code if our product is running inefficiently, but it's often far harder for us hackers to say exactly why the traffic is not pouring in, why the traffic is not converting to user sign ups or why the sales aren't increasing. At this point we think how much fun it would be to work on another exciting idea, doing the fun part again. - Finally (I already realise this is quite an essay), the idea may not have been so great to start with. It is a common thing to have 'great' ideas, which at first seem brilliant, but after a week seem weak. I always try to give any idea I have at least 3 days of thought before jumping in. Similarly I always ask other people for their thoughts and whether they would use this service? Ultimately, there is nothing more demotivating than working on a project realising that no one actually wants it.