Well now I have to see if I have the nerve to stick a knife in my own idea. Again.
I hit these moments. I already killed a few ideas. Most of those never made it past Balsamiq. But this one is already up on staging in Azure, costing 12 cents an hour + a small SQL instance. I've got 6 different csproj files and even some unit tests.
I'm in the middle of some coding sprint and some roadblock makes me look up from VS2010 and question the whole thing. Someone built the same thing I was thinking about. But they did it 4 years ago. I am more behind the curve than I thought. 38 years old in a few days - what are the 21 year olds working on? Would I even understand? Can I pivot from 2008 to 2012? I envision a room full of the smartest people I know. There is a powerpoint projecting on a wall, maybe a plate of cookies in the center of the room. I recreate the whole boardroom in my brain, because right now, I am my own board. Someone has to call me out on my BS. Someone who hasn't spent nights and weekends coding away and fixing a million bugs and learning SOLR or Entity Framework just to get this thing off the ground.
They will ask me things like - How is your product differentiated in the market? Have you looked at [X]? Seems just like yours! How are you going to acquire customers? How long is it going to take you to get to market? Or worse yet, they sit there, tapping away on their iPads, totally and completely bored.
I used to leave these most of these questions to someone else.
Oh yeah, that's me now, isn't it?