I built 3 MVPs that never shipped. Here's what I learned.

I want to tell you about three projects I spent hundreds of hours on that nobody ever used. Not because I ran out of time. Because I never shipped them. The three projects Project 1: Freelancer time tracker Core timer working within two weeks. Then: reporting dashboard, CSV export, team features, client portal — for a product with zero users. Archived when I changed jobs. Project 2: Notion template marketplace 60% done before the backend rewrites started. "The architecture wasn't clean enough." Month four: clean code, no product, no energy. Project 3: AI habit tracker Built it, used it myself for two weeks, stopped when I couldn't answer "why would anyone pay for this?" Three codebases on GitHub. Zero shipped products. The pattern I kept missing I was optimizing for building, not for shipping. Without a hard external forcing function, the project always slipped. Re-entry friction accumulated. Every session started with: what do I work on today? If that question took 20 minutes to answe