I have trouble finishing projects sometimes, too. I'm sure everyone does. The only way I've found to overcome it is to build something so simple that I can launch it before that initial endorphin rush subsides.
Once it's out in the world and providing some modicum of value to me and others, I can start deriving joy from fixing that one thing or adding that other small feature that's keeping me from being able to do X.
Case in point: http://www.viainstapaper.com. I wanted to be able to see what people were sharing from Instapaper. I came up with the idea around 11PM on Valentine's Day, and spent an hour prototyping the Twitter search stuff in Ruby. The next afternoon, I slapped a Rails frontend on it, and called it 'launched'[1]. Over the next couple days, I found myself getting annoyed by missing features or nasty bugs, so I'd fix those. Once this subsided, I announced it to the world, and it's been pretty much running on autopilot since.
I wouldn't say it's set the world on fire, but it's gotten me the attention of Marco Arment, Max Linsky (proprietor of Longform.org), and a handful of other people whose opinions I greatly respect.
[1] Hooray again for Heroku, Ruby, Rails, Bootstrap, and all of the other infrastructure that makes it possible to build something like this in just a few hours.
Once it's out in the world and providing some modicum of value to me and others, I can start deriving joy from fixing that one thing or adding that other small feature that's keeping me from being able to do X.
Case in point: http://www.viainstapaper.com. I wanted to be able to see what people were sharing from Instapaper. I came up with the idea around 11PM on Valentine's Day, and spent an hour prototyping the Twitter search stuff in Ruby. The next afternoon, I slapped a Rails frontend on it, and called it 'launched'[1]. Over the next couple days, I found myself getting annoyed by missing features or nasty bugs, so I'd fix those. Once this subsided, I announced it to the world, and it's been pretty much running on autopilot since.
I wouldn't say it's set the world on fire, but it's gotten me the attention of Marco Arment, Max Linsky (proprietor of Longform.org), and a handful of other people whose opinions I greatly respect.
[1] Hooray again for Heroku, Ruby, Rails, Bootstrap, and all of the other infrastructure that makes it possible to build something like this in just a few hours.