If it's not a ridiculously complicated project, I like to build stuff immediately. I'm trying to avoid the situation where I lose enthusiasm for a project because it's not something 'real'. The coroner says most of my projects have died this way.

So I'm trying to get something out in a weekend this time around.

I'm not doing anything particularly complicated. The tech is just simple web dev stuff. For most stuff, I work in a pre-validated market with lots of competitors. I'm not exactly betting the entire house on one bet working off either.

My next project is just something fun and useful, without much thought for monetization.

Ideally, you have boilerplate with all the plumbing + apis for shared code between projects with analytics, payments, auth, etc (something like shipfa.st/ but for your own preferred stack) and try to cut corners by using BaaS/CMS/UI Templates/same tech stack every time/paid solutions.

This is what I'm trying to do for upcoming projects. Hope it helps.