While I am not nearly as prolific as you (I don’t have nearly as many projects). I feel like I share nearly the exact same behavior as you. I have several side projects that I work on and I almost always have thought about them as the start of a business. I do have one project that I try and push on as a side income, but I mostly keep it going because I use the tool myself (money-stew.com cough cough). I waffle on how much effort it deserves and what my expectations are.
I have wondered a lot about the same things as you and I am starting to try and think about projects as less about starting a business and more about building one off projects that I can use myself. I feel like this allows me to get more pleasure out of building but makes it a bit more difficult to justify the time. Really, what I want is to build things — I don’t really know how much I want to start a full on business, that might actually suck a lot. Of course, if I could launch an app or something that could generate enough passive income to quit my day job — that would be fucking awesome. I really don’t know how likely that is to happen — I figure not very.
I am an engineer and thats what I like doing, if I where ever able to build a business that I relied on the income. It would become just another job with quite a bit more flexibility — but I would still have to do a bunch of shit I didn’t want to do.
I try and make my projects more about learning about tech that might help move my career in a direction that I want to go.
