I feel like HN should have a special flag called "survivorship bias" that we can use to tag posts like this. For every project like this one, there are 1000 others where someone spent 15 hrs/week for 5 years, built something really cool, but never got any funding or traction.

Now, that time was probably better spent on a cool project than on playing video games or watching TV. But you shouldn't think that consistent engineering effort alone will have any payoff bigger than personal intellectual satisfaction.