What you always need to consider when taking on a huge project is what techniques you want to leverage and whether you've scoped things appropriately.
That is, when you make a small personal work, you can leverage all your technical skills towards the goal. And you can redesign the problem to fit your skills. You get to try anything just for the sake of learning.
But if you intend to build a whole business, the leverage - and hence the techniques - come from a different, more abstract place. The SV startup model that is often on display in HN is based on leveraging lots of capital and the existing Bay Area tech ecosystem to build very large, capable organizations in a short span of time. That takes a very broad skillset and it isn't 100% based on the founding team's own skills, but rather on the strength of the connections and recruits they can get as they try to build "business machinery". An organization is ultimately a designed thing, just like a product.
When a codebase gets past the prototype/greenfield phase and becomes a grind of churning out features, bugfixes and optimizations, sales, product marketing and customer support, it is likely to escape the grasp of your existing techniques, because - unless you're extremely selective about what you're aiming for - that kind of breadth is going to be better suited towards an organization with defined roles and specialists than a lone developer who is wearing every hat every day. There's both a technical burden and an emotional burden involved and most people, most of the time, do better by sharing it, hence the common advice to have co-founders.
That said, plodding along for long periods with slow progress is hardly unusual regardless of how you scoped the project or who you got involved. Sometimes you have a technique handy that makes it go smoothly, but oftentimes it is just a grind and you have to commit to the grind to get the learning done and even know what you're doing wrong. It's no different from training your body or mind in other contexts: some things come easily, others don't. Try to go from strength to strength, but don't despair when you have to do something you find painful and stressful.
That is, when you make a small personal work, you can leverage all your technical skills towards the goal. And you can redesign the problem to fit your skills. You get to try anything just for the sake of learning.
But if you intend to build a whole business, the leverage - and hence the techniques - come from a different, more abstract place. The SV startup model that is often on display in HN is based on leveraging lots of capital and the existing Bay Area tech ecosystem to build very large, capable organizations in a short span of time. That takes a very broad skillset and it isn't 100% based on the founding team's own skills, but rather on the strength of the connections and recruits they can get as they try to build "business machinery". An organization is ultimately a designed thing, just like a product.
When a codebase gets past the prototype/greenfield phase and becomes a grind of churning out features, bugfixes and optimizations, sales, product marketing and customer support, it is likely to escape the grasp of your existing techniques, because - unless you're extremely selective about what you're aiming for - that kind of breadth is going to be better suited towards an organization with defined roles and specialists than a lone developer who is wearing every hat every day. There's both a technical burden and an emotional burden involved and most people, most of the time, do better by sharing it, hence the common advice to have co-founders.
That said, plodding along for long periods with slow progress is hardly unusual regardless of how you scoped the project or who you got involved. Sometimes you have a technique handy that makes it go smoothly, but oftentimes it is just a grind and you have to commit to the grind to get the learning done and even know what you're doing wrong. It's no different from training your body or mind in other contexts: some things come easily, others don't. Try to go from strength to strength, but don't despair when you have to do something you find painful and stressful.