If I'm solving a problem I personally care about, then I will also be personally willing to put in vastly more effort into learning and getting up to speed with the solution than the vast majority of my target customers will.
As the OP said, you need something that will give relatively quick return on investment of effort. If it's going to require a larger up-front investment, then you have to really, really care about the improvement it's providing in order to put in that effort.
I have innumerable half-baked solutions to various problems I care about, and by "half-baked" I mean they only work in specific situations and require massaging the inputs into a form that the solutions will accept. And that's fine for me; after all, I cared enough to implement the fancy solution in the first place. But I don't expect anyone else to use it unless I clean it up and package it nicely.
If I'm solving a problem I personally care about, then I will also be personally willing to put in vastly more effort into learning and getting up to speed with the solution than the vast majority of my target customers will.
As the OP said, you need something that will give relatively quick return on investment of effort. If it's going to require a larger up-front investment, then you have to really, really care about the improvement it's providing in order to put in that effort.
I have innumerable half-baked solutions to various problems I care about, and by "half-baked" I mean they only work in specific situations and require massaging the inputs into a form that the solutions will accept. And that's fine for me; after all, I cared enough to implement the fancy solution in the first place. But I don't expect anyone else to use it unless I clean it up and package it nicely.