Should I develop my hobby in a startup?

Many years ago I became interested in programming and started writing an application for myself (plug-in for AutoCAD). And so years have passed and the question arises - to develop your hobby in a startup or leave it further as a hobby? Reason on the subject under the cut

This entry - the story, reasoning and the question in one bottle. Therefore, it will be logical to break into these three parts

Story

Back in 2007, being already an old 22-year-old man, I got a job at a design institute in my hometown. And before that I received a secondary special education in the construction industry. After that I received a higher education in this area, but this is not the point. After reviewing the product AutoCAD, I almost immediately noticed a cool feature - the ability to write plug-ins under it. There was interest in this matter at school (probably like everyone else - there was a basic at school), so I started trying VBA. Then he quickly switched to the fact that the auto shell was closer - to the lisp.
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It is worth noting one important thing - after school I wanted to enter a local technical university at the Faculty of Automation and Computer Engineering (that is, yes - I wanted to study as a programmer), but thanks to corruption in education at all levels, I did not enter, having score 36 out of 40 possible. And he followed in the footsteps of his grandfather - in construction. Perhaps this bitter experience repulsed the desire to study as a programmer in general (which is a pity), but from time to time it strongly attracted

But back to the main story - having learned only the basics of Lisp, I wrote a few plug-ins for myself. And I suddenly wanted more. I will not lie - I wanted fame! I put together my plugins, came up with the original name ModPlus (I’m probably one of the few who didn’t stick the word CAD to the name) and got into the Internet. Spread. Is free.

But in my head I was always sitting (and still sitting) the same thought is just a hobby! And this thought allowed me to throw the plugin for long periods. The biggest is almost 2 years.

In parallel, there were also changes in life, in terms of a career — a crisis in the country in 2008, a shift of several jobs, one of which was not at all related to a career. All this was accompanied by meager wages. As a result, these swings brought me back to the design channel and I revived my plug-in again. By the way, by that time I already had a “super site” created on ucoz.

I began to realize that just a useful plugin for auto-cuts can't compare with the same useful plugin, but with a high-quality appearance and all sorts of dynamic rendering at work. But a lisp cannot do this (as well as many other things) and the search for a new language has begun. Looking at C ++ a bit, I understood - not my language level (more precisely - I am not of that level). There is only one option - .Net. And then the choice of language did not even arise - of course C #. Well, as soon as I found out about WPF, there were no issues with using WinForms!

As a result, many of my evenings and weekends were devoted to my project. Much of it is constantly corresponded (and rewritten) in proportion to how I learned better C #. At one point, I had an idea - to make my plugin modular. A kind of "shop" of small plug-ins, assembled in one place. For a long time I was “afraid” to take on implementation, since it was already difficult for me, and from the point of view of rewriting the code, it was a tremendous job. But all the same, I decided and did it. As for the appearance - what I wrote a little higher - I screwed the fairly popular Mahapps.Metro design library to all the windows - but this was not seen in the autocade. In parallel, I purchased a hosting and made a normal Joomla site. After several torments, I still acquired a good template for the site to make it look modern. And the main thing - I made some parts of the plugin (those modules) paid. True with ridiculous prices - a maximum of 100 rubles.

At the end of the first part, I already tried to write more compactly, passing the main story. And the most important (and sad) conclusion is the past 10 years of life!
And just recently, thanks to my hobby, I was invited to Moscow to one of the largest design organizations in the country in the automation department. Write plugins for Revit. The hobby “paid for itself”, though not soon

Reasoning

Now I have on my hands a rather unique product. Unlike similar and similar products:

1. I have the most original modern design
2. It is a quality site (for most of these projects, the site is just miserable)
3. Sophisticated and developed (not perfect of course) automatic update system
4. Practically unique principle of function submission (there is one more similar, but only under Revit. And, of course, foreign)
5. There are already regular users (some since the lisp version)

And it seems that here everything is in order to turn a hobby into a startup. But there are a couple of fly in the ointment:

1. I am alone. Just doing it all alone. At the same time, I clearly understand that if you find other coders, designers, etc., then the project may become even cooler. But it's hard for me to overcome myself in terms of “trusting someone” - yet for many years I did this alone
2. Money. Needed! Need to invest in advertising. Invest in various little things (literally today I paid the advance to the freelancer for the development of the logo). Invest in work on the site (I don’t rummage there, but there are problems and tasks)
3. Age. I'm already 32. Although here I probably bent with the problem
4. Fear. The most important problem of any startup is - what if it doesn't work out ?!
5. And the last - motivation! Here it is often not enough and you just want to throw it all to hell!

Question

I want to ask the question to both myself and the readers of my sayings - is it worth trying?
In fact, I will only invest in something that may never pay for itself. And you need a lot of money. And so many of them there.

Perhaps someone is reading this now and is breaking his head with exactly the same reasoning - I hope he will decide! While people like me are afraid

ZY If you read all this - thank you for your patience.