After reading almost all the above, I also wish to say something here.
In 2017, I was almost broke. But I was adamant to build some online community for my local district (Bathinda, Punjab, India). Before that, I ran a successful and very clean WhatsApp group of nearly 300 members.
So even in the time of some financial crunch, I started building a website based on this wonderful software - Discourse. But learning it for me wasn’t easy. I was 48 in 2017, and my memory was, and is, very very very poor. I can’t dial a number on my mobile after reading it from the computer screen in one go. I’ve to read the 10-digit number at least two times to be 100% sure that I’m dialing correctly.
So despite these two huge problems, financial crunch (that includes my need to provide for our family of four), and memory issues, I kept on learning to keep it working. And soon I realized that I’ve spent nearly two years just to make this website of mine run properly and on its own. I.e., for a full two years, I kept tuning it and learning it. Before this, I had never heard of cloud computing or knew what a VPS was, although I was a Power User of Windows and knew local networking concepts.
And now after seven years, my website is still running, and without a single rupee’s earning, I’m spending INR 1000 (USD 13) on it every month! But I’m 100% sure, one day it’ll get traction. Maybe that will take another 5-7 years.
Note: My financial position improved a bit after 2021 after my unmarried daughter got a government job, and she managed to fund me for a retail cycle shop, which I’m running right now (Bobby Cycles).
P.S. Perhaps I would have quit learning to build a Discourse-based website in 2019 or 2020, had there not been two people around/helping users in the community: @pfaffman and @itsbhanusharma (he’s much nearer to me geographically).
Ps2: Today I’ve just under 1k daily page views (crawlers excluded). And I do believe that one day this website will be as famous in my local district/city as I think it should be.