Prime example. A friend of mine over the Christmas break was noodling around that he wants to get back into forums. He was doing it years ago - before me - and he misses working on forums. Like me, he spent time playing around building things to help forums rather than running the forums themselves.
He was talking about doing a whole new forum software, and I'm intrigued, but what he's got in mind is really... more of what we already have.
Now, I have ideas. I have ideas that if I could pull them off, would probably shake the foundations of the forum world in some way because they are quite radical, quite out there - dig back in the forums on simplemachines.org and wedge.org and you'll find me suggesting ideas 10 years ago that no-one was doing then but are now common-place.
But I don't have the guts to give it a go because I'm afraid that it'll end up being a thing no-one wants. I'm scared it's too distant from the classical forum crowd to appeal to the forum folk, and too unlike the other things to draw the non-forum folk in.
But I have ideas. I have some vague screen mockups - and I even have someone who would help me do it, if only I weren't so unsure of myself after being bitten multiple times with the whole forum thing.