I had a "big" ambition at first: a tailored CMS, plus CRM, that will fit well within the "niche" business model of bike rental and sale for traveling… The project will be able to earn me some pocket money from it sales for the shops that I knew… Basically you understood it: a wide scope, along with an uncertain money earning model, and the long run that burns people out. The lessons that I learned was:
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Define your purpose, and your scope. Do it as soon as possible. Do it before you start any planing, or design, or coding. Ask someone you trust about the worthiness of the project.
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Be sure that the project can interest you for a time, financially, or non-financially, which leads to the next point:
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For a solo developer, find something small and feasible (a Minimum Viable Product can be released in less than 1 month full-time, and less than 3 months part-time).
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If you are learning something new in the process, multiply the number by 1.5 (or by 2 at maximum). Anything that takes too long to finish without earning you any money has big risks of burning you out.
I really did not have a lot of thoughts when I choose my technical stack:
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Tailwind CSS was chosen since it is a lot more customizable than Bootstrap or anything else, and a tad better than plain CSS
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Angular was chosen since it looks like the "hardest" Javascript framework to use
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.NET Core was chosen since I had a few times working with C# and WinForms, and wanted to see how it runs on Linux
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MariaDB was chosen since I worked with PostgresQL, and wanted to see how MySQL works, and also wanted a mix into my data
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Caddy was chosen since I wanted the deployment to be simple and easy
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Docker Compose was chosen since I also wanted the deployment to be simple and easy
What was right, your guess?