Ask HN: What happened to your first few projects?

I've worked on several side projects over the last year or so, and I keep seeing ideas that're practically the same as those I'm working on having been fully implemented a few weeks after I've started. I'm not losing heart, and I'm taking this as a positive sign that I'm going in the right direction (albeit a little too slowly) - but it's made me interested in how common this is, especially among people who have many successful side projects a few years on.

How did your first few projects fail (if they did), and do projects still fail for the reasons I described above?