How do you stay patient when you have 0 users and $0 revenue?

I’m actually asking because I’m starting to struggle with this.
I’ve been building my product for a while now. The product works, I keep improving it, I’ve put it in front of people, but getting people to actually use it consistently is a completely different problem.

And the money part... still $0 MRR.
I knew it wouldn't happen overnight, but there’s something mentally difficult about spending weeks building something and then opening your dashboard and seeing almost nothing.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m doing something wrong.

Then I look around online and it feels like everyone is launching something every other week and getting hundreds of users immediately.

Maybe that's just the internet making everything look easier than it is. I’m also starting to wonder if AI has made distribution harder.

Before all these AI coding tools, being able to build software was a real advantage. If you were a good developer, there were fewer people who could actually build the thing.

Now almost anyone can build something. So the bottleneck has moved.

There are thousands of products launching, thousands of founders posting about them, and everyone is fighting for the same few seconds of attention.

I wasn't around for the early SaaS days, so maybe I'm romanticizing it, but it seems like there was a time when being able to build a good product was enough to get some attention.

Now I can build the product. Getting someone to care about it feels harder.

For the solo founders who have been through the 0 users → first 10 → first $1K MRR stage, how did you keep yourself going?

Was there a point where you realized “this is normal, I just need to keep going”?
Or did you eventually realize you were working on something nobody actually wanted?
I’m trying to figure out the difference before I waste six months being “patient” with the wrong thing.