If you have any inkling of working for yourself or putting out some software then you will never regret starting early. You will always think that you should have started earlier. But regardless of that you can always start at any point.
Think of it this way. Take a vacation, but for a year. It will be nothing like a vacation but it will look that way to a lot of other people. You will learn to live with that. Use this time to think and build something. You will pretty much be thinking about this project or business 24/7 for the next year. Think about what you’re going to build and think hard.
Figure out where your lane is. Are you a coder, are you an artist, do you build web apps, do you want to contribute to open source. Think about where your lane is and the pros and cons of staying in that lane versus going outside of it. Is it time to reinvent yourself? Is it time to recommit to your lane? Is this project small enough for one person, do I need a partner? If it’s not small enough, rescope, think hard. Is the idea too big, too grand, in a crowded market, in a market you have no business thinking you could impact on your own. Try to find someone else to bounce the ideas off of.
A quick story. Initially when we decided to write our own stuff we were brainstorming and it happen to be football season. As you can imagine the idea of making a fantasy football site sounded great. Solid idea, lots of users, lots of money there. Wrong. That just happened to be an easy idea that came to mind and brainstorming ideas is hard. Think harder. I try to tell myself that a lot, think harder.
Anyway, we had no business considering that idea since it’s way way out of our league. We could do the technical part but that’s not even close to making the business work as a whole. Anyway, we were able to salvage the technical part of all of it because it was your standard web stack and we put it to good use when we eventually came to our senses and built out more of Game Data Editor and now we are going to roll out GDEOnline. The moral of the story I guess is think hard and start early.