Have you ever built a whole feature only to realize nobody actually cared?

I used to fall into the trap of spending weeks polishing a feature just because I thought it looked cool on paper without ever checking if users actually felt the pain point. One time I showed a quick prototype to a user right before coding it, and they flat out told me they already solved that exact problem using a basic spreadsheet template. It hurt my ego for a minute but it saved me from wasting days on code nobody wanted.

Do you show your raw ideas to users early on or do you prefer building the whole thing in secret first?