Retrospective: Shutting Down a Side Project After 3 Months
I officially shut down the side project I'd been working on after work and every weekend. At first I thought, "If this works, it could be pretty useful," but looking back three months later, the code was 60% complete and I had zero users.
The biggest problem was my appetite for features. I thought I was building an MVP, but looking at it now, it wasn't an MVP—it was just a pile of everything I wanted to build. It wasn't until I'd built login, payments, and an admin page that I thought, "What was the core feature again?"
- Starting to code right away without a spec
- Not showing it to a single acquaintance, let alone doing user interviews
- Spending two days on deployment automation (I should have deployed first)
Next time, I've decided to start with a landing page and add payments later. For now, I'm not going to do anything this weekend. Seriously.
9 answers
60% in three months is honestly pretty fast, isn't it? Most fizzle out around 30%. So the problem wasn't speed—it was direction.
This is true lol — I've also killed a project while building an admin page.