What I Took Away from Shutting Down a Side Project After 6 Months
Last winter I started a side project, and last week I officially shut it down. At first I kept at it every weekend thinking, "If this works, it could actually be really useful," but in the end there was no traffic, so I wrapped it up.
Honestly, I think I spent more time revising the planning doc than writing code. To add a single feature, I'd write requirements in Notion, draw wireframes, tear it all down and start over... I wasn't sure if I was developing or what.
So here's what I have left—just two things.
- The conviction that Next.js + Supabase can cover pretty much any service
- A deployment automation script (I built this really well, so I'll use it again on my next project)
If you ask whether I regret burning 6 months on a service with zero users, half of me does and half of me doesn't. Anyway, I'm going to rest for about a week and then start thinking about the next one.
6 answers
Got a source? Isn’t “Next.js + Supabase covers pretty much everything” a bit of an overgeneralization? Once you scale up, you hit the limits of Supabase’s free tier almost immediately.
Oh, I didn’t know this. I totally relate to spending more time on the planning doc. I’ve often spent a week deciding on a single feature, only for the actual implementation to take half a day.
Agreed, these kinds of posts are the most realistic. They’re rare in a community where only success stories get posted.
But if there were zero users for six months, I’m more curious why they kept sticking with it in the meantime. Wouldn’t you get a sense after a month or two that traffic isn’t coming? I mean, that’s a bit... unless they made it for their own satisfaction, I guess.
I did something similar for 8 months and then quit, but after quitting, my next project actually picked up speed right away. Leaving behind the deployment script was a really smart move lol. I didn’t keep anything like that, so I had to rebuild it from scratch later. Next time, definitely put a timebox on the planning phase. If a Notion doc goes past 3 days, it’s better to just start coding.
Six months is that ambiguous stretch—neither short nor long—but you summed it up well. Once you clear your head during the week off, the next idea tends to come surprisingly quickly. Nice work.