After 6 Months on an After-Work Side Project, I Finally Gave It Up
I put in 2 hours every day. 6 hours on weekends. The result: 200 users, 0 won in revenue.
The first two months were fun. I learned a lot technically, and for the first time, I deployed something on my own. But starting in the third month, problems began to show up little by little.
The biggest problem was that I kept changing the product plan. Whenever one user gave feedback, I tore everything apart and rebuilt it to match, and because of that, nothing ever got finished. In hindsight, I should have set one clear goal and stuck with only that for three months.
The second was not doing any marketing. I thought that if I just wrote code, people would come, but no one uses a service no one knows about. In the end, I spent more time in the last two months on promotion than on development, but it was already too late.
The third is health. Over six months, my back and wrists got completely wrecked. You have to exercise alongside it to keep going.
I don't regret it because I learned a lot. But I'm now certain that I won't do it this way next time.
8 answers
Agreed—if you don't do marketing, literally no one knows... I've been realizing that myself for 3 years now.
With 200 users, isn't that pretty good for doing it alone? The zero revenue is a shame, but it doesn't seem like a failure.
Constantly changing the plan is truly fatal. I did the opposite—ignored all feedback and pushed forward for a year, and that also failed in its own way. Ultimately, it comes down to criteria: just asking yourself, 'Does this feedback shake my core hypothesis?' will filter out half of them. Next time, try locking in goals in 3-month increments and just piling all other requests into the backlog.