6 Months of an After-Work Side Project: Why I Eventually Shut It Down
Six months ago, I built a service that organizes reading notes with AI and released it gradually. In the end, I shut down the server last week. Here's a retrospective on the failure, and some lessons.
The biggest problem was that I didn't define the user. I vaguely targeted "people who like books," but that mixed together people in book clubs, people who only read self-help books, and people reading academic texts. Every time I set feature priorities, I kept wavering.
Second, I thought about monetization too late. After running it free for six months and then introducing paid plans, churn was high. I should have designed it with a pricing model in mind from the start.
Third, I tried to do everything alone. Juggling design, marketing, and customer support left me with less than two hours a day to write code.
Still, I definitely learned something. Next time, I'll start with just three features, add payments, and show it to 10 acquaintances first. I'll do it properly then.
7 answers
Agreed, not setting a target is seriously fatal.
10 acquaintances is a bit... they all just say it's good out of goodwill, so you often don't get real feedback. Isn't it better to put it out to strangers first?
I wasted a year on something similar, and in the end the problem wasn’t the tech—it was “who pays.” Turns out the right order is to decide the pricing structure before feature priorities.
Putting off monetization really stings ㅠㅠ I switched to showing the payment page first by month 3. The more free users pile up, the harder it is to turn things around later.
Well, I don’t think late monetization was the cause of the failure. If nobody was going to use it in the first place, it would’ve been the same no matter when it was added. The retrospective feels a bit like it’s reversing cause and effect.
Shutting down a server takes decisiveness too lol. Most people just leave it running.
I really relate to trying to do everything alone. I outsourced design and just dropped marketing entirely. At first I was anxious, but once I focused on code, my speed literally doubled. Trying to be good at everything and ending up good at nothing feels like the biggest trap of side projects.