I killed my side projects - clean slate

I have recently shut down the indie products I’ve been accumulating over the years, RIP:

redeal.app - real estate investment calculator - inspired by bigger pockets, initially scraping daft (irish real estate listing website)
invertimo.com - investment tracking and bookkeeping (open source), useful for stocks, funds or any sort of crypto assets if multiple exchanges/etc are used, was integrated with degiro, interactive brokers and binance… + manual uploads
watchlimits.com (that is partially alive as the last version is still available in the chrome store, but the ‘premium features’ won’t be working) - a productivity extension helping with excessive video watching online

I lost motivation to work on these projects, they were either in zombie stage (Redeal/Invertimo) or in somewhat alive stage (watchlimits), but little momentum or financial potential. I would occasionally get some support/feature requests for watchlimits, but I didn’t want to throw good money after bad (in terms of my productive project time).

And there were also server costs and upkeep costs of my time to get everything running smoothly and securely. Additionally there was guilt from not providing a good product experience as I wasn’t motivated to deliver fixes or improvements.

So I pulled the plug! Servers turned down. I didn’t bother in open sourcing closed source stuff or selling the projects.

Joy of creating vs burden of maintaining

There are people who are great builders and there are people who are great operators (or maintainers or gardeners). I am a capable operator, but it has to be related to something that I really believe in. I’m not internally motivated by the activity itself. While I can create stuff, just for the joy of creating.

I had a pretty strong creative impulse to build side projects over the years. I had a dream of having my software company for some time, but it’s a pretty difficult task. I also didn’t have very good opportunities to build products e2e at work, so building complete products as side projects was a good outlet. It was a nice way to experiment with UX, tech, product design, marketing - all on the side of working in a pretty demanding job.

And I was somewhat successful, because I delivered 3 project MVPs - Redeal (real estate investment), Invertimo (stock investment tracking and book keeping), Watchlimits (productivity chrome extension). All got some users who found value in it. With watchlimits getting some payments and reaching almost 1k of free active users (and more installs).

I learned quite a lot about building a product, getting feedback, marketing, I got confidence in the fact that I can build stuff - even if part time and it could be better it was good enough to execute the vision, the technical side was never a blocker for my projects.

But what these projects had in common was that they had very little potential or momentum to become profitable. I also wasn’t that passionate about any of the topics. The itch was scratched, the products remained alive, but they were pretty much in zombie mode.

Why didn’t I shut down the projects the moment I stopped believing in them?

Cleanup is work and it’s somewhat tedious
Emotional attachment

To properly unwind the project I would have to put in quite a lot of hours and I am chronically overscheduled - even if it’s a spontaneous week of windsurfing - it’s hard to fit in a bunch of productive project hours for a thing that I don’t really want to do. It’s very easy to procrastinate.

And there is an emotional load of killing your baby, even if you stopped caring about the baby - you feel bad about both not caring about your baby and then killing your baby project.

Clinging after stopped developing

Some thoughts that were at the back of my mind:

“Maybe it will still work out?”
“Maybe I will feel like working on it again?”
“It’s proof that I can build things and release things, right?”
“What will people who observed my journey think?”
“It’s not expensive to keep around… some people have value from it”

I never had any solid conviction in my project watchlimits. From the start it was “let’s do this as a learning project and carry on working on it until I feel like it or find a better thing to work on”. It started during a hackathon. I had a strong desire to have a project to work on, but finding the right idea was hard, talking to prospective customers was hard, so I did what I knew how to do… jumped into the building process.

Doing back of the napkin calculations only confirmed my hunches. It was very unlikely that the project was financially viable. But I tried! I tried a lot of stuff and I learned pretty well how it feels to release a product with little financial traction.

After I couldn’t really convert people to paid, I made the ‘premium’ features free. It was somewhat disheartening that after I put effort into building the premium features almost no one was using it. After opening the features, people did actually find value in them and it was making me happy for a while.

And the user base has grown roughly from a hundred to about 1k active users and they started giving me more and more requests and at some point I just stopped working on it entirely. My heart wasn’t in it.

Moving on

It feels good to have a clean slate. The limbo of “it’s still somewhat alive, but I don’t want to work on it” was taking a toll on me. I want to spend time on projects that I find interesting, exciting, or are related to some important goal to me.

I am still happy I build those side projects, I got a lot out of it:

Experience - knowing that you can do something and having feelings of competence are very important - they reduce the activation energy for starting new projects
Codebases - I can look up old solutions to common problems - having boilerplates is very valuable as it can make me go from idea to production faster
Blog posts - some distilled knowledge and signal of expertise

Now without the small infrastructure burden and a slightly bigger psychological burden, I am freer to pick up new stuff. Wish me luck!