A community to share your failed projects

So, it's official. I'm shutting down another one of my projects that I've spent the last 6 months on. It's the 4th one I've had to cancel in the last 2 years.

It's incredibly difficult shutting your project down, but I think there's a silver lining. It's better to end something soon and move on than to continue with it even though you know it has no future. However, here's the big problem: how can you find data to validate shutting it down or to keep on going.

There's multiple inputs you can trust: traction, potential market size, conversations with customers, etc. But I've found that there's another tactic that works best. It's to speak with other founders who have done something similar and either moved on or pivoted to something else.

The community of indie hackers/founders is extremely helpful and any conversation I've had with another founder in my market has been very supportive. Not only do you learn an incredible amount from their stories, you've been in each other's shoes which makes the conversation highly empathetic. Sometimes you end the call with another ally, or potentially, a new collaborator.

For my last project, I felt that something was off with customer conversations and I reached out to one of the main "competitors" in the space I was trying to tackle. They immediately replied to schedule a call for the day after and we ended up speaking for a total of 4 hours. They were completely transparent and validated all my hypothesizes of the market.

At the end of the call, we both promised to keep in touch with the likelihood of combining our tech to pivot to something else. It was that rewarding experience that led me to this post. I realized that I wanted to share my learnings from my past projects so that other founders might be successful where I was not.

I don't know what's the best way to share my experiences, so I figured I would start by posting here to see if there are any others who would want to participate. If you'd like to share your experiences, I've made a Discord server where we can discuss. Here's a link to it: Fail Fast Discord Server

Thanks for taking the time to read this far. I've had amazing experiences with the community in the past and I felt it was my time to try and give back. Happy hacking everyone!