Give your side project the farewell it deserves
I've been thinking of finally restarting the work on sideproject.fail which I was postponing for years.
The problem:
- As almost every other indie hacker, I have a graveyard of dead or unfinished side projects. Some of them I didn't finish because of lack of motivation, some because I found out it was already implemented, others were finished but never got popular and died. Sometimes other responsibilities were blocking the way.
- Those projects are slowly rotting in my Github. I think each of this projects is a new step in my technical and personal development and it is sad that we as indie hackers often do not share what problems we had, why we did certain things and what we learned.
- Additionally, we often give up very early or are just paralyzed by doubt.
The idea:
- Create a place to share our small "failed" and weird indie projects. (No million-dollar startup catastrophes).
- Each project has as much info as possible: idea, technical info, repositories, budget, current state, lessons learned, duplicates, ets.
- Each project could either be revived or users can clearly vote to bury it forever.
- Users shall be able to comment and collaborate to revive old projects.
- Weekly newsletter with new fails.
What do you think? If you like the idea go to sideproject.fail and subscribe. Thank you!
Subscribed!
I have this old idea in my idea notes
“Failedprojects - learn from others mistakes”
Not sure how I feel about it...
but interested enough to subscribe!
Its funny, I have almost the same idea sitting in my backlog.
I have so many failing side projects I would love to share my experience with. Looking forward to see what you will build.
(btw, I don't get the email checkbox on the landing page! email is the only option anyway)
About the checkbox: that's MailChimp's interpretation of GDPR regulations...
Hi @batkir!
That's quite an original idea! I personally also have a whole graveyard of failed projects.
I guess I could be coming on a regular basis to visit your website if the info on these failures were like super easy and quick to digest.
For example, your homepage could display a list of failures with a great emphasis on what the project was (in three words), why it failed (main reason, like lack of motivation, lack of validation, ...) and the lesson learned.
I could also use a newsletter like this (bi-weekly or monthly), reminding me of the typical mistakes and how to avoid them.
Did I capture your idea correctly?
Exactly! It should easy and fun to read. And I really want to have voting to "revive" or "bury" the project.
Nice idea! I had a similar idea once, for half-baked designs. I.e., designs which never made it past the finishing post, either because another design proposal was chosen or the project was abandonded altogether.
I'm wondering, will this allow other users to take over the project, or will it be for the original author to share his lessons, and perhaps find a way to restart it?
One site, which kind of does what you propose, is Failory - although, I think your idea would be more user driven.
Failory is great and there is a lot to learn from their interviews. They focus more on interviews with failed startup founders.
As you said sideproject.fail would be user driven and hopefully could be really fun and maybe trigger some collaborations or restart projects.
Nice to bid them farewell. All part of our learning experiences.
I like that.
As anyone else, I have a whole catalogue of unsuccessful projects.