Shutting down profitable side projects
Have you ever been in situation where you shut down a side project while it was decently profitable ?
What were your reasons ( not proud of idea, type of business, product, etc ) and motivations ?
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not side project but the main project. 5 years ago I shut down my Ice Cream business. It only requires a small amount of my time and making healthy revenue.
That time, I was a naive guy and lack of experience. I shut down because I was not proud of it. If I back to 5 years ago, I will keep the business and pursue my dream without worrying about money. I regret it a lot.
Hi, guys!
At Failory (https://www.failory.com/), we write about entrepreneurs who shut down their profitable businesses (https://www.failory.com/interview-failure).
We've met with quite a few entrepreneurs who shared their lessons and provided some insightful thoughts about this matter.
If you know somebody that had run a profitable business, shut it down for some reason, and is willing to share his experience and knowledge, please do ping me at [email protected]. I'd be happy to conduct an interview and share interesting and helpful insights based on experience.
After all, it's all about learning from one another and sharing what has/not helped us along the way.
Thank you!
I let a few projects die because they took too much time and there was no way (or at that time i didnt know how) to automatize it. Mostly design mini projects.
I built a pay by instalments payment gateway called PayItLater in Australia, it was a copy of AfterPay (look it up, it's crazy).
I ran it for 6 months all by myself as a side project - with $20k invested I managed to pull out my original $20k + $10k of transaction fee profits.
Since it required capital to run, I couldn't grow it more because I didn't have more capital.
AfterPay is a unicorn in Australia now and launching in the US, so it hurts a little bit.
I shut it down because it wasn't making enough money for me to work on full time (with a young family etc) and I couldn't really work out how to raise money.
I remember to shutdown a really profitable website, just because I wanted to make another one, bigger and better...
In the end that idea worked for me, but now i know its just stupid to close profitable projects...
Yes, had to do because there was a lot of time spent on customer service and it was not feasible being an indie.
This can be tricky. We also have the issue with ImprovMX and will certainly hire a VA to help us at a low cost.