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18 Comments

What do you all do with dead/failed projects?

Might be too a general a question as each one is different but what do you do with a project when it fails/you give up?

Do you let it rot, or do you try and extrapolate value somehow?

  1. 2

    My approach is creating a boilerplate system structure BEFORE creating any of those projects. So, even if they fail, about 80% are still able to be reused later.

    It also helps in terms of team members... because once they figure out how to use that boilerplate, the productivity is great.

    Currently, besides my fintech (no revenue so far =( ), I have a fully automated project (avg 300 CAD/mo). Not a huge success, but also ... why kill it? It is stills generating passive income (about 30 min/week maintenance).

  2. 2

    I showcase them on my portfolio. No shame.

    Who cares if I didn’t gain money. I gained experience and that’s what matters.

  3. 2

    Sometimes we let it rot, but we usually try to sell our dead projects. If you not sell them, they will cost you a fortune in maintenance (time and money).

    If you look at the big players like Google, they constantly just drop (delete) failed projects, because of maintenance costs and focus.

    1. 2

      where do you sell them?

      1. 2

        Sedo, NamePros... sometimes Flippa (but it's risky because of many scammers there)

        1. 1

          Sedo and NamePros are for domain names no?

  4. 2

    Hi Liam,

    For me as a tech founder, when some product doesn't work, I just reuse the codebase for the next project.

    A failed experience is always a success, because it makes you think, makes you analyze, makes you wonder what didn't work.

    When something is successfull you are mostly enjoy it and not learning.

    My takeway, there is always value to exprapolate.

    1. 2

      Yeah, this is why I never sell my dust-gathering projects. There are so many reusable code-snippets and hundreds of hours of integration code in there, I wouldn't want others to figure out how I do my other projects.

    2. 1

      Agree with you that theres always value

  5. 1

    Don't ever delete them, you never know when a good chunk of it can be recycled. Sometimes the data is valuable, sometimes the code is...

  6. 1

    Sometimes you need to let go. We decided to shut down our first project, called Emvi (which is also our company name). I wrote a short Twitter thread about some of the reasons here: https://twitter.com/emvi/status/1406292847960133635

    Something that really bothers me though, is that we have 50-60 active users that somewhat rely on it. So even after it didn't make any money, I still feel responsible for that. The good part about it is, that we can re-use our domain for our company website and sell our services. Our second product (Pirsch Analytics) is doing much better, and I recommend to choose a different name/domain for your product and separate it from your company.

  7. 1

    I donated one of them to another IH.
    Others are just rotting, or used to get pieces of code

  8. 1

    I reuse some of the code if I can.

    But that's about it.

  9. 1

    Only ever tried to get value by writing down learnings as reference for future projects or as a start if I get renewed motivation to pick up the project again.

  10. 1

    I don’t know if this helps if you’re trying to sell or not but microacquire requires revenue if you want to sell with them.

  11. 1

    Tried selling a few on Side Projectors. But the rest are sitting in cold storage.

    Are you looking to sell your failed project?

    1. 1

      Curious more than anything.

      I have several dead projects that I couldn't make work or realised I wasn't interested in. But they just gather dust and I wondered what others did.

      They were mostly pre-revenue so hard to justify a sale

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