Today, I decided to kill my side project.

I didn't work on it in the past 3-4 months, possibly even longer.

When I started this project, I did it because I had an urge to create something that wasn't fulfilled at my day job. At first I was really motivated and worked on it every evening. At some point, life got in the way, momentum was broken. I started to skip days here and there. The first thing I knew, I stopped working on the project altogether.

Asides from life getting in the way, I feel like there are a few things I got wrong with this project which might also explain the loss of motivation to continue. I'm mentioning them here so maybe the community can learn from it.

##Here's what I got wrong:

I had no clear path to monetization

The idea for this project was to offer marketing prompt and ideas for indie builders.

You would get 4 new ones each day. With those prompts, they would get out of their comfort zone by doing a little bit of marketing each day to gain traction for their projects.

However, I had no idea how much I could charge for something like this. With subscription fatigue, I don't feel like I could have gone for a monthly, or even a yearly membership.

I don't have the time to build/manage/market a SaaS

I have a full time job, a girlfriend, two young daughters and a house to take care of. Building a SaaS requires time commitments and sacrifices that I'm not ready to make.

I might revisit this in a few years, but now is not the right time.

I should have gone with an info product

Looking back at what I built, I definitely should have gone for an info product on Gumroad instead.

A list of marketing prompts in a document, maybe a google sheets or a PDF would have been better than making a SaaS. With the amount of time I spent on the development and VPS setup, I would probably have a been able to build a complete product.

The product was not a good fit for my skills

While I understand how marketing works, I am not a specialist. I realized this when I saw @sophia_oneal' Tangram project.

For her project, the vision and the execution are there. This was critically missing from mine.

However, there are a few things I got right

The problem

While my approach wasn't the right one, this problem impacts enough people to make it worthwhile to build something in that space.

The community (here and on Twitter)

I started to interact with people on Twitter, made some great connections with people that build in public.

I also had some pretty interesting discussions on the forums here.

In conclusion

As for myself, some changes happened at my day job and I'm getting to build some amazing stuff. I'm working on a project that's bigger and more challenging than any other projects I've had the opportunity to work on previously. This means I no longer have that urge to create during my free time.

So while I'm not building anything for the time being, I'll still lurk around here and keep track of what other Indies are building. I wish you luck on your various projects.