What do you do with your "failed" projects?
Hey everyone,
I am sure most of us have projects which just don't make it because of reasons like poor response, losing the motivation to continue or any other reason.
Do you consider them "failed"? If so, What do you do with those projects?
P.S. Writing this 3rd time because a bug was truncating all the content!
I write my code as reusable as possible so I can share it for future projects.
I never write code that goes to waste.
That's a smart way. But what about the project? Do you just leave them behind?
@sergio You are right. This is something which I find very hard to get hold of. But as soon as we learn it, it's better for us.
Took me a few years, but now I don't consider them failed from all points of view. We learn valuable lessons even from the projects we're not happy how they turned out, or we didn't manage to monetize or whatever.
Some projects I buried and let the domains expire, some I sold — sometimes for not enough money to justify the amount of hours I put into them.
They say "one man's meat is another man's porridge". Just because I didn't succeed in growing or monetizing them, doesn't mean other people can't do a better job than me with the same project. I still prefer to sell for less rather than kill them, and I don't feel bad when the buyers succeded with my project. I sometimes wish they paid me in marketing lessons 😄
Whatever you choose to do (bury or sell), don't hold on to projects that eat up your time but don't bring you revenue or satisfaction, ideally both. :)
What a fine answer, Alina. This is actually some great advice for makers. One of my active project's domain is going to expire very soon and I have been holding onto it for 4+ years but now I feel it's just eating up my time. Maybe, letting go of it can be the answer.
What I think I'll do when I want to shutdown a project is to take the whole project, cut off all paid APIs and put it on a free server, or a server for all my shutdown projects and host it on my personal domain. Can be pretty nice to be able to have an interactive version for your portfolio.
Also, @sergio's advice: making code reusable. I always keep all of them backed up to github, so I can take a peek at my code to see how I can solve a problem I've already solved in another project.
So you are saying to keep it alive by adding it on like a sub-domain of your personal website? I like the idea of keeping them as an addition to your portfolio.
I would say , think of your project will be in future to be Open Source… this will motivate you to make your code as readeble as can , awesome doc as can , and you want it to get more collaboration as many as can.. cool right…
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