Day 684 - Hoarding is good - https://golifelog.com/posts/hoarding-is-good-1668466201806
I’m probably weird for doing this… but I like keep my projects alive forever. But always felt peer influenced to abandon it in order to “focus”. If the costs on your attention is zero, do you need to kill it? If the financial costs and effort for maintenance or tech support is low to zero, I just keep them on. Because you’ll never know if the growth opportunity can come later. Sometimes the product failed because it was before its time. Maybe at a later time, the market or something about it will trend and it will get successful then.
I’ve personally experienced this twice.
The Grant Hunt bot was a social impact project I made early on in my indie journey. It’s a directory of local social impact grants that non-profits can search on to find grants to fund their social good programmes. I made it, it didn’t quite get popular or viral, and then I just left it alone for a few years, no coding, no marketing it. Then later when the pandemic arrived, a philanthropic funder wanted to fund it to be updated to the latest grants so that non-profits can benefit during that time of crisis. If I had killed it early, I wouldn’t have had that chance to revive it for the pandemic!
The other project was Sheet2Bio. Truth is, Sheet2bio was like the third iteration of an idea. It started with me making a Carrd plugin that pulled data from a Google Sheet to display some data and charts. I left it there after making it for fun. Then after talking to a friend in F&B, that evolved into Restobio, a bio link contact page for the F&B industry. Restaurants could update their Google Sheet easily that then updates the contact bio link page to share important links to their website, order page and social media pages. I built out 1 bio link page for 1 local restaurant. But I wasn’t from the F&B industry, so I didn’t know how to market or grow it, so it went cold. But I kept it alive and left it alone. Finally, early this year I had an idea to make a Google Sheet version of the personal bio link page, and launched it. Got many users, and 1-2 paid ones. Wasn’t a great success, but it fared better after 3 pivots! Who knows what the next iteration will bring!
So moral of the story:
Hoarding is good.
Hoard your projects, if costs are low. Let it lie low and wait for the ripe opportunity to pounce back to life.
They say, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. But you can’t take the shot if you killed it too early.
I’ve personally experienced this twice.
The Grant Hunt bot was a social impact project I made early on in my indie journey. It’s a directory of local social impact grants that non-profits can search on to find grants to fund their social good programmes. I made it, it didn’t quite get popular or viral, and then I just left it alone for a few years, no coding, no marketing it. Then later when the pandemic arrived, a philanthropic funder wanted to fund it to be updated to the latest grants so that non-profits can benefit during that time of crisis. If I had killed it early, I wouldn’t have had that chance to revive it for the pandemic!
The other project was Sheet2Bio. Truth is, Sheet2bio was like the third iteration of an idea. It started with me making a Carrd plugin that pulled data from a Google Sheet to display some data and charts. I left it there after making it for fun. Then after talking to a friend in F&B, that evolved into Restobio, a bio link contact page for the F&B industry. Restaurants could update their Google Sheet easily that then updates the contact bio link page to share important links to their website, order page and social media pages. I built out 1 bio link page for 1 local restaurant. But I wasn’t from the F&B industry, so I didn’t know how to market or grow it, so it went cold. But I kept it alive and left it alone. Finally, early this year I had an idea to make a Google Sheet version of the personal bio link page, and launched it. Got many users, and 1-2 paid ones. Wasn’t a great success, but it fared better after 3 pivots! Who knows what the next iteration will bring!
So moral of the story:
Hoarding is good.
Hoard your projects, if costs are low. Let it lie low and wait for the ripe opportunity to pounce back to life.
They say, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. But you can’t take the shot if you killed it too early.