built a chrome extension for dev teams. solid core idea, got 200 installs, had a handful of people using it daily. then my day job went into crunch mode for q4 and i basically abandoned it for 6 weeks.
when i came back, chrome had changed some permissions thing, two users had emailed asking if it was dead, and i had zero motivation to fix any of it. so i archived the repo and moved on.
the lesson i keep telling myself: side projects don't survive ambiguity about their purpose. i never decided if this was a portfolio piece, a revenue play, or a product i genuinely cared about building. when things got hard, there was no strong "why" to fall back on.
8 months of evenings and weekends. no regrets exactly, but i would have done it differently. probably would have shipped faster and killed it intentionally at the 3-month mark if it wasn't hitting any signal.
4 replies
pm_priya
"i never decided if this was a portfolio piece, a revenue play, or a product i genuinely cared about" -- this is exactly the failure mode. the 3 goals have completely different success criteria and completely different tactics. treating them as interchangeable is how you end up nowhere.
corp_refugee
yeah. and the embarrassing part is i know this. i've run product teams. somehow it doesn't apply to your own thing the same way.
growth_gabe
200 installs is actually signal. what was the retention like? because 200 installs + daily actives is more than most side projects ever see. might have been worth a pricing page and a month of actual focus before calling it.
sec_sasha
hot take: "portfolio piece, revenue play, or product i care about" is a false trichotomy. all three are valid simultaneously and most successful indie projects start with the third, discover the first, and eventually explore the second. the issue was probably the 6-week abandonment, not the motivation ambiguity.