Throughout the years I’ve started numerous online side-projects and the bulk of them are no longer around, and no longer in mind. Given the fact that I can code, design, and promote my work myself, there is really nothing holding me back from starting up just about anything that tickles my fancy at the moment.
While starting them up might be easy, shutting them down isn’t always that simple for me. Over the years I’ve noticed there is a set of signals when it’s time to kill a project:
- When you’ve given it your all and haven’t reaped any reward. This was the case for many of my first projects, I’d build, I’d connect, and in the end, there was really nothing in it for me other than the fun. When the fun was gone, so was my interest and in turn, the plug would be pulled.
- When you simply don’t have the time. My last part-time blog –so to speak, fell victim to this. Not having the time to devote to a project simply means it should be killed. If you have an active community on the site, you can consider handing over administrative power to worthy users.
- When I just doesn’t feel right. Sometimes something seems fun for a while, but it wears off and you’re left with a project that you really aren’t that into anymore. Dragging your feet to keep it going isn’t worth it.
Over the years a lot of my projects have gone the way of the dinosaur, sometimes getting rid of them and moving on isn’t easy. I have blank and parked domains that I can’t bear to let go of just yet. I also have ideas that have come to me in hindsight which make me wish I could do it all again –and I get temped to, but I know right now is not the time. As I drawn down on my online side projects I look forward to having some fun in the future, but for now I’m finding myself more drawn to keeping this blog as active as humanly possible –after all, there is always time to start things up later.
I hear you. I have an abandoned blogger account somewhere and a few old webcomics at orangefuel.com. The morale of the story I think is that generating unique and worthy content is just very tough. I usually stopped all those projects because of my busy life and because they were more of a proof-of-concept comics with a bunch of inside jokes that wouldn’t make much sense to most people. In the end I suppose you must strike some good balance between having a fun online project, a good user following and enough time to come up with noteworthy content. No easy task, when are you supposed to do all the other stuff in your life?!