2 builders who never spoke to each other

Pause the project rather than close it

Where hosting and support are cheap, leaving something dormant costs almost nothing and keeps the option open, so default to pausing rather than shutting down. Decide early whether a launch earned enough to justify more effort and treat a weak result as permission to move on, then run several projects in sequence so you learn by contrast what a real hit feels like against a miss.

The method

1. 01

   Default to pausing a project rather than shutting it down, provided keeping it alive is cheap in hosting and support.

2. 02

   Decide early whether a launch earns enough to justify more effort, and take a weak result as permission to move to the next idea.

3. 03

   Launch several projects in sequence so you learn by contrast what a real hit feels like against a miss.

4. 04

   When several launches produce different results, compare the shape of demand behind each rather than pouring more work into the one that stalled.

What it returned

• 2011

  Taylor Otwell's first paid product in 2011 was an invoice manager for lawn companies called Coin Fly; he and a partner shipped it, used it themselves, and nobody else signed up. Three years later Forge had roughly a thousand customers within a month.

• Of roughly twenty projects Zue built in a decade only three succeeded, but most still exist because he pauses instead of killing them.

Sources

• From 0 to $1m challengeFlorin Pop · florin-pop.com · How do I plan to make money? · 2024-08-28
• When should you quit?Justin Jackson · justinjackson.ca · Experience is a good teacher · undated
• Why didn't my project take off?Justin Jackson · justinjackson.ca · Why didn't my project take off? · undated
• Quit Monkey, Grit MonkeyCory Zue · coryzue.com · Take a break · 2023-02-28