Give me total failure over half-assed wins

Or why you don't want a product that’s neither a huge success or a complete failure

Whats worse than a product that totally and clearly flopped?

A product that’s neither a huge success or a total failure. Slow growth. Getting revenue but not enough to survive on, yet not neglible either.

Because when you get zero customers, it’s a clear signal you either need to pivot, or you need to scrap it and focus on something else. But with a half-assed success or failure, you get mixed signals, tainted with hope and bias of wanting it to work. You’ll continue to invest time and energy into it, thinking it’ll work out eventually. You just need “impatience with action, patience with results”. Maybe it does eventually, after years, a decade. It works if you got enough runway of cash, time and motivation. It’s more likely that it doesn’t work out, or you simply run out of juice.

True story.

I held out for two years before finally deciding to do set that project aside as a side project, to build it slowly while I focused on other projects that moved the needle. I was so relieved I finally did that. Because that lost time is more painful than anything.

These days, my indie hacker serenity prayer is not to pray for huge success, but to ask for total failure if it’s not meant to be. With a 8.5% hit rate or less, it’s fair to say, asking for total failure is a safer, better bet.

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