Let it cook

Don't shut down your projects too quickly... sometimes the right time comes much later

The current conventional wisdom of shipping products is to shut it down quickly if there’s no growth/customers within a few months.

Move fast and kill your babies?

Ship fast, yes. But no need to shut it down. Especially if it costs little or nothing to maintain. Sometimes right time comes much later.

Like how Pieter Levels does it:

Started to monetize ✈️ AirlineList.com with Airline List Pro. I started the site 4 years ago, and especially now with the live luggage data it seems worth to pay for. The easiest step to monetize it I think is tying it to a Nomad List membership ($100) for now. The [ Join Nomad List ] button links to Nomad List and if you’re signed in there it sends you straight back to Airline List with a ?hash= that is checked and lets you use Airline List Pro – @levelsio

The “started 4 years ago” bit is understated. Love that he let it simmer that long.

An opportunity comes later and bam, monetize.

Sometimes the project just needs time to climb up page rankings. Let it compound. Especially if the product and market is validated already, and it’s just about carving out a slice of the market by improving SEO (which takes time). This definitely happened to me more than once - for Carrd plugins, and Keto List Singapore.

Working against this is the popular bias is that if your product doesn’t go instantly viral, then kill it and move on to the next shiny thing in their “12 startups in 12 months” list.

TBH I’m all for 12 startups in 12 months, but it’s a fine line between trying many things to see what sticks, versus shiny object syndrome. Former is a about increasing your surface area for luck. Latter is just gratification.

And another thing: Moving on to next thing ≠ shutting down.

If the attention needed is minimal, like 1h per week or few hours per month, why not? For all the effort put in to build it, seems like a waste to just shut it down if the maintenance needed is minimal or near zero. Just stopping developing it, put it on pause but let it self-run. Or you could just automate the time-consuming bits, or declare self-help for support.

“But it’s distracting! I want to just focus on one thing.”

Don’t mistake your subjective personal need for a single track mind for what’s objectively good for the business. Hot take: You just need to be more organised, know how to prioritise things better, and be selectively incompetent for the rest.

Leave it be. Simmer it. Maybe it might become the hit product you’re looking for one day.

Let it cook.

---