Side projects don’t need users, they need lessons

Every developer has the graveyard. The repos with three commits. The domain that renewed twice and pointed nowhere. The app that worked, almost, before it quietly stopped mattering.

We’ve been taught to feel guilty about this. No users, no launch, no revenue — failure, abandoned, another one that didn’t make it. The vocabulary comes from startups, and it’s the wrong vocabulary entirely.

A side project isn’t a small startup. It’s tuition.

Look honestly at what the graveyard actually produced. That dead SaaS taught you authentication, the real kind, with password resets and edge cases. The abandoned mobile app was where you learned to ship to an app store — a bureaucratic skill no tutorial covers. The API that nobody called was your first deployment, your first SSL panic, your first 3 a.m. server mystery. And one of those corpses taught you something more valuable than any of it: that you don’t actually enjoy building consumer products, which redirected your whole career before you bet years on the wrong direction.

None of that shows up if your only metric is users. All of it shows up in the next thing you build, and the next job you do, and the speed at which you now make decisions that used to paralyze you.

The pressure to monetize everything is what poisons this. The moment a side project becomes a pre-revenue business, it inherits all the obligations of one — marketing, retention, polish, persistence — and loses the one property that made it valuable: it was a lab where failing costs nothing. A lab with KPIs is just a second job.

This doesn’t mean never finishing. It means finishing the right thing. The question to ask before quietly archiving a project isn’t “did it get users?” It’s “did I extract the lesson?” Sometimes that means pushing one more week to get through the part you’ve never done before — the deploy, the payment integration, the launch post — because the lesson lives in the part you’re avoiding. Stopping right before it is the only real failure available.

So audit the graveyard, but audit it correctly. Each stone marks something you can now do that you couldn’t before.

Some projects are meant to find users. Most are meant to find out what you’re capable of.

Both count as shipping.