The Side Project Graveyard: Why 90% of Developer Projects Die (And How to Ship Yours)

I have 47 unfinished projects on my Mac. One is literally just a folder named "million-dollar-idea" with a single empty Swift file inside. Sound familiar? The 5 Stages of Side Project Death The Spark (Day 1) — Amazing idea at 2 AM, create repo, write README The Honeymoon (Days 2-5) — Everything flows, best project ever The Wall (Week 2) — Hit the boring part: auth, payments, deployment The New Spark (Week 3) — A shinier new idea appears Death — Original project sits untouched forever How I Broke the Cycle 1. The 2-Week Rule If I can't ship v1 in 2 weeks, scope is too big. My SwiftUI Starter Kit? Planned 20 screens, shipped with 5. Those 5 made money. 2. Build in Public Post progress on social media. Social pressure > motivation. Every. Time. 3. Solve Your Own Problem Every project I shipped solved MY problem: Needed SwiftUI boilerplate -> Built starter templates Needed productivity system -> Built Notion templates Needed to track finances -> Built finance tracker 4. Ship Ugly Shipped +