I have a lot of side projects. Most advice says I should kill them.
Pick a winner. Archive anything that isn’t growing. Stop spending time on products that will never become companies.
I get the advice. I just don’t think every piece of software has to justify itself like a startup.
They still do something
BudJet helps me understand where my money goes. Viddl downloads a video without turning the page into an ad maze. SlovoCard helps me learn the language around me. Earth Roulette turns “where should we go?” into an actual place.
They stay useful if the market is small, growth is flat or I’m one of the main users. I’d like them to make money. I don’t require it.
Rebuilding would throw work away
A small product that has been around for years holds decisions you can’t easily recover. BudJet has its category model. Earth Roulette has years of destination data. SlovoCard has language variants and corrections. Viddl has fixes for sites that keep changing.
Delete the product and all of that goes with it.
Sometimes deletion is still right. A security problem, a hosting bill or a dead dependency can make it the only responsible choice. Maintenance isn’t free.
Sometimes maintenance is two seconds
SlovoCard’s typed-answer cards used to jump to the next card the moment you submitted an answer. You never got to read the correction. In July I added a two-second pause to the cloze and listening cards.
The test waits 1,999 milliseconds and checks that the card hasn’t moved. One more millisecond and it goes through. No new deck, no subscription tier, no relaunch. An exercise I use got less annoying.
That same month, the model behind BudJet’s Telegram receipt reader was removed, so I swapped in a replacement. Nobody sending a receipt wanted a new feature. They wanted the old one to keep working.
That’s most of what keeping a small product alive looks like. If I call something maintained, I still look after it.