

Ask HN: How many project have you started but haven't shipped? - richerd

Starting a project is easy, but finishing is hard. I have a folder with 20+ unfinished/unshipped projects. Am I the only one that has the problem of being unable to ship things?
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IsaacL
Let's see, I have 33, count em, subfolders in my /prj directory.

4 are folders for random hacks or experiments I do (eg, one for Ruby, one for
Clojure, two for misc stuff). So I won't count them.

5 are random admin stuff, so I won't count them either.

2 are folders containing work from previous jobs. 2 are university projects.

That leaves 20 personal projects I started.

 _Unshipped/unfinished_ :

-Botnet (Facebook game in Rails, never finished)

-KAF (Business plan + notes for a startup in the smart TV space. Never actually wrote any code for this so I don't know if it counts as a project).

-NAND cpu (simulated CPU built from simulated NAND gates. I got as far as making an adder and got bored)

-Pixelworld: (a multi-user canvas thing.)

-Robots Rising (clojure browser game, got bored and gave up)

-Unimemes (can scrape Facebook groups and find the most liked pictures, got bored)

 _"Shipped" but gave up quickly_ :

-ChineseVille (Facebook app similar to Lingt, "launched" with a very incomplete alpha and gave up after no-one showed interest)

-Discrete (Pixel-art webcomic, did about 5 strips, some people on Reddit liked it but I decided it was too pretentious so deleted it)

-Nohao (user-rated learning resources. Released a very early version and no-one was interested, so gave up).

-Real Reading List (similar to Nohao, but focused on textbooks. (lesson: everyone has had the idea of reselling textbooks to students, it has never worked)).

 _Learning projects_ :

-Facebook-friends scraper

-Pond (Clojure game)

-Rails survey app

 _Hackathon projects_ :

-Twitballot (twitter polls)

-Vettr (online careers fair)

 _Shipped_ :

-My personal homepage

-Shintolin (MMO browser game)

-Writing (stuff on my personal blog)

-Warwick Fashion Group (blog done for a friend)

-Warwick Uni Startups (website for a university society)

I count the last 3 groups as successes, which makes 10/20 hit rate. That's
better than I thought, though I'm being a bit generous with the definition of
"shipped". Shintolin is the only significant personal project I've worked on
(it was also the first, go figure). There's also a whole bunch of
work/university/freelance projects I've completed which aren't on this list,
but that's obviously thanks to massive extrinsic motivations.

Unlike most people, my problem is shipping too early -- I tend to release
stuff in a really crappy, unfinished state, when of course no-one will be
interested. (It did work for Shintolin, though -- I posted it on a forum when
all players could do was walk around and punch each other, and people seemed
to really like it). That said, I don't regret giving up on any of the other
projects (except maybe ChineseVille, which could have worked if I stuck with
it).

(And of course, software projects are by default never finished. That's why
I've come to enjoy writing -- you realise you've already written too many
words, even though you have more to say, and can then stop and hit "publish".
There's no limit to the features you can add to any piece of software).

I've realised I'm gonna have to partner with a finisher if I want to achieve
anything significant in future.

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zpk
Tons. This work is like art, imagine, create, not finish, and toss to the
side.

Here's a few that come to mind:

'07 - A Search Engine that used MS/GOOGLE/YAHOO as my seed and resorted the
order based on some composite ranking from comparing the three results.

'08 - An Email Myself Blogging service that took some words, links, and posted
it on the date in the email.

'09 - A Local Coupon site to work against Valpak. You could throttle the
amount discounted so you didn't have the Group On effect. I came back to this
idea 20x, but in order for it to work you have to hit the pavement and talk to
store/rest/bar owners.

'10 - Social networking site for fitness with a workout tracking tool.

'11 - Quit a company that got bought by Google (just had to get it off my
chest)

'12 - Notes sharing tool that's transformed into something else. I stopped for
a month on it, bugged me so much that finally late March I got back on that
damn horse. In 4 weekends I have POC (like a lawn motor on wheels) that
finally worked...but I'm excited about it now.

In the end that # of projects doesn't count for a damn thing. Everyone of
those ideas listed above could work, have worked for someone else. Someone
that saw one thing to the end. You aren't alone though, so don't beat yourself
up one bit.

1, that's the number I am going to focus on this year. Finishing one idea out.

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anonhacker
Quite a few unshipped. I think there ought to be a difference between
unfinished and unshipped. My projects are unshipped by which i mean I finished
them but couldn't commit the time to market/sell them.

Eventually you learn: If you build it they will come; If you are lucky.

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manuscreationis
I have a ton of projects that I haven't finished... Some of them are still
ideas I think could have some merit, if only I had the time or motivation to
finish...

Burnout is a real killer

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brandoncordell
Definitely 20+, could be closer to 30+. Some of them I lost interest in, some
I lost interest in the technology. Some I want to work on so bad but have no
time.

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helen842000
Yep I'd say around 20 started. Somewhere close to 100 new ideas not even
touched yet. I'm just staying locked onto one thing at a time now.

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conancat
I have around 10 here... yeah, procrastination is the root of all unshipped
products. :/

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steve918
I lost count a long time ago.

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bmelton
You are not. To be fair, I also have a few products that I've shipped but that
didn't go anywhere -- of course, I didn't really expect them to as I didn't
really do anything in the way of marketing or anything, but they're out there
(or shuttered).

In my case, for the most part, I'll either come up with an idea or a
challenge. In some cases, I'll work towards an idea and usually, I'll get
further along with those because I start with the boring stuff like logins,
user profile pages, etc.

With the challenges ("How would you build a web site that did <insert
something novel here>?"), those are pretty much guaranteed to be DOA. I do the
hard part, sometimes realizing my initial approach was stupid, starting over,
and then doing it more elegantly, and then uhhhh, well, that's it. The chance
of me writing all the boring crud for something like that to make it multi-
user is infinitesimal.

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nerd_in_rage
Dozens.

