I've shipped a lot of side projects. Most went nowhere, and it was almost never the code. Cursor and Claude Code made the code the easy part. They went nowhere because I built the wrong thing, confidently, for six weekends in a row, and only let myself see it after the time was already gone.
That's the trap when building gets cheap. Marc Lou shipped 35 startups, 30 flopped, 5 pay his bills. Everyone reads that as "ship more." It isn't. It's "stop babysitting the one that isn't moving." Getting emotionally attached to one idea is the most expensive habit in this game, because the cost of being wrong is no longer the code. It's the months you refuse to walk away.
So I changed the order of operations. Now, before I open the editor, I force myself through nine decisions in sequence, and each one has to be grounded in something real, not a vibe:
Is it worth building? (Is there an unmet need, or am I just excited?)
Who actually pays? (A named buyer, not "developers.")
What actually hurts? (Which pain is hair-on-fire vs. mildly annoying.)
How do I win? (Where's the gap nobody's serving.)
What's actually V1? (The smallest thing that would change my mind if it failed.)
How do I charge? (A defensible number, not "charge what you're worth.")
Will they pay? (A smoke test before I build, not after.)
How do I launch? (Channels chosen before the build, because the channel shapes the product.)
What do I export? (The decisions written into the config files my coding agent actually reads.)
The point isn't the nine questions. It's the order. Build first and ask whether it was worth building second, and you end up six weekends deep in something you can't bring yourself to kill. Decide first and the kill happens cheaply, on a Tuesday, before there's any code to feel attached to.
When I run ideas through this properly, a real chunk of them don't survive. That used to feel like failure. Now it feels like the quarter I got back.
I eventually got tired of doing this in a messy Notion doc, so I built ShipFit to force the nine in sequence and ground each one in real data — real competitor sites, sourced prices, actual reviews — instead of a confident guess. It exports the config files at the end. Starts at $5 if you want to try it on your next idea.
But honestly the tool is secondary to the habit. What I'm curious about: what's the last idea you should have killed a month earlier than you did, and what finally made you do it?
Top comments (0)