Why Do Side Projects Fail? 6 Habits of Founders Who Built for Years and Earned Nothing

The short version: Garb, a product designer, built about 72 apps in 60 days. Those apps made nothing. Then his host asked him to stop building entirely — and talk to two customers a day instead. He made about $100 in the next 30 days. By day 60, the number was $6,500.

I went through 100 founder interviews from Starter Story for this set of articles. Almost every founder now making real money has a story like Garb's: a long stretch of hard work that produced nothing. The difference between them and everyone else is not effort. It is which kind of work they eventually stopped doing.

What follows: the 6 habits behind tactical busyness, the 3 signals that should stop you, and 8 paths that look like shortcuts — but only work if you already have what most beginners don't.

One honest note before we start: these interviews are with founders who eventually succeeded. So this article is their history of failing, not a study of everyone who failed. The traps are real either way.

What does a year of wasted work look like?

Garb is a product designer. Over one 60-day stretch, he built about 72 apps. "Eventually I got to about 72 apps within those 60 days," he says. The revenue from all of them: "I did not really get any revenue from them."

The diagnosis came from his host, who had watched him do it: "It's more of an issue with an addiction to building and shiny object syndrome and maybe a little bit of a fear of rejection."

The prescription was blunt. No new features, no new projects, no new ideas for 30 days — "go cold turkey off that." Instead, two customer conversations a day, one post a day, and a goal of $1,000.

He made about $100 in the first month. Not much — except it was the first time his work had produced anything anyone paid for. By day 60, he was at $6,500.

There's a name for what he was doing before. Tactical busyness is staying busy with the fun part of the work — building — while the scary part — talking to customers, selling, distributing — stays untouched. It feels exactly like progress. That's what makes it dangerous.

Why do smart people stay busy the wrong way?

Gil can name it precisely. "The curse of being a software developer is that it's so easy to fall in love with an idea," he says. "Too often we just get excited about that invention without making sure that it's actually like a painkiller."

He has lived the pattern from the inside: "It lets you think you have validation, so you go in a hole for 3 months... and then you pop up for air" and find nobody waiting. The reason it's so hard to stop is simple. Building is fun. "For some people coding and building is really really fun," as his host put it, "and the scary part is going out, building some audience, getting in front of customers."

Andy Cloak, whose Data Fetcher now runs at $23,000 a month, lost about six months to this loop. His own account is unusually honest: "The thing that I tell myself is that it was because of platform risk or the market saturation. But really it was cuz growth had slowed and I was getting bored and losing motivation."

The fix he landed on is worth copying. He now uses an AI as a business coach. "Every time I start to get distracted or I'm not working hard enough," he says, "I literally go to Claude and I say: be my business coach and make me focus on the thing that's working, and talk me out of trying to launch something new."

The trap isn't laziness. It's the feeling of progress.

What are the 6 habits of tactical busyness?

Six patterns run through the interviews. Most founders who lost years to them were not lazy — they were busy in a direction that never touched the market.

Nobody gets paid for how busy they were. Often, intense effort is just a respectable form of hiding. Every habit above produces work. None of them produces demand.

If you want the positive version of this — where to actually look for demand — start with the full list of patterns and angles from those 100 interviews. The short version: the market only pays for something it already wants. Everything in this article is what happens when the work never touches that.

When should you have stopped?

You will not feel the right moment. The founders here didn't — that's how they lost months and years. What they can give you is three signals that showed up, in hindsight, well before they stopped.

1. No real money, weeks in. If your target audience won't pay anything after a few weeks in front of them, more features won't fix it. The interviews are consistent on the timeline: if people won't pay within the first weeks of seeing it, the problem isn't the pitch.
2. Months of code, no channel. If the plan needs months of building, and you still can't say where the first 100 users will come from, the plan is upside down. Distribution is not a phase after the build. It's the test of whether the build should happen.
3. Trials that don't stick. Low trial-to-paid conversion plus quick churn is the market answering you. Users tried it. They left. That answer doesn't change with a new landing page.

And the founders have one more thing to give: what they'd do differently. Julian, whose fitness app now makes over $400,000 a month, doesn't hesitate. "In our case it was our previous startup," he says. "We probably dragged that for an extra year. We should have probably called it days way earlier."

Andy's version of the same lesson: "I would tell young Andy to do proper user testing. Do it early and do it often, because I wasted almost an entire year without ever speaking to the people that are using what I'd built."

The cheapest diagnostic takes five seconds. When did you last talk to a customer? If you can't remember, that's your stop signal — not "when the project fails."

What looks like a shortcut but isn't?

The interviews also collect a second kind of trap: paths that work beautifully for the founders you see on stage, and that beginners copy without the resources behind them. Eight of them came up repeatedly.

Those paths aren't faster. They're just not yours. Other people's shortcuts are mostly runways they built in advance with resources they already had — not something you can step onto out of thin air. That's not a reason to resent them. It's a reason to stop measuring yourself against founders whose starting line was your distant finish line.

What should you do instead?

Every path above has a cheaper cousin. The interviews are full of them — the same destination, without the resources you don't have.

• No audience? Borrow one that exists. Hassam bought his way into a creator's audience with equity. Din did something simpler: he put his product on a lifetime-deal platform, whose buyer list did the distribution. His launch brought $65,000 in three days.
• No ad budget? Build a search footprint. Bhanu spends nothing on marketing. He built small free tools around low-competition keywords, and they pull around 50,000 visitors a month — enough to run his product at $13,000 MRR.
• No connections? Manufacture them publicly. Gil entered an industry he knew nothing about with a brand-new account and zero followers. He followed everyone in the space, shipped free tools, and did one-on-one outreach to every person on his list. That's how he sold $20,000 in pre-orders before writing any code.
• No idea where to start? Start where the validation is cheapest. That's the whole point of the other articles in this set: validating an idea before you build it, and pre-selling before you write code. And when you want the constructive half, the full list of patterns and angles is where to start.

None of these are tricks. All of them are the same move: replace the resource you don't have with an action you can take today.

FAQ

Why do side projects fail even when the product is good?

Nobody who can pay knows the product exists. Anish put it well: "Nobody who has an audience or influence cares about a product that is not ready." Good products fail because distribution is treated as something that happens after the important work. It is the important work.

How do I know my project won't make money?

Run the three stop signals: weeks pass with no payment, months of building with no channel, trials that don't stick. Two or more of those at once is the market answering. More building will not change the answer.

Is building many products always a waste?

No. Marc Lou shipped about 35 products, and 30 of them "barely make any money" — yet his system works because every product really ships and really gets tested against the market, and he rolls the dice again quickly instead of grinding on one thing for years. Garb's problem was never the number 72. It was that the number 72 never touched a customer. Volume with validation is a strategy. Volume in a cave is a habit.

Should I stop working on my side project?

That's your call, not the market's — but the market already voted, and it's in your data: payment, usage, retention. If you're waiting for a feeling, you'll wait past the point that costs you most. Use the signals, set a date, and decide with numbers.

What if I can't quit my job for this?

Nobody in this article quit their job first. Garb's challenge didn't require it — two conversations a day fit around any job. The founders here started with an hour after work, not a leap of faith.

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One more thing. The 6 habits, the 3 stop signals, and the 8 shortcut-traps are on one page in the checklist I put together from these interviews. It is free, and it costs you an email.

Get the checklist →

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Related reading

• How to Find a SaaS Idea That Actually Makes Money
• How to Validate a SaaS Idea From Your Own Pain Point
• How to Pre-Sell a SaaS Product

*A note on sources: every case in this article comes from founder interviews published by Starter Story. I went through 100 of them and cross-checked the load-bearing numbers against the original transcripts. Results are self-reported by the founders. And a reminder of the math here: these founders all succeeded eventually — this is their history of failing, not a full sample of everyone who failed.*