15 Years of Over-Building, 65 Dead Projects… and Finally a Habit That Sticks

I’ve been coding for day job for 15 years. And I’ve killed… 65 side-projects. 🪦

Every single time: build → polish → nobody use → move on to next project.

This time I forced myself into the TenK6 loop:

🔹 List 5 I wrote down 5 ideas:

a sudoku game

a YouTube content idea generator

a video editor that ditches Capcut/Canva

a growth coach

(and one more I forgot already)

🔹 Pick 1 I picked “growth coach” → called it Indie10k. People told me don’t put a number in the domain. But they don’t understand—first $10k MRR means everything for indie devs.

🔹 Ship 1 No over-building. After 65 corpses, I finally didn’t touch “clean architecture.” Just Next.js boilerplate → deploy to Vercel since commit 1. Landing page + fake login → shipped Day 1.

🔹 Ask 3 Didn’t wait for “perfect.” I posted on IndieHackers, Product Hunt forum, and even sent Reddit DMs. People actually signed up after reading the pitch. People said Indie10k is gold and like it.

🔹 Measure 1 I’ve run three loops:

V1 = too big, too heavy

V2 = still too heavy

V3 = finally lean enough → I can see users buying in, moving their first TenK 6 loops and towards the goal they set.

🔹 Share 1 For god’s sake, why didn’t I do this earlier? Nobody told me. I used to only see code. Now I talk about pain → solutions. And only offer Indie10k if a user is engaged.

That tiny shift—habits, not features—is why Indie10k hasn’t died like the others.

👉 Longer story here: From Long-Term Dev to Indie Hacker Habits

Curious: how many projects did you bury before one finally stuck?