An interesting discussion with a reader follows. While you're reading, if you have experience with half-finished projects/apps/websites/businesses/etc, please think to yourself, "What would I do?" and answer in the comments.

Hi Sebastian,

First off, thanks for making yourself available to talk. I just saw the comment saying you're surprised more people don't take you up on your offer, so I figured I'd send you an email :)

I have a project which has potential, but I'm not sure I can be the one to take it places.

It is a task-oriented team chat application, similar to campfirehq.
Its task-oriented nature sets it apart, because you can make a task as easily as typing !implement history search and hitting enter. This makes it very easy to see who is working on what, and discuss it. The barriers to communication and organization are lowered, helping teams move more quickly, and stay organized.

If you'd like, you can see the demo at http://eric.no.de/demo

I'm really not sure what to do with it, and I was wondering if you have any advice or thoughts on the matter.

Have a great day and thanks for making yourself available!
-David Trejo

Hey David,

Good to connect, glad you dropped a line.

So I think there's two different questions here - what do I, Sebastian, do? And, what should you do?

Those are two different questions because I've found most of my half-dead projects just die and nothing else comes of it. But I think you could probably do better than that.

I've realized this only somewhat recently, so my new thing with 90% done projects that are dragging is to decide what the last 2% I need to do to ship is, and then ship at 92% done. Get something out there. It's hard to resurrect a dead project once you've moved on mentally. A large amount of the necessary work on any project is getting kind of a mental map of how things are going to work, and wrapping your mind around the project. If the map is dissolved and your mind isn't wrapped around it any more, it can be very tough to get something out. So now that I'm recognizing that, I'm trying to reach some at least semi-completed state before mentally moving on. When things start dragging, it's time to adjust scope down and get SOMETHING out ASAP.

Okay, let's talk about your chat app specifically.

"I'm really not sure what to do with it, and I was wondering if you have any advice or thoughts on the matter."

The first question you've got to ask yourself is, "What outcome(s) would I like to get from this?"

What do you want? A bit of cash? Some exposure? Help the world? A credential? "Closure" on this particular area of your life before moving on? See people using/thriving with your app?

Those are all slightly different. So first, I'd ask, "What do I want here?" A good second question would be, "What would success look like?" You know, maybe you could put some numbers to it.

One thing that occurs to me, if you don't want to actively develop or market your app any more, is that you could write a postmortem on the project, maybe a long blog post or essay, maybe a two-part blog post... well-written, this could give you some exposure to smart people, a little credential, give you some closure, and then at the end of it you could ask if anyone wants to [take over, buy it for a small amount of cash, help you open-source it, whatever your goal for the project is, etc].

I think that'd be a decent option, but first off, open up a text file or get a piece of paper and pen and write down, "What outcome(s) would I like to get from this?" This might take 10-20 minutes to do, but it's well worth doing before you start to do any specific work on the project. It's hard to get your desired outcome if you don't know what it is.

If you like, I'd be happy to both of these emails up on my blog, and maybe my readers will have some suggestions as well? Totally your call if you'd like to do that, but I'd be happy to if it interests you - so, does that suit you?

Cheers,

Sebastian

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Hi Sebastian,

Thank you for the thorough response.

There are a few rough edges to Hakeru, the chat app, but I think it is ready for people to see and use.

"What do you want? A bit of cash? Some exposure? Help the world? A credential? "Closure" on this particular area of your life before moving on? See people using/thriving with your app?"

After sitting down and thinking about this, here's what I came up with:
- I want to leave it up, at least so that I can use it, and have it in my portfolio so people can be impressed ;)
- I'm not going to charge, because I don't want to take the time to implement a payment system, or take on more responsibilities
- I'd like to write a post-mortem, at the very least for myself and Eric, who developed a large part of the app (I've cc'd him).

"Those are all slightly different. So first, I'd ask, "What do I want here?" A good second question would be, "What would success look like?" You know, maybe you could put some numbers to it."

I think success would be just to get some exposure from the blog post, and leave up the site. I've found the app quite useful for hackathons where I'm part of a small team.

"One thing that occurs to me, if you don't want to actively develop or market your app any more, is that you could write a postmortem on the project, maybe a long blog post or essay, maybe a two-part blog post... well-written, this could give you some exposure to smart people, a little credential, give you some closure, and then at the end of it you could ask if anyone wants to [take over, buy it for a small amount of cash, help you open-source it, whatever your goal for the project is, etc]."

I think this is a very good option. In addition to the exposure, it might lead to someone buying and adopting the project, which I would like very much.

Thank you for the ideas and for making me sit down and think!
-David Trejo
(DTrejo on HN)

Your turn, dear reader. You can see a demo of David's app here - http://eric.no.de/demo

What thoughts do you have for David? What would you do, in his shoes? Know anyone that's navigated something like this well?