Thinking of Ending a Project You Started? – Info Entrepreneurship

Lessons Learned From Ending Yet Another Project

Some people are good at starting projects, some are good at running them, some are good at growing them, and some are good at maintaining them.

Which one are you?

I'm very much a starter. I like to try new things and start new projects all the time. The problem with that is: I tend to have too many things going on at the same time.

Do you have a similar problem?

Tomorrow, I'll be suspending activities on a project I was proud of: Viking Boutique. It was the world's first and only story-driven store. It was a very entertaining store where potential customers reacted really well to my ads.

The problem was, no one bought the products. They only cared about the funny stories I was writing.

After reading The Dip, by Seth Godin, it was clear that Viking Boutique was in a dip.

During a few journaling sessions, I came up with different plans to get it out of the dip, but I never executed on them. I tried really hard, but I could not come up with a simple enough plan to execute with the resources I had available.

Maybe it was just a dumb excuse.

Anyhow, below is how I start, run, and (sadly) kill projects.

I'm hoping that will give you a good idea of a project's cycle and how NOT to get too attached to a project you can't easily dig out of a dip.

This is only from my experience having done many projects and had to kill them. These are lessons I learned that may or may not apply to everyone.

Starting a Project

I'm personally not a big fan of traditional business plans. It may be because I'm a starter and like to get my feet wet as soon as possible. That's likely not the best way to go, but nonetheless, I know the steps below are important to kickstart a project successfully.