The project exists in a quantum state between alive and dead. It has customers — technically. It has a Twitter account — inactive since March. It has a roadmap — last updated eight months ago.
Side project limbo is what happens when a founder cannot bring themselves to either commit or kill. The project has enough life to feel like something, and enough ambiguity to avoid making a decision about it. Shutting it down would feel like failure. Committing to it would feel risky. So it exists in between, a drain on mental energy that produces almost no return.
The psychological function of a limbo project is that it keeps a door open. "If my main thing does not work out, I still have this." The insurance policy is worth something emotionally, even if the project itself generates nothing. The founder maintains optionality at the cost of focus.
What is insidious about limbo is the slow resource drain. The domain renews automatically. The server costs $9/month. The email list decays. The three customers who were paying stop paying because support tickets do not get answered. Six months later, the project is genuinely dead — but the founder still has not fully processed it because it was never declared officially over.
$ Make the binary decision
Is this project alive or dead? Not "on pause" — that is just a comfortable lie. Give yourself one week to decide. If you decide alive, set a 30-day milestone. If you decide dead, shut it down properly.
$ If dead: shut it down right
Email all users, offer refunds, cancel subscriptions, redirect the domain. Closing a project completely frees more mental energy than you expect. The clarity is worth the discomfort.
$ If alive: ship something in 7 days
Not a plan. Not a redesign. One thing that a user asked for. Get it in front of someone who cares. If you cannot ship one thing in 7 days, the project is dead.
the mrrsucks take
Side project limbo is decision debt with a recurring billing cycle. The AI has seen your commit history, your last login date, and your revenue trend. It looks like a project in a hospice that nobody has told it is in a hospice. Make the decision. Either direction is better than this.
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