HACKER Q&A
📣 netham91

What is your failed/unfinished projects ratio?


Lot of times we end up measuring our unfinished projects as failures. I don't want to argue whether unfinished is a failure or not, but draw our irrational minds towards this observation. The journey to this ratio will be helpful to some of us.

And then I need some data also for my research, which I will share.

Do share how you reached this number, what assumptions you made, etc.

Every small projects count :)

  👤 medymed Accepted Answer ✓
I’m not a programmer by trade so I exclusively work on smallish projects, not profit driven but rather interest driven.

Percent of seriously considered side projects that I actually start: ~10-20%.

Percent of projects started that are ‘finished’ to a functional bare minimum: ~50%. Let’s say this is around 20 projects over the past 10 years. Range of maybe 30-300 hours invested per project.

Percent of finished projects that have enough reach or impact to feel successful: ~15%. Of these, probably 200-300 hours invested per project.

If I were trying to do profit-driven projects based on an uninspiring idea to address an uncertain market gap (that I otherwise wouldn’t care about) then I think the failures would be more painful.