Somewhere between sixty and seventy percent of side projects never make it to launch. No single study proves that number, because most of these projects die quietly in a private repo nobody ever mentions again.
But talk to enough builders and look at enough abandoned Supabase instances and expired domains, and the pattern holds. This failure rate was already high before AI coding tools existed. It's higher now, for a reason most people get backwards.
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The obvious explanation is that vibe coding lowered the bar for who gets to try. Someone with no development background can describe an idea in plain language and watch something resembling a product appear in an afternoon.
More attempts should mean more finished products. Instead, it means more projects entering a funnel that was never built for this volume, and more of them dying before anyone outside the builder's own head sees them.
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The cost of shipping has changed
Traditional startup post-mortems blame the top post-launch killers on no market need and running out of cash, and CB Insights puts those numbers around forty-two and twenty-nine percent.
That data describes companies that already launched. The death I'm describing happens earlier, and it's driven by something more mundane: operational drag.
A decade ago, an MVP cost time, not money. Maybe ten dollars a month for a VPS and a weekend of attention. The modern stack looks different.
Database hosting, auth, transactional email, a domain, analytics, and now AI API usage all bill separately, and they all start charging before a single customer shows up.
Fifty to two hundred dollars a month in subscriptions doesn't sound like much until you're four months into a build with zero revenue and a growing sense that you're funding a hobby nobody cared about.
That's when a project stops feeling like a fun distraction and starts feeling like a leak. The builder pulls the plug not because the idea was bad, but because the bleeding became the main event.
This hits AI wrapper products especially hard, once the builder does the math on token costs at scale and realizes the pricing model they had in mind won't survive real usage.
The complexity trap
The second failure mode has nothing to do with money. It's a miscalibration of how hard the thing is.
Describe an idea to an AI coding assistant, and it hands you something that looks like a working product within minutes. That first version is convincing. It is also almost never close to done.
The gap between "looks like an MVP" and "is an MVP" is where most inexperienced builders get lost, because the tools are good enough to hide that gap until you're deep inside it.
I've built companies for twenty years, and I still underestimated the workload on a recent project, a docs editor with a notes feature.
On paper it sounded like a weekend build. It wasn't, and I had to step back and rescope before I could keep moving. If that happens to someone who's built and delegated for two decades, it happens far more often to someone shipping their first real product with an AI assistant doing most of the thinking.
Free tiers make this worse in a specific way. They're fine for a weekend hackathon.
The moment you need a custom domain, a background worker, or basic log retention, you hit a paywall, and you end up upgrading three or four services just to reach production.
The claim that building has never been cheaper holds right up until you need the features that make something usable.
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The real reasons projects die
Strip away cost and complexity, and what's left is more human. Most of what kills a side project isn't a skill gap. It's a lack of consistency. Starting is easy.
Continuing once the excitement fades, once the project is competing against work, family, and easier sources of dopamine, is hard. A few patterns show up again and again:
Scope creep disguised as progress, where adding a feature feels more productive than shipping what already works
Perfectionism that delays a usable first version indefinitely
A new idea arriving right as the current one gets difficult, which makes the old project suddenly feel boring
No clear definition of done, which lets a project stay "almost finished" forever
Sunk cost from months already invested, which keeps people polishing something that should have been abandoned
None of that requires bad luck or bad instincts. It's just what happens by default when nothing is pushing a project toward an end date.
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What separates people who ship
The builders who consistently finish things aren't smarter or more talented. They've usually just installed a few constraints the rest of us skip:
They shrink the scope until shipping is almost impossible to avoid, building the smallest version that proves the idea rather than the version that impresses them
They set a real ship-by date and treat it as a milestone, not the finish line
They keep some kind of log, even an ugly one, so they can tell activity apart from progress
They ask one honest question before starting anything: am I going to ship this
That last question filters out more dead-end projects than any amount of planning.
Shipping is a skill you build through repetition, not a trait you either have or don't. Every project you finish makes the next one easier. The goal was never to complete every idea you start.
Most ideas deserve to be abandoned once they've taught you what they had to teach. The goal is to become the kind of builder who ships consistently, one small, unglamorous, launched project at a time.
