Does the article ever actually mention what he failed at? He developed an open source game engine and... what? Did he expect people to donate to him or something? What was the monetization plan?
From reading the article author’s failure was failing to ask that question of himself. With no clear objective or milestones, the project ate a huge amount of manpower for no material gain and left him thoroughly burnt out.
It doesn’t matter if your project is for-profit or Free. Identify your deliverables, identify your schedule, and never turn a blind-eye to your failures to meet both.
Oh, and never mistake makework for productivity either. If your product isn’t selling, what it doesn’t need is more features. What it does need is better marketing and sales skills. Quite frankly, building the technology part is the least important part of building a successful Product. Being geeks, it’s awfully easy to work on (i.e. fiddle with) the one bit that you’re naturally good at, when what you should be doing is working on all the parts that you’re not.
Perhaps what happened here is a side project grew into something larger, it's now just a project, and he fell into putting more time and effort into it without making a conscious decision due to popularity - perhaps that's when it can bite you, when you realise you don't enjoy it anymore and it's become one sided.
I think side projects should stay as small as possible unless there looks to be a real potential for both yourself personally and the rest of the world - even then failing fast feels like the best idea.
And +1 for failing fast. It is failing slow that’s the disaster.
When you have people using your stuff, you have to decide whether you care about them or not. It’s ok not to care, you don’t owe anybody anything, but if you lead them on or give them the impression that you do, then they are invested in something because of it and it would be pretty shitty to just disappear. You still can, if you like, but you should at least do it consciously.
If you have people the impression that you would support something then you need to be clear with them that this isn’t actually the case, otherwise you’re a bit of a dick for leading them on. It’s perfectly ok to just throw something out to the world without supporting it in any way and it’s also ok to step back from something you did once support, but you should at least communicate this so people don’t get the wrong impression.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm painting, some people bought my pictures"
"So what's your exit strategy?"If I'm trying to make money off such a side project "quit whenever you want" isn't sustainable. But that isn't one of my goals. I just want to enjoy building things and give the project back to the community, and I'm lucky to have a separate source of income to accomplish that. If nobody cares, then that's fine. The time I spent puzzling over the problems I was facing was a more interesting use of my time for me than sitting around all day watching YouTube, anyway. Also, I at least believe I'm getting somewhere with my project still, so I still have motivation to keep working on it.
Maybe there's some confusion over the term "side project" which could mean "a thing someone developed in off hours that they're intending to bootstrap into a sustainable business," but it could also mean "some person's hobby."
But the fact that I currently have no way of monetizing this means I'll have to work on it in my spare time, meaning it will take that much longer to get to a point where I can declare it's shipped. Maybe I'll lose interest before that point. But to me that's perfectly fine and nothing to become gloomy over if it doesn't work out. Though, to be honest I might not be saying this if my project had users who would be frustrated with me for stepping away from working on it, but the reality is that it's so much work for one person to accomplish and at times it's draining to push forward on it every day, despite what I get out of working on it.
Been there, done that, lost the shirt. Lessons learned.
You pretty much nailed it. I went into the project without a clear monetization plan and when I got around to trying to figure it out I didn't know how.
It doesn't really go into detail about whether he offered other direct contracts or work fire hire or other tried other licensing or any other strategy.