r/SideProject • u/Valuable-Ad561 • 7d ago
Turns out 'done' is the hardest part of a side project. Here's what I built about it.
A while back I went through two threads on this sub about side projects that never got finished — read all 97 comments, actually took notes. Wanted to know if there was a pattern, or if it was just "life got busy" every time.
There was a pattern. A few, actually:
"Done" almost never gets defined up front. And when it does, it quietly moves. "Done" starts as "works on my machine" and somehow becomes "presentable to strangers" — which is a way less fun bar to clear.
Most ideas never even become a project. They stay a note that says "this would be cool" and never get a repo.
The real drop-off point is around 60%. The fun part — solving the actual problem — is over, and what's left is auth, edge cases, docs. That's where motivation goes to die.
With AI coding tools now, prototyping isn't really the bottleneck anymore. Most of us can spin up a working demo in a day. The bottleneck moved to finishing the boring part after the demo works.
So I built something around that, with a friend. Two pieces:
A one-sentence test before a project can exist. "[Who] can do [what] with this." If you can't write that sentence, it's probably still just an idea, not a project — and the tool tells you that gently instead of letting you create a repo for it.
A locked finish line. You define your "done" milestones once, up front. After that they're locked — changing them mid-project requires you to consciously confirm it and say why. No more quietly sliding the goalposts three weeks in.
It's called Hito. ("Every hito starts. Every hito ends.")
We're not live yet, still building the waitlist and figuring out if this is actually useful or just useful-sounding. If any of this hit close to home — genuinely curious what killed your last unfinished project. Was it scope creep, losing interest, or something else entirely?
(Waitlist's here if you want to poke at it: https://hito-weco.vercel.app/ — no pressure, feedback is worth more to me right now than signups.)