Every developer has that folder. The one called:

final-final-app

new-saas

startup-v3

this-one-will-work

Inside it is a brilliant unfinished idea that's dead after 2 weeks. Usually, the problem isn’t skill. It’s scope.

I’ve done this myself. I wanted to build “a simple app.” Three days later, I was planning:

AI features

Realtime sync

Notifications

Analytics

Multi-tenant architecture

Still no homepage, no users, no product, just vibes and folder structures.

Most side projects fail because developers build for imaginary scale. We act like we already have 100k users, investors and enterprise customers. In reality, nobody has even signed up yet.

The biggest lesson I learned:

MVP doesn’t mean ugly.

It means small.

Your first version probably only needs One feature, one problem solved, one deployed link and that’s it.

A task app doesn’t need AI summaries, Workspaces and Activity logs.…