How to Ship Side Projects Faster: A Tactical Guide

Speed Is a Scope Problem, Not a Coding Problem

Let me save you some time: shipping side projects faster has almost nothing to do with typing speed, framework choice, or how many monitors you have. It has everything to do with how much you decide to build.

A developer who builds 5 features in 3 weeks ships faster than a developer who builds 20 features in 3 months. Not because the first developer is faster at writing code. Because the first developer decided to build less.

This sounds too simple to be useful, but it is the one insight that separates developers who ship from developers who have a collection of 90%-done projects. Indie Hackers data on first product launches consistently shows that focused MVPs ship dramatically faster than unconstrained ones. The GitHub Octoverse shows developer productivity has increased with AI tools, but shipping rates haven't kept pace — the bottleneck moved from writing code to managing scope.

How to ship faster as a solo developer goes deep on this philosophy. Here I want to focus on the specific, tactical moves that cut time from your shipping timeline.

The scope-speed equation

Feature count and ship time don't scale linearly. They scale exponentially, because features interact, create dependencies, surface edge cases, and compound testing requirements.

A rough model that holds across most solo projects:

Feature count	Typical ship time
3 features	1–2 weeks
5 features	2–4 weeks
10 features	2–4 months
15+ features	Rarely ships

Feature 15 doesn't add one unit of work. It adds integration work with features 1 through 14. This is why a 5-feature MVP ships in weeks while a 15-feature one ships never — not just "takes longer," but never.

Tactic 1: Define Your MVP in One Sentence

Before you write any code, finish this sentence: "A user can _____ and get value from it."

If you cannot fill in that blank with a single, simple action, your MVP is too complex. Here are examples:

• "A user can paste a URL and get a summary of the article."
• "A user can upload a CSV and get a formatted report."
• "A user can type a question and get answers from their documents."

Notice what these do not include. No account creation. No settings. No teams. No premium tiers. Just the core value proposition in one action.

Your entire v1 should be that one sentence, plus the minimum infrastructure needed to deliver it (hosting, maybe auth, maybe a database). Everything else is a v1.1 feature.

Tactic 2: Cap Features at 5

Write down every feature you want to build. Now pick the top 5. That is your v1.

I know this feels aggressive. You probably have 15 features that all feel necessary. They are not. Your users will come for one or two features. The rest are things you think they want, based on no evidence, because you have not shipped yet and nobody has used it.

Five features is enough to deliver value. Five features is achievable in 2-3 weeks. Five features is small enough to keep in your head without a project management tool.

If you struggle to cut features, try this exercise: for each feature on your list, ask "Would a user pay for the product without this feature?" If the answer is yes, cut it. It can come later.

Scope Locking enforces this cap. Once you lock your feature list, adding anything new requires you to consciously unlock and explain why. That friction prevents the slow creep from 5 features to 8 to 12 to "why is this project taking so long?"

Tactic 3: Deploy on Day One

I will keep saying this until every developer does it: deploy your project to a live URL on day one. Before you have features. Before it does anything. Push an empty app to production.

Here is what this does for your shipping speed:

It eliminates deployment as a bottleneck. Deployment bugs, environment issues, CI/CD configuration, all of that gets sorted on day one when the stakes are zero, instead of on launch day when you are stressed and eager to ship.

It makes shipping incremental. Every feature you build gets deployed as part of your normal workflow. There is no "big deploy" at the end. Shipping is just pushing your latest commit, something you have been doing every day.

It removes the psychological barrier of "going live." When your project is already live, launching is just telling people about a URL that already exists. That is a much smaller step than deploying, testing, fixing, and then telling people.

Vercel, Netlify, Railway. Pick one. Connect your repo. It takes 10 minutes and saves you hours of launch-day stress.

Tactic 4: Use Managed Services for Everything

Do not build auth. Use Clerk, Supabase Auth, or NextAuth. Do not build file uploads. Use Uploadthing or S3 with presigned URLs. Do not build payments. Use Stripe. Do not build email sending. Use Resend or Postmark.

Every custom system you build is a system you have to maintain, debug, and secure. More importantly, it is time you are not spending on your actual product, the thing that makes your project different from everything else.

Your competitive advantage is your product idea, not your custom JWT implementation. Nobody has ever chosen a product because it had a hand-rolled authentication system.

I see developers spend weeks building infrastructure that they could have set up in an afternoon with a managed service. This is not a cost optimization (managed services are cheap or free for small projects). It is a time optimization. Every hour spent on infrastructure is an hour not spent on shipping.

Tactic 5: Time-Box Everything

Parkinson's Law says work expands to fill the time available. If you give yourself a weekend to build a landing page, it will take a weekend. If you give yourself 2 hours, it will take 2 hours. The 2-hour version will be worse, but it will be done.

Time-box everything:

• Landing page: 2 hours
• Auth integration: 3 hours
• Database schema: 1 hour
• Core feature: 8-10 hours total
• Bug fixes before launch: 4 hours

These are aggressive time limits. That is the point. Aggressive time limits force you to make decisions quickly. Should the button be blue or green? Pick one. Move on. Should the form have validation? Add the minimum. Move on. Should the error messages be helpful? Make them accurate. Move on.

Decisions are the biggest time sink in solo development. Time-boxing compresses decisions. You do not have time to deliberate, so you decide and keep building.

Tactic 6: Skip the Polish

Polish is where side projects go to die slowly. Not because polish is bad, but because polish has no natural endpoint. You can always make something a little better, a little smoother, a little more polished.

Here is my rule: polish nothing until after launch. Ship with rough edges. Ship with a default Tailwind color scheme. Ship with system fonts. Ship with basic error messages that say "something went wrong." Ship with a signup flow that has one step instead of five.

After launch, you will learn which parts of your product users actually interact with. Polish those parts. Ignore the rest. You will discover that 80% of what you planned to polish, nobody cares about.

I have launched products where the settings page was literally a bullet list of options with raw HTML inputs. Nobody complained. Nobody even mentioned it. Meanwhile, I have seen developers spend two weeks on a beautiful settings page for a product that had zero users.

Polish is earned by user attention. If nobody is using a feature, polishing it is wasted time.

Tactic 7: The Deploy-Then-Iterate Approach

Traditional approach: plan everything, build everything, polish everything, deploy, launch.

Fast approach: deploy, build the minimum, launch, iterate based on feedback.

The traditional approach assumes you know what users want before they have used your product. You do not. You think you do, but you do not. Every launched product I have seen required significant changes after real users got their hands on it. Features that seemed necessary were ignored. Features that seemed optional were requested constantly.

If you are going to change things after launch anyway, why spend weeks perfecting the pre-launch version? Ship the minimum, get feedback, and invest your polish time where it actually matters.

This requires a mindset shift. You need to be comfortable launching something imperfect. You need to accept that users will find bugs. You need to resist the urge to fix everything before telling anyone about it.

For more on the workflow behind this approach, I wrote about the best workflow for solo developers. The core insight is that solo developers need a tighter feedback loop than teams, because there is nobody else to catch your blind spots.

Tactic 8: Cut the Feature You Love Most

This one hurts, but it is effective. Look at your feature list. Find the feature you are most excited about building. The one you have been thinking about in the shower. The one that is "going to make this product special."

Cut it.

I am serious. That feature is the one most likely to consume disproportionate time, because you care about it the most and will over-engineer it. It is also the feature most likely to cause scope creep, because your excitement will lead to "just one more thing" additions.

Move it to v1.1. Ship without it. If users ask for it, build it. If they do not ask, you just saved yourself a week.

This is counterintuitive because we think the features we are excited about are the features users will love. Sometimes that is true. But you do not know until you ship, and shipping faster is more important than shipping with your favorite feature.

Tactic 9: Set a Public Ship Date

"I'll ship it when it's ready" is a polite way of saying "I'll never ship it." You need a date. And you need to tell someone about that date.

Pick a date 2-3 weeks from now. Post it somewhere: Twitter, a Discord server, your personal blog, a text message to a friend. Make it real.

When the date arrives, ship whatever you have. Not what you planned to have. What you actually have. If only 3 of your 5 features are done, ship with 3 features. If the design is rough, ship with a rough design. The date is the constraint, and the scope adjusts to fit.

This is the opposite of how most developers work. Most developers fix the scope and let the timeline expand. Fast shippers fix the timeline and let the scope compress.

Ship Cards make the act of shipping permanent and shareable. When you ship on your public date, you get a card that proves it. That card is a receipt for your discipline, a record that says you committed to a date and hit it.

Tactic 10: Eliminate Decisions

Every decision you make during development costs time. Not the execution time, the deliberation time. Should I use this library or that one? Should this be a modal or a new page? Should the API return JSON or use GraphQL?

Here is how to eliminate decisions:

Pick your stack before you start and do not change it. If you work in Next.js, use Next.js for everything. Do not evaluate alternatives mid-project.

Use defaults everywhere. Default colors, default fonts, default spacing. You can customize later. Right now, defaults ship faster.

Copy patterns from products you admire. Do not design from scratch. Find a product with a similar feature, study how they built it, and do the same thing. This is not cheating. This is efficient.

Make a decision document before you start. "I will use Supabase for auth and database. I will use Vercel for hosting. I will use Tailwind for styling. I will not evaluate other options." Stick to it.

The identity shift that changes everything

Most developers think of themselves as builders. The identity is "I build things." The metric is "I wrote code today."

Shippers think differently. The identity is "I ship things." The metric is "I moved closer to done today."

A builder adds features because more features means more building means more identity reinforcement. A shipper cuts features because fewer features means faster shipping. When you identify as a shipper, every decision has a different filter. "Should I add this feature?" becomes "Will this feature help me ship faster or slower?" The answer to 80% of feature ideas is "slower."

Build this habit: at the start of every coding session, ask what's the one thing you can do today that moves you closest to shipping. Not what would be cool to build. What brings the ship date closer. This question alone cuts your feature list in half.

The Real Speed Multiplier

Every tactic in this post comes back to one idea: speed comes from building less, deciding faster, and shipping sooner. There is no trick, no framework, no tool that makes you ship faster if your scope is too big and your standards are too high for a v1.

The developers who ship fast have learned to separate "good enough for launch" from "good enough for scale." They build for launch first and scale second. They deploy before they are ready. They tell people before they are comfortable.

You can learn to do the same thing. It feels wrong at first. Every instinct you have as an engineer says "make it better before releasing it." Override that instinct. Ship it. Then make it better.

Your users do not need a perfect product. They need a product that exists.

---

What is the fastest way to ship a side project?

Cut your feature list to 3-5 items, deploy on day one, time-box your work sessions, skip polish until after launch, and set a hard ship date 2-3 weeks out. Speed comes from building less, not coding faster.

How do I stop over-engineering my side projects?

Ask yourself: will this matter if the project has 10 users? If the answer is no, skip it. Use managed services for auth, hosting, and payments. Write the simplest code that works. You can refactor when you have users who need you to.

Should I use a boilerplate or starter template to ship faster?

Templates save setup time, which is worth maybe a day or two. The real time savings come from scope discipline. A template with 20 planned features is still slow. A template with 4 planned features is fast. Use templates for setup, but do not mistake setup speed for shipping speed.

How do I know if I am spending too much time on my side project?

If your v1 is taking more than 4 weeks of part-time work, your scope is too large. If you are polishing features before the core functionality works, you are spending time in the wrong order. If you cannot describe your shipped product in one sentence, it is too complex.

What should I skip in my side project MVP?

Skip custom auth, skip admin dashboards, skip notification systems, skip dark mode, skip custom error pages, skip onboarding flows, skip analytics dashboards, skip settings pages with more than 3 options. Build the one thing that makes your product different from everything else.