Will This Side Project Survive?

Five well-weighted signals beat 30 vague ones. The quiz scores momentum, time honesty, distribution, kill discipline, and accountability, the five factors that show up in every published side-project failure post-mortem. The accuracy claim is calibrated: the score tells you which signal is dragging you down, not whether your specific project will ship. Use the named fix as the next action, not the verdict as a verdict on you.

The signal with the highest drag, computed as weight times (1 minus your normalized score on that signal). If you scored low on momentum and low on distribution, the quiz picks the higher-weighted one and names the corresponding fix. Each fix is a concrete action you can take this week, no AI hallucination, no fluff. Five fixes total, one per signal, plus a complacency warning if you scored 100.

A kill date is a calendar date you commit to in advance: if the project hasn't hit X by Y, you stop. Without one, side projects outlive their usefulness by a year and burn the energy you needed for the next thing. The quiz weights kill discipline at 20 because it is the single decision that prevents months of sunk cost. The Idea Validation Checklist on this site covers how to set defensible kill criteria.

Not necessarily. A score of 30 means you are drifting badly, not that the idea is bad. Look at the named fix: that one signal is doing 60 to 80 percent of the damage. Fix it for two weeks, retake the quiz, see if the score moves. If it doesn't, the idea is the problem and a kill date becomes the next decision.

Structurally, yes. The data says most projects that died had a stretch of 90-plus scores six months before. The risk at this score is complacency: skipping the user conversation because everything else is humming, or quietly extending the kill date because momentum feels permanent. Retake monthly, not just when something feels off.

Because the strongest predictor of permanent abandonment in side-project failure data is a four-plus week gap with no commits. Time honesty, distribution, and kill discipline are weighted just below at 20 each. Accountability gets 15 because it is a force-multiplier on the others, not a standalone cause. Total weight is 100.

Yes, with caveats. The momentum, time, and accountability signals work for any project. Distribution and kill discipline are less relevant for client work where the brief and the deadline are externally fixed. For client work the score floor is artificially higher, so don't trust an 80 to mean the project is healthy.

Yes. The 5-signal model is product-agnostic. Replace "user" in question 3 with "reader", "student", or "customer". The math is identical. Indie devs building content products or courses are over-indexed in the failure data, so the quiz is arguably more useful there than for traditional SaaS.

A combination of published indie founder failure data (Pieter Levels 4-of-70 disclosure at levels.io/12-startups-12-months, Steam indie-game commercial failure rates around 70 percent, side-project completion surveys showing around 80 percent abandoned at the 80 percent mark) and the recurring themes across the top 15 articles on "why side projects fail". The weights are opinionated, not regressed on a private dataset.

Only in your browser. The last result and your answers are saved to localStorage on this domain only. Nothing is sent to a server, no analytics, no tracking. The shareable URL encodes your answers in the hash so even that never leaves your client. Clear the data any time by clicking Retake.

Four patterns appear in almost every abandoned side project. First, the commit gap: once a project goes four weeks without a real commit, the restart cost grows faster than motivation. Second, time dishonesty: developers plan 10 hours and do 2, then blame a bad week instead of a bad plan. Third, building without users: sixty days of no user feedback means the product drifts from the validated idea without anyone noticing. Fourth, no kill date: without a written date to stop, every side project outlives its usefulness. The survival quiz scores all four of these plus accountability as a fifth signal.

Ninety days is a defensible default for an indie SaaS MVP. Long enough to build something real, short enough that the kill date is believable. Projects without a time boundary tend to expand indefinitely: scope grows, motivation drops, and the project joins the abandoned pile. Set a 90-day kill date at the start, define the criteria that would justify stopping early, and treat the date as a contract with yourself. The SaaS Idea Validation Checklist on this site covers how to write defensible kill criteria before you write the first line of code.