The graveyard is part of the portfolio
On killing ideas that don't deserve more time — and why archiving honestly beats zombie-maintaining.
Every product studio has a graveyard. Ours does too. You won't find
those projects in the main navigation — but you'll find some marked
ARCHIVED in the product list, and we think that's a feature.
Sunk cost is the enemy
The most expensive thing a small company can do is keep a mediocre idea on life support. It eats attention, it demoralizes, and — worst of all — it blocks the slot where a good idea could live.
The math is brutal: hours spent "maintaining" a dead idea have the same cost as hours spent building a live one. The opportunity cost is invisible on any dashboard, which is exactly why it survives.
How we decide
We don't have a fancy framework. Three questions:
- Would we start this today? Not "is it finished?" — if it didn't exist, would we build it now? If no, the only reason to continue is sunk cost.
- Is anyone pulling? Real usage, real requests, real emails. Not politeness, not "growth seems flat-ish but maybe."
- What does keeping it cost? Sometimes the honest answer is "almost nothing" — and then a quiet product may stay (see: QuickMemorial, deliberately low-maintenance and healthy). Cost alone doesn't kill ideas. Cost plus indifference does.
Archiving is not failing
We mark archived products ARCHIVED, keep the story published, and
write down what we learned. The failure mode isn't archiving — it's
pretending. A zombie product teaches nothing, helps no one, and quietly
lies to visitors about being alive.
The graveyard is evidence that the filter works.
What the dead ideas taught us
The pattern across our archived projects is consistent: we built for imagined users instead of noticed problems. The products that live — every single one — started with a frustration we personally hit. The products that died started with a market size.
That's the whole lesson, and we relearn it roughly once a year.