January 8, 2026
Why side projects die
Side projects rarely fail because the idea was bad. They fail because momentum breaks, and getting back in is harder than starting fresh.
Most side projects don’t die with a dramatic failure. They die quietly. You step away for a weekend. Then a week. Then a month. And somewhere in that gap, the project stops feeling like yours.
This is the most common way side projects end: not with a bang, but with a slow fade.
The momentum gap
When you’re deep in a project, everything makes sense. You know what you were working on, what’s broken, what’s next. Your mental model is loaded and active.
But context is fragile. A few days away and the details start to blur. A week, and you’re staring at your own code like it was written by someone else.
The gap between “I was just working on this” and “I have no idea where I left off” is surprisingly small.
Why existing tools don’t help
Most developer tools focus on the doing: writing code, running tests, deploying. Very few care about the resuming.
Task managers give you a list of things to do, but not the context to actually start. Documentation helps, but nobody wants to write a handoff doc to their future self every time they close their laptop.
The result: getting back into a project requires a mini archaeology dig through commits, branches, open tabs, and half-finished thoughts.
The real cost
Every time you hit this wall, a small decision happens in your head:
“Should I spend 30 minutes getting back into context, or just… do something else?”
Most of the time, “something else” wins. Not because you don’t care about the project, but because the friction is just high enough to tip the balance.
Multiply that by every side project you’ve ever started, and you get a graveyard of good ideas that simply lost momentum.
A different approach
What if your tools remembered the context for you? Not in a heavy, structured way, but just enough to lower the activation energy of coming back.
That’s what we’re building with KeepGoing. A quiet, lightweight way to capture where you left off so that returning to a project feels natural instead of daunting.
No streaks. No guilt. No productivity theater.
Just a simple way to keep going.
This is the first post on the KeepGoing blog. We’ll be sharing what we learn along the way.