Why Developers Abandon Projects, but Founders Finish Them
The real shift is identity: you stop chasing what feels exciting to build and start staying with problems that deserve to exist.
The other day, someone asked me a very interesting question in a private channel. She said, “As a developer, I’ve started and abandoned so many side projects. I saw that you take an idea from scratch to completion. It feels incredibly impressive. How do you approach it?”
I thought about it for a while, and my answer was that I personally think this is an identity question.
When I treated myself purely as a developer, I also kept building and abandoning projects. I would get excited, start coding, build something halfway, then somehow lose interest because none of those projects really hit me deeply enough. But when you start treating yourself as a founder, your perspective naturally changes. Development is still important, of course, but it is no longer the whole game. You start to care about distribution, go-to-market, who your ideal customer profile is, and whether anyone actually needs this thing badly enough.
Your focus shifts subtly, sometimes in a way you do not even notice at first.
You begin to study how people pitch an idea. You notice how some people can explain something in one sentence and make it immediately click. You start learning frameworks for finding your minimal ideal customer. You start paying attention to positioning, urgency, pain points, and the tiny emotional triggers that make people care.
And maybe for the first time, you feel a strong impulse to move the needle…
Do you see what changed? I mentioned so many things that you only really start noticing when your identity shifts from “developer” to “founder.” Because being a founder changes what you pay attention to. You start seeing things you used to ignore.
I think this outward shift in perception is a reflection of something deeper within. It is how you see yourself. Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do.” If you repeatedly focus on how to make the system more robust, and how to improve maintainability, you become a very good developer.
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But if you intentionally learn how to pitch your idea, use a one-minute pitch template to sharpen your thinking, talk to users, test your assumptions, and find the right people to care about your product, you slowly start becoming a founder.
And I think this is why some projects get abandoned while others keep pulling you forward. It is not always because the idea is better. Sometimes it is because your relationship with the idea has changed.
When I was only thinking like a developer, a side project was something I built when I felt inspired. If the inspiration disappeared, the project disappeared with it. But as a founder, the project becomes less about whether I feel excited every single day, and more about whether the problem is worth staying with.
That shift matters a lot, because every project will eventually become boring in the middle. That is usually the point where the developer identity wants to escape and start something new. But the founder identity asks a different question: “Is there still a real problem here?” If the answer is yes, then you keep going. You simplify, reposition, test again, talk to more people, make the value clearer, and try to find one more person who cares.
So maybe my answer is this: I do not think completion comes from discipline alone. It comes from caring about the problem deeply enough that you are willing to survive the boring middle. And that caring often begins with identity.
That is the part I did not understand before. Taking an idea from scratch to completion is not about having endless motivation. It is about slowly becoming the kind of person who can hold the idea through uncertainty. You become someone who does not just build when it is fun. You become someone who stays long enough to find out whether the idea deserves to live.
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The more notes I write, the more I start to understand how to write a good note.
But honestly, most of the current note-writing playbooks do not sound right to me. A lot of them feel like they are teaching you to repeat a pattern or hook like this.
I personally do not like that very much.
When more and more people use the same tricks, everything starts to sound very mechanical. You can almost see the structure behind the words.
But I actually think writing a thoughtful and reflective note can be very, very easy.
The key is not to copy the surface pattern. The key is to understand the thinking technique behind it.
Once you understand that, you can create something similar within a minute. And it still sounds like you. It carries your own experience, your own observation, and your own way of seeing the world.
