Origin story
Why I built SideQuick
You are not lazy for drifting away from a project. Most new things stop quietly. SideQuick exists because I needed progress to feel real on the days when hype was gone.
I have 134 GitHub repos. Maybe 15 of them ever went anywhere. The pattern was always the same. Get excited about an idea, buy the domain, spend hours setting everything up, work on it for a few weeks, then slowly stop opening it. No dramatic reason. Just one day I'd realise I hadn't touched it in a month.
It wasn't laziness. I genuinely wanted to finish things. The problem was that raw willpower and a blank to-do list weren't enough to keep me going once the initial excitement wore off.
SideQuick was my attempt to fix that for myself. Turn the work into quests. Earn XP. Level up. Make progress feel like something worth coming back to.
It's still here. That's how I know it works.
You are in crowded company
Founders and federal statisticians both track the same blunt truth: most new efforts do not survive unchanged for years on end. That does not mean you should quit — it means the default environment is hostile to follow-through, and tooling should compensate.
BLS Business Employment Dynamics tracks cohorts over time; figures are commonly cited aggregates for survival curves (exact rates vary by industry and start year).
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, establishment age and survival; see also BLS The Economics Daily (2013 cohort, 2023).
CB Insights tagged public shutdowns from hundreds of companies; many cite more than one reason, so shares overlap and exceed 100% combined. “Ran out of capital” is often the last chapter, not the only plot twist.
Source: CB Insights — Why startups fail.
Not survey data — a simple picture of how enthusiasm often drifts after the first few weeks without a system.
134 repos. About 15 that ever went anywhere. The rest are not failures of character — they are what happens when setup and excitement outlast follow-through systems.
Articles worth the bookmark
Mix of hard data, founder archaeology, and systems thinking — the stuff I kept returning to while building this app.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor StatisticsEstablishment age and survival (BLS)↗Official longitudinal tables on how long new private-sector establishments tend to last.
- BLS · The Economics Daily34.7% of 2013 establishments still operating in 2023↗A concrete ten-year snapshot: most new establishments do not make it a full decade.
- CB InsightsWhy startups fail: top reasons from post-mortems↗Hundreds of founder letters distilled into recurring failure modes — often before “motivation” ever enters the chat.
- CNBCWhy start-ups fail: cash runs out↗A readable summary of early CB Insights findings for anyone who prefers narrative journalism.
- DEV CommunityThe side project graveyard↗Developer culture in the open: shiny new repos, stalled maintenance, and what shipping habits change.
- James ClearForget setting goals. Focus on this instead.↗A short case for systems over sheer intention — the same shift SideQuick tries to embody as quests and streaks.
Ready to try the same loop that kept me shipping?