Hey everyone, I'm really seeking some advice here because I'm in a difficult spot with my side project. I've been working on it for about four months and even hired a dev team to help. We may have over-engineered some parts, but I'm genuinely proud of the foundation, architecture, and overall code quality we've built. The issue is that we're only 65% done and due to financial constraints, I can't keep funding the project at this point. I feel stuck between two options:
1. Keep the dev team and try to finish the last 35%—but I worry about scope creep and I'm not confident we can wrap it up anytime soon.
2. Stop the devs and finish the project myself, possibly cutting corners and worrying about long-term integrity.
I want to know from your experiences if I should aggressively cut the scope and ship a simpler version, restructure the team, pause the project, or go the route of wiping and coding the last part myself. Any frameworks or hard truths based on your experiences would be super helpful! Thanks a lot!
5 Answers
Let go of the perfectionism! Shipping what you've completed is key. Your core 65% is better than what many have launched. Users care about functionality, not how shiny the code is. Get it out there!
You really need to think about this from a product perspective, not just a coding one. What’s your end goal? Who is your audience and do they even want what you’re building? It might be worth simplifying the project to test demand sooner rather than later.
Absolutely agree. It's all about getting a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) out there. You could be building for months but if nobody is interested, what's the point? Focus on shipping something that works so you can gather feedback.
I say cut down your scope to what you’ve already developed and just ship it. You’ll get validation from real users, which will help guide your next steps. If you have leftover funds, allocate that for after you release, to build on the feedback you receive.
You really should just ship. The clean architecture is great, but it won't matter if the project never launches. Aim for a simple version of what you have, get feedback, and tackle the rest later.

Related Questions
How To: Running Codex CLI on Windows with Azure OpenAI
Set Wordpress Featured Image Using Javascript
How To Fix PHP Random Being The Same
Why no WebP Support with Wordpress
Replace Wordpress Cron With Linux Cron
Customize Yoast Canonical URL Programmatically