The Most Underrated Content Strategy Is Knowing When to Kill It
Every creator I know has a graveyard of dead projects. Some are abandoned TikTok series that peaked at 200 views. Some are newsletters with three subscribers and a backlog of guilt. Some are entire side hustles that consumed six months of evenings before quietly suffocating.
We don’t talk about those enough. Launch stories get the spotlight — the Product Hunt debuts, the “how I grew to 100K followers” threads, the celebratory screenshots of dashboard spikes. But the postmortems? Those get whispered in DMs, buried in private Discord channels, or never written at all.
That’s why RIP My Build caught my attention. It’s not a scheduling tool, not an AI content generator, not another analytics dashboard. It’s a public obituary board for dead side projects. And honestly, for anyone who operates social accounts or runs a creator business, it might be one of the more useful things to launch this month — not because it’ll make you money, but because it might save you from wasting more of it.
The creator economy has a survivorship bias problem. We see the winners because the algorithms surface them. We rarely see the 90% of accounts that plateau, the newsletters that die at issue #12, the YouTube channels that stop uploading after eight months of zero momentum. That missing data distorts our decisions. We chase strategies that worked for outliers while ignoring the much larger sample of people who tried the same thing and failed — often for reasons that had nothing to do with execution quality.
So let’s talk about what a dead-project graveyard can teach us, why the “shipping is enough” mantra is half-true at best, and what operators can actually borrow from a tool that’s essentially a digital cemetery.
What Problem This Actually Solves: Normalizing the Postmortem
The product itself is simple. Horia Jurcut, the maker, has built a space where people can write obituaries for projects that didn’t make it. The launch page includes a discussion thread asking builders to share the moment they knew their side project was over — the first week without users, a shinier idea, life getting in the way. The team has decided to make obituaries free permanently to encourage more people to share.
That’s the entire pitch. No freemium tier, no enterprise plan, no API. Just a place to publicly bury your dead projects and read about other people’s.
On the surface, this seems like the opposite of useful for social media operators. We’re in the business of growth, engagement, and optimization. Why would we spend time reading about failures?
Here’s why: because the failure data is where the actual learning lives.
When I look back at accounts I’ve managed — both my own and clients’ — the most instructive moments weren’t the viral posts. They were the quiet deaths. The Instagram account that grew to 8,000 followers and then flatlined for four months because I stopped posting Reels after the algorithm shift. The podcast that got 40 downloads per episode for twelve episodes before I finally pulled the plug. The newsletter that I kept sending to 500 people who never opened it, because canceling felt like admitting defeat.
Each of those had a turning point. And in every case, I ignored it for longer than I should have.
The thread on the RIP My Build launch page captures this perfectly. One commenter, Rabnoor Singh, describes building three failed projects — an AI agency, a voice AI tool, and a procurement platform — before finding something that worked. The one that still bothers him: the first paying customer who signed, paid, and then never logged in. Not once.
“At the time I read that as a win because the money had arrived. It took me embarrassingly long to notice that a signature and a payment can both happen without anyone actually wanting the thing.”
That’s the kind of honest reflection that never makes it into a launch post. And it’s exactly the kind of insight that saves creators from repeating expensive mistakes.
The maker himself acknowledges the value of postmortems in the discussion thread: “The best postmortems are often more useful than launch stories.” I’d go further — they’re more useful than most growth guides, too.
How This Differs From Everything Else in the Creator Economy Stack
The creator economy tooling landscape is crowded with products that promise more: more reach, more engagement, more revenue. Buffer automates your posting schedule. Hootsuite gives you a command center for every platform. Canva makes design accessible. Metricool tracks analytics across networks.
All of these tools are built on the same implicit promise: if you use them correctly, your numbers will go up.
RIP My Build makes no such promise. It doesn’t promise growth. It doesn’t promise efficiency. It doesn’t even promise to help you do anything better. It just provides a space to acknowledge that things didn’t work out — and to learn from that acknowledgment.
That’s a fundamentally different value proposition. And it’s one that the creator economy desperately needs.
Here’s what I mean. When I schedule 30 posts across 5 platforms in a month — which I did last month, and which is a pretty typical workflow for anyone running a serious content operation — I’m making dozens of micro-decisions based on assumptions. I assume the algorithm will reward consistency. I assume my audience wants more of what I’ve been giving them. I assume that if I just keep posting, something will eventually break through.
Those assumptions are rarely tested. I measure engagement rates, watch time, and follower growth — but I don’t systematically measure whether the underlying strategy is sound. I’m optimizing a machine that might be pointed in the wrong direction.
The postmortem framework forces you to ask a different question: not “how do I make this work?” but “should this exist at all?”
That’s a question that Later and CapCut and every other tool in my stack will never ask. They’re built to help you execute. RIP My Build is built to help you reflect.
Why the “Shipping Is Enough” Mantra Is Half-True
The creator economy runs on a specific gospel: ship fast, ship often, and the algorithm will reward you. There’s truth in that — consistency matters, and the platforms do favor accounts that produce regularly. But the “ship and it will grow” mentality has a dark side.
When I’ve tested this approach — posting daily Reels for 60 days straight, or publishing a new YouTube video every week for a quarter — the results were mixed. Some content performed well. Most didn’t. And the act of shipping became its own trap: I was so focused on producing that I stopped evaluating whether I was producing the right things.
This is where the postmortem mindset helps. The RIP My Build thread is full of people who shipped consistently and still failed. The AI agency that didn’t find product-market fit. The voice AI tool that nobody needed. The procurement platform that solved a problem no one was willing to pay to solve.
None of those failures were caused by insufficient shipping. They were caused by building things that didn’t need to exist.
The same logic applies to content. I’ve seen creators post daily for a year and gain 200 followers because they were making content that didn’t resonate. I’ve seen others post twice a week and grow 10x faster because they’d figured out what their audience actually wanted. The difference wasn’t output volume — it was strategic alignment.
The postmortem forces you to confront that misalignment. When you write an obituary for a project, you have to answer the question: what was the turning point? And that question inevitably leads to deeper ones: was I solving a real problem? Was I serving a real audience? Was I doing this because it was working, or because I was afraid to stop?
Those are the questions that RIP My Build is designed to surface. And they’re the questions that most creator-economy tools are designed to help you avoid.
What Creators and Social Media Teams Can Borrow From This Right Now
You don’t need to use the product to benefit from its philosophy. Here’s what I’m taking from it, and what I’d suggest any operator try this week.
Start a death list. Not a to-do list — a death list. A running document where you track every content initiative, platform experiment, and side project that you’ve killed or should kill. For each one, write three things: what you tried, what the actual results were, and what you’d do differently. This is the operational equivalent of an obituary, and it’s the most valuable content strategy document you’ll ever create.
Schedule a quarterly postmortem. I block time at the end of every quarter to review what worked and what didn’t across all the accounts I manage. The format is simple: for each platform, I list the top three performing posts and the bottom three, then I write a paragraph about what the pattern suggests. It’s not deep analysis — it’s just honest observation. And it’s consistently more useful than any analytics dashboard I’ve used.
Share your failures publicly. This is the hardest one, and the one I think RIP My Build is trying to make easier. When I’ve written about failed experiments on X or LinkedIn, the engagement is always higher than when I share wins. People are hungry for honest assessments of what doesn’t work. They’re tired of the highlight reel.
The comment from Lisa on the launch thread captures this tension perfectly: “Mine is not buried yet, but today taught me that shipping and being seen are two different problems. We went live today too. Can an obituary be edited if the thing comes back?”
That’s the right question. An obituary shouldn’t be permanent — it should be a checkpoint. The goal isn’t to memorialize failure; it’s to learn from it and move on.
Where the Math Breaks: The Problem With Postmortem Data
I need to be honest about the limitations here. Postmortems are useful, but they’re also biased in specific ways that operators should understand.
First, there’s survivorship bias in reverse. People who write obituaries are self-selecting. They’re more likely to be reflective, more likely to blame themselves rather than external factors, and more likely to have the time and energy to write about their failures. That doesn’t make their lessons invalid — but it does mean the sample isn’t representative.
Second, postmortems are retrospective. They’re written after the fact, which means they’re filtered through the lens of what happened. The builder who killed their AI agency might attribute the failure to poor market timing, when the real issue was that they never validated demand in the first place. The story gets cleaned up, and the messiest lessons get lost.
Third, there’s a selection problem with what gets posted. The RIP My Build thread is full of tech projects — AI tools, SaaS products, apps. That’s useful for indie hackers, but less directly relevant for social media operators who are trying to grow an audience, not build a product. The failure modes are different.
So take the lessons with a grain of salt. Postmortems are data points, not gospel. They’re most useful when they prompt you to ask your own questions, not when they provide ready-made answers.
Who This Is NOT For
If you’re a social media manager at a large brand, this product probably isn’t for you. Your job is to execute a strategy that someone else designed, and your failures are usually invisible — buried in quarterly reports and attributed to “algorithm changes” rather than strategic missteps. The postmortem culture doesn’t exist in most corporate settings, and a public obituary board isn’t going to change that.
If you’re a creator who’s currently succeeding, this also might not be for you — at least not right now. When you’re in a growth phase, the last thing you want to read about is failure. It’s demotivating, and it can make you second-guess strategies that are working.
But if you’re a creator who’s plateaued, or an indie founder who’s killed more projects than you’ve launched, or a social media operator who’s tired of pretending everything is working when it isn’t — this is for you. Not because the product will fix anything, but because it might give you permission to stop pretending.
My Honest Judgment: What’s Missing and What I’d Watch
Here’s where I land. RIP My Build is a good idea with a clear gap in the market. The creator economy needs more spaces for honest reflection, and the maker’s decision to keep obituaries free permanently is the right call — it removes the friction that would otherwise prevent people from sharing.
But there are open questions. The product is early, and the launch page doesn’t disclose much about where it’s going. There’s no information about moderation, community guidelines, or how the team plans to handle the inevitable spam and self-promotion that will show up as the community grows. There’s no indication of whether the obituaries will be searchable, categorized, or structured in a way that makes them useful for research. And there’s no clear path to monetization — which is fine for now, but it raises questions about long-term sustainability.
My take: the product will live or die based on the quality of its community. If it becomes a space where people genuinely share their failures and lessons, it’ll be invaluable. If it devolves into a self-promotion channel where people post about their dead projects to drive traffic to their new ones, it’ll be worthless.
The comment from rick segal on the launch page suggests one interesting direction: “Make it open source so some propeller head, like me, can make an MCP that lets the bots get prompted with any zombies/dead ones out there.” If the data becomes accessible — through an API or open-source structure — it could become a genuinely useful research resource for understanding failure patterns across the creator economy.
That’s what I’d watch. Not the product itself, but whether it can build a data set that’s actually useful.
What I’d Watch and Test Next
If you’re a creator or social media operator who wants to apply this thinking this week, here’s what I’d suggest:
Write one obituary for a dead project. It doesn’t have to be public. Write it for yourself. Pick a project that failed — a YouTube channel you abandoned, a newsletter you stopped sending, a content series that never took off — and write three paragraphs: what you tried, what happened, and what you’d do differently. Be brutally honest. Don’t blame the algorithm, don’t blame the platform, don’t blame timing. Own your part of it.
Read three postmortems from other people. The RIP My Build thread is a good starting point. Read the comment from Rabnoor Singh about the paying customer who never logged in — that’s the kind of lesson that sticks. Then find postmortems from creators in your niche who’ve been honest about their failures.
Run a 30-day kill test. Pick one content initiative that’s been underperforming — a series, a platform, a format — and commit to either fixing it or killing it within 30 days. Set specific metrics for what “working” looks like. If it doesn’t hit those metrics, kill it and write the obituary. This is the operational version of the postmortem, and it’s the most effective way to stop wasting time on things that aren’t working.
Share one failure publicly. Post about a dead project on your social channels. Be honest about what went wrong. You’ll be surprised by how much engagement you get — and you might help another creator avoid the same mistake.
The creator economy needs more honest conversations about failure. Not because failure is glamorous, but because it’s informative. The projects that die have as much to teach us as the ones that succeed — often more.
The question is whether we’re willing to listen.
