Killing Your Darlings: Why Founders Should Ruthlessly Cut Their Projects

There’s a common belief in startup culture that the more ideas you launch, the better your odds. That spreading your bets across multiple SaaS products increases your chance of success. I believed that for a long time.

Over the past two months, I’ve proven myself wrong. One by one, I shut down three SaaS projects I had poured time, design, and early resources into. Today, I’m focused on one: Haulvana.

This wasn’t a breakdown. It wasn’t a failure-driven pivot. It was the result of an honest look at where the market is heading and where I could build the most value. Haulvana emerged as the clear winner, not just because of early traction, but because of something more important: undeniable market pull.

If you’re juggling multiple projects, I want to share why I made this shift, what I’ve learned from it, and a framework that might help you figure out where to place your full focus.

The Slow Death of Split Focus

At one point, I was actively developing four different micro-SaaS products. They were each scoped to be lean, manageable, and quickly testable. I had systems, automation, and frameworks in place to make it all feel efficient.

But focus isn’t a time allocation problem. It’s an energy and attention problem.

Every project you keep alive divides your thinking, your execution, and your commitment. It limits how close you can get to your users and how fast you can respond. When you split your attention across multiple SaaS ideas, you don't have four startups - you have four distractions.

Why Haulvana Rose to the Top

Haulvana is a fleet and operations management platform built for commercial and residential haulers: roll-on/roll-off operators, container services, and smaller hauling firms that the tech world has ignored for years.

When I started talking to people in this space, I expected a tough crowd. What I found instead was a clear and growing demand for modern software. Over the last three years, multiple SaaS products have popped up in the waste and fleet tech space, all chasing the same opportunity. But despite this activity, very few have gained real traction.

Why? A few reasons became obvious the more I dug in:

• They aren’t building what customers actually want.
  Most products either solve a narrow slice of the problem or try to serve a single anchor client with custom features that don’t scale.

• The tech is mediocre.
  Clunky, confusing UIs. Missing core features. Poor onboarding. Some are hard to use, others are impossible to understand without training.

• They lack a go-to-market strategy.
  Most of these companies are either hoping for inbound or stuck in a cycle of founder-led sales without a plan. There’s no vertical SEO. No community engagement. No outbound motion with real ICPs.

• They’re building for the category, not the customer.
  That difference matters. Operators don’t want fancy dashboards. They want tools that help dispatch a driver faster, issue invoices correctly, and make customers stop calling for status updates.

In contrast, every conversation I had about Haulvana felt like I was chasing demand, not creating it. When your target users nod during calls and say, “If this worked, I’d use it tomorrow,” that’s a clue. When they start referring you to others in their network before you even have pricing, that’s a signal.

So I made the decision to shut everything else down and go all-in.

The Emotional Weight of Letting Go

Letting go of the other three projects wasn’t easy. Each one had something going for it. A unique angle. A clever tech stack. Even some light traction in one case. But “clever” isn’t enough. Potential isn’t enough. None of them had the market gravity that Haulvana does.

And I’ll admit, killing your darlings feels like failure, even when it's a win. You mourn the hours, the designs, the late-night builds.

That quote landed differently as I archived domains and deleted Notion pages. Saying no to three decent ideas allowed me to say yes with conviction to the one idea that’s actually moving.

A Framework to Decide What to Keep

If you’re working on more than one thing right now, and you’re not sure what to prioritize, here’s the framework I used to make the decision:

1. Market Pull
   Are real customers proactively engaging with you? Are they referring you? Are they asking when they can start paying?

2. Problem Depth
   Are you solving a problem that’s critical to the user’s business, or just a “nice-to-have”? Look at how often the problem happens and how much it costs them.

3. Product-Market Fit Speed
   How fast can you iterate and get feedback? If you’re struggling to ship and test with users weekly, it’s probably not your highest-leverage bet.

4. Clarity of GTM
   Can you see a clear and repeatable path to acquiring more users—beyond friends, Twitter followers, or one anchor client?

5. Personal Conviction
   Does this feel like something you can give five years to? If not, it may not be worth giving five months.

All In Means All In

Today, every hour goes to Haulvana. I’m working directly with early customers, refining the dispatch system, building a simple customer portal, and rolling out SMS notifications and scheduling tools. The roadmap is shaped entirely by operators and their pain points.

I’m not trying to make this a unicorn. I’m trying to make it indispensable.

And that only happens when you stop building for variety and start building for impact.

Final thought: If you're sitting on too many projects right now, ask yourself this—what’s the one idea you’d bet the next five years on? Start there.

Then kill the rest.

Lets keep building