Ruthless Prioritization

When you’re building alone—no PM, no designer, no QA, just you and your idea—your most valuable resource isn’t code, or even time. It’s focus. And yet, focus is exactly what slips when you don’t ruthlessly prioritize.

Off topic: I do use — a lot to maintain my writing flow. It does not mean it's written by AI. Just saying. Now back to article 😄

Most indie hackers and solo builders know this. And still, they will spend weeks redesigning a settings page no one will ever use. Or building a dashboard for a feature that doesn’t even have a single user yet. Or fiddling with animations for a product that hasn’t shipped.

Why? Because it feels good. It feels like progress. You’re “working” on your product. But the truth is: if you’re not prioritizing what moves the needle right now, you're just procrastinating in disguise.

Ruthless prioritization isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s survival.

When you’re a team of one, you can’t afford to treat all tasks equally. You can't afford to perfect things before they're proven. Your energy, motivation, and time are finite. Every hour you spend tweaking an empty state is an hour stolen from getting feedback, launching, or validating if your product even matters.

Correct prioritization starts with a question: what is the single most important thing I need to do to make progress right now?

Not in theory. Not for the roadmap. Right now.

Often, the answer is uncomfortable. It’s usually not the thing you want to do. It’s the hard conversation. The ugly MVP. The cold outreach. The unfinished but functional prototype. It’s the work that leads to momentum, not polish.

One of the biggest traps builders fall into is solving problems they think they’ll have later. “What if the user wants to do X?” “What if we get 10,000 users on day one?” “What if someone needs dark mode?” These what-ifs are seductive. They create a false sense of importance around features that have no bearing on whether your product lives or dies.

If you haven’t launched, you don’t have a product. You have a project. And until that project gets into the hands of real users, it’s just your personal playground. I wrote more about this mindset shift in project vs product mindset, and how treating your build like a product and not just a fun side project can change everything.

Here’s the painful part: if you don’t ruthlessly prioritize, your project will quietly rot. You won’t even notice. One day, you’ll realize it’s been months since you opened the repo. You’ll feel guilty about it. You’ll say it needs a bit more work before launch. But deep down, you’ll know. You built the wrong things in the wrong order. You never gave it a real shot.

So how do you avoid this? Simple isn’t easy, but it’s clear.

Prioritize outcomes over output. Prioritize learning over building. Prioritize momentum over perfection. Build only what helps you validate, learn, or grow.

When you're stuck between two tasks, ask: which one gets me closer to learning if this product is valuable? Not what looks good. Not what feels fun to build. Just what helps you learn faster. That’s the only thing that matters early on.

Ruthless prioritization means saying no to most things. It means shipping before you're ready. It means leaving corners rough and edges unpolished. Not because you don’t care, but because you care about the right things.

There’s always time to perfect something that people already want. But there’s never enough time to polish something no one asked for.

In the end, your ability to prioritize like a ruthless editor, not a romantic artist, will determine whether your side project stays a side project or becomes something real. The builders who learn to choose what matters most, win. The rest keep tweaking.

Ruthless prioritization is what will determine whether your side project stays a side project or becomes something real and meaningful. The builders who commit to making hard decisions, cut what doesn’t matter, avoid distractions, and ship — are the ones who move forward. Everyone else gets stuck perfecting things that no one asked.

Closing note — Choose wisely. And ship.