I like to test ideas and move on relatively quickly. If I don’t see that it is interesting enough I do something else. More time for the next project.
There are good and bad things about this kind of approach.
There are a few Projects that I’ve been supporting for years, but they’re fairly low maintenance. That usually means just updating them to make sure they’re compatible with the next OS version since I can’t really justify spending much time on them considering the revenue is simply not there. Most of them I just abandon quickly, sometimes even before sharing it with anyone if the idea doesn’t seem interesting or if commercially unsuccessful. Many have said this is totally the wrong approach and I should just stick with a single product for a long period of time. That might work for them, but I just can’t stay focused on one product for too long. Maybe one day I will find that one product that really hooks me in, but I have not found it yet and it is not productive focusing on something you don’t really want to do.
The question when to pull the plug is a hard one. And you can never be 100% certain that the decision to do it or not is right. Maybe if you tried releasing one more feature it would take off. And maybe it wouldn’t have changed anything. You never know for sure.
What you can do is see the trajectory. Either a product got enough traction to justify investing in it further, or it did not. That is not bulletproof, since a product that didn’t get traction might be for some reason that can be fixed. But generally is the core idea is not interesting enough it is not really worth investing time into.