Park is honest sleep
Founder Playbook · PARK stage. Shelving a product without sunk-cost guilt — and writing down what would revive it.
PARK is the stage founders abuse in both directions: they park too fast (every setback reads as "not now") or never park at all (everything stays "almost ready" for a year). Done honestly, PARK is the most useful non-building decision in the portfolio.
Park ≠ quit
Quitting is a judgment about the idea. Parking is a judgment about timing and inputs: the idea may be sound, but you lack the distribution, the capital, the skill, or the market moment — right now. The distinction matters because it changes what you write down. A quit needs a eulogy; a park needs a revival condition.
The revival condition
A park without a revival condition is a quit with better PR — and it will haunt you. Before shelving, write one sentence: what would have to change for this to be worth reopening? Concrete things only:
- "The platform opens an API for this" — checkable.
- "I have 5 hours/week for three months" — checkable.
- "I feel more motivated" — not checkable. That's a quit wearing a park.
Then let the system carry it: the archived product keeps its evidence, scorecard, and history, and reviving it later starts from context, not archaeology.
Shelve without sunk-cost guilt
The months you spent weren't wasted — they're the research that produced the revival condition. What would be waste is reopening the product every time the revival condition isn't met, paying the switching cost over and over. Park is only honest if it's boring: no drama, no reopening "just to see," no guilt-coding on weekends. The product sleeps; the decision stands until the condition fires.
Where the OS enforces this
- The PARK decision requires a rationale — the revival condition lives in the record, not your head.
- Archiving keeps the product's full history (scorecard, experiments, decisions) intact and out of the active queue — nothing counts toward the dashboards, nothing nags you.
- Reviews surface parked products on the schedule you set, so "check the revival condition" happens on purpose, not at 1 AM.
Next: Kill it with dignity.