Every site that gets this right shows the state of each project. Live, dead, sold, paused. That is the field doing the work, and it is the one I had been treating as a detail.
I have nine things on my projects page. Some earn money, one is waiting on an approval, one is a directory I update on weekends. To a visitor they look identical. I only noticed after spending a morning on the personal sites of people who are further along with the same problem.
The ones who list everything
Mubashar Iqbal has 127 projects on iworkedon.com, grouped by year, going back to 2000. Every one carries a badge: Active, Dead, Sold, Left, Autopilot, Pre-launch, Zombie. Seven states. Without them the page would be unreadable. With them you can scan two decades in about a minute.
Marc Lou does the same thing with money. His site lists over forty products ranked by monthly revenue, the amount printed next to each name, and a badge on the ones he sold or shut down. Michael Lynch groups his into businesses, educational and open source, gives each one a year range, and says out loud which ones never made any money. Portfolio Rebalancer, in his own words, “couldn’t find any users interested in paying”.
Simon Høiberg built a timeline instead. Product logo, the word Launched or Acquired, and a month. FeedHive in February 2021, TinyKiwi acquired in January 2023.
Four sites, one shared decision. Say what happened to each thing.
The ones who keep the list short
Marc Köhlbrugge runs WIP, BetaList, Startup Jobs and five more, and his site shows them under a single heading: Currently working on. Logo, name, one line each. No revenue, no dates, no history. The heading does the filtering, so the page can never get longer than what he is actually doing.
Josh Pigford writes “Dabbler. Currently building…an offensive number of things”, then gives a plain bulleted list of five with a one-line description and a link on each. Andrey Azimov splits his into current and past and tags the past ones Acquired, which is the only status he needs.
Where the revenue numbers go
Pieter Levels has no product list at all. levels.io is a reverse-chronological feed of posts, and you find out what he runs by reading, revenue included, because the numbers sit inside the posts. That works when people arrive already wanting to read him. For anyone else it is an expensive way to answer “what does this person make”.
Marc Lou put the number in the sort order instead. His most profitable product is at the top because it is the most profitable, and the page is legible in three seconds.
The two who show almost nothing
Jon Yongfook has built plenty. His site shows Bannerbear and stops. Danny Postma’s shows HeadshotPro and stops. Both made the same call: once one product carries the business, a portfolio page costs you, because it splits the attention of someone who came to buy one thing.
I do not have that problem yet. Worth knowing what it looks like when I do.
What I changed here
The projects page used to be a table with a status column, which is the field every good page shares. It is now a list grouped by status, so the heading carries the state and each row is down to an icon, a name, a launch date and a sentence. Live has six things in it. In review has Koppel, sitting with Bol. Scheduled has one. Building has one.
What that grouping made obvious is the group that is missing. There is no shut-down section, because I have never marked anything as shut down. Nine projects started, none stopped, which is not a track record. It is an admission that I have not gone back and closed the books on anything.
It also settled an argument I had been having with myself. philip.nl used to sit in that list as a project. It is the page you are reading, so it is off the list now. The 12 in 12 counter reads seven, set by hand, and seven is the number I am willing to defend.