Why I removed DearMeWiser from my product list.
DearMeWiser is no longer on the product page. I did not kill it in anger and I did not spin up a teardown thread. I just quietly took it off because it did not belong next to the rest of the lineup, and keeping it there was costing more than it was giving back. If you are a founder carrying a project that does not fit your niche anymore, this is the short version of how I thought about it.
The product was not the problem. The fit was.
DearMeWiser was being shaped as a reflective app for personal growth. It is a reasonable idea and I still think there is a version of it that works. The problem is that my niche on this site is very specific: founders and indie builders who are trying to ship real products inside real constraints. Everything else on the page speaks to that person. A reflective journaling app does not.
When a product sits in your lineup but does not match your niche, it does quiet damage. It blurs the promise the page is making. It makes the portfolio feel like a list of things you built, rather than a focused answer to a specific kind of person's problem.
What it was costing to keep it on the page
The cost was not technical. A paused product page is cheap to host. The cost was narrative. Every visitor landing on the products page was running a silent check: does this person build for me or not. A single product pointed at a different audience weakens that check for every other product on the list.
It was also costing me a small amount of attention. Every time I updated the page, I had to decide what to do about DearMeWiser. Every time I wrote a post, I had to decide whether to mention it. That is not a dramatic cost in any one moment, but it compounds quietly, and compounding quiet costs are exactly the thing indie builders need to watch.
The rule I used to make the call
The rule is simple. A product belongs on the list if it is aimed at the same person the rest of the page is aimed at. If it is not, it either needs to change, or it needs to live somewhere else. DearMeWiser did not change. So it moved.
That rule is useful because it does not ask whether the product is good. It asks whether the product is on-niche. A lot of founders get stuck trying to decide whether to keep a project on technical or sentimental grounds, when the real question is about fit. Good work in the wrong lineup still pulls your positioning sideways.
What the niche can take from this
If you are building a portfolio of small products, it is worth auditing the lineup the same way. Look at each product through the eyes of the exact person your site is for. If one of them does not speak to that person, you have three honest options: reposition it so it does, move it to a separate home, or take it off the page. All three are fine. Leaving it there by default is the one that slowly costs you.
Niche discipline is not only about what you add. It is about what you are willing to remove once you see more clearly who you are building for. That part rarely gets written about because it feels like subtraction. But subtraction is how a product list turns into a positioning.
What happens to DearMeWiser
For now, nothing. The idea still exists and the code still exists. It just does not live on this site, because this site is not the right shelf for it. If and when it finds its own home, I will link to it from there. The point of removing it was not to erase it. The point was to make the products that remain speak more clearly to the person this page is actually for.
Related reading: How IkigaiNiche helps you find a better niche
See the current lineup: What I'm building