A free community resurrection program for the projects that almost shipped. Send us your stalled side project, your half-built MVP, your almost-something — we'll spend a weekend with you tearing down the wall it hit, ship something demo-able, and publish the post-mortem so the next builder doesn't repeat it.
It fails because the builder hit a wall they hadn't seen before. The auth refactor that took longer than estimated. The data model that needed re-thinking. The deployment story that turned into six configs and a Cloudflare ticket. The realtime layer that was supposed to be "easy."
Most of those walls aren't genuinely hard — they're hard for the specific person hitting them. There's almost always somebody who's stood in front of that wall before and now finds it boring. Project 404 is the introduction.
— Jordan Hammond, on the founding of Project 404
It runs four times a year. Two days each time. Four projects per cohort. Four to six volunteer engineers, plus the 404inc team, plus the original builder. By Sunday evening there's something demo-able. By the next Friday there's a written post-mortem in the public archive — what stalled it, what fixed it, and what the next builder hitting that wall should know.
The whole thing is free. There is no hidden tier. No "introductory engagement" pitch. No retainer email three weeks later. We do this because the company we run is built on the lessons of side projects that compounded — and we owe a quiet tax to the next ones.
We pick four per quarter. Volume means we have to be honest about what fits. Nothing here is moral judgment — it's just where we can actually move the needle in two days.
Six fields. We read every submission within two weeks. The four we pick get a confirmation email and a date; the rest get a paragraph of honest feedback from a senior engineer — that alone is sometimes the unblock.
Every Project 404 weekend ends with a public post-mortem. Below is a slice — twelve of the forty-seven we've done since June 2024. Click any card to read the full retrospective.
Volunteering is the heart of Project 404. The 404inc team can lead a resurrection, but four projects per quarter is too many people for two of us. We need engineers who'll show up for two days, dig into a codebase they didn't write, and pair with someone who's been staring at the same wall for too long.
You don't need a senior title. You need two days, working knowledge of at least one part of the modern stack, and the willingness to read someone else's code without judgment. The matchmaking handles the rest.
Here's what the weekend looks like:
It just has your name on it because you got there first. Send it over — we'll spend a weekend tearing it down with you.