Everyone Has A Banana Stand

You know exactly what yours is.

It’s the thing you started with genuine excitement, spent real time on, maybe even told a few people about. Then life got in the way, or the excitement faded, or it got hard in a way you didn’t expect. Now it sits somewhere in a dusty corner of the internet; half-built, half-promoted, technically alive but not really living. Somewhere between ‘done’ and ‘not done,’ and you’re not sure you have the energy to push it either direction.

That’s your banana stand.

The name

In the TV series Arrested Development, the Bluth family owns a banana stand on the pier. It’s small, it’s unglamorous, and the patriarch George Bluth keeps telling his son Michael there’s always money in the banana stand. Michael ignores it. He’s focused on bigger things. He wants to build something real.

The banana stand burns down. Turns out there was money, the folding in-your-wallet type, hidden in the walls.

Don’t be a Michael. Because we’ve all got a project we dismiss as too small, too niche, too unglamorous to take seriously. We walk past it every day looking for something bigger. And the thing we’re ignoring has been quietly waiting, full of potential we haven’t bothered to count.

Why your project stalls

Our banana stand projects go nowhere for one of three reasons, and if you’re honest with yourself you already know which one applies.

The first is fear of failure dressed up as perfectionism. The project isn’t ready yet. The branding needs work. The website needs another pass. You’ll launch it properly when the timing is right. The timing is never right because a project that never launches can never fail, and that’s exactly the point.

The second is distraction. Something shinier appeared. A new platform, a new idea, a new opportunity that felt more urgent. Your Banana Stand got deprioritised once and then again and then it became the thing you’d get back to eventually.

The third is the scariness of building in public. You told people about it. Or you didn’t, because you were afraid of what they’d think. Either way, the imaginary audience that judges you, laughs at you, asks ‘how’s it’s going’ when it’s overtly not going anywhere? Oh, the embarrassment. Much easier to stall and never ship.

These aren’t character flaws. They’re just patterns.

Banana stands are everywhere

Look around and you find them in every form: book manuscripts sitting at 60,000 words with no ending in sight, ecommerce stores that went live and then went quiet, software projects that never made it to version 1.0, newsletters that published four issues before the author ran out of steam, online courses built in full but never promoted, social accounts that posted furiously for six weeks and then fell silent.

The graveyard is enormous. And everyone you admire has at least one project buried there.

This is mine

I’m Mark. The Banana Stand started as a Substack newsletter in late 2024, casual and exploratory, the kind of thing you do when you’re testing whether an idea has legs. Then life intervened and it went quiet for longer than I intended.

The difference this time is intent. I’m not resurrecting this as a hobby. I’m building it as a real business: a content ecosystem with WordPress at its core, a newsletter audience, and a product catalogue of short, practical PDFs that solve immediate problems for people running small businesses. The Substack is still here as a discovery channel. The business is being built properly, in public, with the same systems and thinking I write about every week.

I’m building The Banana Stand alongside you. When I tell you that half-arsed projects can become real ones, I’m not blowing smoke. I’m doing it right now, and you’re reading the evidence.

What to do with yours

No need to burn it down and start over. No need to rebrand or start a new platform with a better logo. Just make one decision: is this worth finishing, or is it worth releasing?

Finishing means recommitting with a real plan, a real timeline, and the willingness to ship something imperfect. Releasing means acknowledging it served its purpose as a learning exercise, closing it down cleanly, and moving on without guilt.

The one thing you can’t keep doing is leaving it in the half-life.

Pick your banana stand. Then go do it.