Here's a question: do you actually know how your projects are doing right now? Not a vague sense. The real numbers. MRR for each project. Whether it went up or down this week. How many unresolved errors are sitting in Sentry. Whether you're on track for your quarterly goals. What you shipped last week and what you're planning to ship next.
If the answer is "not really, but it feels like things are okay," that's the problem this post is about.
Why a weekly review matters
When you're running one project, you have a natural feel for how things are going. You check Stripe occasionally, you see the errors as they come in, you know what you shipped because you just shipped it. The business lives in your head.
Scale that to two, three, four projects and the mental model breaks down. You haven't checked Stripe for Project C in two weeks. There might be a spike in errors you haven't noticed. That goal you set in January? No idea if you're on track. Revenue could be declining slowly and you wouldn't know until it's obvious.
The weekly review is the fix. Twenty minutes, once a week, systematically checking in on every project. It catches problems early, keeps you honest about your numbers, and gives you a clear plan for the coming week. It's the simplest habit that makes the biggest difference for anyone managing multiple SaaS projects.
What to review
The review should be quick and structured. Not a deep strategic session. Not a two-hour planning marathon. Just a systematic check on each project, covering the same things every week.
Revenue. What's the MRR for each project? Did it go up or down since last week? Any new customers? Any churn? If you're tracking expenses, what's the profit? The goal isn't deep financial analysis. It's pattern recognition. Three weeks of declining MRR is a signal. Two new customers after a dry spell is worth noticing.
Errors. Open up your error monitoring (Sentry or whatever you use). Any new unresolved issues? Anything with a high event count that you've been ignoring? This takes two minutes per project and prevents the situation where a bug has been affecting users for a month and you had no idea.
What shipped. What did you actually complete this week? This sounds obvious, but it's easy to spend a week feeling busy without actually finishing anything. Writing down what shipped forces you to notice when you're spinning your wheels.
What's next. Based on the roadmap, what are you working on next week? This is the plan, not a commitment. It can change. But having a starting point for Monday morning instead of staring at your backlog wondering where to begin is worth a lot.
How you're feeling. This is the one that seems optional but isn't. How do you feel about each project right now? Excited? Neutral? Dreading it? A project can be growing while making you miserable. Revenue going up doesn't help if you hate working on it. Tracking mood over time surfaces patterns that metrics alone never will. Three weeks of "dreading" is a signal that something needs to change, whether that's the project itself or your approach to it.
When and how
Sunday evening works well. It draws a line between the week that's ending and the week that's starting. You go into Monday already knowing the state of things and what you're doing first.
Some people prefer Friday afternoon, wrapping up the week while it's fresh. Others do Monday morning as a startup ritual. The day matters less than the consistency. Pick a time, do it every week, don't skip it.
The format can be as simple as a few bullet points per project. Or it can be more structured with mood ratings and goal progress alongside the notes. What matters is that you actually look at the numbers and write something down. The act of writing forces you to think about what's really going on, rather than relying on a vague impression.
Keep the old reviews somewhere you can look back at them. A month of weekly check-ins becomes a history of your portfolio. You can see when a project started stalling, when you started losing motivation, when a goal fell off track. This retrospective view is incredibly useful for deciding where to double down and where to let go.
The five-minute version
If twenty minutes feels like too much, here's the absolute minimum. For each project, answer three questions:
Is MRR up or down? Are there any errors that need attention? What am I doing next week?
That's it. Five minutes total. You can do this on your phone. The bar for "better than nothing" is extremely low, and even this minimal version will catch most problems before they get serious.
What a good check-in looks like
A useful check-in is short and honest. Not a report for someone else. A note for future you.
Something like: "MRR flat at £340. No new signups this week. Two cancellations, one came back. Error count is fine. Shipped the onboarding email sequence. Next week: pricing page redesign. Feeling good about this one, momentum is back after the slump last month."
That took thirty seconds to write and contains enough information to be genuinely useful when you look back at it in a month.
Compare that to: "Things are going okay." That's what you'll write in your head if you don't write anything at all. It's useless. You won't remember what "okay" meant in six weeks.
The dashboard problem
The weekly review only works if the numbers are accessible. If checking MRR means logging into three Stripe dashboards, and checking errors means opening two Sentry accounts, and checking goals means finding that Notion page you haven't opened since February, the review will take an hour instead of twenty minutes. And then you'll stop doing it.
This is why a unified dashboard matters. Not because dashboards are exciting, but because they reduce the friction of the weekly review to near zero. Open one page, see all your projects, check the numbers, write your notes, move on.
What we built for this
Weekly check-ins are a core feature in Shipchart. Each project has a check-in log where you record notes alongside a mood rating (great, good, okay, struggling). The dashboard shows MRR, errors, goal progress, and recent activity across all your projects in one view, so the weekly review is just opening one page and spending a few minutes per project.
Over time, the check-in history becomes a journal of your portfolio. You can see the week Project B's revenue started declining, the week you started feeling burned out on Project A, the week you decided to kill Project D. It's the qualitative layer on top of the metrics.
There's a free tier. But the important thing is the habit, not the tool. A weekly review in a plain text file is infinitely better than no weekly review at all.
Start this week
If you take one thing from this post, do a check-in this Sunday. Every project. Revenue, errors, what shipped, what's next, how you feel. Write it down somewhere.
Do it again next Sunday.
By the third week, you'll wonder how you ever managed without it.