Not a failure post. Not a success post. Just an honest look at a year of building things and figuring out.
A year ago, I told myself this was the year I'd ship something real. Something people would pay for. Something I could point to and say — yeah, I built that, and it works.
A year later, here I am. Four projects in. No paying users. And somehow, not defeated.
Let me walk you through.
Failure #1: Tymelace — A to-do list, but make it WhatsApp
The idea was simple: people use WhatsApp for everything anyway, so why not just remind them of their tasks there? I thought I was being clever.
I spent three months on the landing page. Three months. Obsessing over font sizes and button colours and whether the hero section felt "right." The product was a reminder app. It reminded nobody of anything, because nobody ever signed up.
When I finally looked at whether anyone would actually pay for this — it turned out WhatsApp's API wasn't cheap, and people didn't want to pay for something they could do in any notes app. The idea died before it was even a product. I'd been designing the packaging for an empty box.
Failure #2: WeekNWork — An agency with no clients
A bunch of friends and I decided to start a design and development agency. We did the whole thing — landing page, professional email addresses, a phone number. We were very official.
Then nothing happened. No outreach. No projects. No hustle. The domain quietly expired a month ago, and that's honestly how I remembered this chapter of my life existed.
It wasn't really a failure. It was a group of people who liked the idea of running an agency more than they liked the work of running one. Happens more than anyone admits.
Failure #3: Getritely — AI replies for X, but make it thoughtful
This one I'm actually proud of, which is why the word failure is in quotes.
When AI-generated replies started flooding X, I didn't want to just build another one. I wanted to be different. So I went deep — vector databases, embeddings, retrieval systems — so the tool would actually learn how you write. Not just generate replies. Replicate your voice.
I massively over-engineered it. I was optimising for a thousand users when I had zero. But I built the whole thing. Shipped it to ten testers. It worked.
Then I killed it myself. AI replies were getting hate everywhere, and I didn't want to add to the noise. The app still runs. I just chose not to push it. There's something I respect about that decision, even now.
FUN FACT — It still works like charm (people are still using it) and if you want to try — https://www.getritely.com/
Failure #4: Basedraft — A content database I built for myself
I started making content on Instagram around this time, and I kept losing ideas across four different apps — Notion, WhatsApp, Notes, random scraps of paper. So I built something to fix that.
It works. I use it every day. Some friends use it too. I just never told anyone else it existed.
That's the entire story of Basedraft. Great product. Zero marketing. Fully my fault.
Will I market it later — yes someday!!
If you read all of that, the pattern is pretty obvious. I wasn't failing because I couldn't build things. I was failing because I kept building the wrong things, in the wrong order, for the wrong reasons.
Tymelace taught me that a polished landing page doesn't validate an idea — people paying does. WeekNWork taught me that good intentions without execution are just intentions. Getritely taught me that I can actually finish something, and that building for craft is its own reward. Basedraft taught me that building for yourself is great, but distribution is the other half of the job.
The knowledge I've picked up across all of this — vector DBs, embeddings, Chrome extensions, content systems, landing pages, SaaS architecture — is real. It doesn't disappear just because the products did.
So what's next? Same thing, honestly. I'm going to keep building. But this time I'm starting from an itch I personally have, and then finding the people who have the same one — before I write a single line of code.
If you want to personally follow my journey — here is my Twitter
It's just consistency over cleverness.
I'll get there.