After 20 Failed SideProjects in 12 Years, I Finally Have One That Is Making Money. I'm So Happy and Excited!

12 Years of hard work, struggle and pain

20 Failed SideProjects 😭

1 made money in 2017 but now dedz. It is a Help Desk software. I think it failed because the space is too competitive and I also don't know how to do marketing.

1 is printing money continuously so far. I'm planning to switch it to a monthly subscription model for sustainability instead of a one-time payment model. It's a tool I built to scratch my own itch in finding customers. The elevator pitch is "Find Your Customers In Seconds with Social Media AI". It's designed to save you time and help you focus on closing deals rather than hunting for leads. I'm also working on adding support for LinkedIn and Reddit soon.

I built it in a few days using Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Digital Ocean, OpenAI, Kamal, etc...

Lessons? 👇

• Solve real problems (e.g, save them time and effort, make them more money). Focus on the pain points of your target customers. Solve 1 problem and do it really well.
• Fail fast. Validate immediately to see if people will pay for it then move on if not. Don't over-engineer. It doesn't need to be scalable initially
• Do marketing (build it and they will come rarely succeeds)
• Keep on shipping 🚀 Many small bets instead of 1 big bet.

I also started a newsletter where I will be sharing all the lessons I'm learning in building startups and programming - Startups and Programming

Any questions? I'll be happy to help by further sharing all the things I've learned.

Also, what do you think of the idea of the tool that I built?

What would make this tool more valuable to you?

How could it better fit into your workflow?