After years of failed projects, I built a Reddit tracker for myself, that became my first project ever with a paying customers!
tl;dr: After years of building useless stuff, I accidentally built a Reddit tracker in a market with a lot of competitors. I found someone complaining about them by that tool, built what he asked for, and he just became my first-ever paying customer. LOL.
The long one:
My side project graveyard is a sight to behold. It’s filled with beautifully coded, perfectly executed ideas that absolutely no one on earth needed. For years, my process was: get a "brilliant" idea in the shower, code for 3 months, launch to crickets, repeat.
I finally realized the problem wasn't my code; it was that I was building solutions for problems that didn't exist.
So, I decided my next project would be a tool to find actual problems people were talking about on Reddit. I spent few weeks building it (thanks to *GPT), got it working, and then did what I probably should have done on day one: a market search.
My heart sank. so much competitors. Of course. It felt like I'd just built the world's most over-engineered shovel in a gold rush full of bulldozers.
I was ready to add my new tool, TrakDdit, to the graveyard with the others. But I figured, what the heck. I might as well use my shiny new shovel to dig around and see why people hated the bulldozers. I set it to track complaints about my competitors.
I found a developer ranting about how all the competitor were not solving his use-case. On a whim, I DMed him, basically saying:
"Hey, I saw you hated all the other Reddit stuff. I accidentally built another one. What would a non-garbage API actually look like to you?"
He was surprised I asked, but he laid out his entire wish list. So, as a last-ditch effort, I built it. Exactly what he asked for.
He became my first-ever paying customer.
I actually laughed out loud.
After years of getting exactly $0.00 for my side projects, the first person to ever pay me for anything was someone I found by accident, complaining about a problem I didn't even know existed when I started. The irony is just perfect.
It wasn't some grand strategy. It was just a series of failures that led me to finally listen to one person.
Here’s a look at the tool that somehow, finally, stuck, you can check it out here:
My Ask to You:
This whole project was an accident that turned into something real. If you're felt this same frustration with other tools, I'd love for you to try the free plan and tell me what you think.
What's the most surprising "win" you've had with a side project?
THANK YOU ALL FOR THE INFINITE VALUE!
