Finally building something for the real world!

After years of tinkering with niche websites and never really getting off the ground, I think I've found a way to make "it" click. By that I mean actually building and selling something relevant to real people, getting quick feedback in person, and using that to pivot and keep going. This is the first time something I've built doesn't feel like a prelude to the "actual" business, and feels genuinely like building the business holistically from day 1. For the first time I also abandoned a lot of my "productivity theatre" and managed to be significantly more productive whilst just somehow naturally holding all the state in my head.
Allow me to elaborate...
Two weeks ago my cofounder and I decided to just book flights to Saigon, rent an apartment, and force ourselves to ship something in five days. We had had previous ideas on what to build, but with the help of AI we landed on something completely different: a tool to help small businesses manage and respond to their Google reviews via WhatsApp.
This may be surprising because it's not a pure-internet SaaS in the common sense, nor is it unique or hugely ambitious. However, the reasons we're trying this are:
We're both technical, so we've never been put in a position where we've had to sell or build a business end-to-end before. Building anything that we just go out and try to sell is valuable experience.
We think we've found a pretty unique combination of "geofenced" distribution (i.e. we can go around and talk/sell to local businesses) AND the scalability of software with minimum marginal costs per customer. We are not going for VC-backed world-dominating ideas here, we just want to try and build some cool tools for businesses to use and this could just be the first of many. Revenue is secondary to learning (and the joy of building!) here, so we are not trying to sell to the whole world online.
I recently read The Mom Test book which presents customer conversations/sales as primarily a market learning tool to figure out what to build, rather than a pushy sales pitch for something you've already built. In that sense we just need a seed of an idea first and may end up working on something quite different.
So far, it's been fun - my cofounder's more scrappy energy got initial things working and has helped to temper my instinct to do things "properly" and make perfect choices upfront, e.g. for cloud infrastructure. For a lot of decisions we ended up with a good balance between speed and rigour, yet changed it if necessary (e.g. starting with Vercel, then switching to Railway for its superior Python support).
After about two days we had a working prototype and a nice website, so we just spontaneously decided to demo our product to a restaurant we were having dinner at one night! We're currently chatting with the managers to see if we can get them to use it as a trial, but I've since read the Mom Test book so I'm adjusting my conversations with them to try and learn more whilst we have the chance.
We're now in the validation phase. Still pre-revenue. Trying to get our first paying customer this week. Happy to post with more details if people are interested!
PS. we're based in HK+Singapore at the moment, keen to get to know others from these places too!