I built 6 projects in 30 days after getting laid off. Here's the honest postmortem.

TL;DR: 6 projects, 1 has real users, 2 are personal tools I use daily, 3 are dead. The "AI lets you ship 10x faster" hype is true for building. It's not true for finding users. Below: what I built, in the order I built it, with honest numbers.

The setup

Laid off March 2026. 8 years as a backend dev. Severance would last me ~6 months if I stayed disciplined. I gave myself a 30-day window: ship as much as possible with AI tools, see what happens.

The rule: every project gets a 7-day deadline, otherwise I kill it. No exceptions.

I built 6 things. Here they are.

What I built (in order)

1. AI Buddy (Chrome sidebar) — Shipped, 11 days, 15 real users. The only one with a public link. I use it daily. https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ai-buddy/eigpaeoigklelmfgnkljhbjjbpohenpn

2. Weekly report generator — 2 days, $0.12/week to run, 1 user (me). Auto-generates my Friday weekly report from git/Slack/Linear. Saves 50 min/week. Stuck with me.

3. Email reply drafter — 1 day, Mac AppleScript plug-in. 1 user (me). Saves 20 min/day. Replaces "thank you for your email" with "got it," which cut my reply time per email from 15s to 3s.

4. Resume rewriter — 5 days, Streamlit + GPT-4. 0 users. PH post got 14 upvotes. r/jobs downvoted it. Killed.

5. Podcast summarizer — 2 days before I killed it. Whisper + GPT-4. I built it because I could, not because I had a problem. Killed.

6. Math error-book (photo → step-by-step solution) — 2 days before I killed it. GPT-4V's handwriting recognition is 60-70% accurate, which is the wrong tool for an "error book." Killed.

What worked

The 3 things I still use daily (AI Buddy, weekly report, email drafter) all share one thing: each one solves a problem I had personally, repeatedly, before I built it. Chrome sidebar: I was switching tabs 10x/day. Weekly report: 1 hour every Friday. Email drafter: rewriting the same 5 templates over and over.

The 3 I killed all share one thing too: I built them because "AI can do this" sounded fun, not because I had a real problem. That's the 2026 trap. The build cost is so low you can ship 100 demos nobody uses.

What I got wrong

I built before I validated. I should have done a 30-minute "pretotype" test before writing code for at least 3 of the 6. For project 4 (resume rewriter), a one-question Google Form ("would you pay $9 for a tool that rewrites your resume to match a JD?") would have killed it in 30 minutes. I spent 5 days instead.

I didn't track costs. I have no idea what the total API spend was across all 6. Even for personal projects, log every API call.

I didn't write about it as I went. This is the first public post about any of these. I should have shipped 6 short posts in April, while the work was fresh, instead of one long post in June.

I over-indexed on "AI can do this." Both killed projects started with the AI capability ("GPT-4V can read handwriting!") instead of a user problem. Capability-first building feels productive. It's not. It produces demos.

The biggest lesson

Building is cheap in 2026. Finding users is not.

AI cut my build cost by 10x. AI did not cut my "find someone who actually cares about this thing" cost by 1 cent. AI Buddy has 15 users after 12 weeks. That's slow. Most of those users came from 1 Reddit comment, 1 Indie Hackers post, and word of mouth from 2 strangers. None of that is AI-assisted. It's all me, typing, late at night, into forums.

If you're starting a 30-day AI build sprint, the AI tools are the easy part. The hard part is the same as it was in 2016: write good copy, find the right people, talk to them one at a time. AI helps you build. AI does not help you sell.

What I'm doing next

AI Buddy has 15 users. I want 150 by September. The plan:

• Write 2 posts/week on something I learned shipping it
• Reply to every user email personally (currently 0-3/week, but I want to make it a habit)
• Add 1 small feature per week that users actually ask for
• Skip the "growth hacking" stuff — Reddit + Indie Hackers + a couple of forums worked last time, will work again

I don't have a "10x growth" plan. I have a "show up and be useful" plan. It got me 15 users. I bet it gets me 150.

If you want to do the 30-day sprint yourself: 6 things, 7 days each, kill what you don't use, ship what you do. Let me know how it goes.

— LQ, indie dev trying to make 15 users into 150